The Amazon
Amazon can be:
- one of the Amazons, a group of female warriors in Greek mythology
- The Amazon River, a big river in South America
- The Amazon Basin, the area drained out by the river
- The Amazon Rainforest, the forest surrounding the river
- Amazon (company), a big online store
Written for younger readers
The Amazon, in simpler words
This version comes from Wikijunior, a set of books written for children aged 8 to 11. It is shorter and uses plainer language than the article above.
From Wikijunior: South America
Part of Wikijunior South America project
The Amazon River is the second longest and the biggest river on Earth. It carries more than 8 times as much water as the second biggest river. The Amazon is also the widest river on Earth, at times six miles wide. A full 20 percent of the water that pours out of the planet’s rivers into the oceans comes from the Amazon. The main Amazon River is 6,387 km (3,980 miles). It collects water from thousands of smaller rivers .
A river starts at it spring and ends when it meets a larger body of water, from a large lake to an ocean. In case it ends meeting a bigger river the smaller one is called a tributarie.
Thousands of kinds of fish and turtles live in the Amazon River, including Piranha. The Boto, a kind of freshwater dolphin, also lives in the Amazon River. The Anaconda, the world’s largest snake, lives there too.
A Spanish explorer named Francisco de Orellana gave the river its name. He was the first European to travel the length of the river. While exploring the river he encountered a tribe of fierce women. They reminded him of a story from ancient Greece about warrior women named “Amazons”. Because of this, he named the river Amazon.
The Amazon Basin is the land covered by the Amazon River. The Amazon Basin is 6,915,000 km 2 (2,670,000 mi 2 ). It is bigger than many countries. The land it covers includes parts of Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador.
In the Amazon Basin there is also the Amazon Rain-forest. The Amazon Rain-forest is the biggest rain-forest in the world. It covers 5.5 million km 2 , almost half of all rain-forests in the world. Lots of animals and plants can only be found in the Amazon Rain-forest. In some places, the vegetation in the rain-forest is so dense that sunlight can’t reach the ground.
The people who live along the Amazon have used the river for agriculture and transportation for thousands of years.
Where this page comes from
The article above is adapted from “The Amazon” on Simple English Wikipedia, by its contributors. We removed reference markers, navigation boxes and tables, expanded measurement templates into readable numbers, and kept the prose otherwise intact. The simpler version is adapted from Wikijunior on Wikibooks.
Both sources are published under CC BY-SA 4.0, so this page is published under the same licence. You may share and adapt it, including commercially, as long as you credit the original and keep the same licence.
Worksheets, answer keys and printable layouts elsewhere on K5Print are our own work and are not covered by this licence.