1 . Ramirez Castañeda, a Colombian biologist, spends her time in the Amazon studying how snakes eat poisonous frogs without getting ill. Although her findings come in many shapes and sizes, she and her colleagues have struggled to get their biological discoveries out to the wider scientific community. With Spanish as her mother tongue, her research had to be translated into English to be published. That wasn’t always possible because of budget or time-and it means that some of her findings were never published.
“It’s not that I’m a bad scientist,” she says. “It’s just because of the language.”
Castañeda is not alone. There is plenty of research in non-English-language papers that gets lost in translation, or is never translated. A research looked through more than 400, 000 peer-reviewed papers in 16 different languages and found 1, 234 studies providing evidence on biodiversity conservation which, because they weren’t in English, may have been overlooked. These included Japanese-language findings on the effectiveness of relocating the endangered Blakiston’s fish owl, the largest owl species.
Some experts argue that for the sake of the bigger picture, scientific knowledge should converge (转换) into one common language. Science is very globalised and becoming more so, so the use of a global language is enormous for that.
Of course, scientists can work with an English partner, or use a translator-but this ultimately strengthens the cycle of dependency on the global north, leading to inequality in international influence. The specific meanings of words can also pose a problem in translation. For example, it is difficult to find in English one single word to describe forest snakes and frogs in the work Castafieda does with indigenous (土著的) communities in the Amazon.
“So we’re losing observations for science, too, ” says Castañeda. “For me, it’s not possible to just have everything translated into English. We need multilingual (多语种的) science, and we need people that feel comfortable doing science in their own languages. It could be possible to switch to a world where, say, Chinese, English and Spanish are the three languages of science, just as English, French and German were the languages of science in the 19th century.”
1. What prevented Castañeda’s discoveries from being more widely known?| A．Poor management. | B．Opposition from her colleagues. |
| C．Her bad reputation. | D．The language barrier. |
| A．Inefficient wildlife conservation. |
| B．A knowledge gap in the scientific world. |
| C．A growing interest in non-English papers. |
| D．Inadequate job opportunities for translators. |
| A．The urgency to protect rare species. |
| B．The need to adopt one global language. |
| C．The challenges in translating scientific texts. |
| D．The biodiversity on the South American continent. |
| A．A potential solution. | B．A theoretical model. |
| C．A popular belief. | D．A global trend. |
2 . Some ants have figured out how to avoid getting lost: build taller anthills, according to a recent study.
Desert ants living in the hot, flat salt pans of Tunisia spend their days looking for food and reach as far as 1.1 kilometers from their nests. To find their way home, desert ants use a navigation system, relying on the sun’s position and counting their steps to track their location relative to their nest.
But this system becomes increasingly unreliable as the distance from the nest increases. “We realized that, whenever the ants in salt pans came closer to their nest, they suddenly pinpointed the nest hill from several meters distance,” says Markus Knaden, a researcher at Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology. “This made us think that the hill serves as a nest-defining landmark.”
So Knaden and colleagues captured ants from nests in the middle of salt pans and from along their shorelines. Only salt-pan nests had distinct hills, up to 40 centimeters tall, whereas the hills on shoreline nests were lower or barely noticeable. Next, the team removed any hills and placed the captured insects some distance away from their nests. Salt-pan ants struggled more than shore ants to find homes. Shore ants relied on the shoreline for guidance and weren’t affected by the hill removal, the researchers concluded.
The team further conducted another study to see if desert ants were deliberately building a taller hill when their surroundings lacked any visible landmarks. So, the researchers removed the hills of 16 salt-pan nests and installed (安装) two 50-centimeter-tall blocks near eight of them. The other eight nests were left without any artificial visual aid. After three days, the researchers found that seven ants from the unaided nests had rebuilt their hills. But only two ants from the nests with man-made blocks nearby had bothered to rebuild.
“It implies that ants regularly assess the complexity of their environment and change their decisions based on their conclusion,” says ecologist Judith Bronstein of the University of Arizona.
1. What aspect of ants is the recent study mainly about?| A．Challenges of survival. | B．Landmarks of habitats. |
| C．Intelligence of navigation. | D．Comparison of varieties. |
| A．Explored. | B．Recognized. | C．Climbed. | D．Crossed. |
| A．To observe different ants’ reactions. | B．To prove impacts of various habitats. |
| C．To disturb desert ants’ navigation system. | D．To test anthills’ functions and significance. |
| A．Evaluate and make changes. | B．Visual aid is a must. |
| C．Cooperation brings victory. | D．No man-made blocks are used. |
3 . A revolution has recently taken place in behavioural biology. Its consequences are far-reaching, both for our self-image as humans and for our relationship with animals. Just a few decades ago, behavioural science was guided by two key beliefs: animals cannot think, and no scientific statements can be made about their emotions. Today, the same discipline holds both ideas to be false and assumes the very opposite: animals of some species are capable of insight – they can recognize themselves in a mirror and exhibit at least a basic sense of self-awareness – and they have rich emotional lives that seem to be amazingly similar to those of humans.
