FIRST SENIORS DICTATIONS Nº 8,9,10

 

         Charlie Brown

 This fictional character has been living with his pet dog Snoopy in a small American town since 1950, when he first appeared in the strip cartoon Peanuts .  Charlie Brown has been popular for almost fifty years, and he still experiences all the happiness and frustration of a typical boy, playing baseball with his friends and going to school.  His first appearance in a TV film was in 1965, and so far he has made several films and many videos.  His appeal is as strong as ever, and his adventures have been translated into many different languages all over the world. Each of the characters that are appear with him has his or her own peculiar personality: Lucy, the eternal grouch; Schroeder, his Beethoven-obsessed pal; Linus, with his security blanket: Pig-Pen, the dust-attracter, and so on.

Armadillos

 

         Armadillo is a Spanish word which means 'the little armoured one'. An armadillo is a little mammal with a bony covering that is like an armour.  There are ten kinds  of armadillos, which live from southern United States to southern South America. The upper parts of armadillos are covered with bony shells. These include one on the head and two solid pieces on the back. These two pieces are connected by a flexible centre section made up of movable bands, and they enable the armadillo to twist and turn.

 

         Curiously, an armadillo's teeth are very soft, so it has to eat soft food, such as ants, termites, larvae, grubs and bugs. It has to dig to find its food, using long, strong claws and powerful forearms.

          They mostly protect themselves by digging and running away. It is only one kind which rolls itself into a ball, to avoid being eaten.

 

Pizzas

 

         Pizza, like most fast food, started off  as a peasant food.  It was simple, cheap and filling, and usually very good as it was made of local ingredients. And then it came into contact with the USA, and the USA corrupted it.  The USA, as we all know, is a land of plenty, and so when the food of immigrant peasants was transported to the USA, it got upgraded, or downgraded, depending on your point of view.  In the case of pizza, the simple combination of a thin, crisp dough base and intensively flavoured tomato purée, cheese, anchovies, etc. was turned into an industrialised production process. The dough was mixed with sugar to make it sweet and injected with fat to make it easy to eat, and then it was topped with almost everything you can imagine – vegetables, meat and even fruit!