Today we are going to talk about some of the largest animals in the world - elephants! Firstly, I would like to provide you with some general information about these amazing animals, so as you can pick an idea what they are all about. and then, I will leave you a short text, a reading comprehension exercise, in which you should choose the right answer. Hope you will have fun and learn a lot! Trunks up! :)
Elephants
Elephants are the largest living land mammals. At
birth it is common for an elephant calf to weigh 100 kg (225 pounds). It takes
20 to 22 months for a baby elephant to develop, the longest gestation period of
any land animal. The largest elephant ever recorded was a male shot in Angola
in 1974, that weighed 12 tonnes (13.5 tons).
An elephant's most obvious characteristic is the
trunk, a much elongated combination of nose and upper lip, which can be used to
grab objects such as food. Elephants also have tusks, large teeth coming out of
their upper jaws. Elephant tusks are the major source of ivory, but because of
the increased rarity of elephants, hunting and ivory trade is now illegal.
Elephants are vegetarians, spending 16 hours a day
collecting plant food from all levels. Their diet is at least 50% grasses,
supplemented with leaves, twigs, bark, roots, and small amounts of fruits,
seeds and flowers. Because elephants only use 40% of what they eat they have to
make up for their digestive system's lack of efficiency in volume. An adult
elephant can consume 300 to 600 pounds of food a day. 60% of that food leaves
the elephant's body undigested.
Walking at a normal pace an elephant covers about 2 to
4 miles an hour but they can reach 24 miles an hour at full speed.
It has long been known that African and Asian
elephants were separate species. African elephants tend to be larger than the
Asian species (up to 4m high and 7500kg) and have bigger ears (which are rich
in veins and thought to help in cooling off the blood in the hotter African
climate). Female African elephants have tusks, while female Asian Elephants do
not. African elephants have a dipped back, as compared with the Asian species,
and have two "fingers" at the tip of their trunks, as opposed to only
one.
Elephants have been used in various capacities by
humans. War elephants were used by armies in the Indian sub-continent, and by
the Persian empire. This use was adopted by Hellenistic Ptolemaic and Seleucid
kingdoms. The Carthaginian general Hannibal took elephants across the Alps when
he was fighting the Romans. Hannibal brought too few elephants to be of much
military use, although his horse cavalry was quite successful. Hannibal
probably used a now extinct third African species, the North African elephant,
smaller than its two southern cousins.
In the wild, elephants exhibit complex social behavior
and strong family bonds. Most females will stay with their original natal group
for a lifetime. Social hierarchy in calf-cow groups is based on size and age,
with the largest and oldest females at the top and the smallest and youngest
coming in last. Adolescent males determine their own ranking order through
head-butting contests, where strength and temperament are as important as size
and age. They communicate with very low and long-ranging subsonic tones.
A recent theory holds that elephants, which share an
ancestor with sea cows, evolved from animals which spent most of their time in
the water or even under water, using their trunks like snorkels for breathing. It
has been recently discovered that the species can still swim using their trunks
in that manner.
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