Karen DeKocky age l0, Of Pella, Iowa, for her question:

How big are the pygmies?

Most American fourth graders are about 55 inches tall and all of them expect to do a lot of growing in the years ahead. But the pygmies are fully grown up when they reach four feet five inches. A few will become giants of four feet eight inches, which makes them as tall as the average young American of l0 to ll years. Most pygmy mothers, as you would expect, are a little shorter than the fathers.

Pygmies live in Africa and in Malaysia and in other lands around the south Pacific Ocean. They are happy little people with golden brown skins and short curly hair of reddish brown. Africa is the home of about l80,000 of the Negrillo pygmies, and experts suspect that at one time they lived throughout all of tropical Africa. Now the little people are found only in the Congo and other regions of dense, steamy jungles.