In America, the famous aerial pictures of Long Island's Levittown in the 1950s, which showed identical, boxy houses marching across bare earth, helped fix a depressing image of suburbia.

ECONOMIST: Suburbs

This bare, sandy earth then becomes an effective rain trap - with no vegetation, water cannot be lost through transpiration (the evaporation of water from plants).

BBC: Termites 'engineer fairy circles'

The sound of feet, of bare soles, flat African feet pat-patting the earth.

NPR: 'Ancestor Stones:' Life and War in Sierra Leone

International astronomers suspect it is a bare, icy, rocky world, much colder than the Earth and 13 times its mass.

BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Planet hunters find 'super-Earth'