tailieunhanh - IELTS Academic Reading Sample 47

Với IELTS Academic Reading Sample 47 sẽ giúp các bạn ôn tập củng cố lại kiến thức và kỹ năng giải bài tập để chuẩn bị cho kỳ thi sắp tới đạt được kết quá mong muốn. Mời các bạn tham khảo. | Fierce fabulous and fantastic A new exhibition traces the history of animal painting in Europe from the anatomically inaccurate to the highly sentimental. The first picture you see in the exhibition Fierce Friends Artists and Animals 1750-1900 is of a giraffe sort of. Painted in about 1785 the creature in it has the neck of a giraffe but its back is too long its haunches too developed and its legs are out of proportion to its body. Like most Europeans in the 18th century the anonymous French artist who painted it had never seen a real giraffe. He relied on eyewitness descriptions and on the skin of a giraffe the scientist and adventurer François Levallard had recently brought back from South Africa. Exotic animals shipped back to Europe at this time usually died soon after arrival even supposing they survived the voyage. Until about 1900 taxidermy consisted of stuffing the carcass with straw so the results fell apart after a few years. This meant that ordinary men and women had very few opportunities to see exotic animals at first hand until the establishment of the first zoos in Paris in 1793 in London in 1818. For an accurate depiction of a giraffe Europeans had to wait until 1827 and the arrival of the first living specimen when the Swiss artist Jacques-Laurent Agasse painted his lovely study of the Nubian giraffe sent to King George IV by the Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt. For most people in the 18th century animals meant farm animals carriage horses and food for the table. But the Enlightenment was an age both of exploration and of discovery as more and more species of animals birds fish and insects were identified and brought back from the South Seas Africa and India. In 1740 almost 600 species of animals were known to science. One hundred years later the number had risen to 2 400 including many that are familiar to most children today as a matter of course ostrich rhino orang-utan and buffalo. Kings and princes to be sure had their own menageries and wealthy .