open cloze 1

The average life span

Life span, also known as life expectancy, is a statistical measure of the average amount of time a living being is expected to live.

Human life expectancy can be very different depending (1) _______________  where you were born and how wealthy your family is. Nowadays, it ranges (2) _______________  around 50 years in most African nations to almost 90 in Southern European countries and Japan.

Sadly, butterflies are among the organisms with the shortest life span. Some species only live (3) _______________  a day. However, some species of butterflies can live (4) _______________  to several months.

What would you say is the maximum lifespan for an animal? And which one would that be? Well, the honor belongs to the Greennland shark, which averages 300 hundred years but some specimens have lived over 500 years. They were alive when the Byzantine Empire (5) _______________  still a thing!

However, when it comes (6) _______________  life expectancy, no living being can beat trees. Some trees can grow (7) _______________  into their thousands, with Tjikko trees in Sweden holding the title of organism with the longest lifespan. Some of these trees are 10,000 years old. 10,000!!! They were already (8) _______________  the planet when our species was still living in caves.