雙語+MP3|美國學(xué)生世界地理40 魚兒、峽灣、瀑布和森林

     HAVE you a good imagination? I mean, when there are clouds in the sky, can you see giants or galloping horses or rabbits with long ears or other things? Then look at the map on page 260 and tell me what it looks like:
     Turn it on the side. Do you see what I see? A WHALE, with his mouth open, ready to swallow little Denmark. Skagerrack and Kattegat are the whale's throat.
     My geography calls this whale the "Scandinavian Peninsula"-that's a big name, but then a whale is a big animal. The geography calls the back of the whale Norway, and it calls the other side Sweden. Norway plus Sweden equals Scandinavian Peninsula.
     Perhaps the reason I thought of a whale was because there are so many real whales in the sea near Norway. Now a whale is the largest fish there is, you know, only it isn't a fish. Fish lay eggs as chickens and birds do, only much smaller and many more, but a whale mother doesn't lay eggs. She has babies as a cat has kittens. Besides, a whale has to have air to breathe and must come up to the top of the water as you would have to do if you were swimming under the water. A fish wouldn't do that, for he couldn't do that, so you see a whale is not a fish.
     The whale eats little fish called herring, lots of them at one gulp, bones and all. There are millions, billions, trillions of herring in the sea, and millions, billions, trillions more than that. They live together in enormous crowds called "schools," but one school of herring has more pupils than all the schools in the World; so, although the whales eat some herring, there are plenty of herring left for us to eat. The Norwegian people catch herring in nets, then they salt, smoke, or dry them to make sure they will keep almost forever without spoiling. Then they send these dried herring all over the World to be sold. I had a herring for breakfast this morning which may have been swimming round Norway years and years ago-it has been kept all that time.
     I also ate a thousand eggs for breakfast this morning. That sounds impossible, but it's really so-only they were not hen's eggs, but herring eggs, for the mother herring carries her eggs inside of her-thousands of them. The herring's eggs we call "roe."

     The seashore of Norway is not smooth and level like a bathing beach. There are mountains all along the edge right in the water and the sea fills the valleys between these mountains. These valleys filled with water are called "fiords."
     Norway is so far north we would expect the water in these fiords to be very cold in the winter; and we know what happens when water gets very cold-it freezes and turns to ice. But, strange to say, the water in these fiords does not freeze. The reason it doesn't freeze is because the sun shines down on the water in the Gulf of Mexico, several thousand miles off. You may wonder what the Gulf of Mexico several thousand miles off has to do with Norway. Well, the boiler way off in my cellar heats the water in the pipes and that heats the radiator in the farthest room in my house. In the same way the sun heats the water in the Gulf as if it were a big boiler and from this Gulf a warm stream of water, called the Gulf Stream, flows as if it were a river in the ocean, all the way across the ocean from the Gulf of Mexico to the shore of Norway and warms the fiords. In the warm water of the fiords the herring schools have a fine recess until a whale or a fisherman comes along.
     The northest city in the World is in Norway and the name of this city ends in est, too. It is Hammerfest. The Gulf Stream seems to end at Hammerfest and it dumps on the shore sticks of wood, some of which have floated like toy boats in a river all the way from the Gulf of Mexico. The people gather this "driftwood" and use it to make fires. Ordinary wood burns with a yellow flame, but wood that has drifted for a long time in the sea-water gets filled with salt from the water and when dried and burned gives off flames colored blue and green and purple, so that driftwood makes especially beautiful fires in open fireplaces.
     You have probably tasted cod-liver oil-and hated it-but you were told it was very good for you, and it is. The cod is a much bigger fish than the herring, but of course not nearly as big as the whale. One of the playgrounds of the cod is near Norway, round some islands called "The Lofodens." Fishermen catch shiploads of cod, press the oil out of their livers, and bottle it for your good health. The bones of the cod they have no use for, so they take them out-and this is quite a job, for there are a great many-and then they dry the flesh of the cod to make food. Here is a sentence that sounds funny unless you put in a period where it belongs, and then it makes perfect sense: "A codfish was swimming round the Lofoden Islands a month after all its bones had been taken out." Where would you put the period to make sense?