Listening exercise
BBC: Elephants learn by sound mimicry
Audio link

Vocabulary:

flavor
call of the wild
funny-sounding elephant
to pretend to be something else
to hear right
drone
engine
somewhere in the distance
Kenyan 2
Mlaika
to imitate
mystifying
amazing
Tsavo
expert
on hand
Joyce Poole
to find s.t. a bit odd
couldn't tell (distinguish)
so alike
to take off
earphones
kilometers
to become convinced
to explain
to be written up in

scientific journal
Nature
Stephanie Watwood
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Massachusetts
to get to s.t.
in a second
author
to pretend to be
parrots
fascinating
to open up a whole new...
to be capable of Ving
to produce
new vocalizations
primarily
songbirds
bats
marine mammals
to be familiar with
to draw a line of connection
dolphins and whales
bottlenose dolphin
how animals use sound
social relationships
phenomenon
to recognize
group communication
social structures
vocal
similar to
to communicate with
to be bored
captive facility
cases of
vocal learning
described
totally foreign to one
social (sort of) cue
rare
conversational repertoire
to be picked up
chain saw
camera shutter
obviously
harbor seal
occasionally
to change s.t. over time
to encounter
individuals
Original BBC report

Listening comprehension questions:
1. What does the announcer call "mystifying"?
2. Where is Kenya, and what languages with more than 100,000 speakers are spoken there? (See Ethnologue: http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp?place=Africa) (Yes, there are a lot of them, but please do list them all!)
3. How did researcher Joyce Poole react when she first noticed this sound?
4. Researcher Stephanie Watwood says that only what kinds of animals were originally believed to produce new vocalizations?
5. What is Stephanie Watwood's main area of research?
6. How did Poole and Watwood connect?
7. What do elephants have in common with certain other animals that Watwood mentions, besides imitating sounds they hear?
8. What kinds of sounds are certain birds known to imitate?
9. A researcher named Peter ['taɪjæk] is mentioned in the report. How could you find the correct spelling of his family name, and what is the correct spelling?

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