Do you know

The Date Palm

The date palm is a wonderful tree. People eat dates. They feed them to their animals. They use the leaves and the wood to build houses. They use the wood to build boats. They make baskets from the leaves. They burn the other parts of the tree to cook their food.

The date palm came from the Middle East. Seven thousand years ago, people in Syria and Egypt ate dates. They made pictures of date palms on their stone buildings. Today date palms grow in the Middle East, parts of Asia and Africa, southern Europe, and other warm parts of the world.

There are more than 2700 kinds of palm trees. Most of them cannot grow in the Middle East because it is too dry. The date palm grows there very well.

Hundreds of years ago, people in southern Europe and some Arab countries made picture of palm trees and palm flowers on some of their buildings. Today we can see these pictures in art museums. People think that the palm tree is beautiful. People thought the same thing a long time ago.

Rice

People all over the world eat rice. Millions of people in Asia, Africa, and South America eat it everyday of their lives. Some people eat almost nothing but rice.

Rice is a kind of  grass. There are more than 7000 kinds of rice. Farmers grow rice in many countries, even in the southern part of the United States and in eastern Australia.

No one really knows where rice came from. Some scientists think that it started to grow in two places. They think that one kind of rice grew in southern Asia thousands of years ago. Someone in China wrote about it almost 5000 years ago. Another kind probably grew in West Africa. Other scientists think that rice came from India, an Indian travelers took it to other parts of the world.

There are two main ways to grow rice. Upland rice grows in dry soil. Most rice grows in wet soil. People in many countries do all of the work of growing rice by hand. This is the same way farmers worked hundreds of years ago. In some countries, people now use machines on their rice farms. The farmers all use fertilizer. Some insects are enemies of rice. Farmers poison them.

People use every part of the rice plant. They make animal feed and rice oil from it. They also make baskets, brooms, rugs, sandals, and roofs for their houses. 

They burn dry rice plants in fires for cooking.