1 . Southern Africa is home to most of the world’s black and white rhinos. Because of global warming, the weather in this area is changing quickly. People have worked hard to protect rhinos from being hunted, but until now, no one has really looked at how the changing weather might hurt these animals.
A research team from the University of Massachusetts Amherst has recently reported that the area will be affected by both higher temperatures and changing precipitation (降水) and the rhinos are more sensitive to rising temperatures, which will quickly increase above the animals’ acceptable maximum threshold.
Over the last 100 years, Africa’s average monthly temperatures have gone up by 0.5℃ to 2℃. Scientists think that in the next 100 years, it might get even warmer, up to 2 more degrees. This change in weather might also change how much rain we get. But here’s the thing：For animals like white and black rhinos, which people have been trying to protect for a long time, will the heat or the rain changes hurt them more? This is a big question because rhinos don’t have sweat to cool down. They stay cool by taking baths and staying in cool shady spots.
To understand how changing climate will affect rhino populations, lead author Hlelowenkhosi S. Mamba and his colleague, focused their efforts on five large national parks representing diverse landscapes in southern Africa that are home to most of the rhinos. They have found that temperature conditions in all study parks will become increasingly unsuitable for both species, but it is predicted that white rhinos will be affected earlier than black rhinos.
“This research highlights the importance of using climate predictions tor both park and rhino management,” says Randhir. “We propose that park managers now think about increasing water supplies, tree cover, watching for stress and planning to allow rhino migration as the world warms.”
1. How are rhinos traditionally protected?| A．By building their living habitats. |
| B．By saving them from illegal hunt. |
| C．By monitoring their physical health. |
| D．By removing their breeding surroundings. |
| A．range | B．register | C．average | D．content |
| A．Cooling heat off by sweating. | B．Drinking much water. |
| C．Migrating to other places. | D．Bathing in the water. |
| A．Predicting the weather. | B．Buying new species. |
| C．Boosting habitats. | D．Restricting visitors. |
2 . Kay Day, an 87-year-old UK woman, adores elephants. But Day, suffering from dementia (痴呆),rarely left her nursing home room and hadn’t seen a real elephant for a really long time.
Day is so crazy about elephants that her room is decorated with elephant photos. Day dreamed of seeing an elephant up close again and never thought it would happen. However, Day’s dream became a reality after her nursing home, the Blakelands Lodge care home inMarston Moretaine, took her on a special journey to the Whipsnade Zoo.
“Kay doesn’t join in many activities and tends to spend quite a lot of time alone,” said Carla Blakelands, the Lodge activity manager. “We sat and discussed wishes and found out she would love to see an elephant. We discussed different options and we found the Elephant Experience at Whipsnade Zoo, so we contacted them about our resident.”
Day was so excited about going to the zoo that she marked off the days on her elephant-themed calendar. Day’s carers and family came along on the trip to assist and watch her experience the exciting day. Day was able to pet the Asian elephants and she said that the elephants’ trunk is her favorite part of the animal. “It’s such a wonderful feeling to have an elephant take some food out of your hand, put it in his trunk, curl it up and put it in his mouth,” she told BBC.
Day expressed her gratitude to the people who organized the trip and said it was one of the best days of her life. “I could sit here forever with an elephant sitting by my side,” she said.
Elephant keeper My Eriksson said that the zoo was honored to have played a role in making Day’s dream come true and that it was amazing to meet someone who is as crazy about elephants as the zookeepers at Whipsnade Zoo.
1. What can we say about the Blakelands Lodge care home?| A．It funds the Whipsnade Zoo. | B．It has a special love for elephants. |
| C．It seldom organizes outings. | D．It cares about its residents’ wishes. |
| A．She has no relatives. | B．She is fairly easy-going. |
| C．She enjoys being alone. | D．She likes group activities. |
| A．She fed the elephants. | B．She argued with her family. |
| C．She arranged an interview. | D．She worked as a zookeeper. |
| A．Annoyed. | B．Grateful. | C．Puzzled. | D．Nervous. |
3 . 4 Reasons Why Wild Animals Are So Important
As we know, the earth gives us food, medicines and materials, often through wild animals. These wild animals are important to our existence. Sadly, they are becoming extinct at an alarming rate. We need to change this loss of nature and create a future where wildlife and people thrive (蓬勃发展) again.
Wild animals keep balance in ecosystems.
Diversity (多样性) means healthier ecosystems and healthier wild animals.
When there is a wildlife issue, you’ll often hear the term biodiversity, which refers to the number of species in an ecosystem.
All of the food that we eat comes from an animal or plant. Living without various food sources causes our nutrition (营养) to suffer. Protecting wildlife and its natural habitats strengthens food safety for humans around the world.
