The Amazon

The Amazon Rain Forest

Author: Bernard Smith

Publishers: Pinguin readers

                             

                                 Summary

The Amazon is the second longest river in the world. It is about 6,400 kilometres long. It is between one and ten kilometres wide. In the Amazon area it rains a lot, between August and November. There are more than 2,000 different kinds of fish in the Amazon. Every square kilometre is full of thousands and thousands of plants, birds and animals. The weather in the Amazon rain forest doesn’t change much. It stays hot (25ºC-35ºC) all through the year.

 There are 3,000 or more fruits in the rain forests of the world. A quarter of the medicines in the world are made from rain forest plants. Every year, the rain forests of the world are getting smaller. We are losing them day after day. Between the years 1978 and 1988, about 15,000 square kilometres of Amazon rain forest disappeared every day.

 The first people in rain forest, of course, were the “Indians”, or “Amerindians”. Today, there are about 350,000 Indians in the Amazon rain forest.

Opinion: It's interesting if you want to know about Amazonas. But I don't.