| A．It stays still. | B．It acts friendly towards them. | C．It tries to catch them. |
1. What probably happened around Fountain Hills during last winter?
| A．All animals died off. | B．It didn’t rain much. | C．Many chemicals were used. |
| A．They were eaten by birds. |
| B．They were dying off themselves. |
| C．They were killed by the government. |
| A．To bring bees to the town. |
| B．To tell people the importance of bees. |
| C．To teach farmers how to grow food better. |
1. What does the man say about foxes?
| A．They are dangerous. | B．They also eat plants. | C．They look pretty and small. |
| A．8 hours. | B．4-5hours. | C．48 minutes. |
4 . Some chimpanzees(黑猩猩)are much wilder when it comes to making beats, scientists have discovered. In a Ugandan rainforest, the chimps have developed their own drumming(击鼓)styles on tree roots. Researchers observed their drumming styles range from rock to jazz. One chimpanzee brought back the style of the late John Bonham, a drummer who played a piece of music, Whole Lotta Love, and is ranked as one of the best. “The chimpanzee makes very fast drums with many evenly separated beats. His drumming is so fast that you can hardly see his hands.” said Catherine, leading scientist of the study.
Drumming with feet and hands with their special calls is used to exchange messages through thick forests, even with miles between them. Ben the Alpha’s call was a close two quick beats and a distant third, sometimes fourth.
Catherine also said. “We could often recognize which chimpanzee was drumming, and it was a fantastic way to find the different ones we were looking for. So if we could recognize, we were sure they could.”
The team was surprised to note the chimpanzees only used their personalized drumming styles when on the move, showing that the chimpanzees could decide whether to be recognized or not. The research could also settle a problem about why these chimpanzees greet each other when they meet but are not observed to say goodbye when they part in the forest. “The chimpanzees don’t need to say goodbye because they’re effectively able to keep in touch.” Catherine said. These long-distance signals give the chimpanzees a way to recognize with each other.
The researchers’ next study will be to explore whether different drumming styles can lead to different drumming cultures among the different chimpanzee populations.
1. What do we know about the chimpanzees in the first paragraph?| A．Their drumming styles are too fast to discover. |
| B．Their own drumming styles have been formed. |
| C．Their wild drumming styles are ranked as the best. |
| D．Their drumming styles are in various music forms. |
| A．By performing different styles of calling. |
| B．By beating the drum quickly on tree roots. |
| C．By combining drumming and special calls. |
| D．By using their personalized drumming styles. |
| A．Because they don’t want to be recognized. |
| B．Because they don’t want to see each other. |
| C．Because they are on the move all the time. |
| D．Because they have their own way to contact. |
| A．The Chimps—singers in their special voices |
| B．The Chimps—drummers in personalized styles |
| C．The Chimps interested in making musical beats |
| D．The Chimps delighted in performing with hands |
5 . What makes people so special? Tool use, self-consciousness, language, and culture are high on the list, but in fact all of these characteristics can be found elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Humans and apes are close relatives, so it is perhaps not surprising that chimpanzees use tools or that gorillas (大猩猩) have a sense of fair play, even rejecting carrots (which they normally accept) when they see their neighbors getting grapes. But the qualities that we often think of as uniquely human exist not just on land, but in the ocean as well.
Among the invertebrates, octopuses (八爪鱼) are known for their intelligence, even exhibiting evidence of playfulness, tool use, and personality. But these skilled predators live alone and consequently lack culture. Dolphins, on the other hand, are large-brained, long-living, social- group-based predators, and it is here that we find the greatest similarity to human-like culture and awareness.
Culture depends on the ability of animals to pass on things they have learned to others. Many animals have culture in this sense, but what sets dolphins apart is what they pass on. Some bottlenose dolphins hold sponges in their mouths that they use as tools to sweep for fish hiding on the ocean floor. This ability is handed down through generations (especially in females), with some families — grandmother, mother, and daughter — all feeding in this highly specialized way.
