Learning English

The smell of chickens

It has been discovered that mosquitoes don't like the smell of live chickens! Could this research help us in the fight against malaria? 

Language challenge

Which of these is NOT a real English expression?

a) Chickens might fly!
b) Don't count your chickens before they hatch.
c) He's running around like a headless chicken.

Watch the video and complete the activity

The story

Scientists have discovered that malaria-carrying mosquitoes are deterred by the smell of certain animals, particularly chickens.

Working in Ethiopia, researchers found that the Anopheles arabiensis mosquito strongly preferred human to animal blood. And while it fed randomly on cattle, goats and sheep, it avoided chickens.

Habte Tekie - Addis Ababa University

They feed on humans and other domestic animals, but not on chicken, because the mosquito antennae did not respond.

Person sleeping under untreated bed nets inside the house, the light trap attached to the chicken didn't catch the malaria mosquitoes, while the light trap in which human beings slept overnight collected quite a significant number of malarial mosquito.

Key words and phrases

repel
keep something away (for example: insects/water) by being unattractive or unpleasant to it

something/someone repels you
you find something/someone disgusting or unpleasant and want to stay away from it/them

deter
prevent/discourage someone from doing something by making it difficult or unpleasant for them to do it

a pun
a funny way of using a word so that more than one meaning is suggested

steer clear of
to avoid someone or something

To do

Try our quiz to see how well you've learned today's language.

Downloads

You can download the audio and PDF document for this episode here.

Language challenge - answer

The answer is: a) Chickens might fly! - The correct idiom is Pigs might fly! We use it to talk about a possible situation that we think is very unlikely to happen in reality.

End of Session 2

Join us in Session 3 for Lingohack - our video which teaches you words from the news using the latest BBC World News bulletins.