Animals Talk: Multiple Choice Vocabulary Test

Have you ever seen bees dancing, gorillas sticking out their tongues or horses rubbing noses? Well, you might be surprised to learn that these are not simply things they do to (0)        D        entertain themselves or visitors at the zoo! They are actually very important (1)________ of communication. So how exactly do animals use the different senses in order to speak to one another?

The sense of smell is the most basic way in which even the simplest of creatures (including the single-celled amoeba!) communicate. Many animals, including the humans (2)________ scents to attract others to them for reproduction, to keep (3)________ predators or to attract prey, whereas others, such as ants, leave scents to show others, as ants, leave scents to show others where to find food. Sometimes, how these scents are detected can be quite incredible. Shakes, for example, use their tongues to pick up scent in the air whereas sharks can detect blood in the ocean about one mile away!

Many animals (4)________ wide use of body language in order to their message (5)________. A female rabbit, for example, shows the white underside of her tail to tell her young to follow heryoung to follow her to safety of the burrow. In the same (6)_______, bees perform a complicated dance of a food (7)________, while a blowfish blows up like a balloon to scare away predators. Meanwhile, gorillas stick out their tongues to show anger!

TOUCH

It’snot just human that (8)________ hands when they meet – chimpanzees also greet one another by touching hands. Other animals use the sense of touch in order to show their feelings (9)________ one another. To show affection, for example, elephants link their trunks together, while horses rub noses and giraffes press their necks together.

SOUND

We’ve all enjoyed walking (10)________ the lovely sound of birds singing, but birds are not the only animals that use the sense of sound to communicate. The world’s largest mammal, the whale, for example, has a complicated repertoire of low-frequency songs to communicate to others where they are and where there is food, sometimes (11)_______ hundreds of kilometres. In fact all sorts of animals use sound to speak in different ways. Elephants, for instance, trumpet in (12)_________ of excitement or danger, male grasshoppers rub their hind legs over their wings to attract females and snakes and crocodiles hiss loudly to ward off intruders.