Gifts from the Rainforest

Gifts from the Rainforest

Gifts from the Rainforest
Reading Level

	edHelper's suggested reading level:	grades 4 to 7
	Flesch-Kincaid grade level:	7.15

Vocabulary

	challenging words:		cholesterol, colon, healers, malignant, exotic, arthritis, miracle, diabetes, worldwide, prescription, diets, affected, canopy, luscious, insecticide, nutmeg
	content words:		United States Cancer Institute, United States, Ajos Sacha

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Gifts from the Rainforest
By Colleen Messina

¹     Imagine a place with air so moist that your skin feels satiny smooth all of the time. Imagine a place with a green canopy overhead made completely of large, luscious leaves. Imagine a place with unusual creatures peeking at you from above and below with their bright eyes. It might sound like a fantasy, but places like that do exist. They are called rainforests. You might not know it, but you enjoy gifts from the rainforest every day.

²     Rainforests grow in a band around Earth's equator. They are vital for the ecology of the planet. Perhaps the most important gift from the rainforest is air. Rainforest plants produce oxygen. They also remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Rainforests clean and recycle water as well. Millions of plants and animals live in the rainforests. Rainforests are abundant, amazing habitats.

³     The rainforests give us many delicious gifts, too. Cocoa, coffee, and tea come from rainforest plants. Rainforests contain over 3,000 types of fruit. Indians eat over 2,000 of these fruits. People in the western world eat about 200 kinds of rainforest fruits, including papayas, bananas, guavas, and pineapples. And if you think that oranges have vitamin C, you should know about the Camu-Camu shrub. It has thirty times more vitamin C than oranges. It has the highest recorded level vitamin C of any plant on Earth.

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