Jimmy Cordova, age 7, of Visalia, California, for his question:

Where did coffee first come from?     

At the age of 7, you can look forward to many treats that are just waiting for you to grow older. One of them is coffee, though even now you can enjoy its wondrous smell when older folks brew it for breakfast. They learned to fix it ages ago    and always the young, children knew that their turn to enjoy it would come later. People have been sipping coffee for at least 700 years. It was discovered so long ago that we have almost forgotten how it happened.   

But long before this, we knew that coffee beans grew on wild coffee bushes. Most experts think that this was in Ethiopia, where flocks of goats roamed on the warm hillsides. The goatherds noticed that their flocks enjoyed the wild coffee berries. But these treats made them extra frisky and kept the baby kids awake at night. Nobody knows when people first tasted the berries. Much later, about 700 years ago, the Arabs learned to roast the dried berry beans to make drinkable coffee. Then gradually the beverage became popular around the world