Michael Halle, age 7, of Tucson, Arizona for his question:

How high is the tallest mountain?

Its name is Mount Everest and its home is the high Himalayas, north of India on the border between Nepal and Tibet. Its proud peak is up there where the blizzards blow snows around its huge rocky shoulders. Sometimes a few feet of icy snow makes its peak higher—then melts away. This is one reason why experts cannot give Mount Everest’s height to the exact inch.

The height of the world’s highest mountain has been measured several times—and each time the answer was a little different. However, all of the experts agree that it reaches more than 29,000 feet above the level of the sea. Some add an extra two feet; some say that Mount Everest is 29,100 feet tall. In any case, nobody will contradict us when we say that the world’s tallest mountain is about five and a half miles high