_2011年职称英语冲刺班课件第13讲-理工类.doc

大家论坛职称英语版块：/forum-109-1.html Longer Lives for Wild Elephants Most people think of zoos as safe places for animals, where struggles such as difficulty finding food and avoiding predators dont exist. Without such problems, animals in zoos should live to a ripe old age1. But that may not be true for2 the largest land animals on Earth. Scientists have known that elephants in zoos often suffer from poor health. They develop diseases, joint problems and behavior changes. Sometimes, they even become infertile, or unable to have babies. To learn more about how captivity affects elephants, a team of international scientists compared the life spans of female elephants born in zoos with female elephants living outdoors in their native lands. Zoos keep detailed records of all the animals in their care, documenting factors such as birth dates, illnesses, weight and death. These records made it possible for the researchers to analyze 40 years of data on 800 African and Asian elephants in zoos across Europe. The scientists compared the life spans of the zoo-born elephants with the life spans of thousands of female wild elephants in Africa and Asian elephants that work in logging camps3, over approximately the same time period. The team found that female African elephants born in zoos lived an average of 16.9 years. Their wild counterparts who died of natural causes lived an average of 56 years -- more then three times as long. Female Asian elephants followed a similar pattern. In zoos, they lived 18.9 years, while those in the logging camps lived 41.7 years. Scientists dont yet know why wild elephants seem to fare so much better than their zoo-raised counterparts. Georgia Mason, a biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada who led study, thinks stress and obesity may be to blame4. Zoo elephants dont get the same kind of exercise they would in the wild, and most are very fat. Elephant social lives are also much different in zoos than in the wild, where they live in large herd