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Animal Themes
Endangered Animals Theme Unit
Mammals
 Tigers

Tigers
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 4 to 7
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   8.87

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    genetic, mutation, nighttime, socialize, various, strength, fully-grown, running, breed, rate, vegetation, impressive, easily, rarely, mangrove, nurture
     content words:    South China

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Other Languages
     Spanish: Los Tigres

Tigers   
1     Tigers, known for their strength, are the largest of all cats! Well, while most scientists agree that this statement is true, others argue that the title really belongs to ligers.
 
2     Let's do some quick comparisons. A Siberian tiger can be more than 9 feet long and weigh over 600 pounds, whereas a liger has an impressive body length of nearly 11 feet and a weight of more than 900 pounds! Wait a second! Obviously, a liger is much larger than a tiger, so why don't most scientists say that ligers are the world's largest cats? Well, the answer to that question is that ligers are not natural wild animals. When scientists pair up a male lion with a female tiger, they get a liger. (If scientists cross breed between a female lion and a male tiger, however, they get a tigon. Interestingly, a tigon is smaller than either of its parents.) Since ligers are really the product of our ingenious matchmaking attempts, they get discredited when it comes to decide which member of the cat family is the biggest.
 
3     Tigers have dark stripes running vertically on their bodies. Except for their white bellies, most tigers wear orange or reddish brown fur coats. Rarely, we may come across some unusual looking tigers: white with brown stripes, white with no apparent stripes, or black with yellowish white stripes. These tigers, resulting from an atypical genetic mutation, do exist in the wild. Many people may think that white tigers are albinos. They are not, because their eyes are blue, not pink.

Paragraphs 4 to 7:
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