1Hi, it's Dog.
2Today we have a question about April Fool's Day from someone named Mira.
3Why do we celebrate April Fool's Day?
4That's a great question.
5April Fool's Day is always a day of the year you have to be a little careful.
6You never know, you might walk into a room and find out it's been filled with balloons.
7Or maybe you find your classroom has been covered in newspaper.
8April Fool's Day might be one of the strangest holidays there is.
9A holiday where people play pranks on each other.
10Little things that might annoy someone, or make them laugh,
11or sometimes just confuse people.
12Here's one of my favorite pranks.
13This teacher played a prank on his students
14by giving them the hardest spelling quiz ever.
15All right, going through the list with the spelling. You're checking your own list! Here we go.
16The first word is "Blorskee." I lost my blorskee at a carnival.
17B-L-O-R-S-K-E-E.
18The next word is "Speekuzslmn." Look, there's a Speekuzslmn.
19S-P-E-E-K-U-Z-S-L-M-N.
20There are silent letters at the end of that one.
21But then he told them the truth.
22This is an April Fool's joke. It's close enough, April Fool's!
23No one knows exactly why or when April Fool's Day started.
24But it's been going on a while.
25Every year, for a long time now.
26Newspapers tend to print at least one fake story or picture.
27Most people have fun trying to spot the one story or photo that's fake.
28But always, every April Fool's Day,
29there's someone who forgets what day of the year it is,
30and they wind up getting tricked.
31Like, maybe someone offers you a cookie,
32only for you to find out it's been filled with toothpaste. Yuck!
33Have you ever had someone play an April Fool's prank on you?
34Since lots of April Fool's pranks are about confusing or annoying people,
35not everyone loves getting pranks played on them.
36Like, imagine you found your car covered in post-it notes.
37You might find the prank funny, but other people might be upset.
38It could really depend on how far the prank goes.
39For example, one year on April Fool's Day,
40a television station in Boston, USA - a place that has no volcanoes -
41aired a fake news story claiming that a nearby hill had started to erupt lava.
42It was meant as a joke, but a lot of people took it seriously.
43They panicked and they packed their cars up and left their homes.
44When they later found out that it wasn't true, the news station got in big trouble.
45Modern technology makes it harder and harder to know what's fake.
46Like, take these two photographs.
47You've got a photo of a lion and a photo of a child.
48But using a computer, it's actually fairly easy to take the child out of the photo
49and make it look like... see?
50there's a child reaching out and giving the lion a hug.
51And it's not just photos that someone can fake using modern technology.
52One year, the British television channel BBC aired this video.
53Can you spot what's wrong with it?
54It shows penguins flying.
55But this video is not real.
56Animators used computer software to draw penguins,
57then used special effects to make it seem like a real video.
58They did such a good job that some people saw this video and were actually fooled.
59They thought someone found penguins that could fly.
60Will you remember not to get fooled on April Fool's Day?
61Here's a tip.
62Just always remember what day it is.
63If it's the beginning of April and you hear or see something that seems a little unbelievable,
64maybe think twice.
65That's all for this week's question.
66Thanks, Mira, for asking it!