A tree is a perennial plant, consisting of a woody trunk of some elevation, which branches into a crown. The word, as such, comes from the Latin arbor, arbŏris.
For a plant to be considered as a tree, it must have certain characteristics: having roots, a height between two and six meters, a trunk of at least 10 cm and a crown. In the cup, in turn, the branches and leaves will be found. Trees can also produce flowers and fruits.
Trees can live thousands of years and some, like redwoods, can overcome heights greater than one hundred meters.
Trees are very important for the environment: they are a fundamental component of the natural landscape, they produce the oxygen we breathe in the atmosphere, they help reduce carbon dioxide, they prevent erosion and their foliage offers protection against the weather.
The human being uses trees for agriculture and landscaping, because they produce fruits and give beauty to the landscape. Wood, on the other hand, is appreciated for construction and as a source of energy.
Trees are constantly threatened, as they are exploited in an immoderate manner by man, thus destroying forests and animal habitats.
Likewise, the tree is also used as a concept or tool by various disciplines of knowledge to illustrate different things, as well as for some world religions, for which the tree is one of the essential elements of its cosmogony.
Tree of Life
An archetypal element that appears in many mythologies around the world is known by the name of the tree of life, and has a sacred meaning, hence it has a great religious tradition.
For the Judeo-Christian doctrine collected in the Bible, it represents the tree of knowledge, forbidden to Adam and Eve. Mesoamerican cultures relate it to an element that connects the planes of the underworld and the sky with the earth plane. Other pre-Hispanic cultures, such as the piaroas of the Amazon rainforest, for example, see on Mount Autana the mythical tree of all fruits.
The expression “tree of life” was also used by Charles Darwin in reference to the tree that shows the evolutionary relationships between different species.
Christmas tree
The Christmas tree is an element of symbolic and decorative character with which the arrival of Christmas is celebrated. It is decorated with lights, colored balls, foam, garlands and bows, and is topped, at its top, with a star, which represents the star of Bethlehem.
Christmas trees can be natural (coniferous, especially) or artificial plants, when they are made of plastic or other synthetic materials. It is said that his lights represent the light that Jesus brought to the world when he was born.
Family tree
Family trees or family trees are graphic representations of the relationships between different members of a family. They are constructed as a tree structure diagram.
These types of trees are made in order to know how a family is constituted, which are the ancestors of an individual, which are their descendants and their peers. In this sense, they allow to know better the roots and the past of a family.
Decisions Tree
Decision trees are prediction models that are constructed from a series of data in a sequence of logical operations. They serve to represent and categorize a series of conditions that are presented successively, and to visualize the options and opportunities available to them. They are used for problem solving and decision making in areas as diverse as economics and information technology.
Tree in computer science
In computer science, a tree is known as a data structure consisting of interconnected nodes, whose shape is similar to that of this plant. This structure is built on a parent node with child nodes connected to it. The node that lacks a father is known as the root, while the one without a child is called a leaf. The nodes that have both parents and children are called branches.
Camshaft
A camshaft is known as a mechanism whose objective is to distribute movements synchronously to activate other mechanisms that work at repetitive intervals. In this sense, the camshaft is a cyclic timer. It is used, for example, in internal combustion engines for closing and opening valves.
