Many people say dolphins are very intelligent.They seem to be able to think, understand, and learn things quickly.But are they smart like humans or more than cats or dogs?Dolphins use their brains differently from people.But scientists say dolphin intelligence and human intelligence are similar in some ways.How?
Fact 1：Talk to me
Like humans, every dolphin has its own "name". The name is a special whistle.Each dolphin chooses a specific whistle for itself, usually by its first birthday.Actually, scientists think dolphins, like people, "talk" to each other about a lot of things, such as their ages, their feelings, or finding food.And, like humans, dolphins use a system of sounds and body languages to communicate.But understanding their conversations is not easy for humans.No one speaks dolphin's language yet, but some scientists are trying to learn.
Fact 2：Let's play
Dolphins are also social animals.They live in groups, and they often join others from different groups to play games and have fun—just like people.In fact, playing together is something only intelligent animals do.
Fact 3：Fishermen's helper
Dolphins and humans are similar in another way：both make plans to get something they want.In the seas of southern Brazil, for example, dolphins use an interesting strategy（策略）to get food.When fish are near a boat, dolphins show signs to the fishermen to put their nets in the water.Using this method, the men can catch a lot of fish.What is the advantage for the dolphins in doing so?They get to eat some of the fish.
1. What does a dolphin often use as its "name"?| A．A body language. |
| B．A special whistle. |
| C．Its feeling. |
| D．Its age. |
| A．By playing with other fish. |
| B．By following fishing boats. |
| C．By leading the fish into the net. |
| D．By showing signs to the fishermen. |
| A．Dolphins are smarter than humans. |
| B．Dolphins make friends with humans. |
| C．Dolphins teach humans to speak their language. |
| D．Dolphins and humans are similar in some ways. |
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【推荐1】Manatees — often called sea cows — are an anomaly in the animal kingdom. Neither predator nor prey, these peaceable creatures, which can grow to 13 feet and weigh more than 2,000 pounds, are evolutionarily devoid of aggression. Crystal River — “Manatee Capital of the World” — is the epicenter of their presence and recovery.
Yet despite some gains, manatees still face grave threats. Three-quarters of Florida’s 22 million people live along the coast, many in prime manatee habitat, where the strain of human-presence has degraded the state’s enchanted springs, waterways, and wetlands. In Indian River Lagoon, for example, an important manatee habitat along Florida’s densely populated east coast, decades of human waste, sediment from real estate development, and fertilizers from lawns and farms have clouded the water. That has killed seagrass, manatees’ main food source there. More than a thousand manatees have died in the lagoon during the past two years.
What people don’t understand is the need to help support them in waterways. That means restoring seagrass beds and freshwater aquatic vegetation, the basis of their existence and of the overall health of Florida’s waters. Steps to reverse the damage started small. Neighbors gathered with rakes, scooping up algae by hand. Ironically, it was Save Crystal River — the group environmentalists had opposed during their fight over the manatee’s endangered status — that spearheaded the restoration of aquatic vegetation. With funding from the state government, Save Crystal River hired Sea& Shoreline, an aquatic restoration firm, to remove the waste and replant the river bottom with eelgrass, which grows long, ribbon like leaves.
While the prospect of replanting the entire river was daunting, after vacuuming more than 300 million pounds of detritus and planting some 350,000 individual eelgrass pods by hand, the groups have flipped the river back to an ecosystem no longer dominated by algae.
Instead of spending the few short winter months in Crystal River before heading back out into the Gulf of Mexico to graze, some manatees now linger here year-round, enjoying fat times. Aerial surveys from January 2022 revealed the highest number of manatees ever recorded in these waters — more than a thousand in Kings Bay alone.
