ADVANCED 6 – BRITANICO GOLD – READING TASK – AUG 2023

You are going to read an article about cryptozoology. Five sentences have been removed from
the text. Choose from the sentences A-F the one which fits each gap (31-35). There is an extra
sentence you do not need to use.

What is cryptozoology?

Is there such an animal as a yeti? Does Bigfoot really exist? Cryptozoology is the study of animal
species that people claim to have seen, but which are as yet unknown to science. Some people call it
a pseudoscience, but I object to that terminology because I’m not interested in ghost stories or UFOs.
They’re like a wisp of smoke compared to biological cases where I can find real evidence to back up
what people say, such as hair, footprints or photographs. 31. ______ The giant panda, the megamouth
shark, and the Komodo dragon were all cryptozoological until the 20th century. People had seen them,
but their reports were dismissed as fantastical. Now, they’re accepted as zoological species.

Growing up, I never thought of myself as a zoologist or a biologist. What interested me more was the
romantic aspects of natural history. When I was twelve, I watched Half Human, a movie about the yeti.
32. _______ So I went to the local library, where I found a limited number of books, but in them were
the contact details of cryptozoologists to correspond with.

By the time I was fourteen, I was well-known in the field; now I’m considered its elder statesman. I
started writing articles, then books. But I wasn’t just sitting in my room: I was with game wardens,
investigating reports of phenomena such as mystery cats or giant snakes. I still do that today.
33. _______ I went to the area to look for signs of the animal itself. Although I didn’t find one, I
commented on the case to the media and wrote articles about the long history of mysterious giant
snakes, from the Giant Pennsylvania snake sightings of the mid-1800s to the Peninsula Python
sightings in Ohio in 1944.

Some of the sightings of these creatures are misidentification. Bigfoot could be the back end of a moose
or it could be a known animal in an unusual place. There have been fakes too. I’ve found, however, that
these generally only account for around one per cent of all cases. If you listened to the media, however,
you’d think it was a much higher figure.

I’ve written more than forty books about these animals, and I founded a museum devoted to them in
Portland, Maine in the USA. We display artefacts such as a dart gun used to hunt Bigfoot from 1969 to
1973, footprint casts from Bigfoot and the yeti, and ephemera from famous movies. We also catalogue
fakes. 34. _______ We have a mask from the Georgia Bigfoot hoax of 2008, when an ape costume
was passed off as a Bigfoot corpse. We also had a Bigfoot statue at one point. All our visitors were
invited to take a picture of themselves with it. Our mission is educational and scientific: we have a good
relationship with the schools in Portland.

In the course of my career, I’ve run into two groups that I disagree with. 35. _______ But members of
the other one are just as closed-minded. These I call the ‘true believers’. Every sound they hear in the
woods is a Bigfoot. I surround myself with and identify with the people in the middle: the open-minded
sceptics.
A. We have a Feejee mermaid: a half-monkey, half-fish that was fabricated in the 19th century and later
exhibited in sideshows.
B. For example, last summer residents of Westbrook, Maine, found a giant snakeskin.
C. The goal of cryptozoology is to discover new species.
D. I believed that neither of these was real.
E. The first were the debunkers who say that there’s nothing out there.
F. I asked my teachers about it, but they told me to get back to my schoolwork.