The World’s Oxygen – level 3
09-09-2019 15:00
People are concerned about the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, as there are so many fires burning in the Amazon rainforest.
People believe that the Amazon rainforest produces 20% of the world’s oxygen because there are so many plants creating oxygen through photosynthesis there.
However, there are also many forest microbes there eating and breaking up dead plants and they breathe the oxygen –rainforests both create and use a lot of oxygen.
A professor said that the fires are terrible, but they are not decreasing the world’s oxygen. Instead, the world’s oxygen mostly comes from the oceans.
Experts say that deforestation in the rainforest is a worse problem. Satellite images show that the Brazilian Amazon lost 430 square miles of forest in August because of deforestation and not fire damage.
Difficult words: photosynthesis (a process where green plants use sunlight to create energy for them to grow and they create oxygen in the process), microbe (a small animal like a bacteria), deforestation (removing forests, trees, and plants to put something else there).
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