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The Man in the Moon?


The Man in the Moon?
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 5 to 8
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   5.52

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    singular, early, space, reflect, include, contain, when, large, instead, within, being, high, word, different, across, story
     content words:    Mare Tranquillitatis, Mare Imbrium, Mare Nectaris, Mar Serenitatis, Mount Everest


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The Man in the Moon?
By Cindy Grigg
  

1     When you were little, you may have been told a story about "the man in the moon." When we look at the full moon, it almost looks like it has a face. What are these different areas?
 
2     When you look at the moon from Earth, you can see dark areas, light areas, and craters. Because the dark areas look a little like Earth's oceans, they are called maria (singular, mare). Maria is the Latin word for "seas." A long time ago, early Greek and Latin observers thought these dark areas were oceans on the moon. But the moon's maria don't contain any water.
 
3     Some of the names of maria are Mare Tranquillitatis (the Sea of Tranquility), Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains), Mare Nectaris (Sea of Nectar), and Mar Serenitatis (Sea of Serenity). The largest maria are more than 1000 km. across. Instead of being seas, the maria are just darker areas that don't reflect the sun's light as much as other areas.

Paragraphs 4 to 5:
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