雅思阅读材料之蜜蜂和杀虫剂.docx

智课网IELTS备考资料雅思阅读材料之蜜蜂与杀虫剂 出国英语考试有哪些 雅思6.5是什么水平 雅思阅读评分标准 托福阅读评分标准 雅思和托福的区别 IN THE winter of 2006 beekeepers in America noticed something odd—lots of their hives were dying for no obvious reason. As the months passed, reports of similar phenomena began coming in from their European counterparts. Mystified scientists coined the label “colony collapse disorder” (CCD) to describe what was happening. Since then, much brow-sweat has been expended trying to work out just what CCD really is. 2006年冬，美国养蜂人注意到奇怪的现象，他们的蜜蜂成批死掉，原因不明。几个月后，类似的现象也出现在欧洲同行的报告上。困惑的科学家们给这个现象贴上了“蜂群衰竭失调”（CCD）的标签。自那时起，为揭开CCD的面纱，人们不知道多少次抹去额头的汗水。 Dying bees are a problem, and not just for apiarists. Bees pollinate many of the world’s crops—a service estimated to be worth $15 billion a year in America alone. And there is no shortage of theories to explain the insects’ decline. Climate change, habitat destruction, a paralysing virus, fungal infection and even a plague of parasitic mites have all been proposed. But one of the leading ideas is that the bees are suffering from the effects of neonicotinoids, a class of commonly used pesticides, introduced in the 1990s, which are toxic to insects but much less so to mammals. 蜜蜂之死不仅令养蜂家头痛。蜜蜂给世界上的很多庄稼授粉，仅在美国，这种服务每年价值150亿美元。尽管对蜜蜂数量下降的原因提出了形形色色的理论，如气候变化、栖息地遭破坏、麻痹病毒、霉菌感染，甚至还有寄生虫肆虐。但其中一个主导观点是蜜蜂正在遭受新烟碱的侵害，二十世纪九十年代人们引入这种杀虫剂，它对昆虫有毒，但对哺乳动物的毒性较小，使用范围广泛。 Two papers published this week in Science lend weight to this idea. The first, from a group led by Penelope Whitehorn and David Goulson of the University of Stirling, in Britain, examined the effects these insecticides have on bumblebees, which are closely related to honeybees. Bumblebees are less studied than their honeybee cousins, but they also pollinate many commonly eaten crops, including strawberries, raspberries and runner beans. 本期科学杂志刊登的两篇论文证实了这种观点。第一篇出自英国斯特林大学Penelope Whitehorn 和 David Goulson 指导的团队，他们检验了这些杀虫剂给大黄蜂带来的影响，大黄蜂和蜜蜂的关系密切。和同宗的蜜蜂比起来，对大黄蜂的研究要少一些。但它们给很多可食作物传粉，如草莓、树莓和红花菜豆。 The two research