Текст вопроса
Two Creatures of the Past – Mammoths and Mastodons
For questions 1-12, read the text below and decide which answer (A, B, C or D) best fits each space. There is an example at the beginning (0).
Example:
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0 |
A far |
B distant |
C remote |
D distinct |
The elephant has some (0)...B.....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 saw a shape of a massive, hairy mammoth, apparently looking out 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 put to good use, protecting the mammoths’ young from other animals, and brushing away snow.
To most of us, mammoths are probably the most of the elephant’s extinct relatives, but thousands 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 twigs 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 in the climate at that time which to their disappearance.