Text A 课文A

The penguins　企鹅一家子

I’m Peter Penguin. Fanny Penguin is my wife. Most of the time we live in the water. It is as cold as in an icebox. We can only see snow and ice in our world, but it is not all white. There are other colors, too. Sometimes the ice looks green, or blue just like the color of the sky. In summer the sun shines all the time. We have no night at all. Then comes our winter. It is at night all the time. We eat shellfish from the sea. We ride on big pieces of ice. We can’t fly, but we can swim very fast. Every winter we go back to the land. Fanny lays two eggs each time. Then she must go back to the sea to find some food. I look after the eggs. Soon we have two babies. We are happy to see each other again.

Vocabulary 词汇

Text B 课文B

Silkworms　蚕

Silk is useful and beautiful. It comes from the cocoons of silkworms.

Silkworms change a lot as they grow up. They grow over four stages, and they look quite different at each stage. First it is an egg. The egg hatches into a caterpillar. The caterpillar eats, grows and bursts out of its skin a few times. Then it spins long slender threads and winds the threads around its body to make a cocoon. It goes to sleep in this cocoon. The silkworm is now a chrysalis. In the cocoon the chrysalis changes into a moth. The moth finally breaks through its cocoon to enter the last stage of its life as an insect.

Many silkworms do not live to become moths. To get silk, people put the cocoons in hot water and kill the chrysalises inside the cocoons. Every yard of silk means the death of thousands of silkworms in the chrysalis stage.

Vocabulary 词汇