^^ 안녕하세요. A LONG WINTER NAP Summer is a good time of year for most animals. It's easy for them to keep warm, and food is plentiful. Winter is harder for them. Lakes and ponds are frozen, snow may cover the ground, and food is much harder to find. Many birds and some animals escape northern winters by migration south in the fall and returning in the spring. The woodchuck, or groundhog, as it is also called, deals with winter differently. It hibernates. As soon as it feels the weather turning cold, it digs a burrow at least five feet underground and makes a comfortable nest with leaves and grass. It spends the cold winter months nestled in its underground bed, and does not usually wake up until spring. It is far enough below ground so that there is no danger that it will freeze to death even during the most severe winter. Since it will not eat at all during the winter, the woodchuck eats as much and as often as it can during the summer. People with gardens know how destructive one can be to their plants. As winter approaches, the woodchuck becomes so fat it can hardly move. It gets ready for its long sleep by preparing its nest and closing off the opening of the tunnels that leads down to it. When it starts to feel drowsy, it makes itself comfortable and falls into a long, deep sleep that can last up to eight months. If you observed the woodchuck in this state, you might think it had died. Its breathing almost ceases, and its heart slows down to about four beats in a minute. If you took its temperature, you would find that it had fallen to just above freezing. When the woodchuck wakes up in the spring after going without food for so many months, its weight has been reduced to only half of what it was in the fall. Almost all its body fat has been used up to keep it alive during its long sleep. By February or March, the famished animal is ready to leave its hole and go looking for its first meal. Years ago, people who lived in the country eagerly awaited the sign of the first goundhog putting its head above ground; it was a sign that winter was over. This gave rise to a number of stories. One of them, told by German farmers who had settled in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, was about a groundhog they called Punxsutawney Phil. This remarkable animal could forecast the weather. According to the story, Phil ventured from his nest every February 2. He poked his head above ground and looked around. If he saw his shadow, it meant that there would be another month and a half of winter, so he went back to sleep for another six weeks. If the weather was cloudy, and he didn't see his shadow, it meant spring would be early. This story spread around the country, and February 2 became known as Groundhog Day. *Wordly Wise* French, Spanish, and Italian are Latin languages. This means that many of their words come directly from the Latin that people throughout the Roman Empire spoke two thousand years ago. For example, the French word for winter, which is hiver, comes from the Latin hibernum, which means winter. When modern science began several hundred years ago, there was a need for scientific terms, and these were usually formed from Latin, the language of scholars. The word hibernate was formed in this way. It means "to go into a sleeplike state during the winter," and comes from the Latin word for winter.