Snakes and lizards Lesson 30 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 17 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 .
0 Snakes and lizards are reptiles with dry scaly skin; a lizard usually has four legs, while a snake has none and slides by pushing the sides of its body against bumps on the ground, its belly scales gripping like the tread on a trainer. 1 A snake smells with its tongue: it flicks the forked tongue out, catches scent particles and carries them to a special organ in the roof of its mouth, and the two tips tell it which side the smell is stronger on. 2 It can swallow an egg bigger than its own head because its two lower jaw halves are joined by stretchy tissue, not because it «unhinges» its jaw, and it grows by shedding its whole skin, inside out like a sock pulled off. 3 In The Jungle Book, Kaa the python hypnotises people with spinning eyes; real snakes can't hypnotise anyone, they just have no eyelids, so their stare never blinks. 4 And cartoon chameleons turn into tartan or vanish against any background; real chameleons change colour mostly to show their mood and control their temperature, not to hide. 5 Snakes smell with their forked tongue, which carries scent to a special organ in the roof of the mouth and tells which side a smell is stronger on. 6 Snakes shed their skin in one piece as they grow, starting at the lips, and their eyes turn cloudy blue just before. 7 Snakes swallow food whole; the two halves of the lower jaw are joined by stretchy tissue, so the idea that they unhinge their jaws is a myth. 8 Venomous snakes inject venom through fangs, mostly to catch prey, and bite people only when frightened or stepped on; in Britain the adder is the only venomous snake. 9 Pythons and boas are constrictors that squeeze prey so its blood stops flowing, and the reticulated python, over 6 metres, is the longest snake. 10 Pit vipers such as rattlesnakes have heat-sensing pits on their faces that find warm-blooded prey in total darkness. 11 A rattle is made of hollow rings of keratin that click together as a warning; a ring is added at each shed, and snakes may shed several times a year, so the count doesn't tell the age. 12 Snakes push their bodies against bumps on the ground to move, and pythons still have tiny leg bones left from ancestors with legs. 13 Many lizards drop their tail when grabbed, and it keeps wriggling to distract the predator; the new tail has cartilage instead of bone. 14 Gecko toes have millions of tiny hairs that stick by very weak forces between molecules, adding up to a grip strong enough to hang from a ceiling. 15 A chameleon is a four-legged lizard, and its tongue can be longer than its body and shoots out in a fraction of a second, and chameleons change colour mostly to show mood and control temperature. 16 The Komodo dragon, up to 3 metres long, is the biggest lizard; it lives on a few Indonesian islands, hunts deer and has venom glands in its lower jaw. ← previous Crocodiles and alligatorsnext → Turtles and tortoises↑ back to Biology This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/30-snakes-and-lizards/