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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  89
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.
What does the author mean by saying "unfortunate" (Line 1, Paragraph l)?
选项 A、Plastic rubbish is distasteful for marine creatures.
B、Animals are likely to die from eating plastic objects.
C、Turtles often mistake plastic bags for tasteful jellyfish.
D、Floating plastics are covered by micro-organisms.
答案B
解析 根据题干关键词unfortunate和Line 1，Paragraph 1可定位到第一段第一句。这里unfortunate被用来描述海龟吞食海上漂浮的塑料垃圾的习惯，那么在文中找到作者对该习惯进一步描述的语言，即可推断出作者使用该词的用意。首段第二句紧接着说明该习惯所带来的不幸后果，即“这些塑料制品阻塞海龟的消化道，无法被其体内的消化酶分解，最终可能会导致海龟死亡”。B项Animals are likely to die from eating plastic objects (动物可能因为吃塑料制品而死掉)和原文所述意思一致，且plastic objects是原文these指代的对象，are likely to die from是原文may ultimately kill them的同义替换，故B项为正确答案。第一段中并未提到塑料垃圾的口感如何，A项中的“不合口味的”无中生有，可排除；第一段第三至四句分析了一种海龟喜欢吃塑料垃圾的可能原因，指出“漂浮着的塑料袋看起来像许多种海龟喜欢吃的水母”，而该题问的是作者为什么要用unfortunate来评价海龟喜欢吃塑料的习惯，而非其背后的原因，故C项虽与原文语义一致，但是答非所问，应排除；D项来自第一段最后一句话“他认为是附着在漂浮的塑料物体上的海洋微生物产生的气味引诱海龟进食”，这句话同样与作者的评价无关，故D项也可排除。
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