Listening Comprehension of Text

Long ago people had time to gaze at the stars. Shepherds that spent much time in the open looking after sheep or goats could sit and watch the stars at night. Sailors perhaps had more time than anyone else to watch and wonder as they spend months sailing to distant places. Some clever imaginations invented stories about the Sun, Moon and stars. They imagined them as gods or goddesses. These stories were handed down from parents to children and became legends. To the people who heard them, they seemed qu ite true. This is one story told in India.

The Sun, Moon and stars are a large family. The Sun is the head ruler in the sky. The Moon is his wife and the stars are his children. To keep alive, the Sun catches stars and eats them. But when he gets up in the morning, the stars run from him, and dare not appear again until he goes into his hole in the west.

He crawls along the hole until he finds his narrow bed in the middle of the Earth. It is so small that he has no room to turn and has to creep out on the east side to climb to the sky. His wife, the Moon, then has her sleep. Every month the Moon is sad when the Sun eats some of the stars. She puts a black veil over her face to show her sorrow. This slowly wears off, and by the end of the months her face is bright again.

One of the tastiest and most expensive seafoods is the lobster. At one time there were many of these creatures in the sea. Now, because they fetch high prices, there are fewer and fewer in the oceans. They are trapped by people who make a living by selling them.

In real life they are a greenish-blue colour. When they are boiled, their hard coat turns bright read. That is the colour you see when they are on display in shop windows. These creatures used to be boiled alive, but now they have to be killed with a thin knife before being placed in hot water.

Lobsters are caught in wire baskets called pots. They are attracted to the pots which are filled with old fish heads or rotting meat. The lobsters caught in the pots fight each other, and often the owners of the pots find lobsters inside with claws or legs bitten off.

The broad tail of a lobster moves up and down to send it through the water. Eggs attach themselves to the mother's tail like berries. When the eggs hatch, little lobsters gather around like a hen's chickens. At the first sign of danger, the mother lobster rattles her big claws, and the babies swim for dear life under her body. Then with her brood safe, she steadily swims to a rocky hole.