Indeed, the transformation of the concept of the animal in modern behavioural biology has been fundamental. This has been confirmed by the death of a third belief: for decades, it was taught that animals behave for the good of their species. Today we know this is not the case. Rather, animals do everything to ensure that copies of their own genes are passed to the next generation with maximum efficiency and, when necessary, they will also kill conspecifics. Clearly, they are not, as Jane Goodall had once famously hoped, ‘like us, but better’.
The border between humans and animals is also beginning to blur in other areas. Certain aspects of the social environment can cause stress for both humans and animals, while other similar factors can relieve it. Indeed, animal behaviour does not develop in a fixed manner: environmental influences, socialisation, and learning can change an animal from the prenatal phase (胎儿期) through adulthood. Like humans, animals ultimately appear individualised upon closer inspection.
However, such similarities across genes, brain structure, and the endocrine (内分泌的) system do not automatically imply similarities concerning thoughts, feelings, and behaviour. To better understand these characteristics, we need to look at specific studies in both animals and humans. In the case of animals, such studies take place within the field of behavioural biology, which was properly defined by one of the fathers of the discipline, the Nobel Prize winner Nikolaas Tinbergen, as ‘the study of behaviour by biological methods’.
1. According to the new research, some animals___________.| A．possess rich emotions. | B．can hardly recognize themselves. |
| C．can show little self-awareness. | D．are incapable of understanding. |
| A．their desire to protect their species. |
| B．their ability to recognize themselves in mirrors. |
| C．their urge to guarantee the gene transmission. |
| D．their eagerness to be socially interacted. |
| A．There’s a clear distinction between humans and animals. |
| B．Social environment may have an impact on animal behavior. |
| C．Animals will eventually become standardized. |
| D．Learning alone can shape animal behaviour altogether. |
| A．Evolution of Views in Behavioral Biology: Typical Human, Typical Animal? |
| B．The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Study of Similarities and Differences with Humans |
| C．Understanding the Blurred Boundaries: The Human – Animal Connection in Modern Science |
| D．Past and Present: How Behavioral Biology Views Animals |
4 . “I like pigs,” Winston Churchill supposedly once said. “Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” Whether Churchill’s contemporary George Orwell also liked pigs is less clear. But he, too, surely saw something in them that was lacking in many domestic (驯养的) animals, for it was they who ended up running the show in his novel, Animal Farm. Pigs, then, are intelligent social creatures.
And, like all animals, they sometimes fight. Some pigs tend to be attackers; others tend to be victims. Who is what depends largely on weight. Among pigs, pounds mean power. The attacker might bite, kick or push the victim. Most conflicts end in seconds, but some last a minute or two.
In most animal species fights would be like that. However, many of the conflicts among pigs Dr Norscia, a biologist, observed had interested parties beyond the fighters. He therefore wanted to understand the role of these bystanders in solving conflicts—and what this says about pigs’ cognitive (认知的) abilities.
Since there was usually not enough time for a bystander pig to become involved in the heat of a conflict, though this did occur, Dr Norscia looked at what happened in the three minutes immediately following a fight. Sometimes, he found, the fighters reconciled with each other on their own. The more distantly related the fighters were, the more frequently this happened. Dr Norscia guessed that relations between close relatives are more secure to start with, so rebuilding friendly relations rapidly is less necessary for them.
On other occasions, however, a third pig stepped in. Sometimes this bystander interacted with the attacker, which reduced the number of attacks coming after. Sometimes, the bystander interacted with the victim. This appeared to calm the victim down, for it reduced anxiety-related behavior.
Social intelligence need not, though, be entirely selfless. Pigs are more likely to step in after a conflict if they are closely related to either the attacker or the victim. This is probably an example of kin selection (亲属选择), which favors the development of behavior.
