It isn't snowing.

Don't play near the cars.

'Were you listening to me?' She asked us_____.

'How will you get to France?' I asked them______.

The Meaning of Monkey Talk

Krak! Hok! Boom! These might sound (1) ______ random noises to us, but to a species of monkey living in Ivory Coast, they (2) ______ a very specific meaning. During (3) ______ studies of the Campbell’s monkeys in the Tai National Park, naturalists (4) ______ that when the monkeys spotted a leopard on the prowl, they would cry "Krak!" to (5) ______ other members of their group of the danger. A hok, by (6) ______ , alerted other monkeys that a crowned eagle was circling overhead. Boom seemed only to indicate that a branch had broken (7) ______ a nearby tree. What particularly intrigued the researchers, however, was the fact that the creatures weren’t just (8) ______ certain sounds to certain events, but seemed to have developed a kind of syntax. Sometimes, for instance, a monkey would add an oo sound to one of the above-mentioned noises, to suggest a(an)(9) ______ but more general threat: so krak-oo would mean that there was danger, but not (10) ______ from a leopard. The language of the Campbell’s monkeys may be "the most complex example of ‘proto-syntax’ in animal communication known to date", the researchers told.

Krak! Hok! Boom! These might sound (1) ______ random noises to us, but to a species of monkey living in Ivory Coast...

2. ……… An unrealistic-sounding way to solve the problem of an asteroid crashing into Earth

6. ……… A solution planned for testing

5. ……… Information about NASA’s most successful project to record asteroids near Earth

Asteroids

A In 2010, the planetary defence team at NASA had identified and logged 90 per cent of the asteroids near Earth measuring 1km wide. These ‘near-Earth objects’, or NEOs, are the size of mountains and include anything within 50 million kilometres of Earth’s orbit. With an estimated 50 left to log, NASA says none of the 887 it knows about are a significant danger to the planet.

B Now NASA is working towards logging some of the smaller asteroids, those measuring 140 metres wide or more. Of the 25,000 estimated asteroids of this size, so far about 8,000 have been logged, leaving 17,000 unaccounted for. Considering that a 19-metre asteroid that exploded above the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia in 2013 injured 1,200 people, these middlesized asteroids would be a serious danger if they enter Earth’s orbit.

C Whether NASA can find the remaining middle-sized NEOs depends on getting the money to build NEOCam, a 0.5-metre space telescope which would use infrared light to locate asteroids. If it did get the money, it could probably achieve its goal in ten years. Once logged, the planetary defence team would still need to work out how to defend the planet against being hit by the truly worrying asteroids – the PHAs.

D ‘Potentially Hazardous Asteroids’ are rocks close enough to pass within 7.5 million kilometres of Earth’s orbit. NASA has created a map of 1,400 PHAs, none of which are expected to be a threat in the next one hundred years. With technology already available, NASA can track these objects and make predictions about possible impact, at which point two defence solutions could be launched.

E The first is DART – the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. Plans are scheduled to test DART on the moon of an asteroid called Didymos. ‘Didymoon’ is 150 metres wide, orbiting its 800- metre mother, and hopefully the impact of DART will knock it out of its orbit enough for Earthbased telescopes to pick up.

F Another suggested defence against a PHA on course to hit Earth is to blow it up using a nuclear weapon. It may sound like a plot from a film, and it was the subject of the 1998 film Armageddon, but the Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response (HAMMER) is a genuine NASA proposal. The eight-ton rockets would be fired at an approaching asteroid with the hope of bumping it off course. If the asteroid was too close to Earth for this plan to work, the rockets would carry nuclear bombs to blow it up instead.

Match the paragraph (A–F) with the information it contains (1–6).

1. ……… Information about a plan that needs finance before it can happen