Describe a desert in your own words

A desert is a place with 10 inches or 25cm of rain or less a year.  Deserts cover about one seventh of the earth's surface.

  The landscape of deserts vary greatly; but all deserts have 1 thing in common . They are all extremely dry, and can be one of the harshest places on earth .

  Many deserts have extremes in temperature, with very high temperatures in the day and cold temperatures at night .

Deserts are not only made of sand as many people think.  They  consist of rocks, mountains, and sand. Desert sands are often rock which has weathered down to sand over the centuries.

There are 3 main ways in which a desert can be made. Deserts are formed because of lack of water.

1) Arid or dry regions are  caused by not being near a large body of water.

2) Inland areas lack moisture from the air.

3) Mountains may prevent rain from reaching areas making the areas dry and after awhile a desert.

  There are many deserts on the earth's surface. The largest desert is the Sahara desert found in north Africa. The largest continuous stretch of sand is called the Empty Quarter which is part of the Arabian Desert that stretches 250,000 sq. miles .

  Not all desert area have no rainfall , occasionally rainfall can turn some areas of desert into pockets of green areas . Today vast areas of desert are green as a result of pumping water from deep bore wells.

  Some plants and animals are able to exist in the desert. They are often able to survive by avoiding the driest times and only growing after the rains. A plant may spring up from a dormant seed after the rain and some adapt to the small amount of rainfall and are able to live, like the cacti, who can store water. A Spade foot tadpole often spends most of its time buried in the sand.

  Insects have also learned to adapt to desert live and survive the dry times as eggs or pupae. Some ants store seed to eat during the dry seasons. they also avoid the heat by often coming out only  at night.

Reptile on the other hand do well in the desert because they control their body temperature by gaining or losing heat from their surroundings .  They use less energy and need less food. 

Small mammals like hamsters and mice can also live in the desert by living in burrows . The temperature in the burrows does not change like the surface. They can also store their food in the burrows. They might only come out at night when it is cool.

Larger mammals such as the hedgehog and fox also stay in the burrows and only come out at night to search for food.

 Camels are one of the few animals which seem to be designed to survive in the desert . They can go for days without water and are able to eat the tough desert plants. They store in their humps which help them survive.

Whether an animal or and insect or a human it seem a lot of adapting need to be done to survive and live in the desert.

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A desert is a vast land of sand,with very little moisture around and desert plants like cactus are very common there.Since there is very little moisture ,insects called darkling beetles utilise it very well in a very amazing way-they lift up the moisture from their legs and lift it into the air until drops trickle down into their mouths.There are many species of snakes,which vary from 11 cm - 15 mtrs.So its not just places filled with greenary where we find amazing creatures, there are deserts too!

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A large, dry, barren region, usually having sandy or rocky soil and little or no vegetation. Water lost to evaporation and transpiration in a desert exceeds the amount of precipitation; most deserts average less than 25 cm (9.75 inches) of precipitation each year, concentrated in short local bursts. Deserts cover about one fifth of the Earth's surface, with the principal warm deserts located mainly along the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, where warm, rising equatorial air masses that have already lost most of their moisture descend over the subtropical regions. Cool deserts are located at higher elevations in the temperate regions, often on the lee side of a barrier mountain range where the prevailing winds drop their moisture before crossing the range.

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Plants need much more water than animals do.  Plants use water not only to carry nutrients throughout their tissues, but also to exchange gases with the air in the process known as transpiration. Air, which contains the carbon dioxide that plant cells need for photosynthesis, enters the plant mainly through the stomata (tiny holes under its leaves). The air travels through tiny spaces in the leaf tissue to the cells that conduct photosynthesis. These cells are coated with a thin layer of water. The cell walls do not permit gases to pass through them, but the carbon dioxide can move across the cell walls by dissolving in the water on their surface. The cells remove the carbon dioxide from the water and use the same water to carry out oxygen, the main waste product of photosynthesis. All this mixing of water and air in transpiration, though, has one drawback: more than 90 percent of the water that a plant's roots suck up is lost by evaporation through the stomata. This is why a plant always needs water and why plants that live in dry climates, such as cacti, have reduced leaf surfaces from which less water can escape.

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There are deserts every where. Most people think of "the desert" as an enormous sandy beach without the ocean and picture it as blazing hot at all times.

A desert is any place with less than 10" of rainfall per year. Granted, this includes the poles which some people would exclude from the definition. Deserts may be sandy, rocky, or dusty. The humidity may be low enough to make breathing painful or it can be saturated with moisture (theTihama, along the Red Sea). Thje desert may be hot all the time, if the humidity is high; the temperature may drop drastically at night; or it may be quite cold.In day time it is hot and night time it is cold.Desert plants like cactus are very common there.It has a ability to absorb water in its stem.A desert animal called camel,sweat very little.It drink a lot of water were ever it find it and store them,this ability help them to be alive in desert.And it is also known as the ship of the desert.

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 Thumbs up plzz..

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