剑桥雅思7Test1阅读Passage1原文翻译 Let’s go bats

剑桥雅思7Test1阅读Passage1原文翻译 Let’s go bats

剑桥雅思7 Test 1 Passage 1阅读原文翻译

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.

蝙蝠有一个问题：如何在黑暗中找到自己的出路。他们在夜间狩猎，无法利用光来帮助他们寻找猎物并避开障碍物。你可能会说这是他们自己造成的问题，他们可以简单地通过改变习惯和白天捕猎来避免。但是白天的资源已经被鸟类等其他生物大量利用。鉴于夜间仍有生计，而白天的替代性食物资源已被完全占领，因此自然选择偏爱那些从事夜间狩猎的蝙蝠。夜行性活动很可能可以追溯到所有哺乳动物的祖先。在恐龙主导白天经济的时候，我们哺乳动物的祖先可能就是因为找到了在夜间谋生的方法，才勉强存活下来。仅在大约6500万年前恐龙神秘灭绝之后，我们的祖先才能够在白天大量出现。

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.

蝙蝠有一个实践上的问题：如何在没有光照的情况下找到自己的路径并找到猎物。蝙蝠并不是今天面临这一困难的唯一生物。显然，它们捕文章来自老烤鸭雅思食的在夜间飞行的昆虫也必须找到某种方式。无论白天还是晚上，深海鱼类和鲸鱼几乎都没有光照。生活在极其泥泞的水中的鱼和海豚也看不见。因为尽管光线充足，但它被水中的污物阻挡和分散。还有许多其他现代动物生活在视线受阻或完全看不见的环境中。

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.

面对如何在黑暗中进行机动的问题，工程师会考虑哪些解决方案？他想到的第一个方法可能是使用灯笼或者探照灯来制造光。萤火虫和一些鱼（通常在细菌的帮助下）具有制造自己的光的能力，但该过程似乎消耗大量能量。萤火虫用它们的灯光吸引伴侣。这不需要消耗过多的能量：在漆黑的夜晚，雌性可以相隔一定距离看到雄性微弱的光亮，因为她的眼睛直接暴露在光源本身下。但是，使用光来寻找自己的路径需要更多的能量，因为眼睛必须检测从场景各个部分反射回来的微弱的光线。因此，如果将光源用作前照灯来照亮路径，则它必须比用作信号时更亮才行。无论如何，无论原因是不是能源消耗，似乎除了一些奇怪的深海鱼，人类以外的任何动物都不会利用人造光来寻找路径。

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.

工程师还会想到什么？好吧，盲人有时似乎在前进的道路上有种不可思议的障碍感。它之所以被称为“面部视觉”，是因为盲人报告说它有点像脸部的触摸感。一份报告讲述了一个完全失明的男孩，他可以利用面部视觉骑三轮车告诉绕过他家附近的街区。实验表明，实际上，面部视觉与触摸或脸前无关，尽管感觉可能来自脸的前面，就像幻肢中提到的疼痛一样。事实证明，面部视觉其实是通过耳朵感受到的。盲人甚至没有意识到这一事实。他们实际上是在利用自己脚步声和其他声音的回声来感知障碍物的存在。在发现这一点之前，工程师已经制造了利用该原理的仪器，例如，测量船下海的深度。在发明了这项技术之后，武器设计者将其改装用于探测潜艇只是一个时间问题。第二次世界大战中双方都严重依赖这些设备，其代号为Asdic（英国）和Sonar（美国），以及Radar（美国）或RDF（英国）。它们使用无线电回声而不是声音回声。

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.

声纳和雷达的先驱者当时还不知道，但是现在全世界都知道蝙蝠，或者说是自然选择的蝙蝠，已经在几千万年前完善了该系统。他们的“雷达”所实现的探测壮举和导航工作令工程师钦佩。谈论蝙蝠“雷达”在技术上是不正确的，因为它们不使用无线电波，而使用声波。但是雷达和声纳的基础数学理论非常相似，我们对蝙蝠行为细节的科学理解主要来自将雷达理论应用于它们。发现蝙蝠声纳的美国动物学家唐纳德·格里芬（Donald Griffin）创造了“回声定位”一词，以涵盖动物或人类使用的声纳和雷达。