7 A2 slime

CHAPTER 1 We Love Slime! WHO LIKES SLIME? EVERYBODY! SLIME IS A WONDERFUL THING! You can pull it; you can push it. You can put your fingers into it. It's lots of fun to play with. You can even make your own slime at home. Here's how. You need: White glue Water Borax powder (you can buy this in a grocery store) Two plastic cups Fill the first cup with water. Add some borax powder. Mix. Put some glue in the second cup. Add some water. Mix. Now take a little of the mix from the first cup and add it to the second cup. Mix well. Wait 30 seconds. Excellent! You have SLIME!

Adults like slime, too! A British TV show called Tiswas put people in a glass box and threw slime all over them. The people watching TV loved it! We like eating slimy things, too. Think of sea animals like oysters. Some people eat uncooked oysters, and they feel very slimy in your mouth! The French are famous for cooking slimy animals like snails, and they like frogs' legs, too. Then there's okra, a green vegetable from Asia and Africa. It gets slimy when you cook it because it has mucilage inside it— a mix of protein and sugar. Mucilage is plant slime. Mucus is animal slime.

CHAPTER 2 Is That Water? No, It's Snot! YOU FEEL BAD. YOU SNEEZE A LOT. YOU HAVE A COLD! Having a cold means one thing for certain: snot! What is snot? Is it water that comes out of your nose? No, it's mucus. You can't feel it, but your body is making mucus all the time. Inside your nose, there are small hairs. Every time you breathe in, these hairs catch dirt and germs and stop them from going into your body. But sometimes, the germs get through and grow, and you get a cold. The cold makes the skin on the inside of your nose swell. At the same time, your body makes more mucus to wash the germs away. This mucus mixes with dirt and germs and becomes snot.

We all have mucus running between our noses and throats, and that's nothing to worry about. It means our bodies are working correctly. But snot can be nasty. It is thicker than mucus. That's why it's more difficult for you to breathe when you have a cold. What should we do when we have snot in our noses? First of all, look at the color. Does it have any color at all? No? Then that's good. You're normal and healthy. Yellow or green snot isn't so good. Your body is fighting germs, and when it is fighting, snot changes color. The best thing to do now is to blow your nose. Not everyone does, though. Some people put a finger up their nose and pull snot out— it's called "picking your nose." Don't pick your nose in front of other people. It's not polite.

In the 1920s, a company called Kimberly-Clark started making things called "facial tissues." They were small pieces of soft paper for women to take off their makeup. They called them Kleenex. The company showed pictures of movie stars using them, and women began to buy them. In the summer of 1927, a man who worked at the Kleenex company had hay fever. Hay fever is something that makes you sneeze a lot, usually in the spring or fall. You get it from breathing pollen. So what did he do? He used Kleenex facial tissues to blow his nose! Soon, facial tissues weren't just for women and movie stars. Men and children used them, too. Now you can buy tissues in almost every store.

Do animals sneeze? Animals don't use tissues, but they do sneeze. Sneezing is something we can't easily stop. It's a reflex action. And animals sneeze for some of the same reasons we do sneezing takes away the things that irritate our noses, like dirt and germs. That's why sneezing sometimes feels nice. But animals sneeze into the air, not into a tissue. This means that germs can get out into the air and make other animals sick. Some animals, iguanas, for example, sneeze a lot. Iguanas don't get more colds than other animals. They sneeze to get salt out of their bodies. On the Internet, you can see lots of animals sneezing even an elephant. That's a big sneeze, so watch out!