2. Brazil is the largest country in South America and the fifth largest country in the world! It has a long coastal border with the Atlantic Ocean and borders with ten different countries! Challenge Can you find the names of all the countries Brazil shares a border with using an atlas?
3. Fast facts: Population: 193.7 million Capital city: Brasilia Largest city: Sao Paulo Official language: Portuguese although there are about 180 indigenous languages! Local money: Real Main religion: Catholicism
4. This is flag of Brazil. The stars on the flag represent the southern constellations, the stars you would see in the night sky in Brazil. Can you find out what the words in the middle mean?
5. Brazil is a very varied country. It’s landscape varies from dense forests and jungles to huge cities. It has a greater variety of animals than any other country on Earth! Including an amazing 100,000 different types of insect.
6. But the gap between the richest and the poorest people is one of the biggest in the world. Even though Brazil is quite a wealthy country.
7. Brazil is the ninth-wealthiest country in the world, but 12% of the people live on less than $1 a day. That means that one in eight people has only about 65p a day to buy all their food, clothes, pay their bills... Do you think you could manage on 65p?
8. 11 million people live i n Brazil's largest city, Sao Paulo. It is a very crowded place to live! More than two million people live in ‘favelas’ or shanty towns, one million people live in run-down blocks of flats and 15,000 are living on the streets.
9. CAFOD is helping people to persuade the government to provide good quality housing and better access to jobs, schools and doctors.
10. The Amazon is the largest river in the world and the Amazon Rainforest is the largest tropical forest in the world.
11. The Amazon rainforest is very important for the health of the whole planet. About 20% of the Amazon has been lost already. But climate change and deforestation (cutting down trees) could mean that 60% of the forest may have disappeared by 2030!
12. People from indigenous communities are some of the poorest in Brazil. More than half of the indigenous people living in Brazil live in the Amazon region.
13. The indigenous people who live in the forest have to move when the trees are cut down. CAFOD is helping them to protect their land so that they can support their families and provide food and shelter for them.
