Kangaroo Island Bushfires

Kei Quinal

Reading — Intermediate Level
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Activity

Read the text and answer the questions

Ecologists have grave concerns for the future of unique and endangered wildlife on Kangaroo Island where bush fires have killed thousands of koalas.

Fires on the island, in South Australia, have so far burned through 155,000 hectares – about one third of the island’s entire area – with blazes concentrated in the biodiversity-rich western areas.

Concerns are greatest for the unique and endangered mouse-like marsupial the Kangaroo Island dunnart, and the glossy black-cockatoo, which have both seen extensive areas of critical habitat burned.

The island’s population of endangered glossy black-cockatoos – a unique subspecies – has been the subject of two decades of community conservation work to bring numbers from as low as 150 in the 1990s to as high as 400 in latest counts.

“A lot of the key feeding and breeding areas on the north coast [of Kangaroo Island] have been lost,” said Daniella Teixeira, a scientist researching the birds at the University of Queensland.
  1. Which two endangered species are ecologists most concerned with?
  2. The glossy black-cockatoos have grown from a population of 150 to approximately  
  3. How many hectares of Kangaroo Island have been destroyed?
  4. The preservation of species will be a huge problem because  
  5. What does the phrase "grave concerns" from the first paragraph mean?
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Discussion

Practice your writing skills by discussing the questions below

  1. What do you feel about the Australian bush fires?
  2. In what ways can you help Australia?
  3. How can bush fires be prevented in the future?
  4. Did this incident make you become more concerned of our environment? Why or why not?
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    Vocabulary

      • the existence of many different kinds of plants and animals in an environment
      • extremely important
      • a person who studies the relationships between groups of living things and their environments
      • a type of animal or plant that has become very rare and that could die out completely
      • large in size or amount : very full or complete
      • the place or type of place where a plant or animal naturally or normally lives or grows
      • a type of animal (such as a kangaroo or an opossum) that carries its babies in a pocket of skin on the mother's stomach

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