rainforest

«rainforest» in Mova's school dictionary: a thick forest of tall trees in a place where it rains a… — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 5 sentences of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

noun (rainforest, rainforests; also rain forest)

meaning for a pupil

1) A rainforest is a thick forest of tall trees in a place where it rains a lot almost every month. tree →

2) Most rainforests are tropical, near the equator and hot all year; some are temperate, cooler and wet, like those in New Zealand, Tasmania and the north-west of the USA and Canada. tree →

sense in the lessons

In science and geography lessons, rainforests are taught as habitats with layers (forest floor, understorey, canopy, emergent layer), huge numbers of plants and animals, and as places that help the whole planet by taking in carbon dioxide and giving out oxygen. Pupils learn about cutting down (deforestation) and protecting rainforests. The Amazon is the biggest. Phrases: tropical rainforest, the Amazon rainforest, rainforest animals, rainforest layers.

examples

• The Amazon rainforest is the largest rainforest in the world. tree →
• Sloths, toucans and jaguars live in the rainforest. tree →
• It rains almost every afternoon in a tropical rainforest. tree →
• The canopy is the leafy roof of the rainforest. tree →
• Very little sunlight reaches the rainforest floor. tree →
• We made a model rainforest in a shoebox for our project. tree →
• Queensland in Australia has rainforests near the coast. tree →
• Cutting down rainforests destroys the homes of many animals. tree →

note

Countable: one rainforest, two rainforests. Written as one word or two (rain forest). Myth: rainforests are not the «lungs of the Earth» in a simple way — oceans make much of the oxygen too — but rainforests are still very important. Not every rainforest is hot: temperate rainforests are cool.

In the corpora

• Mandrills, the monkeys with red and blue faces, live in the rainforests of central Africa, not on the open savanna.
• Mandrills live in the rainforests of Central Africa and have short stumpy tails; they are the biggest monkeys in the world.
• Buttress roots spread out like walls around many rainforest trees and hold the tall tree up in thin soil.
• Tree kangaroos live in rainforests, climb with strong arms and can leap many metres down to the ground without getting hurt.
• Many rainforest soils are surprisingly poor, because heavy rain washes nutrients out and most nutrients are stored in the plants.

Trees and pragmatics

Every meaning and example of «rainforest» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.