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  3. Turtles have an unfortunate habit of eating plastic objects floating in the sea. These then get trapped in their alimentary cana

Turtles have an unfortunate habit of eating plastic objects floating in the sea. These then get trapped in their alimentary cana

admin2022-11-16  113
问题     Turtles have an unfortunate habit of eating plastic objects floating in the sea. These then get trapped in their alimentary canals, cannot be broken down by the animals’ digestive enzymes and may ultimately kill them. It is widely assumed that this liking for plastics is a matter of mistaken identity. Drifting plastic bags, for instance, look similar to jellyfish, which many types of turtles love to eat. Yet lots of plastic objects that end up inside turtles have no resemblance to jellyfish. Joseph Pfaller of the University of Florida therefore suspects that something more complicated is going on. As he writes in Current Biology, he thinks that the smell of marine micro-organisms which colonize floating plastic objects induces turtles to feed.
    The idea that the smell of plastic rubbish might lure animals to their doom first emerged in 2016. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, noticed that certain chemicals, which are released into the air by micro-organism-colonized plastics, are those which many seabirds sniff to track down food. These chemicals mark good places to hunt because they indicate an abundance of the bacteria that lie at the bottom of marine food chains. The researchers also found that birds which pursue their food in this way are five or six times more likely to eat plastic than those which do not.
    Since turtles are known to break the surface periodically and sniff the air when navigating towards their feeding areas, Dr. Pfaller theorized that they are following these same chemicals, and are likewise fooled into thinking that floating plastic objects are edible.
    To test that idea, he and his colleagues set up an experiment involving loggerhead turtles, a species frequently killed by plastic. They arranged for 15 of the animals, each around five months old, to be exposed, in random order, to four smells delivered through a pipe to the air above an experimental area. Two of the smells proved far more attractive to the animals than the others. When sniffing both the smell of food and that of five-week-old bottles turtles kept their noses out of the water more than three times as long, and took twice as many breaths as they did when what was on offer was the smell of fresh bottle-plastic or clean water vapour. On the face of it, then, the turtles were responding to the smell of old bottles as if it were the smell of food.
    Though they have not yet tested whether the chemical is the culprit, Dr. Pfaller and his colleagues think it is the most likely candidate. In an unpolluted ocean, pretty well anything which had this smell would be edible—or, at least, harmless. Unfortunately, five-week-old plastic bottles and their like are not.
We can learn from Paragraph 3 that________.
选项 A、turtles like to break the surface from time to time
B、turtles find their food by smelling the air
C、turtles are a fool just like those seabirds
D、turtles are lured to eat plastics by some chemicals
答案D
解析 根据题干关键词Paragraph 3可定位到第三段。该段说明了约瑟夫.普法勒博士提出的海龟吞食塑料垃圾的原因，同上一段研究人员们指出的海鸟吞食塑料垃圾的原因相同，即“海龟也是追随着那些同样的物质，同样也误以为漂浮的塑料物体是可以食用的”，D项语义与其相同，且are lured to eat plastics与原文are likewise fooled into thinking that floating plastic objects are edible为同义替换，some chemicals与原文these same chemicals为同义替换，故为正确答案。A项turtles like to break the surface from time to time(海龟喜欢时不时浮出水面)和B项turtles find their food by smelling the air(海龟通过闻空气味道来觅食)都只是约瑟夫.普法勒博士提出海龟吞食塑料垃圾和第二段海鸟吞食塑料垃圾原因相同的前提条件，而非该段的中心，故应排除；C项turtles are a fool just like those seabirds(海龟像那些海鸟一样傻)是对原文语义are likewise fooled into thinking that floating plastic objects are edible(同样也误以为漂浮的塑料物体是可食用的)的误解，偷换了fool和fooled的概念，故应排除。
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