--- title: Growing: teeth, height, hair, nails, from baby to grown-up — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Growing: teeth, height, hair, nails, from baby to grown-up», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Your body is a building site that never closes: bones lengthen, teeth are swapped, hair and nails creep out, an --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/) [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/) / Growing: teeth, height, hair, nails, f… # Growing: teeth, height, hair, nails, from baby to grown-up Lesson 71 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 15 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/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/0/) — Your body is a building site that never closes: bones lengthen, teeth are swapped, hair and nails creep out, and most of the building work happens while you sleep. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/1/) — Look at the pencil marks on the kitchen door frame: each birthday line is a few centimetres higher, because soft growth plates near the ends of your long bones keep adding new bone until your late teens. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/2/) — The parts you cut, hair and nails, are not alive, which is why the barber's scissors and Sunday nail clippers never hurt; the living part hides in the skin, out of reach. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/3/) — In cartoons a character drinks a potion and shoots up overnight, or a fright turns hair white in a second; real growing is slow, steady and full of surprises, like being taller in the morning than at bedtime. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/4/) — Children have 20 baby teeth; the grown-up tooth underneath pushes up while the root of the baby tooth dissolves, and adults usually end up with 32 teeth counting four wisdom teeth, which may come late or never; a lost adult tooth never grows back. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/5/) — Long bones grow at soft growth plates near their ends, told to work by hormones from the pea-sized pituitary gland under the brain; when the plates harden in the late teens, a person stops getting taller. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/6/) — The soft discs between the bones of the spine get squashed during the day and puff up again at night, so most people are about 1 centimetre taller just after waking, and astronauts in space grow a few centimetres taller for a while. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/7/) — Nails are made of keratin, like hair and rhino horn; the part you cut has no nerves, and fingernails grow about 3 millimetres a month while toenails grow only about 1 millimetre a month. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/8/) — Each hair grows from a follicle in the skin, about 1 centimetre a month; we lose about 50 to 100 hairs a day, and cutting hair does not make it grow back thicker or faster. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/9/) — A baby's skull has soft gaps called fontanelles that close in the first two years; a newborn has around 300 bones and soft parts, and many join so that a grown-up has 206 bones. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/10/) — Many children aged about 3 to 12 get aching legs at night that are gone by morning; they are called growing pains, but doctors are not sure growth causes them, as bones grow very slowly and tired muscles may be part of it, and limping, swelling or redness need a doctor. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/11/) — In deep sleep the body releases most of its growth hormone, and children aged 9 to 12 need about 9 to 12 hours of sleep a night. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/12/) — Babies usually walk on their own somewhere between about 9 and 18 months, while a foal or a baby giraffe stands within an hour of birth; a human baby's brain still has a lot of growing to do, and it must learn balance. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/13/) — In the teenage years the voice box grows and the vocal folds get longer and thicker, so the voice gets deeper and may jump about for a while; the change is often bigger in boys. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/71-growing-from-baby-to-grown-up/14/) — Feet grow fast in childhood, often a size or more a year, and usually stop growing in the early to mid teens, before the rest of the body. - ← previous: [Senses: nose, tongue and skin](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/70-senses-nose-tongue-and-skin/) - next →: [Staying healthy: germs, vaccines, sleep, food and exercise](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/72-staying-healthy/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)