The world’s rainforests cover less than ten percent of the earth’s suce, but contain over forty percent of all plant and animal species. The biggest rainforest is in South America, it’s called the Amazon.
Amazon is by far the largest remaining rainforest area left on our planet. It’s about 6 to 7 million square kilometers. It’s about two-thirds the size of the United States including Alaska. It’s enormous. Sixty percent of it is in Brazil, but the rainforest also extends into Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, French Guiana and Surinam. And amazingly each year the Amazon provides twenty percent of the world’s fresh water. Here you can find at least 60-70 thousand plant species and at least 3 thousand species of fresh water fish. And more monkeys than you find anywhere else on earth. In Brazil alone nine new species of monkeys have been identified over the last year.
But many of those species, known and unknown, are destroyed every day. Moreover, constant logging, mining and raising domestic animals cause a gradual disappearance of the Amazon jungles.
It is said in the passage that the Amazon lies in ______.