Whales Lesson 26 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
1 Stand under the life-size blue whale model hanging in a museum: about 30 metres long, about as long as two and a half buses, around 150 tonnes, with one heart weighing about 180 kilograms, the biggest animal ever known. 2 A whale breathes through a blowhole on top of its head, and the tall spout is warm wet breath turning to mist, the way your breath steams on a frosty morning. 3 Cartoon whales shoot a fountain of sea water out of their heads and swallow ships whole; the spout is breath, not a fountain, and the biggest whale of all eats tiny krill only a few centimetres long. 4 Its tail flukes beat up and down, not side to side like a fish, because the backbones of its land ancestors bent up and down when they ran. 6 Whales are mammals: they breathe air, are warm-blooded, give birth to live young and feed them milk. 7 Whales breathe through a blowhole on top of the head, and the spout is warm wet breath forming a cloud of mist. 8 Baleen whales like humpbacks and blue whales have no teeth, but baleen plates that sieve krill and small fish from huge mouthfuls of water; a blue whale's throat is far too narrow to swallow a person. 9 Humpback whales work together to blow a spiral net of bubbles that traps a shoal of fish, then rise through it with mouths open. 10 Male humpbacks sing long songs that can last for hours; the males in one ocean area sing nearly the same song, and it slowly changes year by year. 11 Sperm whales dive more than 1,000 metres deep, can hold their breath for over an hour, hunt squid using clicks, and have the biggest brain of any animal, around 8 kilograms. 12 Breaching means leaping out of the water; scientists think whales do it to signal, show off or knock off skin pests. 13 Whale tails move up and down, while fish tails move side to side, and humpbacks can be recognised by the pattern under their flukes. 14 A whale calf is born tail first under water, so that it does not drown during the birth, and its mother helps it up for its first breath; a newborn blue whale can gain about 90 kilograms a day. 15 Orcas, or killer whales, are the biggest kind of dolphin and live in family groups led by older females, who can live to around 80 or 90 and remember where to find food in hard times. 16 Whaling, the hunting of whales for oil and meat, nearly wiped out some species; most whaling was banned in 1986, and humpbacks have recovered a lot. 17 Whale poo spreads nutrients that feed plankton, and plankton makes much of Earth's oxygen. ← previous Horses, zebras and donkeysnext → Dolphins, porpoises and seals↑ back to Biology This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/26-whales/