1. What is a feature of manatees?| A．They are gentle animals. | B．They feed on small creatures. |
| C．They are slightly aggressive. | D．They look cute for their shape. |
| A．Climate change. | B．Habitat loss. |
| C．Low food supply. | D．Human activities. |
| A．By removing wastes from the river. |
| B．By raising funds from the government. |
| C．By replanting algae in the river bottom. |
| D．By refining manatees’ living surroundings. |
| A．They enjoy the cold winter of Mexico. |
| B．They remain in Manatee Capital for long. |
| C．They head towards the warmer waters during winter. |
| D．They have the largest population ever recorded globally. |
【推荐2】For underwater photographer Brian Skerry, there are good days. The sun shines, the water's clear. But most days aren't like that. The whales don't show up, or there are particles (颗粒)in the water, or wind brings the waves, or the sun dips behind a cloud at the worst moment.
A National Geographic photography fellow and the 2017, Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year, Skerry free dives — which means no scuba tanks, no equipment except his fins, mask, and camera. Over the past two years he's spent nine weeks off the eastern Caribbean island of Dominica in a 30-Foot boat running after sperm whales around their warm-water habitat.
Sperm whales are intelligent, and mad, escaping to ocean depths when pursued. Still, their ranks have been thinned by whaling, overfishing, and other contact with humans, to the point that the world's conservationists assess them as either vulnerable or endangered. Skerry wants his photos to inform the scientific research and education efforts that will bring whales more attention and potentially some relief. “I feel a sense of responsibility and urgency to make people care about the marine giants,” he says. “I want to give them, for lack of a better word, some humanity.”
Scientists know sperm whales as the ocean's largest toothed animals that kills other animals. They have the biggest brains of any known animal, can weigh up to 45 tons, and have been observed displaying humanlike qualities, such as curiosity and playfulness. But despite their size and their expressiveness, sperm whales remain one of the ocean's biggest mysteries. Do they share complex ideas?
1. What is "free dives"?| A．Diving without charge. | B．Diving without sponsors. |
| C．Diving with little equipment. | D．Diving with few regulations. |
| A．Easily attacked. | B．Strongly built. |
| C．Desperately driven. | D．Distantly removed. |
| A．Sperm whales are the largest fish in the sea. |
| B．Sperm whales are as clever as the human being. |
| C．Sperm whales enjoy being photographed by photographers. |
| D．Sperm whales' population has declined due to illegal fishing. |
| A．Technology magazine. | B．Tourism advertisement. |
| C．National geography. | D．Entertainment report. |
【推荐3】Researchers have known for decades that orcas (逆戟鲸) across the North Pacific have harmful pollutants in their system.
Now, a new study reveals orcas in the western North Atlantic, including those in the Arctic, are significantly more polluted than animals in the east — a finding that “shocked” study leader Anaïs Remili, a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University in Montreal. The research strongly points to their diet playing a major role in the level of pollutants, rather than their location.
The study looked at the presence of persistent organic pollutants, or toxic chemicals that degrade slowly and accumulate in the body, in the blubber (鲸脂) of orcas across the North Atlantic. These pollutants, relics of industrial and agricultural processes, “have a tendency to bind to fat,” says Remili, whose study was published in October in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. These chemicals weaken orcas’ immune systems, disrupt their endocrine (内分泌) function, prevent growth and brain development, and even interfere with reproduction.
Pollutants increase as they move up through the food chain, and the orcas that consume top predators — for example, those that primarily eat other marine mammals rather than fish—are most polluted. Thanks to their high body fat and position as apex (最高点) predators, orcas are some of “the most contaminated animals on the planet,” Remili says.
Her earlier research showed that eastern North Atlantic orcas primarily feed on herring (鲱鱼); mid-North Atlantic orcas feed on seals and mackerel (鲭鱼); and western North Atlantic orcas feed on baleen whales, porpoises (海豚) and seals.
It makes sense that western North Atlantic orcas would have higher pollutants, due to their diet, but “you would expect less contaminants overall in the Arctic compared to industrialized areas,” such as off the east coast of North America, Remili says.
“We’ve really come to learn that you are what you eat,” says Peter Ross, senior scientist and healthy waters program director at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation in British Columbia, who wasn’t involved in the study. “The top of the food chain, as illustrated by these long-lived killer whales, is extremely easy to hurt.”
