--- title: The Australian outback: red kangaroos, emus, thorny devils and runaway camels and toads — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «The Australian outback: red kangaroos, emus, thorny devils and runaway camels and toads», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: The outback is the huge dry middle of Australia: red sand, low bushes, rare rain a --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / The Australian outback: red kangaroos,… # The Australian outback: red kangaroos, emus, thorny devils and runaway camels and toads Lesson 165 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 15 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/0/) — The outback is the huge dry middle of Australia: red sand, low bushes, rare rain and heat that can bake the ground, yet it is full of animals that have found clever ways to live there. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/1/) — A red kangaroo bounds along like a pogo stick, and its springy tendons bounce it forward so it hardly gets tired, while a thorny devil drinks by standing in damp sand and letting tiny grooves suck the water up to its mouth like a straw. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/2/) — People also brought animals that ran wild: dingoes thousands of years ago, then camels and cane toads, and the toads have become a poisonous pest. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/4/) — The red kangaroo is the largest marsupial and can hop at over fifty kilometres an hour; males wrestle and kick each other with their strong back legs. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/5/) — Kangaroos cannot easily move backwards, and people like to say this is why the kangaroo and the emu, which also rarely steps back, are on the Australian coat of arms. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/6/) — Emus are the second largest birds in the world after the ostrich and can run very fast. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/8/) — The thorny devil has tiny grooves between its spines that pull water from damp sand up to its mouth, and it has a false head on its neck that it shows when attacked. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/9/) — The frilled lizard spreads a frill around its neck, held open by rods of cartilage, the bendy stuff in your ears, like an umbrella, to look bigger and frightening. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/10/) — Some termites in northern Australia build tall flat mounds, called magnetic termite mounds, lined up north to south, which helps keep the inside cooler than the outside. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/11/) — Dingoes are wild dogs that came to Australia with people several thousand years ago, and a dingo fence over five thousand kilometres long protects sheep farms. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/12/) — Many desert animals, like hopping mice, get almost all their water from their food, and waterholes fill with animals in the cool of morning and evening. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/13/) — The bilby is a desert marsupial with long rabbit-like ears that digs spiral burrows, and Australians buy chocolate bilbies at Easter to raise money to save them. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/14/) — Australia has the biggest herd of wild camels in the world, descended from camels brought in the 1800s to carry goods across the desert. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/15/) — Cane toads were brought to Australia in 1935 to eat beetles in sugar cane, but they spread across much of northern Australia, and animals like quolls die when they eat these poisonous toads. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/165-the-australian-outback-kangaroos-emus-thorny-devils-and-runaway-toads/16/) — After rare rains the outback can burst into flowers, and some frogs dig into the ground and wait years for the next rain. - ← previous: [Madagascar: chameleons, leaf-tailed geckos, tenrecs, baobabs and a moth Darwin predicted](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/164-madagascar-chameleons-geckos-tenrecs-baobabs-and-darwins-moth/) - next →: [Australia's venomous animals and why few people die](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/166-australias-venomous-animals-and-why-few-people-die/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)