The title of "A Hundred Thousand Why" is borrowed from the popular science reading "A Hundred Thousand Why" by the Soviet scientific literature writer Ilya (real name Ilya Yakov Levich Marshak). Ilya also took a poem from 1907 by Joseph Rudyard Kipling, a British writer and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate: "Where are the 5,000 people? How about seven thousand? A hundred thousand why? " "Hundred thousand" is a virtual finger, which is used to describe many things.

Mi Ailin (1896— 1953) is a famous popular science writer, engineer and children's literature writer in the Soviet Union. Famous popular science works include 100,000 whys, What time is it now, black and white, the sun on the table, a trip in the atomic world, things around us and so on.

The success of a hundred thousand whys lies in the word "set". When planning the first edition of "100,000 Why", we noticed the supporting problems. The first edition is divided into five volumes of physics, chemistry, astronomy, meteorology, agriculture and physiology, with more than 900 "why". Later, three volumes of mathematics, geology and geography and animals were added. 1962 65438+ 8 volumes published in February. At this time, the first edition of "100,000 Why" received 1.484 questions, 1.05 million words. The first edition * * * printed more than 5.3 million copies.