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University of California, Davis, Macaws eat seeds containing alkaloids, a group of chemicals that has some notoriously toxic members such as strychnine. In the wild, the birds are frequently seen perched on eroding riverbanks eating clay. Dr Gillardi fed one group of macaws a mixture of a harmless alkaloid and clay, and a second group just the alkaloid. Several hours later, the macaws that had eaten the clay had 60% less alkaloid in their blood streams than those that had not, suggesting that the hypothesis is correct.
Other observations also support the idea that clays is detoxifying. Towards the tropics the amount toxic compounds in plants increases-and so does the amount of earth eaten by herbivores. Elephants lick clay from mud holes all year around, except in September when they are bingeing on fruit which, because it has evolved to be eaten, is not toxic. And the addition of clay to the diets of domestic cattle increases the amount of nutrients that they can absorb from their food by 10-20%.
A third instance of animal self-medications is the use of mechanical scours to get rid of gut parasites. In 1972 Richard Wrangham, a researcher at the Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania, noticed that chimpanzees were eating the leaves of a tree called Aspilla. The chimps chose the leaves carefully by testing them in their mouths. Having chosen a leaf, a chimp would fold it into a fan and swallow it. Some of the chimps were noticed wrinkling their noses as they swallowed these leaves, suggesting the experience was unpleasant. Later, undigested leaves were found on the forest floor.
Dr Wrangham rightly guessed that the leaves had a medicinal purpose-this was, indeed, one of the earliest interpretations of a behavior pattern as self-medication. However, he guessed wrong about what the mechanism was. His(and everybody else‘s) assumption was that Aspilla contained a drug, and his sparked more than two decades of phytochemical research to try to find out what chemical the chimps were after. But by the 1990s, chimps across Africa had been seen swallowing the leaves of 19 different species that seemed to have few suitable chemicals in common. The drug hypothesis was looking more and more dubious.
It was Dr Huffman who got to the bottom of the problem. He did so by watching what came out of the chimps, rather than concentrating on what went in. He found that the egested leaves were full of intestinal worms. The factor common to all 19 species of leaves swallowed by the chimps was that they were covered with microscopic hooks. These caught the worms and dragged them form their lodgings.
Following that observation, Dr Engel is now particularly excited about how knowledge of the way that animals look after themselves could be used t to improve the health of live-stock. People might also be able to learn a thing or two-and may, indeed, already have done so. Geophagy. For example, is a common behavior in many parts of the world. The medical stalls in African markets frequently sell tablets made of different sorts of clays, appropriate to different medical conditions.
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Africans brought to the Americas as slaves continued this tradition, which gave their owners one more excuse to affect to despise them. Yet, as Dr Engel points out, Rwandan mountain gorillas eat a type of clay rather similar to kaolinite-the main ingredient of many patent medicines sold over the counter in the west for digestive complaints. Dirt can sometimes be good for you, and to be ―as sick as a parrot‖ may, after all, be a state to be desired.
Questions 1-4
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information FALSE if the statement contradicts the information NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
1. Dr. Engel has been working on animal self-medication research for 10 years. 2. Animals often walk a considerable distance to find plants medication. 3. Birds, like Macaw, often eat clay because it is part of their natural diet.
4. According to Dr. Engel, research into animal self-medication can help to invent new painkillers.
Questions 5-9
Complete the notes below using NO MORE THAN ONE WORD OR NUMBER from passage.
Write your answers in boxes 5-9 on your answer sheet. Date Name Animal Food Mechanism 1987 Michael Chimpanzee 5______of Contained Huffman and Veronia chemicals,6__Mohanmedi _, that can kill Seifu parasites 1999 James Gilardi Macaw Seeds(contain Clay and his 7_____)and can8____the colleagues clay poisonous contents in food 1972 Richard Chimpanzee Leaves with Such leaves Wrang-ham tiny 9_____on can catch and surface expel worms from intestines Questions 10-13
Complete the summary below using words from the box.
Write your answers, A-H, in boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet.
