and Alex would normally respond with the correct answer.To do this, Alex had to understand colours and shapes as well as being able to count. So how do they do it? This is a question that I have been asked many times by my students in London.As with many other aspects of English, the reason dates back to when the Normans from Northern France invaded Britain in 1066. It is too much for one blog, so I’ll cover it over several weeks. Understanding the difference between countable nouns and uncountable nouns is an essential part of learning English.In this DailyStep audio word study number 20 from Dailystep.com, we are going to look at countable nouns. Alex, who died in 2007, was the subject of a three-decade-long experiment by animal psychologist Pepperberg taught Alex skills never before thought possible for birds, including language, consciousness, mathematics and basic reading. With apologies to dog lovers, dogs are not the sharpest tools in the shed Even so, figuring out that one quantity is larger than another isn't quite enough. She also had to know that numbers are sequential and that each number has a place within a number line. She would ask, "how many rose-coloured balls?" After glaring in the direction of the noise, the pride dashed into the foliage on the attack "Lions are territorial and live in prides, family groups," says In one experiment when five lionesses were together, McComb played the roars of three lions. Repeated testing showed that there was something fishy: the person asking the question had to know the answer.Pfungst eventually showed that Hans was responding to non-verbal cues from his questioner, such as a slight move of the head or straightening of the back when they approached the right answer.This didn't convince von Osten, who continued to tour Hans around Germany to excited crowds. Some zebrafish are inherently better with numbers than others, just like humans, and he wants to find out what separates these numerate fish at the genetic level.His goal is to find a common counting mechanism that all animals from fish to humans have inherited.That shared mechanism may not exist, but what does seem to be clear is that some form of counting is more or less universal. For now it's unclear if chicks really can conceive of a mental number line Rugani might be able to convince her detractors by For now it's unclear if chicks really can conceive of a mental number line. "We haven't really come across any animals that can't count," says Butterworth. "We haven't really come across any animals that can't count," says Butterworth. This way of thinking had not been observed previously in the animal world. While frogs count to help them mate, bees do so to help them navigate "Take, for example, the frog," says Butterworth. I will cover as many of them as I can!If you would like to subscribe to my regular audio lessons, and also have full access and download rights to the audio in all my blogs, DailyStep Audio lessons make you speak English like a native speaker for a short time each day, and help you to understand native speakers perfectly. If you subscribe to my regular DailyStep audio lessons, I will send you 5 expertly- designed audio lessons per week, so every month you get approximately 22 lessons per level. That's impressive, but Alex had decades of one-on-one training – yet he still never displayed the capabilities of some other animals.For instance, chicks seem to be able to count pretty much from the moment they hatch out of their eggs. The researchers varied both the number of groans and which hyenas were making them. Alex had to understand colours and shapes as well as being able to count When it came to counting, Alex could get up to six.To test him, Pepperberg would place a tray with five green blocks, six green balls, four rose-coloured balls and three rose-coloured blocks. For plural countable nouns, we do not need to use an article.I bought a few kilograms of carrots at the market. In modern English, we still call the live animals by their old Anglo-Saxon names, and the meat of the animals by their French names.However, is not always the case that the name of an animal and the name of its meat are different.
"If you're a small fish subject to predation, it makes sense for you to swim in a large shoal with lots of other fish." Once it finds some, it collects some and returns. "It probably broke down at around five or six lions, because the roars starts to sound confusing," says McComb. But they can do it.In 2012, Butterworth and his colleagues persuaded 200 guppies to judge which shoal they wanted to be in.