Chimpanzees Seek Out Medicinal Plants & Iberian Lynxes Recover

BBC Radio 4 broadcaster Mishal Husain interviews Dr. Elodie Freymann on Today programme about how chimpanzees seek out medicinal plants when they feel sick or wounded. The words in this interview clip (4:06) are colloquial, B2 level or so, but radio interviews are usually rather fast for the time pressures of news programmes, which makes it more difficult for foreign learners to segment speech and understand indivual words, so here you can find a listening comprehension task with its key and a follow-up discussion for C1 students. 

The radio recording has no script, but you can use the list of interesting words to follow the interview, after doing the comprehension task: to seek out, a lead [researcher], to tick, wounds, to go out of their way, rare, super [exciting], [plant] samples, anti-bacterial, anti-inflammatory, to expand, [medicinal] repertoire, to clutch [your stomach], to sneeze, to cough, respiratory [infection], non-invasive, [abnormal] metrics, to quantify [parasites], neophobic, to raise alarm bells, [next] wave, self-medication, a step [to start from], [specific pharmaceutical] compounds, to pinpoint, a [fast] recovery.

If you want further information, you can also check out Victoria Gill's report for BBC News "Chimpanzees self-medicate with healing plants",
which provides new details about Dr. Elodie Freymann's research and it is, problably, the original source for the radio interview above. This article is suitable for B2 students.

Another interesting environment story today on BBC News is the report by Malu Cursino "One of the world's rarest cats no longer endangered", which talks about the Iberian lynx and the recovery in the numbers of this "vulnerable" species, after the latest success in conservation efforts. This article can also be accessed by B2 learners.