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The Rain Forest Essay

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The Rain Forest

The destruction of the rainforest is a problem that the people of the world can not continue to ignore. 14 percent of the Earth's land used to be covered by rainforests yet this number has dropped significantly to only about 6 percent (http://www.ran.org/ran/info_center/index.html). Rainforests provide the people of the world with many necessities, some of which would no longer be available if rainforests did not exist. In the last 50 years, rainforests have declined at a terrifying speed of 150 acres per minute or 75 million acres per year (http://www.ran.org/ran/info_center/index.html). People must open their eyes to the horrible tragedy that will inevitably occur if the citizens of the world do not …show more content…

Here, trees receive the necessary sunlight to undergo photosynthesis which is crucial for the survival of the forest as a whole. Many tropical birds, monkeys, apes, snakes, and other animals reside in the canopy
(http://www.davesite.com/rainforests/review1.shtml).

Temperate rainforests are located along the Pacific coast of Canada, the
United States, New Zealand, Tasmania, Chile, Ireland, as well as Scotland and
Norway. Most temperate rainforests are much younger than tropical rainforests only being less than 10, 000 years old. The temperate rainforests differ from the tropical in that their soil is full of much more nutrients. Temperate rainforests are also much more scarce than tropical rainforests
(http://www.davesite.com/rainforests/review1.shtml).

The rainforests of the world are homes to just about every group of animals known to man and it would be impossible to give recognition to them all.
The only animals that appear to be few in number are large mammals. The largest animal of the rainforest is thought to be the okapi, "a shy, elusive beast from west Africa (Nichol 56)." Gorillas, apes, the orang-utan of the Far East, gibbons, and chimps which can grow to the size of a human are also among the larger animals in the forest. A wide variety of monkeys including the tiniest monkeys in the world, the pigmy marmoset, live among the trees in the South
American rainforests (Nichol 61).

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