Wildlife helps medical research.
Wild animals have helped us find important medicines that help with many diseases.
| A．All living things are interconnected. |
| B．Healthy ecosystems mean a lot of diversity. |
| C．Or we will lose these animals to future generations. |
| D．People worldwide depend on wildlife for their snack. |
| E．Wildlife provides important nutrients for the human race. |
| F．The human race has always turned to nature for medicine. |
| G．We should notice the influence caused by wildlife on culture. |
4 . Great whites, the largest predatory(捕食性的)sharks in the world with the most fatal attacks on humans, are tough to imagine as newborn babies. That is partially because no one has seen one in the wild, it seems, until now.
Wildlife filmmaker Carlos Gauna and UC Riverside biology doctoral student Phillip Sternes were scanning the waters for sharks on July 9, 2023, near Santa Barbara on California’s central coast. That day, something exciting appeared on the viewfinder of Gauna’s drone camera. It was a shark pup(幼崽)unlike any they’d ever seen.
“We enlarged the images, put them in slow motion, and realized the white layer was being shed(脱落)from the body as it was swimming,” Sternes said. “I believe it was a newborn white shark shedding its embryonic layer.”
These observations are documented in a new paper in the Environmental Biology of Fishes journal. What Gauna and Sternes observed could help solve the longstanding mystery of great white birthing habits. This may well be the first evidence we have of a pup in the wild. Great whites, referred to only as white sharks by scientists, are gray on the top and white on the bottom. But this roughly 5-foot-long shark was pure white.
Though the paper authors acknowledge it is possible that the white layer the shark shed could have been a skin condition, the two believe what they saw was in fact a newborn great white. First, great white females give birth to live pups. A second reason is the presence of large, likely pregnant great whites in this location. Finally, this location off the coast of central California has long been proposed as a birthing location for great whites. Many scholars believe great whites are born farther out at sea.
Great whites are listed as an international endangered species. “Further research is needed to confirm these waters are indeed a great white breeding ground. But if it does, we would want lawmakers to step in and protect these waters to help white sharks keep thriving,” Sternes said.
1. What do we know about what appeared on Carlo s Gauna’s camera?| A．It is rare in the world. | B．It is tough to identify. |
| C．It is not open to the public. | D．It is unbelievable to scientists. |
| A．Pure gray. | B．White only on the bottom. |
| C．Gray on the top. | D．Pure white. |
| A．How great white females give birth to pups. |
| B．How the authors prove they saw a baby shark. |
| C．Why the authors believe they saw a newborn shark pup. |
| D．Why the authors think the white layer is a skin condition. |
| A．Helping white sharks to stop breeding. |
| B．Using laws to protect shark pups and their habitats. |
| C．Listing white sharks as endangered species. |
| D．Further study to confirm white sharks breeding waters. |
5 . Wild African elephants may break sleep records for mammals (哺乳动物). New data show that they seem to survive on about two hours of shut-eye a night. Much of that sleeping took place while they were standing up. The animals lie down to sleep only once every three to four nights.
Trying to figure out how much wild elephants sleep just by watching them 24 hours a day is tricky, especially in the dark. Much of what scientists had known about sleeping elephants came from animals living in zoos, notes Paul Manger, who is a brain researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. In zoos, elephants have been recorded sleeping from about three hours to nearly seven during a 24-hour period. Using electronic monitors on African elephants in the wild, however, has turned up more extreme behavior.
Manger’s team implanted (植入) activity monitors in the trunks (象鼻) of two elephants. Both were female leaders of their herds in the Chobe National Park. Trunks, like human hands, are important for exploring the world. Elephants hardly keep them still — unless sleeping. The researchers thought that a trunk monitor that didn’t move for at least five minutes likely meant its host was asleep.
The monitors tracked the animals over about a month. During that time, the elephants averaged just two hours of sleep a day. What’s more, the elephants were able to skip a night’s sleep without needing extra rest the next day. Those trunk implants showed there were times when the elephants went up to 46 hours without any sleep.
There has been some thought that animals need sleep to store memories properly. But that can’t explain animals, like the elephants, which skip sleep for a night without needing catch-up rest later. “Elephants are usually not considered to be forgetful animals,” Manger observes. In fact, he notes, studies have found that they can have long memories.
