Capital letters: Pallas's cat
The Grammar Bit!
Read the sentences opposite. You’ll notice that they each contain capital letters. Capital letters (also known as upper-case letters) are used for a number of reasons. Here are some of the main reasons:
- They follow a full-stop to show that a new sentence has started.
- They indicate proper nouns such as the names of people, places, days of the week and months.
- They are used for the pronoun ‘I’.
Now read the sentences again. Can you tell your talk partner why certain words need a capital letter (highlighted in bold) at the start?
Scintillating Sentences
1) Pallas’s cats live across Asia, with the biggest population believed to be in Mongolia. They are named after a man called Peter Pallas, who first described them in 1776.
2) These cats look bigger than they really are because they have thick fur. Their fur can change colour with the seasons.
3) Although there are many wild cats living in countries like China, Mongolia and Afghanistan, I have heard that the numbers of Pallas’s cats are said to be decreasing (getting smaller).
Did you know?
You might have noticed that the Pallas’s cat has round ears rather than pointed ears like other cats. This is the reason for its scientific name, Otocolobus manul, which means ugly-eared!