Another characteristic that dolphins share with humans is their ability to recognize themselves in a mirror. When facing a mirror, most animals behave as though they are interacting with another individual. Even in humans, the ability to recognize that the image in a mirror is oneself does not occur before the age of 18 months. Dolphins not only recognize themselves, but if a black mark is put on the body of a dolphin, it will spend extra time at the mirror to look at the mark.
1. The example of gorillas rejecting carrots shows they ________.| A．are not easy to fool | B．prefer fruit to vegetables |
| C．have a special taste for food | D．have an awareness of equality |
| A．Cooperation. | B．Intelligence. |
| C．Tool using ability. | D．Fun-loving spirits. |
| A．They tend to hunt in groups. |
| B．Their hunting skills are passed down. |
| C．Their learning environment is favourable. |
| D．Their families are typically female-controlled. |
| A．Dolphins enjoy looking at their own reflection in the mirror. |
| B．Dolphins are as intelligent as a typical 18-month-old human baby. |
| C．Dolphins are generally regarded as the most advanced non-human species. |
| D．Dolphins’ ability to recognize their own reflection is a higher-order mental skill. |
“Children look at screens for too long every day, and don’t exercise and sleep enough, and it’s affecting their cognitive (认知的) ability”, researchers have said
When I was a little boy, I
The scientists already knew that keeping cubs (幼兽) safe, healthy, and fed is a full-time job for a female tiger. But they weren’t exactly sure how mother tigers did it. By
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8 . New research on ants has firstly shown that insects have the ability to shrink and then regrow their brains. It relates to how these particular ants, called the Indian jumping ant, reproduce.
“In most ant colonies (种群), the queen is the only member of the colony that lays eggs. When she dies, the colony dies. The workers just do the hunting and take care of the babies and the chores.” says Clint Penick, a professor of biology at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. But this is not true for Indian jumping ants. Their worker ants have the ability to mate and reproduce. So when the queen dies, a dominance tournament starts. They’ll fight each other over a month to decide who’s going to be the next queen.
The queen doesn’t have an exact replacement. Tournament winners — called “gamergates” — all assume queen-like duties of laying eggs. The study found that when the ants take on the role of gamergates, their brains reduce its size by 19% on average, so that they can save energy to focus on producing eggs. The fact that the ants’ brains shrink to reproduce wasn’t new. But what scientists didn’t know was whether they had the ability to regrow.
Penick’s team separated gamergates from their colonies for a few weeks. The thinking was that the lack of social interaction and care would make them return to their previous status. It worked. After several weeks, the ex-gamergates were back to being low-class workers — with their bigger brains regrown. “We are now starting to find that there are animal species that are capable of shrinking their brains and then regrowing them, even humans to some degree.” Penick says.
There are still potential suggestions for humans. According to Penick, the brains are more flexible in size than we knew. The brains of ants have some shared features with humans. So now scientists are looking at digging into the genetic and other neural mechanisms (神经机制) supporting these brain changes.
1. What is special about the Indian jumping ant colony?| A．The worker ants fight with the queen. | B．The queen is the only one to lay eggs. |
| C．The colony continues even if queen dies. | D．The queen is devoted to baby nursing. |
| A．Some ants won the competition of laying eggs. |
| B．Gamergates are not willing to regrow their brains. |
| C．Whether ants can regrow brains wasn’t known before. |
| D．The downsizing of ants’ brains was first found in the study. |
| A．shortage of socialization | B．separation from their living space |
| C．a return to previous status | D．low-class workloads for working ants |
| A．The Special Queens of the Ant Colony |
| B．A Genetic Wonder: from Ants to Humans |
| C．The Flexible Brain of Indian Jumping Ants |
| D．A Shrinking Ant Brain: from a Worker to a Queen |
9 . Medicine is notonly a human invention. Many other animals have been known to self-medicate with plants and minerals for infections and other conditions.
Behavioral ecologist Helen Morrogh-Bernard has spent decades studying orangutans (猩猩) and says she has now found evidence they use plants in a medicinal way.
