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109
Text Four
You are going to read an extract from a book about collecting animals for zoos. For
questions 1 – 7, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according
the text.
ON ANY collecting trip, obtaining
the animals is, as a rule, the simplest
part of the job. As soon as the local
people discover that you are willing to
buy live wild creatures, the stuff
comes pouring in; ninety per cent is, of
course, the commoner types, but they
do bring an occasional rarity. If you
want the really rare stuff, you
generally have to go out and find it
yourself, but while you are devoting
your time to this you can be sure that
all the common local animals will be
brought in to you. So one might also
say that getting the animals is easy:
the really hart pard is keeping them
once you have got them.
The chief difficulty you have when
you have got a newly caught animal is
not so much the shock it might be
suffering, but the fact that being
caught forces it to exist close to a
creature it regards as an enemy of the
worst possible sort: yourself. On many
occasions an animal may take
beautifully to being in a cage but
getting used to the idea of living with
people is another matter. This is the
difficulty toy can only deal with by
patience and kindness. For month after
month an animal may try to bite you
every time you approach its cage, until
you despair of ever making a
favourable impression on it. Then, one
day, sometimes without any
preliminary warning, it will trot
forward and take food from your hand,
or allow you to tickle it behind the
ears. At such moments you feel that
all the waiting in the world was
worth-while.
Feeding, of course, is one of your
main problems. Not only must you
have a fairly extensive knowledge of
what each animal eats in the wild
state, but you have to work out
something else when the natural food
is unavailable, and then to teach the
animal to eat it. You also have to
provide for their individual likes and
dislikes, which vary enormously. I
have known a rat which, refusing all
normal rat food – fruit, bread,
vegetables – lived for three days on an
exclusive diet of spaghetti. I have had
a group of five monkeys, of the same
age and types, who displayed the
oddest individual characteristics. Out
of five, two loved hard-boiled eggs,
while the other three were frightened
of the strange white shapes and would
not touch them, actually screaming in
fear if you put such a terrifying object
as hard-boiled egg into their cage.
These five monkeys all adopted
oranges but, whereas four would
carefully peel their fruit and throw
away the skin, the fifth would peel his
orange equally carefully and then
throw away the orange and eat the
peel. When you have a collection of
several hundred creatures all
displaying such curious
characteristics, you are sometimes
driven mad in your efforts to satisfy
their desires, and so keep them
healthy and happy.
But of all the irritating tasks that
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