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  3. The ability of falling cats to right themselves in midair and land on their feet has been a source of wonder for ages. Biologist

The ability of falling cats to right themselves in midair and land on their feet has been a source of wonder for ages. Biologist

admin2010-04-28  71
问题    The ability of falling cats to right themselves in midair and land on their feet has been a source of wonder for ages. Biologists long regarded it as an example of adaptation by natural selection, but for physicists it bordered on the miraculous. Newton’ s laws of motion assume that the total amount of spin of a body can- not change unless an external torque speeds it up or slows it down. If a cat has no spin when it is released and experiences no external toque, it ought not to be able to twist around as it falls.
   In the speed of its execution, the righting of a tumbling cat resembles a magician’ s trick. The gyrations of the cat in midair are too fast for the human eye to follow, so the process is obscured. Either the eye must be speeded up, or the cat’ s fail be slowed down for the phenomenon to be observed. A century ago the former was accomplished by means of high - speed photography using equipment now available in any pharmacy. But in the nineteenth century the capture on film of a falling cat constituted a scientific experiment.
   The experiment was described in a paper presented to the Paris Academy in 1894. Two sequences of twenty photographs each, one from the side and one from behind, show a white cat in the act of righting it- .self. Grainy and quaint though they are, the photos show that the cat was dropped upside down, with no initial spin, and still landed on its feet. Careful analysis of the photos reveals the secret: As the cat rotates the front of its body clockwise, the rear and tall twist counterclockwise, so that the total spin remains zero, in perfect accord with Newton’s laws. Halfway down, the cat pulls in its legs before reversing its twist and then extends them again, with the desired end result. The explanation was that while no body can acquire spin without torque, a flexible one can readily change its orientation, or phase. Cats know this instinctively, but scientists could not be sure how it happened until they increased the speed of their perceptions a thousand fold.
Why arc the photographs mentioned referred to as an "experiment"?
选项 A、The photographs were not very clear.
B、The purpose of the photographs was to explain the process.
C、The photographer used inferior equipment.
D、The photographer thought the cat might be injured
答案B
解析 第二段最后一句以及后面详细的摄影过程说明十九世纪人们通过高速的摄影技术和设备来做“科学实验”以便观察并解释这个有趣的想象，因为只有摄影才能记录下如此快的动作，故正确答案为 B。
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