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Articles from Britannica encyclopedias for elementary and high school students.
- grass - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
Grasses are a family of plants with leaves that usually look like blades. Most of them also have hollow stems and many branching roots. The green grass found in yards, the grasses growing on open land, grains, and bamboos all belong to the grass family.
- grasses - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
The grass family probably is the most abundant family of vascular plants-that is, those with liquid-carrying stems-in terms of numbers of individual plants. Grasses dominate great areas of Earth’s surface, including prairies, steppes, savannas, pampas, and paramos-all types of grassland. The family, called Gramineae or Poaceae, is also fairly sizable in its number of species, with an estimated 600 to 700 genera containing about 10,000 species. It ranks about fifth among the flowering plants in total number of species. The family is of prime importance to the world’s agriculture because it contains all the important cereal grains (see grain). Moreover, a large number of species are the food of grazing livestock and wild herbivores, or plant eaters. Grasses were intimately involved in the evolution of domestic animals and very likely of humans also.