Mount Everest
Mountain
The highest point on Earth, on the border of Nepal and China.
Mount Everest is 8,849 metres high: nowhere on Earth can you stand higher. It is part of the Himalayas. In Nepal it is called Sagarmatha, in Tibet Chomolungma.
Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary were the first to reach the top, on 29 May 1953. The air up there holds only about a third of the oxygen you breathe at sea level.
- high
- 8,849 m
- first climbed
- 1953
- of the oxygen at sea level
- 1/3
- 1
The mountain is still growing, by a few millimetres every year.
- 2
The rock at the summit holds fossils of sea creatures: long ago it was the bottom of a sea.
- 3
A climb takes about two months, because the body needs weeks to get used to the thin air.
Question 1 of 2