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For audiobook listeners, this page includes all the illustrations in the book, including first of all the text-based example illustrating the importance of consonants in comprehension, which was impossible to read out loud!

The vital role of consonants

See if you can understand this sentence where all the consonants have been removed:

e ou e eai i a ae ea eeaio i e ea.

Impossible, yes? Now try the same sentence this time with all the vowels removed:

w cld b dlng wth lrgly df gnrtn n twnty yrs.

Wave structure

First 32 harmonics of a string

By Hyacinth - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65098419

Biomass on Earth by kingdom

Units are gigatons of carbon

Source: Y.M. Bar-On,R. Phillips,& R. Milo, The biomass distribution on Earth, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 115 (25) 6506-6511, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 (2018).

Head size and hearing thresholds