劍橋雅思7Test1閱讀Passage1原文翻譯 Let’s go bats

劍橋雅思7Test1閱讀Passage1原文翻譯 Let’s go bats

劍橋雅思7 Test 1 Passage 1閱讀原文翻譯

自然段A

Bats have a problem: how to find their way around in the dark. They hunt at night, and cannot use light to help them find prey and avoid obstacles. You might say that this is a problem of their own making, one that they could avoid simply by changing their habits and hunting by day. But the daytime economy is already heavily exploited by other creatures such as birds. Given that there is a living to be made at night, and given that alternative daytime trades are thoroughly occupied, natural selection has favoured bats that make a go of the night-hunting trade. It is probable that the nocturnal trades go way back in the ancestry of all mammals. In the time when the dinosaurs dominated the daytime economy, our mammalian ancestors probably only managed to survive at all because they found ways of scraping a living at night. Only after the mysterious mass extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago were our ancestors able to emerge into the daylight in any substantial numbers.

蝙蝠有一個問題：如何在黑暗中找到自己的出路。他們在夜間狩獵，無法利用光來幫助他們尋找獵物并避開障礙物。你可能會說這是他們自己造成的問題，他們可以簡單地通過改變習(xí)慣和白天捕獵來避免。但是白天的資源已經(jīng)被鳥類等其他生物大量利用。鑒于夜間仍有生計，而白天的替代性食物資源已被完全占領(lǐng)，因此自然選擇偏愛那些從事夜間狩獵的蝙蝠。夜行性活動很可能可以追溯到所有哺乳動物的祖先。在恐龍主導(dǎo)白天經(jīng)濟的時候，我們哺乳動物的祖先可能就是因為找到了在夜間謀生的方法，才勉強存活下來。僅在大約6500萬年前恐龍神秘滅絕之后，我們的祖先才能夠在白天大量出現(xiàn)。

自然段B

Bats have an engineering problem: how to find their way and find their prey in the absence of light. Bats are not the only creatures to face this difficulty today. Obviously the night-flying insects that they prey on must find their way about somehow. Deep-sea fish and whales have little or no light by day or by night. Fish and dolphins that live in extremely muddy water cannot see because, although there is light, it is obstructed and scattered by the dirt in the water. Plenty of other modern animals make their living in conditions where seeing is difficult or impossible.

蝙蝠有一個實踐上的問題：如何在沒有光照的情況下找到自己的路徑并找到獵物。蝙蝠并不是今天面臨這一困難的唯一生物。顯然，它們捕文章來自老烤鴨雅思食的在夜間飛行的昆蟲也必須找到某種方式。無論白天還是晚上，深海魚類和鯨魚幾乎都沒有光照。生活在極其泥濘的水中的魚和海豚也看不見。因為盡管光線充足，但它被水中的污物阻擋和分散。還有許多其他現(xiàn)代動物生活在視線受阻或完全看不見的環(huán)境中。

自然段C

Given the questions of how to manoeuvre in the dark, what solutions might an engineer consider? The first one that might occur to him is to manufacture light, to use a lantern or a searchlight. Fireflies and some fish (usually with the help of bacteria) have the power to manufacture their own light, but the process seems to consume a large amount of energy. Fireflies use their light for attracting mates. This doesn’t require a prohibitive amount of energy: a male’s tiny pinprick of light can be seen by a female from some distance on a dark night, since her eyes are exposed directly to the light source itself. However, using light to find one’s own way around requires vastly more energy, since the eyes have to detect the tiny fraction of the light that bounces off each part of the scene. The light source must therefore be immensely brighter if it is to be used as a headlight to illuminate the path, than if it is to be used as a signal to others. In any event, whether or not the reason is the energy expense, it seems to be the case that, with the possible exception of some weird deep-sea fish, no animal apart from man uses manufactured light to find its way about.

