Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, is much admired today for its
wonderful views of the Virginia countryside. It is located on the top of a high hill— "Monticello" means "little mountain" in Italian. In Jefferson's time, however, people
thought he was a little crazy to build a house on a hilltop. In those days, people did
not care so much about views. They cared more about comfort, so they usually built
their houses in places they could get to easily. For that reason, most houses were built
Anthropologists used to believe that romantic love was invented by Europeans
in the Middle Ages. By romantic love, they mean an intense attraction and longing
to be with the loved person. Some anthropologists believed that this kind of love
spread from the West to other cultures only recently. Others thought that it may
have existed in some other cultures, but only among the rich and privileged. Now,
however, most anthropologists agree that romantic love has probably always existed
among humans. It is not surprising, then, that stories of romance, like Romeo and
Juliet
At Ashkelon, in Israel, archaeologists have found a very large dog cemetery. The
cemetery dates from the fifth century B.C., when that area was part of the Persian
Empire. So far, about 1,000 dog graves have been found in the cemetery.
Archaeologists are not certain about the reason for so many graves, but they believe
that dogs must have been very important for the people there. In fact, all of the dogs
died of natural causes and were buried very carefully. Perhaps
Why do we grow old? This is a question that people have asked since the beginning
of history. Now biologists are looking for scientific answers to this question. They think
that aging is part of our genetic program. From the evolutionary point of view this makes
sense. A person who can no longer have children is not useful to the species, so he or she
Almost every language has some topic areas that are especially rich in vocabulary
and idiomatic expressions. For example, the Inuit people who live in the far north of
Alaska and Canada have many different ways to describe snow. The Irish, on the other
hand, have a wide variety of ways to describe a green landscape. Other examples can
be found in language relating to food. For instance, the French and Italian languages
are rich in vocabulary for talking about wine, while American English has many ways
to indicate how a steak should be cooked. We can conclude from all this that the
development of a language is
Texas is famous for its cattle farms, but another kind of farm is growing much
faster: ostrich farms. Not long ago, ostrich farms were rare, but there are now
thousands of them in the United States, many of them in Texas. It's easy to see why so
many farmers are interested in these large birds. The price of ostrich meat is many
times higher than the price of beef, which makes the birds extremely valuable: A pair
of young adult ostriches are worth over $40,000, and an ostrich egg may be worth up
to $1,500. Since a female ostrich may lay up to eighty eggs a year
72. What is the world's largest living creature? It may be a fungus that scientists have
discovered in the state of Wisconsin. This fungus is huge—it spreads over about thirty- seven acres and is still growing. This may seem like a science fiction nightmare, but in
fact the fungus lives underground in the woods and does not disturb its environment.
It also grows very slowly, having taken 1,500 years to reach its present size. Scientists
used to think that this fungus was made up of many different fungi. Now, with DNA
testing, they have definite proof that it is really
73. After Columbus traveled to the Americas, Europeans began to import many kinds
of products from the New World. Some of the products are well known, such as coffee,
cocoa, tobacco, tomatoes, corn, potatoes, pumpkins, beans, and strawberries, but other
products are little known today. For two centuries, one of the most important New
World exports was the cochineal. This small red insect was used for making red cloth.
It is still used for this purpose today, and some insects are still exported from the
Americas. However, with the invention of chemical colorants, the cochineal has
74. Immigration in the United States continues at a steady pace in the twenty-first
century, with hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants every year and many more
illegal immigrants. The immigrants of the early twentieth century came mostly from
Europe, but today's immigrants come from many different parts of the world and
many different cultural and racial backgrounds. Like the earlier immigrants, however,
they have a strong desire to work and do well in their new homeland. For this reason,
many people feel that the U.S. government should not shut its doors to the
newcomers. Immigrants have helped the country grow in the past, and now the
United States
75. In many parts of England, hedges are an important part of the countryside. (A
hedge is a kind of fence made of bushes or trees.) An English botanist, Max Hooper,
studied the English hedges and discovered some interesting facts about them. First, he
determined that the older the hedge, the more species of bushes and trees it contained.
Second, he concluded that a hedge usually starts with one species and gains a species
with each century. Using this rule, which became known as "Hooper's Rule," people
have studied hedges in England and discovered that many of them are very old. Quite
a few of them have more than ten species, which means that they