Elephants don't forget-at least, female(雌性的) elephants don't. Elephant families are matriarchal. And the social knowledge gained by the oldest females is the key to a family group's survival (生存), according to a study published in April by Karen McComb, a biologist at Sussex University in England.
Elephants announce their presence by making a deep, long sound, a practice referred to as contact calling(联络呼叫). An unfamiliar call may mean that an elephant from outside the family group is nearby. A stranger can cause trouble. Interrupting feeding or disturbing the young. So an elephant matriarch signals the family to gather around her; then they all lift their trunks in the air to smell the unfamiliar caller. False alarms can disturb the group and take time and energy away from feeding, so survival may depend in part on getting it right.
Working with Cynthia Moss, who founded the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya 30 years ago, McComb tested the social knowledge of 21 Amboseli elephant families with matriarchs 27 to 67 years old. She played recordings of contact calls to each family and found that the oldest matriarchs were much better at picking out unfamiliar calls. In fact, a group with a matriarch in her fifties was several thousand times more likely to form into a group upon hearing an unfamiliar contact call than when hearing a familiar call. However, families with younger matriarchs were less than twice as likely to gather together upon hearing an unfamiliar contact call as compared with a familiar call. And they gathered together a lot. Moreover, the social knowledge of older matriarchs translated into favorable results: Families with older matriarchs produced more baby elephants in each female-reproductive year.
This finding shows how difficult it is to protect the oldest members of elephant families. As elephants age, they continue to grow larger, as do their much wanted tusks(象牙). So the older-and wiser-a matriarch is, the greater the chance she will be killed. About 800,000 elephants have been killed by people in the past 20 years.
增加：在缺词处加一个漏字符号（∧），并在下面写出该加的词。
删除：把多余的词用斜线（﹨）划掉。
修改：在错的词下划一横线，并在该词下面写出修改后的词。
注意：1）每处错误及其修改均仅限一词；
2）只允许修改10处，多者（从第11处起）不计分。
Dear Sir/Madam,
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I'm sorry to have received such poorly service, and I believe I have every right ask you to deal with this problem. I hope you either return my money back or deliver a new set of books to me. Beside, I'd like to be informed of the process of your deal with my complaint.
I'm looking forward to your reply.
Li Hua
Johnson Smith
Founder and CEO
Johnson Review
When international aid is given, steps must be taken to ensure (确保)that the aid reaches the people for whom it is intended. The way to achieve this may not be simple. It is very difficult for a nation to give help directly to people in another nation. The United Nations Organization (UNO) could undertake to direct the distribution of aid. Here however rises the problem of costs. Also tied with this is time. Perhaps the UNO could set up a body of devoted men and women in every country who can speedily distribute aid to victims of floods and earthquakes.
More than the help that one nation can give to another during a disaster; it would be more effective to give other forms of help during normal times. A common proverb says, “Give me a fish and I eat for day, teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime.” If we follow this wise saying, it would be right to teach people from less developed nations to take care of themselves. For example, a country could share its technology with another. This could be in simple areas like agriculture or in more complex areas like medical and health care or even in building satellites. Even small country is able to help less developed nations. Sometimes what is take for granted, like the setting up of a water purification plant or the administration of a school, could be useful for countries which are looking about to solve common problems. It does not cost much to share such simple things. Exchange students could be attached for a number of months or years and learn the required craft while on the site. They can then take their knowledge back to their homelands and if necessary come back form time to time to clear doubts or to update themselves. Such aid will be truly helpful and there is no chance of it being temporary or of it falling into the wrong hands.
Many countries run extensive courses in all sorts of skills. It will not cost much to include deserving foreigners in these courses. Besides giving effective help to the countries concerned, there is also the build-up of friendships to consider. Giving direct help by giving materials may be effective in the short run and must continue to be given in the event of emergencies. However, in the long run what is really effective would be the sharing of knowledge.
Games have already become a good companion for people. Whether kids or adults, they prefer to spend their spare time in playing games. Why are games so popular? Firstly, they can attract people easily and secondly, they are east to upgrade(升级). Each day, thousands of games come out. And no matter which kind of game you like, there is always a game that suits you. Now when people meet, they would like to talk about the newest games.
Here are the hottest new games for girls. They are Didi games. 80 percent of girls like dressing-up games. There are varieties of dressing-up games in Didi. The leading roles of them also vary from common girls to princesses. If you are lucky enough, you can be dressed up as the famous stars you admire. At the same time, wedding dressing-up games can also be found. Whether you admit it or not, all girls like things related to wedding, so most girls like to be dressed up as brides.
In order to attract kids' attention, many games choose fairies(精灵) as the leading roles, for fairies are really alluring to girls. Maybe the magic wands(魔杖) of the fairies really have supernatural powers(超自然力量). There are various kinds of Didi fairy games, such as Fairy of Water, Catching Flowers Contest, Winter Garden Fairy, etc.
Cooking games are also girls' favorite games. Making a cake, soup or other delicious food is a category of simple games. There are also complicated ones, for example, preparing a dinner. It is more challenging but most girls like challenges. Another category of games which attracts people must be the games related to farms. Why are they so popular? Because the games can let people enjoy the fun as farmers. There are also farm animals that kids like very much. Here you can build your own farms. Also you can experience the life of farmers.
