IELTS Reading: Matching Paragraph Headings: Chicken Bones

Some writers summarise the main idea of a paragraph in its topic sentence, usually its first. They might also add a conclusion at the end of the paragraph. So during your skimming, concentrate on the beginning and the end of each paragraph. But remember that sometimes the heading will come from the meaning of the whole paragraph and not simply the topic sentence/summary sentence.

Remember the reading strategy that we learnt. We can usually simply look for synonyms: words/phrases; but sometimes, you’ll need to understand the meaning of the whole paragraph.

The passage about our discarded chicken bones being discovered in the distant future.

First check the meanings of the following vocabulary

• eternal
• legacy
• unprecedented
• vanish
• posit
• domesticate
• skeletal
• fossilised
• mummify

To practice your listening, you can copy the contents of this file — Human Legacy — over to the window here and have the speaker read it for your convenience.

Human Legacy:  Chicken Bones

A: In his seminal 1973 philosophical work The Denial of Death, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ernest Becker asserts that by believing in themselves and the culture they create, people feel they can become heroic and, henceforth, part of something eternal: something that will never die as compared to their physical body. This gives people the feeling that their lives have meaning, a purpose, and are significant in the grand scheme of things. This results in us as humans striving to leave some sort of significant legacy behind us. We want to ensure that our symbolic or spiritual self lives on beyond death.

B: But for the present global human civilisation, the legacy we’ll leave behind will most likely be chicken bones. That’s right — just chicken bones. According to some experts, human civilisation is currently in the era of the Anthropocene, which is a term that’s used to describe the unprecedented influence humans have on the planet. Because of this influence, when our human civilisation eventually vanishes, there will still remain significant footprints that mark our existence in history. A new study suggests that the largest, most significant footprint that humans will leave behind will be formed from chicken bones.

C: The study, published in Royal Society Open Science, posits that the remains of domesticated chickens will be a major marker of our civilisation, simply because there are just so many of them. At any one time there are more than 22.7 billion domesticated chickens, and they far outnumber any other species of bird currently living. They’re actually the most numerous vertebrate species on land at any given time, outnumbering even the human population by 3 times. More than 65 billion chickens were slaughtered in 2016 alone to accommodate our apparent insatiable appetite for the bird, and that rate of chicken consumption is only increasing. If this pattern of consumption continues, chicken is on track to becoming the world’s most consumed meat, beating out the current number one: pork.

D: The chickens that are consumed today have, over time, developed a specific skeletal structure unique to the modern human era. Researchers compared the bones of these modern birds to that of their ancestors and concluded that the chicken bones of today will undoubtedly become fossilised as a representation of when humans dominated planet Earth.

E: While most wild bird bones are prone to decay, chicken bones are often discarded in landfills. When bones are surrounded by organic material their structure can be maintained for longer periods. The researchers say that these bones will then be mummified, which is why lead study author Carys E. Bennett asserts that chickens are “a potential future fossil of this age.”

F: So while humankind has certainly created a multitude of significant advancements and discoveries over the course of 300,000 years and counting, when everything is taken into account it looks like the only legacy that humans will leave behind is evidence of our fried chicken addiction.

The passage has 6 paragraphs, labelled A, B, …  to F, Choose the correct heading from the above list for the paragraphs. Write the number of the headings as answers for the following 6 questions:

1. Never mind Man’s prowess
2. Leaving an impression for ensuing generations
3. Humanity’s current cravings
4. Man’s belief in being remembered in the future
5. Signs of evolution
6. The whys and how’s of preservation

Answers below the image

1. F
2. B
3. C
4. A
5. D
6. E