--- title: The desert: living with little water — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «The desert: living with little water», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: A desert is a place with very little rain, not necessarily a hot one: deserts bake by day but can freeze at night, because dry air an --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/) [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/) / The desert: living with little water # The desert: living with little water Lesson 5 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/5-the-desert/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/0/) — A desert is a place with very little rain, not necessarily a hot one: deserts bake by day but can freeze at night, because dry air and clear skies let the ground's heat escape into space once the sun goes down. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/1/) — Every desert living thing is a water saver: the cactus stores it, the kangaroo rat makes it from its food, the beetle catches it from fog and the flowers wait years as seeds for one good rain. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/2/) — Animals also dodge the heat: they hide in burrows by day, come out at night, lift their feet off scorching sand or carry big ears that give off heat like radiators. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/3/) — In the Road Runner cartoons the bird says «meep meep» and leaves Wile E. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/4/) — Coyote in a cloud of dust; a real roadrunner runs at about 30 km per hour and a real coyote can run about twice as fast, so coyotes do sometimes catch roadrunners. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/5/) — At the zoo a camel kneels with its humps wobbling, and many people think the humps are water tanks; they are actually stores of fat, and a dromedary has one hump while a Bactrian camel has two. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/6/) — A camel's hump stores fat, not water; keeping fat in one place lets heat escape from the rest of the body, and a thirsty camel can drink more than 100 litres in about 10 minutes. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/8/) — The saguaro cactus of Arizona and Mexico can grow over 12 metres tall and live over 150 years; its pleated stem swells like an accordion to store water, and its first arm often grows only at about 50 to 70 years old. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/10/) — Namib fog-basking beetles stand head-down in the morning sea fog so that drops collect on their backs and run down to their mouths. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/12/) — Desert seeds can wait in the soil for years and, after heavy rain, sprout, flower and seed within a few weeks, sometimes as a superbloom even in the Atacama. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/13/) — Kangaroo rats can live without ever drinking: they get water from dry seeds and from burning their food, make very concentrated urine and plug their cool burrows by day. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/14/) — Scorpions glow blue-green under ultraviolet light, and scientists are still not sure why; of more than 2,000 kinds, only a few dozen have venom dangerous to people, but none should be picked up. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/15/) — The Australian thorny devil eats thousands of small ants at a meal, draws water from damp sand through grooves in its skin to its mouth and shows a spiny false head to predators. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/16/) — The greater roadrunner is a cuckoo that runs at about 30 km per hour, eats lizards, insects and even rattlesnakes, and warms up on cold mornings by showing dark skin to the sun. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/17/) — A coyote can run at about 65 km per hour, and coyotes are among the real predators of roadrunners. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/5-the-desert/18/) — Deserts are defined by very little rain, not by heat, so they can drop below freezing at night, and Antarctica is the biggest desert on Earth. - ← previous: [The savanna: grass, trees and the great herds](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/4-the-savanna/) - next →: [The Arctic: ice, snow and the polar bear's world](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/6-the-arctic/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)