World News for Students of English

05-07-2016 15:00

We rely on them for milk, but now will we rely on them for gold? That’s right, scientists in India claim to have found traces of gold in the urine of an indigenous cow breed. The researchers of the Junagadh Agricultural University said they made the discovery after seven years of extensive research on 500 urine samples of Gir cows.

Samples taken from calves, pregnant cows and ones which had stopped producing milk altogether show that there are 10 to 30 milligrams of gold in a litre of urine. Seems too good to be true, but it’s no moot point.

The head of the biotechnology department says that the amount varies from breed to breed and age to age but that all of the 500 samples contained gold in them.

The team’s findings even showed that cow wee has medicinal value which means we could even start using cow urine to treat illnesses which would be pretty…golden.

Difficult words: claim (say), trace (a very small quantity of something), urine (pee, wee), indigenous (native, natural to the place), extensive (large), moot (this means two things: debatable and it makes fun of the sound “moo” that cows make).

Source: www.ondemandnews.com