Have you ever entered a rainforest?
It is a special, dark place where trees grow very tall and millions of animals, insects, and plants live and grow there.
A rainforest is found in hot and humid parts of the world. It rains a lot there.
Trees grow so closely that their branches and leaves slow the rain to reach the ground.
Rainforests are about 6% of Earth’s surface.
The largest rainforest and the most enormous is the Amazon in South America.
It covers almost five million square kilometers.
The second largest rainforest is in Western Africa.
There are also rainforests in America, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Islands Rainforests provide us with many things.
Half of the world’s species of animals and plants live in the rainforests.
Eighty percent 80% of the food we eat first grew there.
Twenty-five percent 25% of the medicine we take when we are sick is made of plants that grow only in rainforests.
The Amazon Rainforest is called the “lungs of our planet” because it produces twenty percent 20% of the world’s oxygen.
It also gives us one fifth ( 1 /5 ) of the world’s fresh water.
With all the good things we get from rainforests, we are destroying them.
People cut them down to make fields for cows or to grow plants.
Destroying rainforests will result in more pollution, less rain, and less oxygen for the world.