In Focus
 

[The Moon]

1.What is moonlight?
2. What is a harvest moon?
3. Why does the moon look like cheese?
4. The moon has an inner core of metal very much smaller in relation to its size than the Earth’s. True/false?
5.What is the moon made of ?

[Fossils]

1. What are fossils?
2. How are fossils turned to stone?
3. Has flesh ever been preserved as a fossil?
4. What is carbonization?
5. What are trace fossils?
6. What can scientists learn from fossils?
7. How do you date fossils?
8. How are petrified logs formed?
9. What was Piltdown Man?
10. What is known as trilobite fossils?

[Answers]

The moon:

1, The moon is by far the brightest thing in the night sky. But it has no light of its own. Moonlight is the sun’s light reflected off the white dust on the moon’s surface.
2. The harvest moon is the full moon nearest the autumnal equinox(when night and day are of equal length). This moon hangs bright above the eastern horizon for several evenings, providing light for harvesters.
3. The moon looks like cheese because of the holes and also because it appears yellowish.
4. True.
5.The moon is made of rock with metal at the very centre.

Fossils:

1. Impressions of ancient life preserved in rocks are known as fossils. When a dead mammal is buried on the sea floor or any other place, the soft parts rot away and the hard parts remain. Later these parts harden into rocks. Water seeping through the rocks form fossil moulds. Minerals fill these moulds to form casts which preserve the shapes of the hard parts. There are fossils which show the outlines of leaves turned to stone and insects in amber. Amber is the hard substance formed from the sticky resin of trees. The bodies of tiny mammals trapped in this resin are preserved when the resin hardens.
2. When tree trunks or bones are buried, minerals deposited from water sometimes replace the original material. The wood or bone is then petrified or turned to stone.
3. Yes. In Siberia bodies of Wooly Mammoths which lived more than 40,000 years ago have been discovered. When these creatures sank in swampy ground and the soil froze, their bodies were preserved in the icy subsoil in the same manner food in a freezer or refrigerator is preserved today.
4. Usually leaves rot very quickly once plants die. Sometimes leaves which float to the bottom of lakes are buried under fine mud. Sediments above and below the leaf are gradually compressed and hardened into sedimentary rocks. Over time, bacteria gradually change the chemistry of the leaf until only the carbon it contains remains. The shape of the leaf is then preserved in the rock as a thin carbon smear. The process is called carbonization.
5. Trace fossils give information about animals that lived in ancient times. Animal burrows are sometimes preserved as fossils and they give scientists clues about the creatures that made them long ago. Footprints of various animals preserved in hardened mud are trace fossils.
6. From the study of fossils, known as palaeontology, scientists are able to learn how living things evolved on Earth. Fossils can also help palaeontologists to date rocks. This is possible because some species lived for only a short period on Earth. So, if the fossils of these creatures are found in rocks in different places, the rocks must have formed at the same time. Such fossils are called index fossils. Important index fossils include species of trilobites, graptolites, brachiopods, crinoids, ammonites and belemnites.
7. Sometimes dead creatures are found buried under volcanic ash. The ash sometimes contains radioactive substances that can be dated by scientists. Hence, they can work on the time when animals lived.
8. Petrified logs form when water replaces the molecules in buried logs with minerals. Slowly stone replicas of the logs are produced.
9. Some bones, thought to be fossils of an early human ancestor were discovered at Piltdown Common, England between 1910 and 1912. But Piltdown Man was a farce. The skull was human but the jawbone came from an orangutan.
10. Trilobite fossils are those of the trilobites that lived in the sea in the Paleozoic era. They were very common during that time.

Win a valuable book from Books.lk

“Reading maketh a full man,” it is said and the importance of reading need not be reiterated. And, it is with the objective of promoting the habit of reading among children that the Junior Observer in collaboration with Bookazone (Pvt.) Ltd; the innovators of the country’s first web portal (www.books.lk), launched a competition in September.

We give a lucky reader an opportunity to win a valuable book priced at Rs 1000 from books.lk. All you have to do is answer a the question and mail it to the address given, on or before Friday of that week.

The name of each week’s winner will be published later.

Here is how Bookazone will help you enter the magical world of books, to not only entertain yourself but also enhance your knowledge.

It allows you to purchase any title of book regardless of the author, publisher, or the country of origin. Although Bookazone web portal was limited to English users since 2009, the latest additions of Sinhala and Tamil is also accessible on www.poth.lk and www.puththagam.lk listing a wide range of books written and published in local languages in addition to what is offered in English apart from magazines, CDs and DVDs.

Once you place an order at Bookazone and make your payment,the deliveries are made free of charge using the best secured mode to any part of the island.

So, keep improving your general knowledge to answer the question posed every week. And what better way to do so than by READING!