1. Why are Churchill and Orwell mentioned at the beginning?| A．To show their preference for pigs. | B．To add some related backgrounds. |
| C．To introduce the topic of the text. | D．To present their attitude to animals. |
| A．They aim to show power. | B．They have audiences. |
| C．They last a little bit longer. | D．They happen more often. |
| A．Caught up. | B．Kept in touch. | C．Made up. | D．Changed in tune. |
| A．Offering comfort to victim pigs. | B．Forming special bonds with strangers. |
| C．Sticking to their behavior. | D．Caring for others with selfless devotion. |
5 . Visual Symbols and the Blind
From several recent studies, it has become clear that blind people can appreciate the use of outlines and perspectives to describe the arrangement of objects and other surfaces in space. But pictures are more than literal representations.
This fact was drawn to my attention dramatically when a blind woman in one of my investigations decided on her own initiative to draw a wheel as it was spinning. To show this motion, she traced a curve inside the circle(Fig. 1). I was surprised. Lines of motion, such as the one she used, are a very recent invention in the history of illustration.
When I asked several other blind study subjects to draw a spinning wheel, one particularly clever interpretation appeared repeatedly: several subjects showed the wheel’s spokes(把柄)as curved lines. When asked about these curves, they all described them as metaphorical ways of suggesting motion. Majority rule would argue that this device somehow indicated motion very well. But was it a better indicator than, say, broken or wavy lines—or any other kind of line, for that matter? The answer was not clear. So I decided to test whether various lines of motion were liable ways of showing movement or if they were merely specific marks. Moreover, I wanted to discover whether there were differences in how the blind and the sighted interpreted lines of motion.
To search out these answers, I created raised—line drawings of five different wheels, depicting spokes with lines that curved, bent, waved, dotted and extended beyond the perimeter of the wheel. I then asked eighteen blind volunteers to feel the wheels and assign one of the following motions to each wheel: shaky, spinning fast, spinning steadily, jerking or braking. My control group consisted of eighteen sighted undergraduates from the University of Toronto.
All but one of the blind subjects assigned distinctive motions to each wheel. Most guessed that the curved spokes indicated that the wheel was spinning steadily; the wavy spokes, they thought, suggested that the wheel was shaky; and the bent spokes were taken as a sign that the wheel was jerking. Subjects assumed that the spokes extending beyond the wheel’s perimeter signified that the wheel had its brakes on and that dotted spokes indicated the wheel was spinning quickly.
In addition, the favoured description for the sighted was the favoured description for the blind in every instance. What is more, the consensus among the sighted was barely higher than that among the blind. Because motion devices are unfamiliar to the blind, the task I gave them involved some problem solving. Evidently, however, the blind not only figured out meanings for each line of motion, but as a group they generally came up with the same meaning at least as frequently as did sighted subjects.
1. The author makes the point that blind people___________.| A．can draw accurately | B．may be interested in studying art |
| C．can recognise conventions such as perspective | D．can draw outlines of different objects and surfaces |
| A．drew a circle on her own initiative | B．was the first person to use lines of motion |
| C．included a symbol representing movement | D．did not understand what a wheel looked like |
| A．got better results than the sighted undergraduates |
| B．worked together well as a group in solving problems |
| C．could control the movement of wheels very accurately |
| D．had good understanding of symbols representing movement |
| A．steadily spinning | B．rapidly spinning | C．shaky | D．jerking |
6 . The goal of this book is to make the case for digital minimalism, including a detailed exploration of what it asks and why it works, and then to teach you how to adopt this philosophy if you decide it’s right for you.
To do so, I divided the book into two parts. In part one, I describe the philosophical foundations of digital minimalism, starting with an examination of the forces that are making so many people’s digital lives increasingly intolerable, before moving on to a detailed discussion of the digital minimalism philosophy.
Part one concludes by introducing my suggested method for adopting this philosophy: the digital declutter. This process requires you to step away from optional online activities for thirty days. At the end of the thirty days, you will then add back a small number of carefully chosen online activities that you believe will provide massive benefits to the things you value.
In the final chapter of part one, I’ll guide you through carrying out your own digital declutter. In doing so, I’ll draw on an experiment I ran in 2018 in which over 1,600 people agreed to perform a digital declutter. You’ll hear these participants’ stories and learn what strategies worked well for them, and what traps they encountered that you should avoid.
The second part of this book takes a closer look at some ideas that will help you cultivate (培养) a sustainable digital minimalism lifestyle. In these chapters, I examine issues such as the importance of solitude (独处) and the necessity of cultivating high-quality leisure to replace the time most now spent on mindless device use. Each chapter concludes with a collection of practices, which are designed to help you act on the big ideas of the chapter. You can view these practices as a toolbox meant to aid your efforts to build a minimalist lifestyle that works for your particular circumstances.
