TEXTO I

Brazil’s other forest

Still brimming with biological diversity, the Atlantic Forest needs allies

By Roger Hamilton

Any good bookstore will offer a shelf of books about the Amazon rain forest. Documentary producers never tire of exploring the Amazon’s tree-shrouded tributaries or tracking the mighty tigre. The Amazon is a land of superlatives, of romance and controversy.

But few people outside of Brazil and the conservation community think much about the continent’s other great repository of plants and animals, the Atlantic Forest.

The reason is simple: Most of the Atlantic Forest is gone. Once stretching 2,800 kilometers from Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, to the state of Rio Grande do Norte, and west to Paraguay and Argentina’s province of Misiones, only about 7 percent of the forest remains.

Of the Atlantic Forest’s original 1.3 million square kilometers, all that remain today are fragments totaling some 99,900 square kilometers. In contrast, despite the increasing pace of deforestation in the Amazon, more than 90 percent of that forest remains intact (although some sources cite lower estimates).

(http://www.iadb.org/idbamerica/index.cfm?thisid=3549, access on Aug. 31, 2005)

 

 

Explique a que se referem os seguintes valores numéricos:(Responda em português)

a) 7 percent ;

 

b) 1.3 million square kilometers.