Joong-gye Middle School Chapters 5 and 10

How do animals stay alive?

There are animals everywhere on Earth.

Some places are very hot, and others are very cold.

Some places have a lot of water, and others are very dry.

This makes life difficult.

But animals can stay alive because their bodies are very special.

Camel and brown bears, for example, cannot always get water or food.

Camels live in the desert.

There is not much water there.

But when camels find water, they can drink about 80 liters in one drink.

Also, their bodies do not lose much water.

This helps them stay alive without water for a week or more.

Brown bears in Alaska cannot find food during the long and cold winter.

So they eat a lot during the warm months.

When winter comes, they hide in a warm place and sleep for about six months.

This helps them stay alive when there is no food.

Some animals are not strong.

Others cannot run, fly, or swim very fast.

But they can hide to keep safe.

Some, for example, can change their colors to match the colors around them.

Others have very hard shells.

The shells protect them from hungry animals.

Nature also designs animals' bodies to help them find and eat food.

Spiders are a good example.

They make a very strong kind of thread to catch insects.

Some spiders bite the insects to poison them.

The poison turns the insides of the insects' bodies to liquid.

Then the spiders can drink it.

Animals have many different kinds of bodies.

They also do different things to protect themselves and find food.

This helps animals live a long and healthy life in different kinds of places on Earth.

Nam June Paik was the man who invented video art.

He worked for about half a century.

To make art, he used music, televisions, and things that he found.

He always had ideas that did not follow the usual rules of art.

Paik was born in Seoul in 1932, but he and his family left Korea when he was in high school.

They went to Hong Kong, and then to Japan.

Paik studied art and music in Tokyo University.

When he was twenty-four, he traveled to Europe and decided to stay in Germany.

There, he met other artists who were very creative.

They made a group.

Paik started to use televisions, music, and video to create things which were very unusual or beautiful.

Paik became famous after his first show in Germany in 1963.

Paik used thirteen black-and-white televisions that were showing the usual TV programs.

However, the images on the TVs were strange electronic patterns.

Paik wanted to show that people could make their own video images.

This was a new idea at that time.

A year later, Paik moved to New York.

There, he started working with a cellist.

Her name was Charlotte Moorman.

In their famous TVCello, they used televisions to make the shape of a cello.

When Moorman played the TV cello, the TVs showed videos of her old concerts.

Finally, Paik is famous for using a lot of televisions to make art.

A good example is the tower of 1,003 televisions that he created for the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

He also created big robots with old TVs and radios.

When people see Paik's art, they often think it is strange.

Also, they often smile.

Now, you can see many of his creations in the Nam June Paik Museum in Gyeonggi-do.