1. How did the African elephants typically sleep according to the new study?| A．They stood up. | B．They walked around. |
| C．They grouped. | D．They kept eyes open. |
| A．To test a new tracker. | B．To help elephants fall asleep. |
| C．To train wild animals. | D．To study elephants’ sleep. |
| A．People always think elephants are forgetful animals. |
| B．A good night’s sleep benefits all the wildlife’s brains. |
| C．Little sleep doesn’t affect the memory of elephants. |
| D．Scientists can’t understand why sleep makes sense. |
| A．Tips on watching wildlife. | B．Wild elephants’ sleep habit. |
| C．Efforts to protect wild elephants. | D．National nature reserves in Africa. |
6 . A Michigan farmer Bristle was digging with a backhoe (反铲挖土机) in one of his wheat fields when — bang — it struck a large bone.
Bristle contacted Fisher, a paleontology (古生物学家) professor at the University of Michigan. Fisher rushed to the farm and identified the bone as a fossil of an Ice Age mammoth (猛犸象). Since it was harvest season, Bristle gave Fisher and his students only one day to remove the rest of the fossils from the ground. The team found 20 percent of the animal’s bones, including its skull, tusks, pelvis, and shoulder blades as well as some teeth, ribs, and other bones.
The age of a mammoth can be determined by counting the rings in one of its tusks. Like the rings in a tree trunk, each ring stands for one year of a mammoth’s life. Fisher thinks that the bones are supposed to belong to male mammoth around forty years old. It was probably a rare hybrid of a woolly mammoth and a Colombian mammoth that lived between 11,700 and 15,000 years ago during the Pleistocene lee Age, when ice sheets covered much of Earth’s land.
The bones appeared to have been cut up and some of them were missing, leading Fisher to conclude that early humans must have killed the animal and stored its meat so they could return to it at a later time. Some other indications of human activity include a stone flake (薄片) that might have been from a cutting tool and the arrangement of the neck bones in order. If the mammoth had died naturally, its bones would have scattered randomly.
In the US, fossils found on private property belong to the owner of the land. However, Bristle donated the fossils to the University of Michigan for further study. Fisher hopes to display the bones at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, possibly combined with fiberglass models of bones from other Michigan mammoths to form a complete Mammoth skeleton (骨架).
1. Why was Fisher’s time limited to one day?| A．Because the mammoth was a small one. | B．Because it was easy to remove the bones. |
| C．Because it was the time of gathering crops. | D．Because Bristle was busy planting in the field. |
| A．By counting the bones. | B．By judging the living age. |
| C．By measuring the ice sheets. | D．By numbering the tusk rings. |
| A．How the mammoth died. | B．Where the missing meat was. |
| C．How the stone flake was made. | D．Whether the neck bones scattered. |
| A．To own the fossils. | B．To study the mammoth. |
| C．To complete the skeleton. | D．To promote the university. |
7 . Monarch butterflies (帝王蝶) are edging dangerously close to extinction despite a decision late last year to remove the orange-and-black insects from the endangered species list, a new study has found.
An annual survey led by the World Wildlife Fund(WWF)of the species wintering in central Mexico found the second-lowest number of monarch butterflies on record, meaning they took up just 2.2 acres of regional forests, 59% less than during the 2022 — 2023 winter season. The findings are troubling to scientists determined to protect the species.
Each year, monarch butterflies migrate (迁徙) thousands of miles from southern Canada and the northern and central US to the mountain forests of central Mexico. They require a large and healthy forest to protect them from winds, rain and low temperatures in the areas where they migrate for winter. Yet because of heat and drought brought on by climate change, scientists say, their natural habitat is quickly depleting. Scientists with the WWF considered this winter season’s findings serious and said they represented the second-smallest area taken up by monarch butterflies in Mexico since 1993.
What’s worse, in recent years, their breeding areas in Canada and the US have seen a reduction in milkweed leaves where female monarch butterflies lay their eggs. “Land-use changes in the United States, combined with the widespread use of chemicals, also contributed to the loss of milkweed and other plants that adult monarch butterflies feed on,” the WWF said.
Monarch butterflies play an important role in maintaining plant ecosystems and are also an important food source for birds, small animals and other insects, according to the National Park Service. It’s necessary that all governments, communities, scientists, and others continue to strengthen our protection efforts to support their unique migration.
1. Why do monarch butterflies fly to central Mexico each year?| A．To spend winter. | B．To lay eggs. |
| C．To search for shelter. | D．To escape from enemies. |
| A．Shifting. | B．Disappearing. | C．Recovering. | D．Increasing. |
| A．The loss of food sources. |
| B．The widespread use of chemicals. |
| C．The land-use changes in the United States. |
| D．The threat of being eaten by other animals. |
| A．To raise people’s awareness about climate change. |
| B．To call for more measures to protect monarch butterflies. |
| C．To inform people of the serious situation of monarch butterflies. |
| D．To prove monarch butterflies should be on the endangered species list. |
8 . Animals have developed a circadian clock—an internal body clock that runs in 24-hour cycles. It is regulated by cues (提示) from their environment. But they may suffer from a “jet lag （时差反应）” when the cues animals are exposed to do not match the ones of their natural environment.
