--- title: Deserts — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Deserts», a lesson of the geography course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: A desert is a place where very little rain or snow falls, usually less than about 250 mm a year, so a desert does not have to be hot or sandy: icy Antarctica is --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/) [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/) / [Geography](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/) / Deserts # Deserts Lesson 18 of the geography 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/geography/18-deserts/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/0/) — A desert is a place where very little rain or snow falls, usually less than about 250 mm a year, so a desert does not have to be hot or sandy: icy Antarctica is the biggest desert on Earth. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/1/) — Films show the Sahara as endless golden dunes, but only about a quarter of it is sand; most of it is bare rock and gravel plains. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/2/) — Many great deserts lie in belts about 30 degrees north and south of the equator, where air that has already dropped its rain over the tropics sinks and warms, so clouds cannot form. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/3/) — In Europa Universalis 5 the Sahara looks like an empty wall between North and West Africa. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/4/) — Really camel caravans crossed it for centuries, carrying salt, gold, cloth and also enslaved people, linking Timbuktu with the salt mines and the Mediterranean. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/5/) — Think of a beach in July: the sand burns your feet even when the air feels fine, because the ground soaks up sunlight and gets much hotter than the air above it. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/6/) — A desert is a place that gets very little rain or snow, usually less than about 250 mm a year, so deserts can be cold as well as hot. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/7/) — Antarctica is the largest desert in the world, and the Sahara, at about 9 million square kilometres, is the largest hot desert, about as large as China. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/9/) — Between about 11,000 and 5,000 years ago the Sahara was much wetter, with lakes, grasslands, hippos and crocodiles, and rock paintings there show swimmers and cattle. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/10/) — The Atacama Desert in Chile is the driest non-polar desert, and some of its weather stations have never recorded measurable rain; its soil is so dry and lifeless, much like Mars, that scientists test Mars rovers there. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/11/) — Death Valley in California holds the record for the highest air temperature, 56.7 degrees Celsius in 1913, though some experts doubt that reading. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/12/) — Satellites have measured ground surfaces near 70 degrees Celsius in Iran's Lut Desert, much hotter than the air above. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/13/) — Many great deserts lie near 30 degrees north or south of the equator, where dry air sinks after losing its rain over the tropics. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/14/) — Camels, which can go a long time without water, carry heavy loads and cope with heat and sand, made regular caravans across the Sahara possible, carrying salt, gold, cloth and also enslaved people between West Africa and North Africa. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/16/) — Australia is the driest inhabited continent, and about 70 percent of it is arid or semi-arid land, so most Australians live near the coast. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/18-deserts/17/) — An oasis is a place in a desert where underground water reaches the surface or can be dug out easily, so palms and crops can grow. - ← previous: [Mountains and highlands](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/17-mountains-and-highlands/) - next →: [Straits: Bosporus, Gibraltar, Malacca, Hormuz and the other narrow doors](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/19-straits-the-narrow-doors/) - ↑ back to [Geography](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/)