bestoĝardeno

Two roots you already own, and the meaning falls out of them.Besto is an animal, at rank 373. Ĝardeno is a garden, at 462. Put them together with the linking -o- that Esperanto uses to keep a compound pronounceable and you have bestoĝardeno, an animal garden, which is a zoo. You could have read this word on your first day of the course without being taught it, and that is the whole argument for compounding in one example.

The alternatives, and why this one won. Zoo exists in Esperanto and so does zoologia ĝardeno, the formal register. But bestoĝardeno is what people actually say, because it costs nothing to learn and nothing to guess. That is the pattern to watch across this whole tier: where English keeps an opaque Greek clipping, Esperanto usually keeps the transparent compound, and the learner who knows two common roots is not stopped by the third word.

This chapter's story is named after it.La bestoĝardeno is the milestone reader for this band, so the word is about to do a lot of work: read the page, then read the story and watch the compound behave in running prose rather than in a list.

The animals inside it. Leono, simio, elefanto and urso are all in this course already, and the kaĝo they are kept in arrived at rank 2,087. A modern zoo would rather you said enfermejo or just loĝejo, and the argument about whether the whole institution should exist is the same in Esperanto as in English.