1. What is the book aimed at?| A．Teaching critical thinking skills. | B．Advocating a simple digital lifestyle. |
| C．Solving philosophical problems. | D．Promoting the use of a digital device. |
| A．Clear-up. | B．Add-on. | C．Check-in. | D．Take-over. |
| A．Theoretical models. | B．Statistical methods. |
| C．Practical examples. | D．Historical analyses. |
| A．Use them as needed. | B．Recommend them to friends. |
| C．Evaluate their effects. | D．Identify the ideas behind them. |
7 . English is the language for international communication, especially in areas such as science and technology. Galileo Galilei said, “Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.” Using numbers and mathematical symbols, one can write “words” and “sentences”. When appropriate, several “sentences” together might form a “mathematical story”. Mathematics has also grammar — the mathematical logic which determines whether statements are valid or not.
A math teacher compares math to English and says, “Math may be viewed as a language — a simpler, more consistent and more regular language than English. Numbers represent nouns, while operational signs (+, －,×, ÷, =) serve as verbs. Both components are governed by rules of syntax. Math facts, such as 2×3=6, may be thought of as math sentences. Students should be encouraged to speak in complete sentences to convey an entire thought. Math at the simple sentence fact level is a much easier language than English. Although math has an infinite number of nouns, it has only five verbs (+, －, ×, ÷, =) associated with four basic operations.”
Nina is an English teacher in elementary school and has 12 years of teaching experience. She has no doubts about the logical connection between English and mathematics. She says, “They are definitely languages. In both languages there are patterns and rules. They are both taught through visualizations and illustrations. Teaching vocabulary is like teaching fractions. You need to illustrate in both languages and practice a lot.”
However, English and mathematics as languages are similar and yet different. The language of mathematics, for example, is precise and less flexible—it cannot afford ambiguity, while natural languages contain constructive ambiguity derived from their cultural and contextual wealth of meanings. Mathematics as well as English as a second language does not develop naturally as a child develops a natural language; they need to be learned.
1. What can be inferred from the first paragraph?| A．English grammar can also be used in math. |
| B．English and math are both general languages. |
| C．Math is the medium of international communication. |
| D．Both English and math have logic behind them. |
| A．Math is much easier than English. |
| B．Math is the simplest language. |
| C．Both math and English can convey an entire thought. |
| D．Math at the simple sentence fact level is much easier than English. |
| A．Unclarity. | B．Evidence. | C．Certainty. | D．Similarity. |
| A．To explain the logic behind English and math. |
| B．To argue for the differences between math and English. |
| C．To compare math and English as languages. |
| D．To promote the development of science and technology. |
8 . Climate change has increased average temperatures by 1℃ over the past century, making heat waves more frequent and intense than those from any other point in recorded history.
The following is what happens if you’re the next to be killed. First, your brain sends a series of messages to your sweat glands telling them to increase sweat production. Then your heart starts beating faster to pump blood to the skin while blood flow is directed away from important organs(器官) like your liver, kidneys and gut.
If heat stroke occurs, your body might get hot and direct so much oxygen-rich blood to the skin that it suffocates(把…闷死) vital internal organs. If your body fails to cool you down, its internal temperature might start to climb from a normal level to about 104 degrees.
While you struggle to stay awake and avoid dizzying confusion, the excessive internal heat is damaging your gut, consequently causing an inflammatory(发炎的) response.
That’s just part of what we know about how extreme heat kills you.
| A．As the heat rises quickly, so does the death number. |
| B．That’s because we can’t study it in humans in the laboratory. |
| C．As temperatures tick ever higher, that figure may well rise. |
| D．At that temperature, your brain becomes affected. |
| E．Surviving the organ failure might require an emergency transplant. |
| F．Sometimes that alone is enough to create problems for a weak or aging heart. |
| G．Left untreated, what follows is a flood of organ failure that leads to your death. |
9 . How do you teach a monkey new tricks? Labs have proved difficult places to train monkeys to respond to different sounds, but in the forests of Senegal’s Niokolo-Koba National Park, researchers were astonished how quickly one species of monkey adapted its behavior to a new sound.
Julia Fischer at the German Primate Center in Gottingen and her team flew drones over a community of green monkeys in the area, to see what they made of a new flying object in their environment. They responded instantly, making alarm calls to warn one another of the potential new threat.
The vocalizations were distant from the ones they made in response to models of leopards and snakes, but almost identical to calls made by a related species of monkey about eagles. The results suggest a hardwired response to the perception of an aerial threat and the use of that specific call.
