托福【阅读背景】：人类为何直立行走.doc

托福【阅读背景】：人类为何直立行走 小马过河为大家准备了“托福【阅读背景】：人类为何直立行走”，供各位备考托福的考生们参考使用，来提高自己的托福成绩！免费咨询电话：400-0123-267 　　Bipedalism - walking on two feet - is one of the defining characteristics of being human, and scientists have debated for years how it came about. In the latest attempt to find an explanation, researchers trained five chimpanzees to walk on atreadmill while wearing masks that allowed measurement of their oxygen consumption. 　　The chimps were measured both while walking upright and while moving on their legs and knuckles. That measurement of the energy needed to move around was compared with similar tests on humans and the results are published in this weeks online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 　　It turns out that humans walking on two legs use only one-quarter of the energy that chimpanzees use while knuckle-walking on four limbs. And the chimps, on average, use as much energy using two legs as they did when they used all four limbs. 　　However, there was variability among chimpanzees in how much energy they used, and this difference corresponded to their different gaits and anatomy. 　　One of the chimps used less energy on two legs, one used about the same and the others used more, said David Raichlen, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona. 　　What we were surprised at was the variation, he said in a telephone interview. That was pretty exciting, because when you talk about how evolution works, variation is the bottom line, without variation there is no evolution. 　　Walking on two legs freed our arms, opening the door to manipulating the world, Raichlen said. We think about the evolution of bipedalism as one of first events that led hominids down the path to being human. 　　The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the L. S. B. Leakey Foundation. 　　人类为何进化到了直立行走的姿态?可能这是因为直立行走要容易得多。用科学术语来说，直立行走能“节省能量”。 　　用两条腿走路是人类的基本特征之一，多年来，科学家们在这一特征的形成问题上一直争论不休。在这项最新研究中，研究人员让五只大猩猩戴着可测算氧气消耗量的面罩在跑步机上行走。 　　研究人员对大猩