Melvin Klassen, age 12, of Victoria, B.C., for his question:

Where do we find a taiga

Taiga is not a fancy way of spelling tiger in fact it has nothing to do with the animal kingdom. Like sputnik, the word taiga comes to us from the Russian language. The Russians use it to describe a vast, wet swampy region in Siberia. This territory begins just south of the cold, northern tundra.

In a tundra region, the surface of the ground thaws only during the summer season. A few feet below the surface, the ground is always frozen. The taiga region is wet and swampy way down deep. There are also taiga regions south of the tundras of Europe and North America.