面對如何在黑暗中進行機動的問題，工程師會考慮哪些解決方案？他想到的第一個方法可能是使用燈籠或者探照燈來制造光。螢火蟲和一些魚（通常在細菌的幫助下）具有制造自己的光的能力，但該過程似乎消耗大量能量。螢火蟲用它們的燈光吸引伴侶。這不需要消耗過多的能量：在漆黑的夜晚，雌性可以相隔一定距離看到雄性微弱的光亮，因為她的眼睛直接暴露在光源本身下。但是，使用光來尋找自己的路徑需要更多的能量，因為眼睛必須檢測從場景各個部分反射回來的微弱的光線。因此，如果將光源用作前照燈來照亮路徑，則它必須比用作信號時更亮才行。無論如何，無論原因是不是能源消耗，似乎除了一些奇怪的深海魚，人類以外的任何動物都不會利用人造光來尋找路徑。

自然段D

What else might the engineer think of? well, blind humans sometimes seem to have an uncanny sense of obstacles in their path. It has been given the name ‘facial vision’, because blind people have reported that it feels a bit like the sense of touch, on the face. One report tells of a totally blind boy who could ride his tricycle at good speed round the block near his home, using facial vision. Experiments showed that, in fact, facial vision is nothing to do with touch or the front of the face, although the sensation may be referred to the front of the face, like the referred pain in a phantom limb. The sensation of facial vision, it turns out, really goes in through the ears. Blind people, without even being aware of the fact, are actually using echoes of their own footsteps and of other sounds, to sense the presence of obstacles. Before this was discovered, engineers had already built instruments to exploit the principle, for example to measure the depth of the sea under a ship. After this technique had been invented, it was only a matter of time before weapons designers adapted it for the detection of submarines. Both sides in the Second world war relied heavily on these devices, under such codenames as Asdic (British) and Sonar (American), as well as Radar (American) or RDF (British), which uses radio echoes rather than sound echoes.

工程師還會想到什么？好吧，盲人有時似乎在前進的道路上有種不可思議的障礙感。它之所以被稱為“面部視覺”，是因為盲人報告說它有點像臉部的觸摸感。一份報告講述了一個完全失明的男孩，他可以利用面部視覺騎三輪車告訴繞過他家附近的街區(qū)。實驗表明，實際上，面部視覺與觸摸或臉前無關(guān)，盡管感覺可能來自臉的前面，就像幻肢中提到的疼痛一樣。事實證明，面部視覺其實是通過耳朵感受到的。盲人甚至沒有意識到這一事實。他們實際上是在利用自己腳步聲和其他聲音的回聲來感知障礙物的存在。在發(fā)現(xiàn)這一點之前，工程師已經(jīng)制造了利用該原理的儀器，例如，測量船下海的深度。在發(fā)明了這項技術(shù)之后，武器設(shè)計者將其改裝用于探測潛艇只是一個時間問題。第二次世界大戰(zhàn)中雙方都嚴(yán)重依賴這些設(shè)備，其代號為Asdic（英國）和Sonar（美國），以及Radar（美國）或RDF（英國）。它們使用無線電回聲而不是聲音回聲。

自然段E

The Sonar and Radar pioneers didn’t know it then, but all the world now knows that bats, or rather natural selection working on bats, had perfected the system tens of millions of years earlier, and their ‘radar’ achieves feats of detection and navigation that would strike an engineer dumb with admiration. It is technically incorrect to talk about bat ‘radar’, since they do not use radio waves. It is sonar. But the underlying mathematical theories of radar and sonar are very similar, and much of our scientific understanding of the details of what bats are doing has come from applying radar theory to them. The American zoologist Donald Griffin, who was largely responsible for the discovery of sonar in bats, coined the term ‘echolocation’ to cover both sonar and radar, whether used by animals or by human instruments.

聲納和雷達的先驅(qū)者當(dāng)時還不知道，但是現(xiàn)在全世界都知道蝙蝠，或者說是自然選擇的蝙蝠，已經(jīng)在幾千萬年前完善了該系統(tǒng)。他們的“雷達”所實現(xiàn)的探測壯舉和導(dǎo)航工作令工程師欽佩。談?wù)擈稹袄走_”在技術(shù)上是不正確的，因為它們不使用無線電波，而使用聲波。但是雷達和聲納的基礎(chǔ)數(shù)學(xué)理論非常相似，我們對蝙蝠行為細節(jié)的科學(xué)理解主要來自將雷達理論應(yīng)用于它們。發(fā)現(xiàn)蝙蝠聲納的美國動物學(xué)家唐納德·格里芬（Donald Griffin）創(chuàng)造了“回聲定位”一詞，以涵蓋動物或人類使用的聲納和雷達。

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