Julie Perkal, age 12, of Newport Beach, California, for her question:

What is a sloth?

A greedy person is said to be piggish and a spiteful person is said to be catty. Actually it is not fair to blame the animals for our bad manners. For one thing, they axe not guilty. True, a pig is a rather sloppy eater but he stops when his tummy is full. Miss Puss scratches to defend her small self and only when scared. At one time, the word sloth meant a person who was bone lazy, a work shirker. The word was borrowed from a certain very, very slow moving animal.

The sloth is a shaggy animal with a roundish head. His eyes squint, his ears and tail are too small to mention. He belongs to the jungles of Central and South America, where he hangs upside down for hours and hours, clutching the boughs with his long, strong claws. Slowly, slowly he gathers leaves and fruit. On the ground, it takes him about seven hours to walk a mile. The sloth is such a slowpoke and so careless about his grooming that green alga plants grow on his paws and in his shaggy hair