The speaker went camping because

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Task I Listening

You will hear a monologue. For statements 1-7, choose A, B, or C to complete the statements correctly.

1.       The speaker went camping because

   A her friends had asked he to      B it was the right weather for it   C she went every weekend

2. The camping spot was

    A in the countryside    B by a large river     C near some houses

3. When Jack told his story, the speaker

    A was calm and relaxed B decided to tell a different kind of story    C became a little afraid

4. When they heard the sound of the bell, the speaker and her friends

     A ignored it              B started whispering     C stopped talking

5. As the sounds got louder, the speaker

     A realized the fire was in danger of going out   B wanted to run away  C decided to shout out a warning

6. When she saw her brother, the speaker

      A started laughing    B became very angry with him      C felt relieved more than anything else

7. By the end of the story, the speaker realizes that

A. you should never tell ghost stories in the dark B. her brother’s joke was quite funny C. she had never been so                 scared in her life

Task II Reading   Read the text. For statements 1-7, choose A, B, C or D to complete each statement correctly.

I’m not on the Menu!

Unlike humans, who just need to open the fridge door or pop into the nearest supermarket whenever they feel hungry, animals across the world spend endless hours every day hunting down their next meal. Of course, the animals they are hunting do their very best to avoid ending up on the dinner plate! It’s a constant battle that requires great cunning on the part of the hunter and the hunted.

Fortunately, however, nature has provided both contestants in the survival game with a whole bag of clever tricks. Just take a look at some of the amazing things animals do to escape the jaws of a predator. In the Indonesian Ocean, the mimic octopus is a feast for many sea creatures, but this master of disguise must first be identified by its hungry hunters. This task is not easy, as this particular octopus can reproduce the appearance and behaviour of other sea creatures with startling accuracy. It can transform its soft body line 9

 into the shape of a sea-snake, a lion fish, or a jellyfish. But why does the mimic octopus disguise itself as a sea-snake or a jellyfish? The answer is simply because these animals are

highly poisonous and no other sea animal dares to approach them.

On the island of Madagascar, the tomato frog has more than one creative way of avoiding the native snake population. One survival technique is its colour: bright colouration in frogs is associated with skin toxins that make them poisonous and screams a visual warning to predators to ‘stay away!’ Any snake unfortunate enough to ignore the danger sign and attack the frog will find its jaws glued together. Why? Well, the tomato frog produces enormous amounts of a thick sticky substance from its skin when it is grabbed by a snake. This ‘glue’ causes the snake’s eyes and mouth to gum up and leads it to releasing the tomato frog from its menacing jaws very quickly! Surprisingly, the tarantula spider is a tasty treat for a number of animals and to escape them it has come up with a crafty defence. The tarantula uses its back legs to ‘throw’ barbed hairs at predators. Tarantulas kick the spiky hairs that    line 22

cover their body into the air directing them in the path of their attacker. The resulting mist of hairs causes physical irritation when it lands on the predator’s skin and eyes. The tarantula can then run away while its attacker is rubbing its sore skin and itchy eyes.

There can be few ways of escaping a hunter more inventive than letting it think that you are one of them. In the sunny valleys of California, rock squirrels and ground squirrels use exactly this strategy against rattlesnakes. These squirrels pick up pieces of shed rattlesnake skin, chew them and then lick their bodies in order to put the smell of the snake’s skin on their fur! The rattlesnake odour masks the squirrel’s own and, at night, the snake believes that another snake is in the squirrel’s burrow rather than supper.                             Test Perhaps the most famous of animal ‘smells’, though, belongs to the skunk. Like the tomato frog, this cute creature uses its elegant black and white markings to keep predators at a distance. Any foolishly persistent predator aiming for a skunk snack will find itself sprayed with one of the most awful stinks in the animal kingdom. Resembling rotten eggs, garlic and burnt rubber, the smell is so sickeningly bad that it can deter a starving bear. Be very careful because if you get too close, the spray can even cause temporary blindness!

Predator and prey are natural links in the food chain, but some of those links go to fascinating lengths to avoid being next on the menu. So the next time you are watching a wildlife programme about big cats on the lookout for lunch, think about what tricks those worried-looking wildebeest might be

thinking up to escape appearing as dessert after the zebra main course!

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