江苏省泗阳中学2013届高考英语 任务型阅读专项训练（五）.docVIP

江苏省泗阳中学2013高考英语任务型阅读专项训练（五） (1) Zebras have their own bug repellent(驱虫剂)? Eww bugs! They are so annoying! We humans are lucky that we can apply repellents to avoid nasty bites. But what’s an animal to do? They have no choice but to spend their days shooing them off with their tails, unless, of course, they are zebras, who apparently have their own automatic repellent--- their striped skin! Scientists had originally thought that the reason why the animal had developed the black and white lines was to help protect itself from predators in the African savannah, because the stripes make it difficult to single out one zebra that is traveling with a herd.While that may be true, the theory has never been tested or proven. Now the experts have another---that the stripes have evolved to repel the annoying horse flies that not only feed off their blood, but also, transmit dangerous germs into the bodies of these innocent animals. The study was performed by a team of Swedish scientists. One of the clues that got them thinking along these lines was the fact that darker horses got bitten more often than light-colored or white ones. The fact that zebras are born black and only develop strips as they grow older made the scientists theorize that the stripes may be something the animals have developed to make themselves less attractive to flies. To test if this may be the case, they painted some boards at a horse-infested horse farm in Budapest with pattens of black and white stripes of varying widths and applied a layer of glue on them. What they noticed was that the places where the black and white stripes were at their narrowest (similar to what zebras have) attracted the fewest flies. They achieved similar results when they painted horses with black and white zebra-like stripes. While the research are not sure why this may be the case, they believe it may be something to do with the way insects operate---horsefl