No. 4 Middle School

Kunming, Yunnan

April 2nd, 2014

Dear Editor,

I live in a beautiful city. Many visitors come to my city. There are so many colorful peacocks (孔雀)here.

    The peacocks mostly (主要）live on the grassland of Dongfeng Square. Visitors can give them food freely. They usually throw food to them, and don't think about at all whether the food is right or not. Some of the peacocks became ill. Some even died after eating the bad food.

    I'm sure most of the visitors who throw food to the peacocks really like the birds, but they don't realize that they may be doing any harm.

    We should tell the visitors that what they have done is very harmful to the birds, and we also must stop this kind of thing from happening.

    Perhaps we can build some small shops beside Dongfeng Square to sell peacock food. For every one of us, it's our duty to give more love to these beautiful birds and to look after them carefully.

Yours,

Sun Yan

    Nearly all our food comes from the soil. Some of us eat meat, of course, but animals live on plants. If there were no plants, we would have no animals and no meat. So the soil is very necessary for life. The top of the ground is usually covered with grass or other plants. There may be dead leaves and dead plants on the grass. The waste matter(粪) from animals also falls on it.

    All soil needs food. If we do not give it any, the plants will be weak. Farmers found that animals' waste is the best food for the soil, but chemical fertilizers(化肥) are also very useful. The same crop（庄稼）should not be grown in the same place every year; it 's better to have a different crop. A change of crop and the use of a good fertilizer will keep the land good.

    Can plants eat people? Probably not, but there are many plants that eat meat. Some of them are big. And they can eat small animals. One famous meat-eating plant is the Venus flytrap(捕蝇草).

    The Venus flytrap is a very strange plant. It grows in dry parts of the United States. Its leaves are like the pages of a book. They can open and close very quickly. Inside the leaves, there are three small hairs. If a fly touches one of the hairs, the leaf closes quickly. The fly cannot get out. In about half an hour, the leaf presses the fly until it is dead. Then, the plant covers the fly. Slowly, the plant eats the fly.

    Why do plants do it? Most plants get what they need from the sun, the air, and the ground. In some places, the ground is very poor. It doesn't have all these important things, especially nitrogen(氮). Animal meat has a lot of nitrogen, so some plants eat meat to get what they need. Let's hope that some of the bigger plants don't get the same idea!

    Trees are useful to man in three important ways: they give him wood and other useful things, they give him cool places, and they help to stop drought and flood.

    Unluckily, in many parts of the world, man has not found that the third of these points is the most important. Man wants to make money from trees, so he has cut them down in large numbers, only to find that without them he has lost the best friends he had. And also, he is usually too careless to plant and look after new trees. So the forests slowly disappear.

    This does not only mean that man will have fewer trees. The results are even worse: for where there are trees, their roots break up soil make the rain in——and also bind the soil, thus stopping it from being washed away easily; but where there are no trees, the rain falls on hard ground and flows away, causing floods and carrying away the rich top-oil. When all the top soil is gone, nothing is left but useless desert.