Nature · Level 2 · 163 words

What Beavers Build

Original passage © Studio AM, written for Fluency.

A beaver does not build a dam because it wants a pond. It builds because it cannot stand the sound of running water. Play a recording of a stream beside a dry bank, and a beaver will pile branches and mud against the loudspeaker.

That simple rule changes whole valleys. Branch by branch, the dam slows the stream, the water spreads out behind it, and a pond forms. In the middle of the pond the beaver builds a lodge, and the door of the lodge sits under the water, where a wolf cannot follow.

The pond is useful to more than the beaver. Slow water drops the mud and sand it was carrying, so the valley floor rises and turns soft. Water sinks into the ground instead of rushing away, and the ground stays wet through dry weeks. Frogs, fish, insects and birds arrive.

The beaver has no plan for any of this. It answers one sound, and a wetland appears behind it.

Comprehension questions

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4 questions
1. What is the main idea of the passage?

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C. One simple instinct in the beaver builds a whole wetland it never intended.
The passage begins with the simple trigger, shows the large results, and ends by saying the beaver has no plan for any of it. That contrast is the point.

2. Where is the door of the beaver's lodge?

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B. under the water
Paragraph two says the door sits under the water, where a wolf cannot follow.

3. What does the loudspeaker example show?

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D. The building behaviour is set off by a sound, not by a plan for a pond.
There is no stream at the loudspeaker, only the sound, and the beaver still builds. That separates the trigger from any goal. Nothing in the text says beavers respond to noise in general.

4. In "beside a dry bank", the word "bank" means

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C. the sloping ground at the edge of water
The word appears where a stream would normally be, and the writer marks it "dry" to show there is no water there now. So it is the land at a water's edge.

Source: Written for Fluency. Original passage © Studio AM, written for Fluency.