STANDARD X

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 171, 16 April 1937, Page 8

STANDARD X

A Spare-time Column NEWS AND NOTES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE On this page, hoys and girls who are ‘'going to school at home” will find today’s lessons arranged for them hy their teachers. There is an English lesson (vnil ou anttKinetic lesson for each standard. And now, in this column, there is something for Standard X. What is Standard X? This question you must answer for yourselves, for the answer really depends upon you. Standard X is any standard and every standard —any form or class you happen to he in. Do not read this column until your set lessons arc done and posted to your teachers. Then, and only then, you are invited to enter Standard X. There are no lessons. You simply read. Standard X is not conducted l>y your teachers. It comes into existence on this page for all of you—in your spare time. « * * Firing the Guns. . Territorials at Fort Dorset, in Seatoun, are being instructed in the firing of big guns. They are practising shooting, firing out to sea at targets taken there by ships. They also shot at objects supposed to be enemy submarines, and hit one of the “periscopes.” The Olympic Torch. . Last year, when the Olympic Games were held at Berlin, a burning torch was carried to Berlin from Olympia, m Greece, where the first games were held, by relays of athletes. On this occasion

the torch went out on the way and it had bo lighted again, in a rather undignified way, with a wax match. In 1940, however, the games will be held in Tokio, in Japan, and Um Olympic Committee there is making careful plans for carrying the flame safely. If you know how hard it is even to carry a lighted candle from one room to another you will be sorry for the committee.

A Foreigner in Court. A man who could not speak English, a young German sailor, was charged in the Wellington Magistrate’s Court yesterday with deserting from his ship, a German vessel. A man who could speak both German and English agreed to interpret for him and took an oath that he would do so fairly. Everything that was said in court and concerned the German w’as told him in his own speech by the interpreter, and all he wanted to say he told the interpreter, who in furn told it to the magistrate. The sailor admitted he had broken a law that sailors must obey, but said it was accidental. The magistrate decided he should not be punished if he left New Zealand on another German ship that was in port at Wellington yesterday. The German was a young man with the fair hair characteristic of his people. The assistance of interpreters is frequently needed in court, but in Wellington it is usually for Chinese, who, although they may understand English well enough to sell fruit or conduct a laundry, do not know enough about our language to follow the unfamiliar talk in court and protect themselves as a person accused should be able to do. Hens Swallow Stones.

If you watch a hen you will eee that she occasionally swallows small etopes as well as the corn-seeds; and there is certainly no nourishment to be had out of a stone. However, the bird is not swallowing stones by mistake, but in order to help it digest the corn. That sounds very strange, but the stomach of a bird is not much like our stomachs or the stomach of a rabbit or a cat. The main part of the hen’s stomach is used, not for digesting the food, but for grinding it up. This grinding part is sometimes

called the “gizzard”; another name for it might be the mill, because, like a real mill, it grinds the corn into fragments by the help of stones. Now, when the food comes down the gullet from the mouth, it has to patw through the gizzard on its way to the intestine; and as soon as it gets into the gizzard the muscles of the wall begin work. They press on to the stones, and squeeze these against the corn-seeds; and the sharp edges of the stones cut into the food and smash it, grind it, into tiny bits. After the gizzard has done its milling, these small bits are allowed to go into the part of the food canal which will first digest them and then pass the nourishment through into the body. So you see, though the hen has no teeth, she manages quite well without. We grind our food in our mouths with our teeth and the hen grinds it up by means of stones in her stomach. It is just another way of chewing.

Over 700 Aeroplane Rides. Aeroplanes do not often come down in unexpected spots nowadays. Union Airways’ aeroplanes made 734 trips between Palmerston North and Dunedin in all sorts of weather last year and 727 times the planes left and arrived at the right time. Your Backbone.

Right down the middle of your back runs the most interesting thing about your body. This is your backbone, a very remarkable support. It is not an undivided, solid rod of bone; if it were you would be unable to bend your body, however hard your muscles contracted, and you would feel as though you had a poker up your back. It is made of little separate bones, called vertebrae, set one on top of the other. If you piled a lot of empty cotton reels one on top of the other this would give you some notion of the arrangement of the vertebrae in the backbone. Every reel has a short tunnel running through it, and that is what you find in the parts of the backbone ; each has a tunnel running through it. For the backbone serves as skeleton in all the three ways: it acts as a flexible support for the body; it serves for the attachment of muscles that bend the body this way and that; and it protects

a very important, very delicate organ. The organ that is specially protected by the backbone passes along the tunnel that goes from end to end through the small reed-like bones that make this part of the skeleton. It is called the spinal cord and, with the help of the brain, this soft organ takes charge of all the body does. Thai is why it is so precious and why it is specially protected inside the • backbone.

The Princesses Play. While visiting the Olympia section of the British Industries Fair recently, the Queen told one of the stall-holders that she wanted some caps and aprons and toy brooms for “pretending” housemaids. “I want a complete set of these,” she said, “as my two little girls are always playing at being maids.” _ How odd it is that while so many little girls play at being princesses, our two princesses, Princess . Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose, nlay at being housemaids. There is a great deal of fun, they think, in sweeping the floor. The Greediest Animals.

• You would be surprised if you knew how much rats eat. They are the greediest animals. It costs between a halfpenny and a penny a day to keep them fat and happy. That means 15 shillings or one pound every year. And yet children can live easily on 10/- a week. In Auckland, rats are costing the city £200,000 a rear in food, besides destroying shopkeepers’ goods and gnawing cables. One pair of rats can have 800 little rats, and so the sanitary inspector of the Auckland City Council says they will all have to be killed.

An Arithmetic Puzzler. Here is a new way of doing arithmetic. It is a puzzler that a man in a shop had to work out, and you will have fun trying to solve it, too. Six collars, seven cuffs there be When pence we charge you thirtythree ; Seven collars and six cuffs to do, The change is only thirty-two; The work is good and up-to-date, Now figure out in pence the rate. The new price was threepence a dozen, or four for a penny; the old price was fourpenco a dozen, or three for a penny. Did you guess it correctly?