Deserts (Bài đọc thêm)

The Middle East and North Africa

Many Things in Common
The Middle East and North Africa are two regions that are often grouped together
because they have many things in common. Islam is the dominant religion and almost everyone speaks Arabic. Most of the Middle East and North Africa is a desert where very little rain falls. There are, however, many exceptions:
 Most Iranians are Muslims, but they are
not Arabs. Until 1935, Iran was known as
Persia, a culture that has existed for thousands of years. Most Iranians speak Farsi.
 The Turks originally came from the land northwest of India. They are also Muslims but speak Turkish rather than Arabic.
 The people of Lebanon primarily speak Arabic, but more than one-third are Christian. Lebanon has traditionally been
a Christian Arabic nation, but Muslims now outnumber Christians because
Muslims have tended to have more
children. Most Arabs living in the United
most Berbers today are Arabic-speaking
Muslims.

Many of the nations of the Middle East and North Africa were once controlled by colonial powers. This is why you will commonly hear many other
languages, including
English, French and
Italian in the region.

The Arabs
People who speak Arabic as their primary language
are known as Arabs. Traditionally, they lived on the Arabian Peninsula, but the language
and culture of the Arabs spread throughout the
Middle East with the expansion of Islam. Arabic is the language of the Quran, the holy book of Islam. Today more than 250 million Arabs live throughout the world. Arabs
constitute the substantial majority of people in
Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.
States are Lebanese. Where is the Middle East?
 Most people in Israel speak Hebrew and
practice Judaism. After World War II
ended, the United Nations created Israel as
a homeland for Jews.

 About twenty-five million Kurds live in the mountains between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. The Kurds are Muslims, but they have the own language and culture. Many Kurds want to keep their traditional
lifestyle and resist assimilating into the population of their host nations.
 A minority of the people of Morocco and Algeria are Berbers. The Berbers are the descendants of the people who lived in North Africa before the Arab invasion.
The Berbers have their own traditions, but
The lands around the southern and
eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea are often called the Middle East or the Near East. The term came from the first geographers in ancient Greece, for whom the region was both near and east. China and Japan are part of the Far East.
The west referred to Western Europe, but later included the American continents once they were discovered. Australia and New Zealand are often considered western nations. This is because most people in those nations have more in common with people in Western Europe and America
than they do with China or Japan.

A century after Mohammad’s death, Islam spread as far as Spain in the west to northern India in the east. The Arabs were great traders whose influence reached as
far as Southeast Asia. Today more Muslims live in
Indonesia, far from the Arab
world, than in any other nation.
The Arabs were interested in learning and in other cultures. Western
Europe was in a period often called the “Dark Ages”
because the civilizations of Greece and Rome
had been extinguished, but the Arabs made great advances in mathematics, medicine, and physical science. They replaced clumsy
Roman numbers with Arabic numerals we use today. Algebra and Chemistry are both
Arabic words.

Deserts
The Middle East and North Africa are one of the driest regions on earth. Nearly two- thirds of the region is desert. A desert is land
that receives an average of less than ten inches of rain per year. The Sahara Desert of
northern Africa is the largest desert in the world. It stretches across 3.5 million square
miles, a area larger than the United States if
you excluded Alaska and Hawaii. The Rub
‘al-Khali, or “Empty Quarter” is a large desert in Saudi Arabia. It is the largest area of
continuous sand in the world.

Desert air contains little moisture, so few clouds form over the land. Without clouds to block the sun, temperatures may reach as high as 125oF during the day. At night,
without the clouds to contain the heat, the temperature can fall to
as low as 40oF.
Extreme temperatures combined with little rainfall make desert life difficult for people,
plants, and animals. Yet, some
life forms have adapted to even the most
severe desert environment. Camels are able to survive long periods without food or water.