The butterfly house Lesson 98 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 18 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 The butterfly house is warm and damp like a rainforest, because butterflies are cold-blooded and the tropical kinds need warmth to fly. 1 A blue morpho flashes bright blue, then vanishes into brown when it closes its wings; another butterfly stares at you with a big fake eye; a glasswing is almost invisible against the leaves. 2 Butterflies cannot chew: they uncurl a long tube called a proboscis to drink from orange slices and rotting bananas, and they taste with their feet when they land. 3 If one lands on your sleeve, let it be, because its wings are covered in tiny scales like dust that rub off easily. 4 In The Very Hungry Caterpillar the caterpillar eats cake and sausage and builds a cocoon, but real caterpillars eat only their own food plants, and butterflies make a chrysalis. 5 Butterfly houses are kept warm and humid; butterflies need a body temperature of about 30 degrees to fly well, so they bask in the sun. 6 The blue morpho's wings are bright blue on top and brown with eye spots underneath; the blue comes from tiny structures on the scales that reflect blue light, not from pigment. 7 Butterfly wings are covered in tiny scales that rub off easily, and losing many can make flying harder; Lepidoptera, the name for butterflies and moths, means «scaly wings». 8 Butterflies drink nectar, fruit juice and water through a long proboscis that uncurls like a party blower, and they taste with their feet. 9 Inside a chrysalis the caterpillar's body breaks down and is rebuilt as a butterfly; cocoons are spun by moths, not butterflies; butterfly houses often buy pupae from butterfly farms in tropical countries, where local people earn money while keeping the forest standing. 10 Owl butterflies have large eye spots on the underside of their wings that may startle birds or draw their pecks away from the body. 11 The atlas moth is one of the biggest moths, as big as a plate; adults have no mouth, do not eat and live only one or two weeks on fat stored as caterpillars. 12 The glasswing butterfly has clear patches on its wings with few scales, which makes it hard to see against leaves and flowers. 13 Monarch butterflies fly thousands of kilometres from Canada and the USA to mountains in Mexico for winter, and it takes several generations to fly north again. 14 Monarchs taste bad to birds because their caterpillars eat poisonous milkweed. 15 Many caterpillars eat only one or a few kinds of plant, so gardens with the right plants help; nettles help red admiral and peacock butterflies in Britain. 16 Many tropical butterflies drink from rotting fruit and mud puddles to get sugar and salts, and in the Amazon some even drink turtles' tears. 17 Butterflies are insects with six legs and four wings, but in many kinds, like monarchs and peacocks, the front pair of legs is tiny, so they seem to stand on four. ← previous The insect house: ants, stick insects, tarantulas and scorpionsnext → The penguin pool↑ back to Biology This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/98-the-butterfly-house/