They monkeys adapted so quickly to the mechanical noise that they began scanning the skies and making the calls even when the sound of the drone was played from the ground. The monkeys were never seen issuing alarm calls in response to birds of prey in the area, suggesting that the birds they usually see aren’t considered a threat. The drones, however, seemed to be perceived as dangerous. “It’s certainly disconnecting, unpredictable, something they’ve not seen before, so it makes sense to alert everybody,” say Fischer. She says she was “blown away” by how rapidly the monkeys appeared to learn. “The listeners are smart. It’s almost impossible to get a monkey in a lab to do an audio task. It isn’t clear why such learning is harder in a lab environment,” she says.
The study involved a year’s worth of fieldwork by a team of eight, who flew the drone about 60 meters above the monkeys. The research wasn’t without incident. Fisher had to duck inside a shelter made of palm leaves at one point, after a baboon ran to attack the leopard model she was holding.
Vervet monkeys in East Africa are related to green monkeys. They have been closely studied for the different calls they make in response to a variety of predators, including pythons, leopards, baboons and martial eagles.
The expectation for the green monkey study was that they would stay silent. come up with a new alarm call or produce one similar to the velvet monkeys’ eagle call. Fischer’s bet was on the eagle call option, and she was proved right. The vocalization appears to be highly conserved by evolution. “It teaches us about how different their vocal communication system is from ours,” says Fischer. “There is a very limited level of flexibility.”
1. What can be learned about green monkeys’ behavioral adaptability to a new sound?| A．They made sounds similar to a new flying object. |
| B．They alerted each other to possible danger. |
| C．They responded as though they had seen eagles. |
| D．They scanned the sky for the source of the sound. |
| A．compare the different sounds made by the monkeys |
| B．specify the monkeys’ extraordinary adaptability |
| C．illustrate these birds pose no threat to the monkeys |
| D．prove drones are more appealing to the monkeys |
| A．The study conducted by Fischer and her team was painstaking. |
| B．Monkeys differ greatly in their ability to adapt to a new sound. |
| C．Researchers have unlocked why monkeys learn quickly in nature. |
| D．Monkeys turn out to be quite flexible in their vocal communication. |
| A．Unbelievable—Monkeys Should Make Different Sound! |
| B．How Do Monkeys Get New Tricks? |
| C．Monkeys See Drones... |
| D．Vervet Monkeys vs Green Monkeys |
10 . Landslides of ash, gas and rock that flow out downhill during volcanic eruptions may be even more dangerous than scientists had realized.
Laboratory and field measurements show pulses of high pressure form within these slides, known as pyroclastic (火山碎屑的) flows. Those pressures can be far stronger, and more destructive, than disaster evaluations typically assume. “It’s not a small difference,” says Cert Lube, a volcanologist at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. Conventional disaster evaluations might suggest a certain flow will only burst windows, but he says, “When actually, the pressures are so strong, they knock down the walls of the building.”
Pyroclastic flows are the deadliest volcanic disaster, in part because of the pressures they cause. Due to their violent nature, researchers often have to evaluate average pressures in the flows using computer simulations (模拟) based on measurements of geologic deposits left by past flows.
At Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, researchers freed mixtures of hot rock, ash and gas down a channel to copy volcanic landslides known as pyroclastic flows. These pyroclastic flows have an inner rhythm (节奏) that makes them especially destructive. To directly study the inner workings of these forces of nature, Lube and colleagues reproduced smaller versions of the flows in experiments, measuring the destructive power. That let the team calculate the pressures inside the flows. The researchers also analyzed the first measurements of pressures in natural flows, collected in 2019, when pyroclastic flows burst from the Whakaari volcano and swallowed a set of sensors.
To the researchers’ surprise, pressures in the flows shook rhythmically. These pressure pulses would successively damage barriers like blows from an electric drill, Lube says. The pulses sometimes smashed more than three times as hard as the average pressure evaluates typically suggested by conventional simulations.
1. Why do researchers use computers to simulate pyroclastic flows?| A．To find out their inner rhythm. | B．To evaluate their violent nature. |
| C．To figure out their average pressures. | D．To copy the scene of volcanic landslides. |
| A．How to prepare simulation experiment. |
| B．How to carry out the simulation experiment. |
| C．Why to conduct the simulation experiment. |
| D．Why to measure the inner rhythm of pyroclastic flows. |
| A．Crashed. | B．Bombed. | C．Conflicted. | D．Increased. |
| A．A Well-known Landslide | B．The Deadliest Volcanic Disaster |
| C．More Destructive Pyroclastic Flows | D．A Pyroclastic Flows Simulation Experiment |
