This quiz is part of a past paper, which means it appeared in a real exam (in June 2003). It’s Part 1 (Selective cloze) of Paper 3 (Use of English) of the ESOL First Certificate in English (FCE) of the University of Cambridge, taken approximately at the upper-intermediate level.
The elephant has some relatives called mammoths, which lived in the Stone Age. More than 15,000 years ago people painted pictures of them on cave walls. Then, astonishingly, in 1799, a man walking along the banks of the River Lena in Siberia a startling discovery. Peering into a wall of ice, he could see the shape of a massive, hairy mammoth, apparently at him. He immediately ran in terror, but several days later he the courage to return and cut the mammoth's tusks -- its two enormous teeth -- out of the ice to sell them. Mammoth tusks are the biggest teeth of any known creature, some a length of five metres. These tusks were to good use, protecting the mammoth's young from other animals, and brushing away snow.
To most of us, mammoths are probably the most of the elephant's extinct relatives, but thousand of years earlier, in the woodlands of eastern North America, lived another of the elephant's relatives called the mastodon. Like mammoths, mastodons may also have had a hairy coat, but mammoths mainly ate grass on the plains, mastodons to eat twig and leaves.
We do not know why mastodons extinct. However, computer studies of the decrease in mammoth suggest that it was a particular of over-hunting by humans, and changes in the climate at that time which to their disappearance.
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Two creatures of the past - mammoths and mastodonsThe elephant has some relatives called mammoths, which lived in the Stone Age. More than 15,000 years ago people painted pictures of them on cave walls. Then, astonishingly, in 1799, a man walking along the banks of the River Lena in Siberia a startling discovery. Peering into a wall of ice, he could see the shape of a massive, hairy mammoth, apparently at him. He immediately ran in terror, but several days later he the courage to return and cut the mammoth's tusks -- its two enormous teeth -- out of the ice to sell them. Mammoth tusks are the biggest teeth of any known creature, some a length of five metres. These tusks were to good use, protecting the mammoth's young from other animals, and brushing away snow.
To most of us, mammoths are probably the most of the elephant's extinct relatives, but thousand of years earlier, in the woodlands of eastern North America, lived another of the elephant's relatives called the mastodon. Like mammoths, mastodons may also have had a hairy coat, but mammoths mainly ate grass on the plains, mastodons to eat twig and leaves.
We do not know why mastodons extinct. However, computer studies of the decrease in mammoth suggest that it was a particular of over-hunting by humans, and changes in the climate at that time which to their disappearance.
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Comments
I never could keep the difference between mammoths and mastadons straight.
Check the second one: "a man... made had a startling discovey"?
Biboy B. C.
And next week I've FCE exam...
Don't worry! You'll do just fine!
By the way, I didn't know that it was possible to sit for the FCE in January in Italy ... when I took it, there were only two sessions per year - June and December.
The problem is that I do lots of mistakes and I write sentences too simple
Bad mark