--- title: Mountains: life as you climb higher — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Mountains: life as you climb higher», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Climbing a high mountain is like travelling from summer to the North Pole in one day: woods at the bottom, then meadows, then rocks, t --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / Mountains: life as you climb higher # Mountains: life as you climb higher Lesson 13 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/0/) — Climbing a high mountain is like travelling from summer to the North Pole in one day: woods at the bottom, then meadows, then rocks, then snow even in July. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/1/) — Every 1000 metres up the air gets about 6 to 7 degrees colder, and it gets thinner, so each breath brings less oxygen and you puff and pant on the path. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/2/) — Up there the summer is short, the wind is fierce and the sunshine is strong, so trees give up at the treeline and only tough, low, hairy or cushion-shaped plants carry on. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/3/) — Mountain animals are champions of cold and thin air: shaggy yaks with big hearts and lungs, ibex with grippy hooves on cliffs, marmots whistling a warning, a snow leopard wrapped in its own tail like a scarf. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/4/) — The treeline is where trees stop on a mountain, because above it the summer is too short and cool and the wind too strong for trees to grow wood; it is about 4000 metres near the equator but only about 600 metres in Scotland. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/5/) — Air is thinner higher up, so each breath has less oxygen; at the top of Mount Everest a breath has only about a third of the oxygen it has at the beach, so most climbers carry oxygen bottles. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/6/) — Air gets colder by about 6 to 7 degrees for every 1000 metres you climb, which is why Kilimanjaro, almost on the equator, has snow and ice near its top; it is not because the top is nearer the Sun, which is about 150 million km away, so a few km closer makes no difference. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/7/) — Alpine ibex climb the almost vertical stone walls of dams, like the Cingino dam in Italy, to lick salt, gripping with hooves that have hard edges and soft pads; baby ibex can climb within days of being born. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/8/) — Marmots are big ground squirrels of mountain meadows that whistle when they see an eagle or a fox, so everyone dives into the burrows; Alpine marmots hibernate about six months a year. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/9/) — Yaks live on the Tibetan plateau, often above 4000 metres, with long thick hair, a woolly undercoat and big lungs and hearts, and they find weather above about 15 degrees hard. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/10/) — Snow leopards of Central Asia use their very long fluffy tail for balance on cliffs and as a warm wrap; they have small round ears and wide furry paws like snowshoes, and they cannot roar, only make a puffing sound. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/11/) — The Andean condor has wings about 3 metres across and glides on rising air; one was found to fly over 170 kilometres without flapping once. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/12/) — Edelweiss is covered in thick woolly white hairs that protect it from strong sunlight, cold and drying wind, and it is protected, so it must not be picked in many places. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/13/) — Llamas mostly spit at other llamas, not at people, to settle arguments over food or space; llamas and alpacas come from the Andes and are cousins of camels. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/14/) — Cushion plants grow in low tight domes that stay calmer and warmer inside, sometimes several degrees warmer than the air; some llareta cushions in the Andes may be over 1000 years old. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/13-mountains-life-as-you-climb/15/) — Pikas are small round relatives of rabbits that stack grass into hay piles under rocks for winter, because they do not hibernate; they overheat easily, so warming mountains are a danger to them. - ← previous: [Forests: woodland through the year and the great northern forest](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/12-forests-woodland-through-the-year/) - next →: [The city as a habitat](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/14-the-city-as-a-habitat/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)