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Though often doubted, the self-medicating behavior of animals has been supported by an increasing amount of evidence. One piece of evidence particularly deals with10___, a soil-consuming behavior commonly found across animals species, because earth, often clay, can neutralize the 11____content of their diet. Such behavior can also be found among humans in Africa, where people purchase 12__at market stalls as a kind of medication to their illnesses. Another example if this is found in chimps eating leaves of often 13____taste but with no apparent medicinal value until its unique structure came into light. A. Mineral B plants C unpleasant D toxic E clay tablets F nutritional G geophagy H harmless
READING PASSAGE 4
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below. 文章背景：
本文主要讲述了某种人造制雨器。
The Rainmaker
Sometimes ideas just pop up out of the blue. Or in Charlie Paton‘s case, out of the rain. ― I was in a bus in Morocco travelling through the desert,‖ he remembers. ―It had been raining and the bus was full of hot, wet people. The windows steamed up and I went to sleep with a towel against the glass. When I woke, the thing was soaking wet. I had to wring it out. And it set me thinking. Why was it so wet?‖
The answer, of course, was condensation. Back home in London, a physicist friend, Philip Davies, explained that the glass, chilled by the rain outside, had cooled the hot humid air inside the bus below its dew point, causing droplets of water to form on the inside of the window. Intrigued, Paton-a lighting engineer by profession-started rigging up his own equipment. ―I made my own solar stills. It occurred to me that you might be able to produce water in this way in the desert, simply by cooling the air. I wondered whether you could make enough to irrigate fields and grow crops.‖
Today, a decade on, his dream has taken shape as giant greenhouse on a desert island off Abu Dhabi in the Persian Gulf ---the first commercially viable Version of his ―seawater greenhouse‖. Local scientists, working with Paton under a license from his company Light Works, are watering the desert and growing vegetables in what is basically a giant dew-making machine that produces fresh water and cool air from sum and seawater. In awarding Paton first prize in a design competition two years ago, Marco Goldschmied, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, called it ―a truly original idea which has the potential to impact on the lives of millions of people
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living in coastal water-starved areas around the world.‖
The design has three main parts (see Graphic). The greenhouse faces into the prevailing wind so that hot, dry desert air blows in through the front wall of perforated cardboard, kept wet and cool by a constant tickle of seawater pumped up from the nearby shoreline. The evaporating seawater cools and moistens the air. Last June, for example, when the temperature outside the Abu Dhabi greenhouse was 46°c, it was in the low 30s inside. While the air outside was dry, the humidity in the greenhouse was 90 percent. The cool, moist air allows the plants to grow faster, and because much less water evaporates from the leaves their demand for moisture drops dramatically. Paton‘s crops thrived on a single litre of water per square metre per day, compared to 8 litres if they were growing outside.
The second feature also cools the air for the plants. Paton has constructed a double-layered roof with an outer layer of clear polythene and an inner, coated layer that reflects infrared light. Visible light can stream through to maximise photosynthesis, while heat from the infrared radiation is trapped in the space between the layer, away from the plants.
At the back of the greenhouse sits the third element, the main water-production unit. Just before entering this unit, the humid air of the greenhouse mixes with hot, dry air from between the two layers of the roof. This means the air can absorb more moisture as it passes through a second moist cardboard wall. Finally, the hot saturated air hits a condenser. This is a metal surface kept cool by still more seawater-the equivalent of the window on Paton‘s Moroccan bus. Drops of pure distilled water from on the condenser and flow into a tank for irrigating the crops.
The greenhouse more or less runs itself. Sensors switch everything on when the sun rises and alter flows of air and seawater through the day in response to changes in temperature, humidity and sunlight. On windless days, fans ensure a constant flow of air through the greenhouse. ― once it is tuned to the local environment, you don‘t need anyone there for it to work,‖ says Paton. ― we can run the entire operation off one 13-amp plug, and in future we could make it entirely independent of the grid, powered from a few solar panels.‖
The net effect is to evaporate seawater into hot desert air, then recondense the moisture as fresh water. At the same time, cool moist air flows through the greenhouse to provide ideal conditions for the crops. The key to the seawater greenhouse‘s potential is its unique combination of desalination and air conditioning. By tapping the power of the sun it can cool as efficiently as a 500-kilowatt air conditioner while using less than 3 kilowatts of electricity. In practice, it evaporates 3000 litres of seawater a day and turns it into about 800 litres of fresh water---just enough to irrigate the plants. The rest is lost as water vapour.
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Critics point out that construction costs of ￡25per square metre mean the water is twice as expensive as water from a conventional desalination plant. But the comparison is misleading, says Paton. The natural air conditioning in the greenhouse massively increases the value of that water. Because the plants need only an eight of the water used by those grown conventionally, the effective cost is only a quarter that of water from a standard desalinator. And costs should plummet when mass production begins, he adds.
Best of all, the greenhouse should be environmentally, friendly. ― I suppose there might be aesthetic objections to large structures on coastal sites,‖ says Harris, ―but it is a clean technology and doesn‘t produce pollution or even large quantities of hot water.‖
Questions 27-31
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information FALSE if the statement contradicts the information NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
27. Paton came up with the idea of making water in desert by pure accident. 28. the bus Paton rode in had poor ventilation because of broken fans. 29. Paton woke up from sleep to discover that his towel was wet.
30. Paton started his greenhouse project immediately after meeting up with his friend. 31. Paton later opened his own business in the Persian Gulf.
Questions 32-36(图形题）
Questions 37-40
Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage
Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.
The greenhouse Paton built is installed with37___to keep the air flowing if the wind stands still, and it is expected in the future to rely on electricity provided solely by 38___. Despite the high construction costs compared to desalination plants, the plants grown in Paton‘s greenhouse need much less water, and if produced in large quantities the 39___could be reduced remarkably. In addition to all these advantages, it is also40___, because it is clean and pollution free.
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