texts to read
C3
Imagine that you are preparing a project with your friend. You have found some interesting material for
the presentation and you want to read this text to your friend. You have 1.5 minutes to read the text silently, then be ready to read it out aloud. You will not have more than 1.5 minutes to read it.
Half the human beings who have ever died, perhaps as many as 45 billion people, have been killed by female mosquitoes. Mosquitoes carry more than a hundred potentially fatal diseases including malaria, yellow fever and elephantiasis. Even today, they kill one person every twelve seconds. Amazingly, nobody had any idea that mosquitoes were dangerous until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1877, the British doctor Sir Patrick Manson proved that yellow fever was caused by mosquito bites.
Seventeen years later it occurred to him that malaria might also be caused by mosquitoes. He encouraged his pupil Ronald Ross to test the hypothesis. Ross was the first person to show how female mosquitoes transmit the parasite. Manson went one better. To show that the theory worked for humans, he infected his own son – using mosquitoes carried in the diplomatic bag from Rome.
Imagine that you are preparing a project with your friend. You have found some interesting material for the presentation and you want to read this text to your friend. You have 1.5 minutes to read the text silently, then be ready to read it out aloud. You will not have more than 1.5 minutes to read it.
Chameleons don’t change colour to match the background. They change colour as a result of different emotional states. Chameleons change colour when or when they beat another chameleon in a fight. They change colour when a member of the opposite sex steps into view and they sometimes change colour due to fluctuations in either light or temperature.
A chameleon’s skin contains several layers of specialised cells. Altering the balance between these layers causes the skin to reflect different kinds of light, making chameleons a kind of walking colour-wheel. It’s odd how persistent the belief that they change colour to match the background is. The myth first appears in the work of a minor Greek writer of entertaining stories and potted biographies. Aristotle, far more influential and writing a century earlier, had already, quite correctly, linked the colour-change to fear. But it’s come back with a vengeance since and to this day is perhaps the only thing most people think they ‘know’ about chameleons.
