Category Social Sciences

Brightly coloured plants add crunch to your lunch – and healthy vitamins, too. No wonder parents everywhere say, “Eat your vegetables!”

What vegetables do you munch? That partly depends on where you live and what plants grow there. In Indonesia, many people enjoy asinan, a tasty dish usually made of mustard leaves, bean sprouts, bean paste, radishes, and peanuts. All these planrs thrive in the hot, wet climate. In China, the root of the lotus flower is sliced for salads.

People serve lots of cabbage, carrots, and potatoes in the United Kingdom, where the weather is wet and mild, in sunny Mexico, people eat red peppers, green peppers, and maize.

Beetroot grows well in cool places, and cooks in Poland, Russia, and Scandinavia make a delicious beetroot soup called borscht.

Right now, wonderful vegetables from far away are waiting at your shop. Try a new one today! With so many colourful, crunchy choices, you might want to eat only vegetables.

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Growing rice is hard but important work. In many Asian countries, the word rice is also the word for rice.

An old Chinese story tells how rice became good to eat. At one time, the grains of the rice plant were empty and not good as food. One day a goddess saw people suffering because they were always hungry. To help the people, the goddess secretly filled the grains with milk. That made the rice good to eat. From then on, people were not so hungry.

The story shows how important rice is. For more than half the people in the world, rice has been the main course at every meal for thousands of years.

Southeast Asia’s hot, wet climate is perfect for growing rice. Farm families in China, Vietnam, and other rice-growing countries plant young rice seedlings in large, flooded fields. When the rice begins to ripen, they drain the water from the fields. At harvest time, they gather and dry the rice.

Rice is much, much more than food. Rice is used to make alcohol, paper, cosmetics, glue, starch, paste, and vinegar. Rice stalks are used to make brooms, hats, mats, rope, sacks and sandals.

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Are you hungry? Would you like some alligator eggs? What about strawberry ice cream? Raw meat in red-pepper sauce? Maybe a few fried ants?

Do those sound tasty or terrible? It all depends on who are and where in the world you live.

Everyone, everywhere, must eat to live. But what people eat, how they cook their food, and even they eat can be very different.

Do you eat bread? Most people in the world do. In fact, bread is the world’s number-one food choice.

Bread is made from grain, such as wheat, maize, oats, barley, rye, or rice. First, the grain is mixed with other ingredients, which may include water, salt, and yeast, to make a dough. Then it is baked.

Bread comes in all shapes and textures. It can rise and be fluffy, like yeast breads or quick breads, or it can lie flat as a pancake. It can be shaped in a loaf, twisted into doughnuts, rolled into rolls, or cut into crackers.

Soft or crusty bread is preferred in Europe, the U.S.A., and Canada, but flat bread is common elsewhere. In Mexico, people eat flat cornmeal or wheat tortillas. In China, thin rice bread is wrapped around other foods. In India, the flat chapatti is baked from ground wheat. In Turkey, a pancake-shaped pita makes a tasty pocket for meat and vegetables. Crusty, long, thin baguette loaves are popular in France. Dark, chewy rye bread is a favourite in Russia and Germany.

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A neighbourhood is a place where people live together. Every neighbourhood is special to the people who live there.

Do you live in the middle of a busy city or in a tiny farm town? Are you in a suburb in Australia or do you live in the African desert? No matter where you live, you have neighbours. They might be very close by, or they may be miles away.

Do you know your neighbours? How are they like you? What do you do together? How do you help one another? Some people live in the desert in Africa. They live in tents that are easy to take down and move. A whole group will move together, neighbours and all. Many people in Australia live on ranches raising cattle and sheep. Ranches in Australia can be many miles apart, so people don’t see their neighbours often.

In towns and small cities, families live near each other. Neighbours are always nearby. People who live in big cities live close to their neighbours and see people all the time.

Neighbours keep things lively in every kind of neighbourhood. What do your neighbours do?

Many people in Newfoundland and Labrador live near the ocean and fish for a living. Some boys from Tanzania in eastern Africa help their families farm cattle on the grasslands. The Amish are religious people in the U.S.A. who live together in farm communities. When an Amish farmer needs a new barn, all the Amish neighbours come together to build it.

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What do your clothes say about you? They’re not talking? Are you sure? Clothes tell a lot about who you are and where you live.

Many people wear folk costumes for religious festivals and ceremonies. Different cultures have different folk costumes.

Women from Kenya, Africa, wear clothes with bright colours and bold patterns. On holidays in Scotland, men dress in kilts-knee-length, pleated wool skirts. Each kilt is woven in a special plaid called a tartan. Each Scottish clan, or group of families, has its own tartan. Women in Guatemala weave all the colours of the rainbow into their traditional clothing. The silver ornaments and jewellery of these people on the island of Borneo in Malaysia show that they are important in their village. They are dressed for a special celebration. On special days, Japanese people wear silk kimonos with beautiful embroidery. American teenagers spend a lot of time together. They usually wear clothes that are very much like the ones that their group of friends wears.

People everywhere dress to protect themselves from the weather. They also dress to look good.

Clothes aren’t needed in the steamy forests of Brazil. But jewellery is very important. Forest dwellers in Brazil make beautiful jewellery out of treasures found in the jungle-stones, bones, teeth, claws, and feathers. For colourful ear ornaments, they may use the bright feathers of the toucan.

In Kenya, Africa, the Masai people wear necklaces and head-dresses made from hundreds of brightly coloured beads. They thread the beads together in patterns.

People have worn jewellery since prehistoric times. Sometimes they thought jewellery could bring good luck. Sometimes it was worn to show how important a person was or as part of a religious ceremony.

Jewellery is most often used as a decoration. When you wear a new watch or tie beads in your hair, your jewellery shows the world who you are and how you feel.

Egyptians long, long ago placed gold jewellery and precious gems in the tombs of their kings, who were called pharaohs. This was to help the pharaoh have good fortune in the afterlife.

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