--- title: The monkey house and the lemurs of Madagascar — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «The monkey house and the lemurs of Madagascar», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Ring-tailed lemurs sit in the morning sun with their arms out like children doing yoga, warming their bellies after a cold n --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/) [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 monkey house and the lemurs of Mad… # The monkey house and the lemurs of Madagascar Lesson 86 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/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/0/) — Ring-tailed lemurs sit in the morning sun with their arms out like children doing yoga, warming their bellies after a cold night; in the wild they live only on Madagascar, an island off Africa. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/1/) — Lemurs are not monkeys but an older branch of the primate family, and in King Julien's real groups it is the females, not a king, who are in charge and eat first. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/2/) — In the monkey house a spider monkey hangs by its tail alone like a fifth hand and eats with both hands, a howler monkey booms so loud it fills the building, and a capuchin cracks a nut with a stone like a hammer. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/3/) — Old cartoons love a monkey slipping on a banana skin, but real monkeys peel bananas neatly and nobody has seen one slip; the joke is for people. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/4/) — Ring-tailed lemurs sunbathe in the morning to warm up, and wild lemurs live only on Madagascar. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/6/) — In ring-tailed lemur groups the females lead, eat first and win most disputes, and many kinds of lemur are among the most endangered primates. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/7/) — Many monkeys of Central and South America have a gripping, or prehensile, tail that holds branches like a fifth hand, with ridged skin under the tip; no African or Asian monkeys have one. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/8/) — Golden lion tamarins from Brazil fell to about 200 in the wild in the 1970s; zoos bred them and returned some to protected forest, and there are now a few thousand. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/9/) — Tamarins and marmosets usually have twins, and the father and older brothers and sisters carry the babies most of the time. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/10/) — Howler monkeys are among the loudest land animals; a big hollow bone in the throat makes their dawn calls echo, grow louder and carry for several kilometres. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/11/) — Male mandrills have the brightest faces of any monkey, bright blue and red, and the brightest belong to the strongest males; Rafiki in The Lion King is drawn like a mandrill crossed with a baboon. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/12/) — Visitors' crisps, bread and sweets, full of salt, fat and sugar, make zoo monkeys ill, because they need a careful diet of leaves, vegetables, insects and pellets. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/13/) — Banana skins are slippery because of a gel on the inside; scientists who measured it won the joke Ig Nobel Prize in 2014. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/14/) — Wild capuchin monkeys in Brazil crack hard nuts with stones on a flat rock, and some of their stone tools are about 3,000 years old. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/86-monkey-house-and-lemurs-of-madagascar/15/) — Sifakas are lemurs built for leaping between trees, so on the ground they bounce sideways with their arms up, like dancers. - ← previous: [The ape house: orangutans, gibbons, bonobos and how apes think](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/85-ape-house-orangutans-gibbons-bonobos/) - next →: [The reptile house: snakes](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/87-reptile-house-snakes/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)