Myths of the Animal Kingdom (2)

• Do mice love cheese?
• Can dogs see in color?
• How accurate are dog years?

Mice love cheese

Unlike the mice in many children's stories and movies, real mice aren't partial to cheese. Studies show that they prefer foods high in sugar, such as fruit and grain, while cheese disgusts their sensitive noses. Makers of Britain's best-selling mousetrap say peanut butter and chocolate make much better bait.

Dogs can't see in color

While it's true that dogs are colorblind, it does not mean that they see everything in black and white. Like colorblind people, dogs are missing one kind of cone in their eyes, which limits their visible range of color. The shades of blue, yellow and gray that they do see can be very helpful as many are farsighted. 

Dog years 

Our concept that one human year is equal to seven dog years has been fought about for some time. Many canine experts say that overall dogs age 10.5 years per human year their first two years. After that, dogs age four dog years per human year.

As we become better acquainted with our world, we can put all these myths to rest.

Info Cloud

We can make most nouns plural by simply adding an s or es to them. However, some nouns don’t follow the spelling rule when they become plural. They have what we call irregular plurals.

And many of such nouns happen to be animal names, there’re some examples. One mouse, two mice. One louse, two lice. One goose, two geese. One hippopotamus, two hippopotami. One octopus, two octopi.

Another form of irregular plurals are nouns with identical singular and plural. For example, the  plural of sheep is sheep.There’s no such word as sheeps.

That’s right, the next time you have trouble sleeping, you can count sheep. So what are some other examples besides sheep?

Buffalo, deer, moose, bison, swine and most fish.

Okay, that’s right. Most sea creatures, such as salmon, trout,cod, squid and shrimp have no separate plural form. But of course, like many English words there are exceptions, such as sharks, whales and stingrays.

Language Lab

partial adj.

/ˈpɑɚʃəl/
not complete or total;
tending to treat one person, group, or thing better than another
partial to : liking something or someone very much and usually more than other things or people
- Nathan likes all kinds of sports, but he's partial to boxing.
- Many parents criticized the teacher for being partial to students with better grades.

colorblind adj.
unable to see the difference between certain colors
- Tests proved that the little boy is colorblind.
- To many people's surprise, this famous painter is actually colorblind.
treating people of different skin colors equally : not affected by racial prejudice
- The judge claims he always stays colorblind when dealing with court cases.

farsighted adj.
able to see things that are far away more clearly than things that are near
- The girl was born farsighted, so she's been wearing glasses since she was three.
nearsighted
- Jacob became nearsighted when he was in junior high.

overall adv.
in general
- Overall, the economic growth rate of the country is decreasing.
adj.
- After the reform, the overall financial situation of the company started to improve.

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