1. What can we know according to Anaïs Remili’s study?| A．The polluted orcas in the Eastern Atlantic are in the lead. |
| B．The orcas’ immune system is influenced negatively by chemicals. |
| C．The blubber of orcas is easy to break down and accumulate in the body. |
| D．Orcas’ location is more important than their diet in the level of pollutants. |
| A．Those feeding on fish. | B．Those feeding on marine plants. |
| C．Those feeding on predators. | D．Those feeding on marine mammals. |
| A．Orcas’ tastes vary from place to place. | B．Orcas can be particular about food. |
| C．Orcas are fond of fish and shrimps. | D．Orcas can only be found in the Atlantic. |
| A．Orcas’ diet resulted in more pollutants. | B．The marine food chain needs to be protected. |
| C．Peter Ross participated in the study unwillingly. | D．Pollutants found in the Arctic orcas are not the most. |
【推荐1】Chimps live in a male-dominated society, where most of their valuable partners are other males. However, as young male chimps become adults, they continue to maintain tight bonds with their mothers, a new study finds.
The dramatic changes of adolescence (青春期) are difficult for chimps, just like they are for humans, says Elizabeth Lonsdorf, an expert on primates at Franklin & Marshall College who was not involved in the study. “Sure enough,” she adds, “their moms remain a key social partner during this time.”
Previous research has shown chimp mothers provide their sons with support that goes far beyond nursing. Young male chimps that are close with their moms grow bigger and have a greater chance of survival. What’s more, losing their mothers after weaning (断奶), but before age 12, gets in the way of the ability of young chimps to win other males and reproduce.
To see whether this bond extends later into life, researchers followed 29 adolescent (9 to 15 years old) and young adult (16 to 20 years old) male chimps at a research site in Kibale National Park in Uganda and observed them from a distance for 3 years. The team found that the young adult males spent less time with their mothers than the adolescents did — 26% vs. 76%. As the male chimps grew older and more independent, they began to travel over wider ranges and spent more time away from their moms.
However, when these young adult males happened to be in the company of their mothers, they acted just like the adolescents. They groomed (梳理) their moms just as often and kept track of them. “Many mothers remained the males’ ‘best friends’, or ‘social partners’ they associated with most frequently,” says study co-leader Rachna Reddy from Harvard University.
Such persistent ties are also common in humans after sons leave their mothers and live on their own — especially in tough times, Reddy says. “We really feel what it’s like to not be able to see our mothers when we want to in tough times. The importance of those bonds in our lives and the comfort we get from them have deep evolutionary roots.”
1. What do we know about Elizabeth Lonsdorf?| A．She is in favor of the new study’s finding. |
| B．She played a supporting role in the new study. |
| C．She did a different study on chimps’ adolescence before. |
| D．She thinks chimps actually live in a female-dominated society. |
| A．It may be easier for it to produce babies. |
| B．It may be hard for it to interact with other chimps. |
| C．It may be much more aggressive than other males. |
| D．It may be tough for it to defeat other males. |
| A．They took care of some motherless chimps. |
| B．They worked hard to win the chimps’ trust. |
| C．They recorded the chimps’ social interaction. |
| D．They limited the chimps’ range of movement. |
| A．To stress the purpose of the study. |
| B．To emphasize the significance of the study. |
| C．To improve humans’ mother-son relationship. |
| D．To make a comparison between chimps and humans. |
【推荐2】In 1953, when visiting his daughter’s maths class, the Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner found every pupil learning the same topic in the same way at the same speed. Later, he built his first “teaching machine”, which let children tackle questions at their own pace. Since then, education technology (edtech) has repeated the cycle of hype and flop (炒作和失败), even as computers have reshaped almost every other part of life.
Softwares to “personalize” learning can help hundreds of millions of children stuck in miserable classes — but only if edtech supporters can resist the temptation to revive (使复苏) harmful ideas about how children learn. Alternatives have so far failed to teach so many children as efficiently as the conventional model of schooling, where classrooms, hierarchical year-groups, standardized curriculums and fixed timetables are still the typical pattern for most of the world’s nearly 1.5 billion schoolchildren. Under this pattern, too many do not reach their potential. That condition remained almost unchanged over the past 15 years, though billions have been spent on IT in schools during that period.
