The hospital burn unit is a popular place on the day after Thanksgiving. I found that about three years ago, when my 18-month-old daughter touched a radiator pipe while playing around our friends’ farmhouse. Instead of feasting on leftover stuffing, I rushed my child as she screamed to hospital. Instead of getting a jump on my Christmas shopping, I learned how to take care of second-degree burns.
Our story had a happy ending. With weeks of twice-daily treatments at Mommy and Papa’s kitchen table burn clinic, my daughter’s hands healed. But other children we saw at the outpatient burn clinic weren’t so lucky. I say hands , a mouth that would never smile straight, a scalp that would never grow hair. All the parents had stories of accidents as easy as ours: a cup of tea knocked from a side table, a tumble into a space heater. “Heater and soup,” one veteran nurse told me at the hospital. “That’s all it is. Heaters and soup.”
Most of the injuries were to hands and wrists, and most came from contact with hot liquids or from touching hot objects. Not only do small children not realize the danger posed by hot objects; their skin is much thinner than that of adults. They burn more quickly, and the burns tend to be deeper and more severe.
Traditional fire safety education focused on preventing fires. The number of children injured by playing with fire has declined substantially when the Consumer Product Safety Commission required that cigarette lighters be child-resistant. “We know people know about smoke alarms,” says Chrissy, program manager for Safe Kids USA, a nonprofit that works to reduce childhood injuries. Now, tire safety experts hope that public education efforts will turn to burns that can be just as terrible as injuries caused by flame.
Which sentence in the passage is the closest in meaning to the following one?
People used to be warned of the fire burns.
Fill in the blank in Paragraph 2 with a proper phrase. (within 10 words)
What is the best title for this passage? (within 10 words)
For what purpose does the author mention “a cup of tea” or “a tumble into a space heater” in paragraph 2? (within 10 words)
Translate the underlined sentence in the last paragraph into Chinese.