2021年高考英语阅读理解预测题及答案
1．One day，gardeners might not just hear the buzz of bees among their flowers，but the whirr of robots，too．Scientists have managed to turn an unassuming drone （无人机）into a remote﹣controlled pollinator（授粉媒介）by attaching horhairs coated with a special，sticky gel（凝胶）to its underbelly（下腹部）．
Animal pollinators are needed for the reproduction of 90% of flowering plants and one third of human food crops．Chief among tho are bees ﹣but many bee populations in the United States have been in sharp decline in recent decades．Thus，the decline of bees isn't just worrisome becau it could damage ecosystems，but also becau it could disrupt agriculture and economy．People have been trying to come up with replacement techniques，but none of them are especially effective yet．
Scientists have thought about using drones，but they haven't figured out how to make free﹣flying robot incts that can rely on their own power source without being attached to a wire．"It's very tough work，" said nior author Eijiro Miyako，a chemist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology．His particular contribution to the field involves a gel，one he'd considered a mistake 10 years before and stuck in a storage cabinet（储物柜）．When it was rediscovered a decad
e later，it hadn't dried up or degraded at all．"I was so surprid becau it still had high viscosity，" Miyako said．
The chemist noticed that when dropped，the gel absorbed an impressive amount of dust from the floor．Miyako realized this material could be very uful for picking up pollen（花粉）．He and his colleagues cho a drone and attached horhairs to its smooth surface to copy a bee's fuzzy body．They coated tho horhairs in the gel，and then controlled the drones over lilies，where they would pick up the pollen from one flower and then deposit the pollen at another one，thus fertilizing it．
The scientists looked at the hairs under a scanning electron microscope and counted up the pollen grains attached to the surface and found that the drones who horhairs had been coated with the gel had about 10 times more pollen than tho that had not been coated with the gel．
Miyako does not think such drones would replace bees altogether，but could simply help
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