Comparing Giraffes and Polar Bears, 19 Sep 2003

Nearly all the Latin and Greek names are mistranslated, the funniest one being on p. 4: "Maritimus means 'mares of the sea'. It was a Greek word".

Well actually, it was Latin (still is). It means 'of the sea, pertaining to the sea'(derived from the Latin word 'mare'= sea). This is clearly a case where the fact finder has got things right, but the author has not bothered to check that she had understood. Common sense should have shown her that there was something dodgy about this equine translation. Or what does she think a maritime museum is? A place for keeping seahorses?

We are further told that "a ruminant is an animal that grazes on grass" (p. 8), suggesting that all grassgrazers are ruminants (when did you last see a horse chew the cud?), that the Arctic means "the land of the great bear" (p. 2; well, Greek 'arktos' does mean bear, but the bear referred to here is the Great Bear of the constellation, hence 'the northern region'), and that nothing attacks polar bears (how about man?).

The author may actually know the difference between ruminants (with their four stomachs) and other grass-eaters, but this is not apparent in the text. When the two animals are compared in this fashion (pp. 6-7): polar bear, "One stomach like other meat-eating animals"- giraffe, "Four stomachs like other grass-eating animals", it is virtually impossible for the reader to come to any other conclusion than that all grass-eaters have four stomachs and that this is one of the features which distinguish them from meat-eaters. Don't worry, this is no new great advance of either science or evolution since the days we were all at junior school: the horses, the hippopotami and the rest of them are still making do with the one stomach they have, and the ruminants only qualify if they chew the cud. (Admittedly, one of the suggested activities with children on p. 8 is to find out if there are grass-eaters other than ruminants, but this is tucked away in the teacher's flaps.)

The author's maths is equally impressive- or, as far as I am concerned, depressing. To get an idea of the weight of a polar bear, you are asked to hold one kilogram in your hand and then told that "The polar bear weighs 35 times more than this kg." According to this calculation, then, I, an ordinary English mother, weigh twice as much as a fully grown polar bear! Say no more, I'm going on that diet!

Of course, missing out a nought (which is what has happened here) can happen to the most careful writer, but science is an unforgiving subject, and in this book error is piled on error.

The problem with so much incorrectness is that you don't know what you can trust, particularly when you are given totally contradictory information. On p. 3 we are told that giraffe means 'one that walks very fast', on the following page it means 'the tallest of them all'. I don't know which is right, but if I ever needed to know (say if I was asked to write a science book for the schools), I could easily find out by looking it up in an English dictionary. That is a problem with a lot of these mistakes- they could so easily have been rectified, had the book been proof-read by the science advisor, or had the author herself taken the trouble to look facts up in the most basic handbooks. Funnily enough, the pupils are asked to look up the origin of the word 'camouflage'- so why can't the author be expected to do this sort of work?

The language, too, could have done with an extra re-reading. We are told things twice in the same paragraph: "The polar bear has adapted brilliantly to its very cold homeland. Polar bears live in the North (sic) of the world where it is very cold". The same goes for giraffes, except that they have adapted brilliantly to their very hot homeland and, surprise, suprise, they live where it is very hot. All right, so this last is a minor point, but in a book that purports to teach literacy and genre (p. 17 and passim), it should have been attended to.
|
I am not sure at what age group this book is aimed at; it hardly seems consistent in its aims. On p. 13 the children are required to scan the text quickly to find a list of words (definitely beyond the ability of most 7 year-olds), on p. 8, they are asked to think of the names for the babies of 5 farmyard animals (about the right level for my 3-year-old). On p. 12 the teacher is asked to draw attention to the word 'enemy' as "a difficult word to remember how to spell correctly", and advised to make up a mnemonic for this word (this on a page that includes the word 'phytoplankton'!).

Some of the exercises seem fairly pointless, such as showing the children the word 'insulation' and asking them to find 10 more words ending in 'tion'- without any explanation, or suggestion that they find out what this ending is or what it does! Where is the point of finding something if it isn't going to tell you anything?

I am beginning to feel I have said enough about a book which only runs to 19 pages of text (excluding glossary, index etc.).

My one star is for the photographs, which are attractive, informative and deserving of a better setting. If they had been published as part of a calendar, I might have been tempted to buy it.

 Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)