考试日期：

2017年3月4日

Reading Passage 1  动物

Title

Red Worm (新)

Question types:

判断6

填空7

文章大意

Red worm-一种动物，作为大自然界的一种材料，比人造的要好

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 Many animals seem able to treat their  illnesses themselves. Humans way have a thing or two to learn from them.

A   For the past decade Dr Engel, a lecturer m environmental sciences at  Britain’s Open  University, has been collating examples of self-medicating behavior in wild  animals. She recently published a book on the subject. In a talk at the  Edinburgh Science Festival earlier this month, she explained that the idea  that animals can treat themselves has been regarded with some skepticism by  her

colleagues in the past. But a growing  number of animal behaviourists now think that wild animals can and do deal  with their own medical needs.

B   One example of self-medication was discovered in 1987. Michael Huffman  and Mohamedi Seifu, working in the Mahale Mountains National Park in  Tanzania, noticed that local chimpanzees suffering from intestinal worms  would dose themselves with the pith of a plant called Veronia. This plant  produces poisonous chemicals called terpenes. Its pith contains a strong  enough concentration to kill gut parasites, but not so strong as to kill  chimps (nor people, for that matter; locals use the pith for the same  purpose). Given that the plant is known locally as “goat-killer”, however, it seems that not all

animals are as smart as chimps and humans.  Some consume it indiscriminately,and succumb.

C   Since the Veronia-eating chimps were discovered, more evidence has  emerged suggesting that animals often eat things for medical rather than  nutritional reasons. Many species, for example, consume dirt-a behaviour  known as geophagy ( 食土癖). Historically, the preferred explanation was that soil supplies  minerals such as salt. But geophagy occurs in areas where the  heart is not a useful source of minerals,  and also in places where minerals can be more easily obtained from certain  plants that are known to be rich in them. Clearly, the animals must be  getting something else out of eating earth.

D   The current belief is that soil-and particularly the clay in it-helps  to detoxify the defensive poisons that some plants produce in an attempt to  prevent themselves from being eaten. Evidence for the detoxifying nature of  clay came in 1999, from an experiment carried out on macaws by James Gilardi  and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis. Macaws eat seeds  containing alkaloids, a group of chemicals that has some notoriously toxic members,  such as strychnine. In the wild, the birds are frequently seen perched on  eroding riverbanks eating clay. Dr Gilardi fed one group of macaws a mixture  of a harmless alkaloid and clay, and a second group just the alkaloid.  Several hours later, the macaws that had eaten the clay had 60% less alkaloid  in their bloodstreams than those that had not, suggesting that the hypothesis  is correct.

E    Other observations also support the idea that clay is detoxifying.  Towards the tropics the amount of toxic compounds in plants increases-and so  does the amount of earth eaten by herbivores. Elephants lick clay from mud  holes all year round, except in September when they are bingeing on fruit  which, because it has evolved to be eaten, is not toxic. And the addition of  clay to the diets of domestic cattle increases the amount of nutrients that  they can absorb from their food by 10-20%.

F  A  third instance of animal self-medication is the use of mechanical scours to  get rid of gut parasites. In 1972 Richard Wrangham, a researcher at the Gombs  Stream Reserve in Tanzania, noticed that chimpanzees were eating the leaves  of a tree called Aspilia. The chimps chose the leaves carefully by testing  them in their mouths. Having chosen a leaf, a chimp would fold it into a fan  and

swallow it. Some of the chimps were noticed  wrinkling their noses as they swallowed these leaves, suggesting the  experience was unpleasant. Later, undigested leaves were found on the forest  floor.

G  Dr  Wrangham rightly guessed that the leaves had a medicinal purpose this was,  indeed, one of the earliest interpretations of a behaviour pattern as  self-medication. However, he guessed wrong about what the mechanism was. His  (and everybody else’s) assumption was that Aspilia contained a drug, and this sparked  more than two decades of phytochemical research to try to find out what  chemical the chimps were after.

But by the  1990s, chimps across Africa had been seen swallowing the leaves of 19  different species that seemed to have few suitable chemicals in common. The  drug hypothesis was looking more and more dubious.

H  It  was Dr Huffman who got to the bottom of the problem. He did so by watching  what came out of the chimps, rather than concentrating on what went in. He  found that the egested leaves were full of intestinal worms. The factor  common to all 19 species of leaves swallowed by the chimps was that they were  covered with microscopic hooks. These caught the worms and dragged them from  their lodgings.

I   Following that observation, Dr Engel is now particularly excited about  how knowledge of the way that animals look after themselves could be used to  improve the health of livestock. People might also be able to learn a thing  or two-and may, indeed, already have done so. Geophagy, for example, is a  common behaviour in many parts of the world. The medical stalls in African  markets frequently sell tablets made of different sorts of clays, appropriate  to different medical conditions.

J   Africans brought to the Americas as slaves continued this tradition,  which gave their owners one more excuse to affect to despise them. Yet, as Dr  Engel points out, Rwandan mountain gorillas eat a type of clay rather similar  to kaolinitethe main ingredient of many patent medicines sold over the  counter in the West for digestive complaints. Dirt can sometimes be good for  you, and to be “as sick as  a parrot” may, after  all, be a state to be desired.

参考答案

1. FALES

2. TRUE

3. NOT GIVEN

4. TRUE

5. TRUE

6.FALSE

7. Light

8. Shells

9. Histidine

10. Minerialisation

11. Gills

12. Fangs

13. Aircraft

难度分析

第一篇中出现俩个常规有序题，难度尚可。但是学生对于这一题材的文章可能不是那么熟悉。之前学生接触的文章多为纯动物类或者纯科技类，但是这篇将动物与有机材料相结合，会有一定难度。