A gentle touch

PHOTO: EPA

Have you ever tried to teach your dog to sit? Imagine how hard it must be to teach an elephant!

Elephants are the biggest animals in the world that live on land. Babies weigh about 113kg when they are born, and the biggest elephant that anybody ever saw was 12,000kg.

Even though they are really big, elephants can be gentle too. An elephant's long nose, called its trunk, has more than 40,000 muscles in it! This means that the elephant can pick up a single piece of grass with its big trunk. Look how gently this big elephant has sat down on this seat. But elephants are very strong too. They are strong enough to rip a branch off a tree.

Do you know? STRONG ELEPHANTS If an elephant wants to eat a piece of fruit that is really high up in a tree, it will use its strong trunk to shake the tree so that the fruit falls out. If that doesn't work, it just knocks the tree over!

The words of the day gentle adj. 溫順的 (weng1 shun4 de5) 輕柔的 (qing1 rou2 de5) That glass bowl will break easily, so be very gentle when you move it. 那玻璃碗很容易破，拿它時動作要非常輕柔。 muscle n. 肌肉 (ji1 rou4)