雅思真题机考机经2016年10月29日.pdfVIP

TEST 5 2016 年 10 月 29 日 READING PASSAGE 1 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 7-13, which are based on Reading Passage below. Ants Could Teach Ants The ants are tiny and usually nest between rocks in the south coast of England. Transformed into research subjects at the University of Bristol, they raced along a tabletop foraging for food - and then, remarkably, returned to guide others. Time and again, followers trailed behind leaders, darting this way and that along the route, presumably to memorise landmarks. Once a follower got its bearings, it tapped the leader with its antennae, prompting the lesson to literally proceed to the next step. The ants were only looking for food, but the researchers said the careful way the leaders led followers - thereby turning them into leaders in their own right - marked the Temnothorax albipennis ant as the very first example of a non-human animal exhibiting teaching behaviour. Tandem running is an example of teaching, to our knowledge the first in a non-human animal, that involves bidirectional feedback between teacher and pupil, remarks Nigel Franks, professor of animal behaviour and ecology, whose paper on the ant educators was published last week in the journal Nature. No sooner was the paper published, of course, than another educator questioned it. Marc Hauser, a psychologist and biologist and one of the scientists who came up with the definition of teaching, said it was unclear whether the ants had learned a new skill or merely acquired new information. Later, Franks took a further study and found that there were even races between leaders. With the guidance of leaders, ants could find food faster. But the hel