What really matters then? The answer is how edtech is used. One way it can help is through tailor- made instruction. Reformers think edtech can put individual attention within reach of all pupils. The other way edtech can aid learning is by making schools more productive. In California schools, instead of textbooks, pupils have “playlists”, which they use to access online lessons and take tests. The software assesses children’s progress, lightening teachers’ marking load and allowing them to focus on other tasks. A study suggested that children in early adopters of this model score better in tests than their peers at other schools.
Such innovation is welcome. But making the best of edtech means getting several things right. First, “personalized learning” must follow the evidence on how children learn. It must not be an excuse to revive the so-called “scientific” ideas such as “learning styles”: the theory that each child has a particular way of taking in information. This theory gave rise to government-sponsored schemes like Brain Gym, which claimed that some pupils should stretch or bend while doing sums. A less consequential falsehood is that technology means children do not need to learn facts or learn from a teacher — instead they can just use Google. Some educationalists go further, arguing that facts get in the way of skills such as creativity. Actually, the opposite is true. According to studies, most effective ways of boosting learning nearly all relied on the craft of a teacher.
Second, edtech must narrow, rather than widen, inequalities in education. Here there are grounds for optimism. Some of the pioneering schools are private ones in Silicon Valley. But many more are run by charter-school groups teaching mostly poor pupils, where laggards (成绩落后者) make the most progress relative to their peers in normal classes. A similar pattern can be observed outside America.
Third, the potential for edtech will be realized only if teachers embrace it. They are right to ask for evidence that products work. But skepticism should not turn into irrational opposition. Given what edtech promises today, closed-mindedness has no place in the classroom.
1. According to the passage, education technology can __________.| A．decrease teachers’ working load |
| B．help standardized curriculums |
| C．benefit personalized learning |
| D．be loved by schoolchildren |
| A．The students who are better at memorization tend to be less creative. |
| B．Schools with bans on phones have better results than high-tech ones. |
| C．Shakespeare was trained in grammar but he penned many great plays. |
| D．Lu Xun’s creativity was unlocked after he gave up studying medicine. |
| A．used to replace traditional teaching |
| B．limited in use among pupils |
| C．aimed at narrowing the wealth gap |
| D．in line with students’ learning styles |
| A．To stress the importance of edtech. |
| B．To introduce the application of edtech. |
| C．To appeal for open-mindedness to edtech. |
| D．To discuss how to get the best out of edtech. |
【推荐3】Our culture is the system we use to build our identity. All living creatures are part of a culture. Even animals have a culture! So what is culture? It’s the way we behave in a group. It begins with each individual family. Within our families we do things to build relationships with each other. This can include routines like daily housework and weekly shopping. It also includes traditions. Traditions are activities that are repeated on a regular basis.
Culture is not limited to individual family groups. The real strength of culture is in larger community (社会)groups. These larger groups are called societies. Every society makes rules for itself. It decides how people should act in different situations. Some of these rules are written down. Some are just things that are automatically expected of all members of that society. Often, cultures can be identified(识别)by what the people believe. Cultures are also known by what they choose to include in their art. Sometimes a society forms around people who speak the same language. Cultures may also be known for their customs, including the foods they make and the things they do.
Our cultures help us understand who we are and what we believe. There are very strong emotions(情感)connecting us to our own society. Two different cultures may disagree on something, especially if they both feel strongly about it. When that happens, war is a common result. People are learning better ways to communicate with each other. The more we learn, the more we appreciate the differences in cultures.
1. The underlined word “routines” in paragraph1 is closest in meaning to________.| A．Hobbies | B．behaviors | C．formal activities | D．daily activities |
| A．In arts | B．In societies | C．In families | D．In languages |
| A．By building a wall | B．By preparing to fight |
| C．By communicating | D．By making friends |
| A．What is Culture? | B．What is Society? |
| C．What is Tradition? | D．What is System? |
