If You Hopped Like a Frog - Hardcover

Einstein wondered what it was like to be a beam of light, but the rest of us are happy wondering what it's like to be a flea or a brachiosaurus. David M. Schwartz's engaging picture book is for the rest of us. With the help of James Warhola's colorful, exaggerated illustrations, we learn about the cool things we could do if we were various nonhuman types of creatures. If you high-jumped like a flea, for example, you could jump straight into the Statue of Liberty's torch. If you ate like a shrew, you could devour over 700 hamburgers a day! Each comparison is explained scientifically in a comically illustrated appendix, where young readers will find questions designed to elicit further comparing and calculating. The best surprise by far is finding out what would happen if you grew as fast in your first nine months of life as you did in the nine months before you were born. (Ages 3 to 8) --Richard Farr

In this high-spirited book, Schwartz does for ratio and proportion what he did for numbers in How Much Is a Million? The author, in an opening letter to readers, admits his secret childhood wish: that he could "hop like a frog," which leads to its corollaryA"Once you know that a frog can jump twenty times its body length, you can figure out how far you could hop if you hopped like a frog." Schwartz continues to extrapolate such kinds of information into fun-filled comparisons: "If you ate like a shrew, you could devour over 700 hamburgers in a day!" Warhola (Bigfoot Cinderrrrrella) matches the text with wit and whimsy, as he imagines what would happen if children grew as fast in their first nine months after birth as they do during pregnancy: a gigantic baby tips an enormous seesaw that uses a mountaintop for a fulcrum and raises a mound of 2.5 million elephants at the other end. Author and artist wisely let the dramatic facts speak for themselves, with just a bit of a wink: "If you flicked your tongue like a chameleon... you could whip the food off your plate without using your hands! But what would your mother say?" The book concludes with straightforward mathematical and zoological explanations for each vignette, then invites readers to undertake some simple and amusing equations of their own. Trivia fans and aspiring scientists alike will revel in these pages. Ages 5-9. (Sept.)
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