Kristine Gandia, a PhD student at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and a team of observers set out to understand how the “jet lag” of living in latitudes (纬度) that animals were not used to can affect them. Giant pandas were chosen as the focus for the study partly because they live highly seasonal lives.”
“Giant pandas are very good animals to focus on,” Gandia said. “They are very popular in zoos and there are a lot that have cameras so we can see how their behavior changes across different latitudes. These cameras enabled us to monitor the giant pandas’ behavior across a 24-hour period.”
Gandia explained that the latitudinal range for giant pandas is between 26 and 42 degrees north. Matching latitudes could also be considered between 26 and 42 degrees south, as these mirror the temperature and lighting conditions.
The team monitored 11 giant pandas in six different zoos. Some zoos were within the animals’ natural latitudes but in other countries and the others were outside that range.
Gandia explained, “We recorded giant panda behavior, trying to account for behaviors that are positive, neutral (中性的) and negative indicators for welfare. So, this would include behaviors like play and grooming as positive behaviors, drinking and defecating as neutral maintenance behaviors, and several abnormal behaviors as negative behaviors, with pacing being the most common.”
Those living in zoos outside of their home latitude were found to be less active and display more negative behaviors.
“Giant pandas living in zoos could be suffering from a ‘jet lag’ if their body clocks don’t match their environments,” Gandia said.
1. What does Gandia and her team’s study focus on?| A．Animal behavior. | B．Animal body clock. | C．Animal popularity. | D．Animal distribution. |
| A．Wide latitude of their natural habitat. | B．Their strong adaptability. |
| C．The existing findings about them. | D．The convenience of observation. |
| A．By analyzing reasons. | B．By comparing recordings. |
| C．By conducting interviews. | D．By listing examples. |
| A．Will “Jet Lag” Be Able to Be Avoided? |
| B．Could Animals Suffer from a “Jet Lag”? |
| C．Is Panda a Proper Subject to Study “Jet Lag”? |
| D．Does Season Have Anything to Do with “Jet Lag”? |
9 . Are worms the heroes we didn’t know we needed? Silent, slimy and wriggling (扭动), you might think that worms are good for nothing except bait (诱饵) on the end of a fishing pole.
The British naturalist Charles Darwin said that no other animal has “played such an important part in the history of the world as these lowly organised creatures”. They have lived on Earth for 600 million years and have even survived five mass extinctions.
Earthworms literally move the earth, and this is why farmers love them. As they travel, they aerate (使透气) the soil by loosening, mixing and oxygenating it.
In 2022, a group of scientists at the Margarita Salas Centre for Biological Research isolated enzymes (酶) found in wax worm saliva (唾液) which are plastic-eating.
So, next time you see a worm, show it a little respect. They really are changing the world!
| A．So, what do worms do that is so great? |
| B．Worms have a lifespan of a few months. |
| C．And worms are even inspiring the building industry. |
| D．It increases the ground’s capacity to hold and empty water. |
| E．However, there is more to the humble worm than meets the eye. |
| F．Humans produce more than 300 million tons of plastic every year. |
| G．These can break down a very common plastic that normally breaks down over many years. |
10 . 
Panda Ya Ya returns home
Ya Ya the giant panda has just arrived in Shanghai, east China on Thursday after 20 years of stay at the Memphis Zoo in the U.S. The flight was around 15.5 hours. Both Chinese and American vets are with Ya Ya.
Ya Ya was born at Beijing Zoo on August 3, 2000. She arrived at Memphis Zoo in April, 2003. Ya Ya has become a bridge of friendship between Chinese and foreign people. She will spend a month in Shanghai before returning to her birthplace, Beijing Zoo.
We do hope all pandas that are in foreign countries can be healthy and happy.
Did you know…?
Baby pandas are born pink and measure about 15cm-that’s about the size of a pencil
Giant pandas spend up to 12 hours a day eating bamboo.
Pandas live for about 20 years in the wild, but in the zoos they can live for up to 35 years.
1. Ya Ya was born in _______.| A．Beijing | B．Chengdu | C．Shanghai ` | D．Guangzhou |
| A．Black and white. | B．Pink. | C．Yellow. | D．Gray. |
| A．Ya Ya spend up to 10 hours a day eating bamboo. | B．Shanghai Zoo is Ya Ya’s final home. |
| C．Ya Ya had a short flight coming back home. | D．Ya Ya helps foreigners know more about China. |
| A．a piece of news | B．an ad | C．a diary | D．a letter |
