The Amazon rainforest, which is also known just as the Amazon, is a very big area of thick jungle in South America. It has a river which goes through it, and this river is one of the biggest rivers in the world. When talking about the river, the correct name is the Amazon River, because, if you don't say the word 'river', people will think you are talking about the jungle.
This place is full of millions of kinds of trees, plants and strange animals that include some that don't exist anywhere else in the world. There are over 40,000 different kinds of plants and insects living in these plants and there are many more that we haven't identified yet. A lot of the medicines we use are made from these plants, and scientists know the jungle is important in the fight against diseases.
Another reason why the Amazon is so special is that this huge area of plant life provides us with clean air. People use so many cars nowadays that the air we breathe is polluted. The trees in the Amazon and all over the planet take the bad gases humans produce and give back oxygen to the air that animal life needs to breathe. For this reason, the Amazon is sometimes called the 'lungs of the planet', and without it, there would be even more problems with pollution and nature would suffer.
This amazing forest is very, very big, and covers areas of Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia. It is the largest tropical rainforest in the world, and its area is over half of the size of the United States. Unfortunately, many people who live there are very poor, so some of them cut the trees down and sell the wood. There are also many fires that are started by people who want to destroy the forest because then they can use the land for cows, which bring them more money. People also want to build more houses and roads in the jungle. For this reason, the Amazon has been getting smaller over time and this has become a huge problem.