C1Reading and Use of Englishঅংশ 7
Gapped text
You are going to read an extract. Six paragraphs have been removed from the extract. Choose from the paragraphs A-G the one which fits each gap (1-6). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
The Escape Artist in Tank Nine
Every morning at half past seven, before the first visitors arrive, Ines Moretti does a head count. It is a short one. Tank Nine at the Porthcarrow Aquarium has a single resident, a common octopus called Pickle, and the first thing Moretti, the aquarium’s senior biologist, checks each day is that Pickle is still inside it. Usually she is. But over the past year there have been several mornings when the tank was empty, and those are the mornings Moretti has learned to dread.
The answer, when they eventually found it, was embarrassingly simple. The lid of Tank Nine was held down by four plastic clips, and Pickle had learned to work one of them loose from the inside, pushing at it patiently with the tip of an arm until a gap appeared. An adult octopus can squeeze through any opening larger than its beak, the only hard part of its body, which in Pickle’s case is about the size of a grape.
None of this would surprise anyone who studies octopuses. They have around five hundred million nerve cells, roughly as many as a dog, and most of them are not in the brain at all but in the arms, which can taste and touch independently. In captivity, octopuses have learned to open jars, to recognise individual keepers and, notoriously, to squirt water at people they do not like.
Moretti is careful about words like ‘personality’ when she talks about animals; scientists are trained not to assume that other creatures think as we do. But after eighteen years of working with octopuses and their relatives, she is convinced that individuals differ in temperament as much as dogs do. ‘Some are shy, some are bold, some are just difficult,’ she says. ‘Pickle is all three, depending on the day.’
So, alongside the screws and the silicone, the team has started giving Pickle puzzles. Her food now arrives inside screw-top jars, plastic building-block boxes and tubes with stoppers at both ends. Moretti changes the puzzles every few days, because Pickle solves most of them quickly and then loses interest. Since the puzzles were introduced, she has not escaped once, although Moretti is reluctant to draw conclusions from a few months.
Those notes may one day be useful to researchers, but for now their keenest readers are the visitors. A summary of Pickle’s latest achievements is chalked on a board beside Tank Nine, and children crowd round it as if it were a football score. Pickle herself spends most of the opening hours hidden in her den, emerging, with impressive timing, just as the crowd starts to drift away.
That decision is partly practical: Tank Nine will need rebuilding, and the budget is tight. But it is also, Moretti admits, a question of whether an aquarium can ever really give an animal like this what it needs. Pickle’s escapes, she suspects, were a kind of argument, and not one she is sure she has won. Tomorrow at half past seven, she will do her head count again, hoping as always that the answer is one.
সন্নিবেশের জন্য অনুচ্ছেদ
একটি অনুচ্ছেদে ক্লিক করুন, তারপর একটি শূন্যস্থানে ক্লিক করুন
যাচাই করতে সব 6টি শূন্যস্থান পূরণ করুন (6টির মধ্যে 0টি সম্পন্ন)