剑桥雅思阅读7原文难度解析(test3)
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剑桥雅思阅读7原文(test3)
READING PASSAGE 1
wouldratherYou should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are bad on Reading Passage 1 below.
Ant Intelligence
When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the inct kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among the, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the id
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ea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by tho involved in the investigations.
Ants store food, repel attackers and u chemical signals to contact one another in ca of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared to the human u of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising images and jingles, political slogans and martial music) to arou and propagate moods and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote, ‘Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, rai aphids_as livestock, launch armies to war, u chemical sprays to alarm and confu enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information cealessly. They do everything but watch television.’
我们是冠军英文However, in ants there is no cultural transmission — everything must be encoded in the genes — whereas in humans the opposite is true. Only basic instincts are carried in the genes of a newborn baby, other skills being learned from others in the community as the child grows up. It may em that this cultural continuity gives us a huge advantage over a
nts. They have never mastered fire nor progresd. Their fungus farming and aphid herding crafts are sophisticated when compared to the agricultural skills of humans five thousand years ago but have been totally overtaken by modern human agribusiness.
Or have they? The farming methods of ants are at least sustainable. They do not ruin environments or u enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the crop farming of ants may be more sophisticated and adaptable than was thought.
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Ants were farmers fifty million years before humans were. Ants can’t digest the cellulo in leaves — but some fungi can. The ants therefore cultivate the fungi in their nests, bringing them leaves to feed on, and then u them as a source of food. Farmer ants crete antibiotics to control other fungi that might act as ‘weeds’, and spread waste to fertili the crop.
It was once thought that the fungus that ants cultivate was a single type that they had propagated, esntially unchanged from the distant past. Not so. Ulrich Mueller of Maryland and his colleagues genetically screened 862 different types of fungi taken from
ants’ nests. The turned out to be highly diver: it ems that ants are continually domesticating new species. Even more impressively, DNA analysis of the fungi suggests that the ants improve or modify the fungi by regularly swapping and sharing strains with neighbouring ant colonies.
Whereas prehistoric man had no exposure to urban lifestyles — the forcing hou of intelligence — the evidence suggests that ants have lived in urban ttings for clo on a hundred million years, developing and maintaining underground cities of specialid chambers and tunnels.
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sinWhen we survey Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles, we are amazed at what has been accomplished by humans. Yet Hoelldobler and Wilson’s magnificent work for ant lovers, The Ants, describes a supercolony of the ant Formica yesnsis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. This ‘megalopolis’ was reported to be compod of 360 million workers and a million queens living in 4,500 interconnected nests across a territory of 2.7 square kilometres.
Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in southern France and elwhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in something like their prent form more than venty million years ago. Beside this, prehistoric man looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence, albeit of a different kind?4p是什么意思
Rearch conducted at Oxford, Susx and Zurich Universities has shown that when dert ants return from a foraging trip, they navigate by integrating bearings and distances, which they continuously update in their heads. They combine the evidence of visual landmarks with a mental library of local directions, all within a framework which is consulted and updated. So ants can learn too.
And in a twelve-year programme of work, Ryabko and Reznikova have found evidence that ants can transmit very complex messages. Scouts who had located food in a maze returned to mobili their foraging teams. They engaged in contact ssions, at the end o
dopof which the scout was removed in order to obrve what her team might do. Often the foragers proceeded to the exact spot in the maze where the food had been. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent the foraging team using odour clues. Discussion now centres on whether the route through the maze is communicated as a ‘left-right’ quence of turns or as a ‘compass bearing and distance’ message.
