Flamingos are tall, mostly pink birds with long legs. But they aren’t actually born pink. They are grey or white, and turn pink over the first couple of years of their lives.

Have you ever heard the saying “you are what you eat”? Well, flamingos are just that. In the wild, flamingos feed on shrimp, small clams, fish, insects, and algae (藻类). Yum! These foods, especially the algae, are rich in carotenoids (类胡萝卜素). Inside a flamingo’s body, carotenoids are changed into a red-orange pigment (色素) that turns its feathers pink.

Before scientists understood that flamingos got their colour from their food, zookeepers puzzled over why the pink birds turned white in zoos. Now they feed flamingos a diet rich in carotenoids and vitamins to keep their birds “in the pink”.

Still, flamingos fade when caring for their babies. Unlike their chicks, mama and papa birds don’t eat much. This makes the pigment stored in their feathers become less and less, so they lose colour.

If a flamingo eats blueberries, will it turn blue? Dr. Kevin McGraw, who studies feather colour in birds at Arizona State University, guesses if a flamingo eats enough blueberries, it would probably still turn pink, not blue! That’s because the pigments that make blueberries blue, are changed into colourless chemicals in the bird’s body. But blueberries also have a small number of carotenoids. So they would probably lightly colour the feathers pink.

①Betty has a new jacket. It’s from her grandma. She likes it because there are different letters (不同的字母) on the jacket and the letters are in different colors.

②________ It’s blue—the color of the sky (天空)! Blue is her brother Jack’s favorite color. Oh, you can see the letter in “GOOD”.

③________ It’s a beautiful (漂亮的) color—the color of the sunflower (向日葵). It’s her mother Linda’s favorite color.

④The letter E is red. It’s the color of the tomato. Her father Bill likes the color best.

⑤The letter A is purple. It’s Betty’s favorite color. Look! Her bed is purple and the quilt on her bed is purple, too.

⑥________ It’s green! “M” is her sister Mary’s favorite letter. You can see the letter M on her schoolbag, jacket and quilt.

⑦The new jacket is very beautiful. Betty likes to wear (穿)it to school.