Grammar tips: Reading B1

Hoy en nuestra sección de ejercicios de Gramática y otros aspectos del inglés, traemos unos ejercicios del nivel B1 con textos para realizar Reading, parte muy importante de cualquier examen oficial. Esperamos os sea de ayuda.

READING: ANIMAL EMOTIONS

You may love your pet, but does your pet love you? Most animal lovers claim that animals definitely experience emotions. Many stories are told of older dogs who become jealous when a new dog (or a baby) arrives home. For many years, however, scientists did not agree that animals experienced emotions; these behaviours, they said, were simply physiological reactions to external stimuli. But now new research is beginning to confirm that animals may have feelings much like ours.

Recent studies have shown that many animals, including chimpanzees, dogs, horses, rats and birds, experience emotions similar to human jealousy, grief and love. Fear has also been widely observed by scientists, perhaps unsurprisingly, since this emotion helps in survival. Biologist Samuel Gosling claims that dogs exhibit four dimensions of personality: affection, sociability, emotional stability and “competence”, a combination of intelligence and obedience. These are similar to the categories of human personality generally found in basic psychological tests.

Other studies have shown that when a recording of dogs’ “laughter” is played to other dogs, they start to play with each other, and rats who “laugh” frequently seem to be popular among other rats, offering further proof of emotions among animals. In addition, animals respond to anti-depressant drugs and this proves that their brain chemistry, which is affected by the drug, must be similar to ours. Experts believe that their emotions must therefore be similar, too.

However, if animals really do have human-like emotions, there are some serious issues to consider: how fair is it, for example, for humans to keep animals in cages, or use them for pharmaceutical testing?

Exercise 1: Are the following statements true or false? Write capital T for true statements and a capital F when false.

1. Animal lovers believe that dogs can be jelous

2. Scientists are beginning to believe that animals have got feelings

3. Only humans experience both possitive and negative emotions

4. Dogs often “laugh” when they see other dogs playing

Coloca las siguientes palabras en los espacios vacíos.

Replace the words in the correct place:

To this day, there are still on the Madrid-Ferrol Alvia line who write messages of support for Francisco Garzón on their train tickets and ask to relay them to the disgraced driver. The notes are taken to him by a small group of close friends who take Garzón out to lunch every two weeks or so, to make he gets out of the house.

People no longer want to lynch Garzón, as they did the day after the . The attitude of the first investigating judge, Luis Aláez, who responsibility in higher places, played a . His friends say that these days, the slight-framed Garzón, who himself from the beginning, no longer hides at home, where he takes care of his ailing mother as he did before the (that is why he asked for a transfer to Galicia, despite originally stationed in Madrid).

Coloca las siguientes palabras en los espacios vacíos: