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Read the following passage. The short-faced bear was a giant North American bear that became extinct about 11,000 years ago.
Read the following passage. The short-faced bear was a giant North American bear that became extinct about 11,000 years ago.
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2022-09-29
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问题
Read the following passage.
The short-faced bear was a giant North American bear that became extinct about 11,000 years ago. These ancient bears were much larger than today’s bears, reaching up to 1.8 meters in height at the shoulder and weighing nearly 1,000 kilograms. There are several theories about what the bear ate to sustain its massive body size.
One theory is that the short-faced bear ate extremely large mammals that used to live in North America. These extinct mammals included giant species of buffalo and elephant-like mammoths. The short-faced bear’s massive front legs and feet would have allowed it to attack giant mammals by pulling them to the ground and preventing them from rising again to flee.
Another theory is that the short-faced bear ate fast-running animals such as deer and antelope.
Although animals like deer and antelope would have been difficult to catch because of their great running speed, paleontologists have reason to believe that the short-faced bear would have been able to keep up with them. Skeletons of short-faced bears indicate that they had unusually long legs that would have allowed them to attain running speed as fast as 65 kilometers per hour. At such speed, the short-faced bear would have been able to chase down these fast-moving prey animals.
Finally, some paleontologists think that the short-faced bear was a type of meat eater called a scavenger. Instead of chasing and killing their own prey, scavengers eat animals that have already been killed by other animals. According to this view, the short-faced bear’s great size would have allowed it to frighten or fight off predators like wolves or lions and then eat the prey that those animals had killed. The short-faced bear was so large that even a group of several smaller predators would have been unable to defend their prey from it successfully.
Now listen to part of a lecture on the topic you just read about.
Summarize the points made in the lecture, being sure to explain how they challenge the specific theories presented in the reading passage.
You’ve read some theories about what the short-faced bear ate. However, each of the theories is probably wrong. Here’s why. First, the short-faced bear seems big enough to pull a giant buffalo or a mammoth down to the ground, but the skeletons of short-faced bears show that they had unusually thin bones, and thin bones meant that the short-faced bear’s front legs and paws were fairly weak in spite of their great size. Without strong bones, the short-faced bear would not have been strong enough to pull down extremely large prey like giant buffalo or mammoths.
Second, the short-faced bear’s long legs probably made it a fast runner, but animals like deer and antelope don’t just run away in a straight line when they’re being chased. Instead, deer and antelope make sharp turns and suddenly change direction to make it hard for predators to follow them. Now, for the short-faced bear, changing directions while running at high speed would have been very difficult. The bear was simply too heavy to make a sharp turn without slowing down, so it would have been unable to catch these animals despite being a fast runner. So, it’s unlikely the short-faced bear would have fed itself by catching deer or antelope.
Third, the short-faced bear could probably have frightened away a group of wolves or lions, but its teeth show that it was not a scavenger. You see, a scavenger eats things that other animals have already partially eaten, so an important part of a scavenger’s diet comes from chewing the bones of partially eaten animals. Since bones are hard, they leave distinct marks on the teeth of animals that chew bones, but when scientists analyzed the teeth of short-faced bears, they did not find those characteristic marks. That suggests short-faced bears were not scavengers that fed on bones.
选项
答案
The lecturer rebuts the three hypotheses on what short-faced bears fed on. By referring to scientific analysis of short-faced bears, he finds that all the three theories proposed in the reading passage are far from the truth. First, the uncommonly thin bones of short-faced bears suggest that their legs and paws, though in great size, were too weak to pull down extremely large prey, such as giant buffalo or mammoths. This finding contradicts the first theory in the article. Second, the speaker points out that although short-faced bears can run as fast as some fast-moving prey, they were not nimble enough to follow deer or antelope. This is because deer and antelope excel in making sharp turns while running fast to get rid of the predators, but it might be very arduous for the heavy short-faced bears to do the same. Therefore, the second theory is unlikely to be true. Third, the last theory argues that the short-faced bear was a scavenger. However, a study of the short-faced bear’s teeth reveals that it was not an eater of that type. Its teeth did not have the distinct marks usually found on scavengers, who often chew the hard bones of dead animals. This finding is opposite to the third theory.
解析
题目:大学应该投入更多资金来完善图书馆和计算机实验室等硬件设施,而不是聘请名师。
这是一个“Agree or Disagree”的作文题目,应该在文章开头做出明确选择,然后按照选定的角度去展开论述,不建议给出模棱两可的回答,比如两方面同样重要。正文可以探讨题目中给出的两个方面的利弊:如果选择同意,要重点讨论improving facilities的益处。如果选择不同意,则要重点强调另一方面,即hiring famous teacher的重要性。强调一方面的益处时,也可以写一下另一方面的不足之处,正反论证结合。
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