Margaret Landrum, age 9, of Decatur, Georgia, for her question:

Does it ever snow in the desert?

Many people think that deserts are very dry and always scorching hot. This idea is only halfway right. It is true that all the world's deserts are very dry. But it is not true that all of them are scorching hot, even in summertime. And some deserts are cold enough for snow every day of the year. The coldest deserts are in polar regions. Winter brings a little snow and the ground is frozen solid. In the summer season, it thaws down just a few inches. In Asia, the great Gobi desert has a few winter snows and it stays coolish through most of the summer. Winter snows sometimes cover our own southwestern deserts. Our highland deserts, perched among the mountains, sometimes get very heavy snowfalls.

A desert is a desert because it is dry. If it happens to be in a warm part of the world, the dry wasteland gets very, very hot. But high deserts and deserts in cold regions stay cooler. Even the driest desert gets an occasional bit of moisture. The hot deserts get a little rain and the cold deserts get a little snow.