How Animals Keep Fit Reading Answers with IELTS Passage

How Animals Keep Fit Reading Answers: The How Animals Keep Fit passage is a fascinating text commonly found in the IELTS General Training Reading Section. It compares how animals maintain physical fitness with how humans train for endurance, revealing key differences in physiology and evolutionary needs. This type of passage is perfect for testing skills like skimming for general ideas, scanning for factual information, and understanding cause-effect relationships. Below, you’ll find sample IELTS exam Reading questions with correct answers and clear explanations.

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How Animals Keep Fit Reading Answers Passage

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on the Reading Passage below.

How Animals Keep Fit

A No one would dream of running a marathon without first making a serious effort to train for it. But no matter how well they have stuck to their training regime, contestants will find that running non-stop for 42 kilometres is going to hurt.

B Now consider the barnacle goose. Every year this bird carries out a 3000-kilometre migration. So how do the birds prepare for this? Do they spend months gradually building up fitness? That’s not really the barnacle goose’s style. Instead, says environmental physiologist Lewis Halsey, ‘They just basically sit on the water and eat a lot.’

Until recently, nobody had really asked whether exercise is as tightly connected to fitness in the rest of the animal kingdom as it is for us. The question is tied up in a broader assumption: that animals maintain fitness because of the exercise they get finding food and escaping predators.

C Halsey points out that this may not necessarily be the case. Take the house cat. Most domestic cats spend much of the day lounging around, apparently doing nothing, rather than hunting for food. But over short distances, even the laziest can move incredibly fast when they want to. Similarly, black and brown bears manage to come out of several months’ hibernation with their muscle mass intact – without having to lift so much as a paw during this time.

D Barnacle geese go one better. In the process of sitting around, they don’t just maintain their fitness. They also develop stronger hearts and bigger flight muscles, enabling them to fly for thousands of kilometres in a migration that may last as little as two days.

So, if exercise isn’t necessarily the key to physical strength, then what is? One clue comes from a broader view of the meaning of physical fitness. Biologically speaking, all it means is that the body has undergone changes that make it stronger and more efficient. In animals such as bears, these changes appear to be triggered by cues such as falling temperatures or insufficient food. In the months of hibernation, these factors seem to prompt the release of muscle-protecting compounds which are then carried to the bears’ muscles in their blood and prevent muscle loss.

E Barnacle geese, Halsey suggests, may be responding to an environmental change such as temperature, which helps their bodies somehow ‘know’ that a big physical challenge is looming. In other bird species, that cue may be something different. Chris Guglielmo, a physiological ecologist, has studied the effect of subjecting migratory songbirds known as yellow-rumped warblers to changing hours of daylight. ‘We don’t need to take little songbirds and train them up to do a 6 or 10-hour flight,’ he says. If they are subjected to the right daylight cycle, ‘we can take them out of the cage and put them in the wind tunnel, and they fly for 10 hours.’

F Unlike migratory birds, however, humans have no biological shortcut to getting fit. Instead, pressures in our evolutionary history made our bodies tie fitness to exercise.

Our ancestors’ lives were unpredictable. They had to do a lot of running to catch food and escape danger, but they also needed to keep muscle mass to a minimum because muscle is biologically expensive. Each kilogram contributes about 10 to 15 kilocalories a day to our metabolism when resting — which doesn’t sound like much until you realise that muscles account for about 40 percent of the average person’s body mass. ‘Most of us are spending 20 percent of our basic energy budget taking care of muscle mass,’ says Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist and marathon runner.

GSo our physiology evolved to let our weight and fitness fluctuate depending on how much food was available. ‘This makes us evolutionarily different from most other animals,’ says Lieberman. In general, animals merely need to be capable of short bouts of intense activity, whether it’s the cheetah chasing prey or the gazelle escaping. Cats are fast, but they don’t need to run very far. Perhaps a few mad dashes around the house are all it takes to keep a domestic one fit enough for feline purposes. ‘Humans, on the other hand, needed to adapt to run slower, but for longer,’ says Lieberman.

He argues that long ago on the African savannah, natural selection made us into ‘supremely adapted’ endurance athletes, capable of running prey into the ground and ranging over long distances with unusual efficiency. But only, it appears, if we train. Otherwise, we quickly degenerate into couch potatoes.

HAs for speed, even those animals that do cover impressive distances don’t have to be the fastest they can possibly be. Barnacle geese needn’t set world records when crossing the North Atlantic; they just need to be able to get to their destination. ‘And,’ says exercise physiologist Ross Tucker, ‘humans may be the only animal that actually cares about reaching peak performance.’ Other than racehorses and greyhounds, both of which we have bred to race, animals aren’t directly competing against one another. ‘I don’t know that all animals are the same, performance-wise … and we don’t know whether training would enhance their ability,’ he says.

Also Read: 

• IELTS Reading Tips And Strategies

• IELTS Listening Tips

• IELTS Writing Tips

• IELTS Speaking Tips And Tricks

How Animals Keep Fit Reading Answers Sample Questions

Questions 1–8

Do the following statements agree with the information in the passage?
Write:

• TRUE – if the statement agrees with the information

• FALSE – if the statement contradicts the information

• NOT GIVEN – if there is no information on this

1. Running a marathon is just as painful for animals as it is for humans.

2. Barnacle geese prepare for migration by exercising frequently.

3. Some animals preserve muscle strength during periods of inactivity.

4. Barnacle geese’s fitness improves even while they are resting.

5. Yellow-rumped warblers can fly for long hours after being trained.

6. Humans evolved to store muscle regardless of food availability.

7. Domestic cats may stay fit through short bursts of activity.

8. Humans were once among the best long-distance runners in nature.

Questions 9–13

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 9–13 on your answer sheet.

9. What did Lewis Halsey suggest about barnacle geese?
   A. They train by flying short distances.
   B. They build muscle only by flying.
   C. They grow stronger without doing much physical activity.
   D. They prepare for flight only through cold exposure.

10. What biological change helps hibernating bears avoid muscle loss?
    A. Daily physical movement
    B. Higher food intake
    C. Increased daylight exposure
    D. Muscle-preserving compounds in their blood

11. What point does Chris Guglielmo make about warblers?
    A. They can’t fly unless properly trained.
    B. They develop fitness only during migration.
    C. Their fitness is triggered by environmental cues.
    D. They are less fit than other birds.

12. Why do humans require exercise to maintain fitness?
    A. Human muscles are smaller than those of animals.
    B. Early human environments were extremely predictable.
    C. Muscles require significant energy to maintain.
    D. Humans evolved to sprint faster than most animals.

13. What does Ross Tucker suggest about animals and performance?
    A. Most animals aim to be the fastest.
    B. Animals are naturally competitive.
    C. Performance training enhances all animals.
    D. Unlike humans, animals don’t care about peak performance.

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