Interesting Facts
Australia has more than 1500 species of spiders? So why am I afraid of the spiders of the South American jungles!!
La Paz, Bolivia, is the world's most fireproof city. At 12,000 feet above sea level, the amount of oxygen in the air barely supports a flame.
When relations with Bolivia soured in 1865, Queen Victoria ordered the Royal Navy to send six gunboats to Bolivia and sink its fleet. Her admirals pointed out that Bolivia had no coastline and therefore no fleet, so the queen sent for a map and a pair of scissors and cut Bolivia from the world.
The Andes-Amazon is the world’s largest river basin and is the source of one-fifth of Earth’s fresh water. It is also the most abundant wilderness on the planet, supporting the world’s highest diversity of birds and concentration of primate diversity, one-third of all freshwater fish species, and more than 60,000 plant species, half of which are endemic varieties not found elsewhere. Today, nearly 20 percent of the intact forest in the Amazon Basin has been lost to logging, cattle ranching, mining, agriculture, and infrastructure development. Current statistics suggest that up to 9,000 square miles of forest are lost every year. (www.moore.org/andes-amazon.aspx)
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