Some people like modem art, while others say that is rubbish. But a cleaner who works in the Tate Gallery in London isn't able to tell the difference. The woman, whose name isn't known, mistook a work of art by the German painter Gustav Metzger for a bag of rubbish, and threw it out with other bags. The plastic bag, which contained pieces of paper and cardboard, was later recovered outside the gallery, but the artist thought that it was too damaged to be put on show again. 78-year-old Mr Metzger explained that the exhibit, which he said was a copy of a similar work he had created in 1960, was meant to show that all art is temporary and “finite” (有限的).
Embarrassed officials at the museum said that they had to call a meeting with cleaners to explain which things should not be touched. They would not say whether Mr Metzger would be paid any compensation for the incident. However, to make absolutely sure the same thing would not happen again, they decided to cover Mr Metzger's work every evening with a colored cloth. In this way the cleaners arriving after the gallery had closed to the general public would realize they should not touch it.
This is not the first time that museum cleaners have had trouble distinguishing exhibits from rubbish. In 2001, in another London gallery, a cleaner threw away a work by the well-known British artist Damien Hirst. It was an arrangement of empty beer bottles, coffee cups, and overflowing ashtrays, which were meant to indicate the chaos in the life of an artist.
However, cleaners don't always throw things away—sometimes they clean them! This was the case with a dirty bath, which was on show in a gallery in Germany. Without asking what the bath was doing in the gallery, the cleaners simply scrubbed it clean.
Did you know that the color of uniforms can influence the performance of an athlete? It may sound strange, but a study suggests this might be true.
Two British scientists studied the results of four sports in the 2004 Athens Olympic Games where the athletes had been given either a red or a blue uniform. They discovered that when there was a big difference in the score, color had no influence on the result. But if it was a close match, the athlete in a red uniform was more likely to win. Then they looked at the uniforms of the soccer teams at the Euro 2004 tournament. Again, teams wearing red won more games.
The two scientists got their idea from earlier studies of wild animals. It had been discovered that when a male show red on its body, it sends a signal of its power and strength. For example, in many kinds of monkey, the more the male shows off its red scare, the more females it can attract
Based on this fact, the British scientists thought that the idea might work for humans, too. According to them, when an athlete sees a competitor in a red uniform, he gets a feeling that his competitor could be stronger than him. And that kind of feeling may have a bad influence on the player's performance in the actual game.
Although the idea is Interesting, most people don't accept that color signals in the animals world can really be useful to humans in sports. They think that it is unreasonable to develop an Idea based on such a small number of examples. Much more research has to be done to prove the influence of uniform colors on the performance of athletes.
We all know the names of certain famous male inventors throughout history, from Galileo to Alexander Graham Bell to Steve Jobs. Do you know the outstanding ladies listed below?
Margaret Knight (1838-1914)
Margaret Knight was nicknamed “the lady Edison'' for her productive inventions which included a safety device for textile looms, shoe manufacturing machines, a rotary engine and internal combustion engine (内燃机), among many others. Knight received 27 patents in her lifetime.
Josephine Cochran(1839-1913)
Cochrane, a wealthy woman who entertained often, wanted a machine that could wash dishes faster than her servants, and without breaking them. When she couldn't find one, she built the first dishwasher herself in 1886. She received a patent for her famous invention and started a company to sell her invention to restaurants and hotels.
Katharine Burr Blodgett (1898-1979)
Katharine Blodgett was the first woman to receive a Ph.D in physics at England's Cambridge University and the first woman hired by General Electric. Her most influential invention was non-reflective glass, which today is still essential for eyeglasses, car windshields and computer screens.
Stephanie Kwolek (1923-2014)
In 1965, Stephanie Kwolek created an unusually lightweight and durable new fiber which was later developed by a chemical company DuPont into the synthetic Kevlar (凯夫拉尔纤维), used in everything from military helmets and bulletproof vests to work-gloves, sports equipment, and building materials. Kwolek was awarded the National Medal of Technology for her research on synthetic fibers and was admitted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1994.
(SV主谓; SVO主谓宾; SVP主系表; SVIODO主谓间接宾语直接宾语; There be…)
Moms try so hard to make sure that their children are healthy. And this means that they try and avoid foods that have too much sugar or artificial ingredients (人工添加剂). Sugary drinks can be one of the main items that moms avoid, and that is because they are bad for their children's teeth and health.
A new study, however, is showing that a sugary drink in the morning may not be so bad after all, at least not for girls. According to Medical Xpress, consuming sugary drinks before class has been shown to improve math scores, but only in girls. It has little impact on boys.
This was shown through a study that was published in the journal Health Economics. It found that sugary drinks had a direct impact on the behavior and math scores of children in preschool. It seems a little early to be offering the children sugary drinks, but let's find out what they discovered.
To complete the study, researchers looked at more than 450 children, and the children in the study were given a sugary drink or an artificially sweetened (人工加糖的) drink and then they collected data before and after they had drunk it. When it came to boys and their behavior, they found that one sugary drink did seem to have a "relaxing" effect on them at first, but it didn't last long and then they were more restless. The sugary drink did not result in any difference in a girl's behavior. They then looked at math scores, and it showed that consuming a sugary drink had a negative impact on boys' math scores, but it had a positive impact on the math scores of the girls.
"There are still a lot of schools that sell and hand out sugary drinks to students, and while this may seem to benefit girls, it could be making things more difficult for young boys," says one of the researchers.
