Steve Judge, age 12, of Crystal City, Missouri, for his question:

How was Brazil discovered?

We tend to think that every country in the world was first discovered by people from Europe, within the past few centuries. Actually, this is not so at all. Various groups of the human family have been wandering the world over for many thousands of years. The original discoverers of Vietnam, ,for example, are not the people we call the Vietnamese. Their descendants live in mountainous regions, where they were driven by the Vietnamese who settled that country later.

The original settlers of a country are called aborigines. The Australian aborigines are the Bushmen. In the Americas, the aborigines are various Indian tribes. So far as we know, Brazil was discovered originally be several tribes who settled in different parts of the vast territory. Thousands of years later, on April 22, 1500, the area was rediscovered by Pedro Alvares Cabral,, a Portuguese explorer. It was claimed for Portugal and named Brazil from brazilwood, a local tree used to make red dye.