Morrogh and her colleagues watched 10 orangutans occasionally chew a particular plant (which is not part of their normal diet) into a foamy lather (泡沫) and then rub it into their fur. The apes spent up to 45 minutes at a time massaging the mixture onto their upper arms or legs. The researchers believe this behavior is the first known example using a painkiller.
Local people use the same plant, Dracaena cantleyi, to treat aches and pains. Morrogh’s co-authors studied its chemistry. They added extracts (汁) from the plant to human cells that had been grown in a dish and had been artificially stimulated to produce cytokines (细胞因子) that causes inflammation (炎症) and discomfort. The plant extract reduced the production of several types of cytokines, the scientists reported the finding in a study published last November in Scientific Reports.
The results suggest that orangutans use the plant to reduce inflammation and treat pain. Such findings could help identify plants and chemicals that might be useful for human medications.
In creatures such as insects, the ability to self-medicate is almost certainly innate; woolly bear (灯蛾毛虫) infected with flies seek out and eat plant substances poisonous to the flies. But more complex animals may learn such tricks after an initial discovery by one member of their group.
For example, an orangutan may have rubbed the plant on its skin to try to treat parasites (寄生虫) and realized that it also had a pleasant pain-killing effect. That behavior may then have been passed on to other orangutans. Because this type of self-medication is seen only in south-central Borneo, Morrogh says, it was probably learned locally.
1. Why does orangutans chew Dracaena cantleyi?| A．To self medicate. | B．To have their normal diet. |
| C．To scare other animals away. | D．To pass on a message to other orangutans. |
| A．They can help vets treat pets. |
| B．They can help scientists study orangutans. |
| C．They can help botanist learn more about plants. |
| D．They can help people find new resources for human medication. |
| A．natural | B．sociable | C．obtainable | D．professional |
| A．Apes use plant extracts to treat pain. |
| B．Humans and animals have a lot in common. |
| C．A plant has been found useful for human medication. |
| D．Morrogh-Bernard and her colleagues have been observing orangutans. |
10 . We all feel better after a night's sleep and insects are no different. But new studies have found a commonly used pesticide (农药) is disturbing the sleep of bees and flies. In one study, researchers gave bees nectar sugar (花蜜糖) mixed with neonicotinoids (烟碱类农药)—one of the most commonly used pesticides—and then tracked their movements.
The impact of the pesticide — similar to the amount a bee would encounter in the wild —was terrible. “It seems to disturb the body clock in bees — they are sleeping a lot more in the daytime. It's causing the disorder of timing of their normal behaviors,” Kiah Tasman, lead author of the studies, said.
This, she explained, could have serious results. “It's quite worrying because our studies show that their motivation of searching for food has decreased. Besides, many plants including the fruit and vegetables and so on rely on pollinators (传粉者), like bees, to reproduce (繁殖). Bees take on a big share of this workload. Pollinators, most often honey bees, are responsible for one in every three bites of food we take, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, and they increase crop values in the US by more than $15 billion each year,” Tasman added.
But bees are under threat because of widespread pesticide use, habitat loss and the climate crisis. “If the time they are managing to go out and search for food is at night-time when many flowers aren't available, that's going to hugely reduce how successful they are at collecting the food that the colony needs to grow and reproduce,” Tasman said. “It could also affect how well bees are able to care for their young. Meanwhile, the same pesticide has already been found to damage the brains of baby bees.”
In a second study, the researchers focused their attention on flies, again exposing them to neonicotinoids. The results showed that the pesticide was working directly on the cells in the brain that run the body clock, which decides when sleep and activity happen in a day, and confusing them.
1. What is the most probable focus of the new studies?| A．The amount of pesticide bees may encounter in the wild. |
| B．The indications of different movements of bees. |
| C．The impact of pesticides on insects' behaviors. |
| D．The similarity between bees' and flies' life habits. |
| A．They lost the right sense of time. |
| B．They could not find food quickly. |
| C．They suffered from sleeplessness. |
| D．They had become much healthier. |
| A．birthplace | B．group |
| C．habitat | D．plant |
| A．Optimistic. | B．Uncertain. |
| C．Indifferent. | D．Negative. |
