The Amazon: Floor to Canopy
BeginnerThe Amazon told as a building, for children aged 6 to 8, hosted by Ben, an eight-year-old boy who climbs it alongside the child. The course does not ask where the forest is — it asks AT WHAT HEIGHT. It opens with a cutaway of four storeys: the forest floor up to about five metres, the understorey up to twenty, the canopy from twenty to forty, and the emergents past forty, with a river standing up through all four. Then it lights one storey per episode and shows who lives there and why: the tapir on the floor, swallowing big seeds whole and dropping them kilometres away in the darkest storey of all; the three-centimetre glass frog in the understorey, with a transparent belly and a trick of storing her own red blood in her liver so she can sleep invisible; the white-throated toucan in the canopy, with a bill over twenty centimetres that is hollow, light as a bridge lattice and doubles as a radiator; the harpy eagle and the fifty-metre brazil nut tree above everybody, held up by a big bee and an agouti; and finally the river, which rises the height of a building once a year so that fish swim among the branches and plant trees. Everything hangs on one number: only about two per cent of the sunlight ever reaches the forest floor.
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Certification Exam
Certification Exam
The Amazon: Floor to Canopy
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Certification Exam
The Amazon: Floor to Canopy
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Tips
See allThe big numbers were kept out of the cue words
Forty, fifty and two per cent anchor nothing
Three centimetres and three metres on the same ruler
The glass frog needed a magnifier; the arapaima needed a queue
The igapó only works if the crowns are full of leaves
A dead tree in water teaches disaster, and the episode says routine
The canopy photo had to be shot from below, looking up
Seen from above, it teaches the opposite of what the sentence says
