The greenhouse effect.

In class one day in fourth grade, my teacher asked if any of us knew what the greenhouse effect was. I raised my hand. Nobody else raised theirs, so my teacher called on me.

"It's when they mix the old food with the fresh food at Chinese food restaurants, so the fresh food isn't any good because it's full of old food that keeps getting older," I said.

"No," my teacher said, shaking his head and looking amused. "No, that's not it at all."

The reason I believed this was because a few years earlier, a Chinese food restaurant opened next to a video store we frequented. One day as we were driving away, my parents were expressing their sympathy for the owners of the restaurant, because it seemed like nobody ever ate there.

"Why don't we eat there, then?" I asked. I thought it would be nice to give them some business. My dad, however, explained to me that if nobody was eating there, they would just keep mixing the fresh food with the old food, and it would just keeping getting worse and worse. He said that this was called the greenhouse effect, and it was the reason why we weren't going to eat there.