Jane Goodall is one of the most well-known scientists in the world. Much of the information we have today about chimpanzees comes from the research of Jane Goodall.
Jane Goodall was born in London in 1934. She became interested in animals and animal stories when she was a very young child. She always dreamed of working with wild animals. When she was eleven years old, she decided that she wanted to go to Africa to live with and write about animals. But this was not the kind of thing young women usually did in the 1940s. Everybody was laughing except her mother. "If you really want something, you work hard, you take advantage of opportunity, you never give up, you find a way," her mother said to her. The opportunity came at last. A school friend invited her to Africa. Jane worked as a waitress until she had got enough money to travel there.
In 1957, Jane Goodall travelled to Africa. She soon met the well-known scientist Louis Leakey and began working for him as an assistant. He later asked her to study a group of chimpanzees living by a lake in Tanzania. Very little was known about wild chimpanzees at that time.
Jane spent many years studying chimpanzees in this area of Africa. It was not easy work. They were very shy and would run away whenever she came near. She learned to watch them from far away using binoculars. Over time, she slowly gained their trust(信任). She gave the chimpanzees human names such as David Graybeard, Flo and Fifi. Watching the chimpanzees, she made many discoveries. They ate vegetables and fruits. But she found that they also eat meat. A few weeks later, she made an even more surprising discovery. She saw chimpanzees making and using tools(工具)to help them catch insects.
Jane Goodall has written many books for adults and children about wild chimpanzees. Hope for Animals and Their World is one of her books. It tells about saving several kinds of endangered animals.
