【导语】这是一篇说明文。蜜蜂的摇摆舞被认为是最复杂的动物交流系统，而一项研究揭示了蜜蜂的新特性，即蜜蜂必须部分地通过观察有经验的舞者来学习舞蹈。文章介绍了研究开展的过程以及发现。
D
The honeybee waggle dance has been celebrated as a most complex animal communication system. A study uncovered its new property that bees must partially learn the dance from watching experienced dancers, a discovery that torpedoes the general perception that the dance is wholly inborn . A dancer bee relays information to follower bees about the target location by adjusting herself while shaking her stomach, allowing for impressive flexibility in the angle, duration and her enthusiasm. Her body’s angle corresponds to the sun’s position relative to the nest entrance.
The distance information is conveyed by the dance duration. And the more energetic and passionate the dance, the better the food. She’ll waggle in a straight line for seconds before circling back to repeat the dance, creating the figure eight pattern.
This bee waggle dance system was long assumed to be natural behavior, but researchers made a breakthrough through an experiment. They created territories of newborn bees completely separated from mature ones. When the newborn started visiting flowers and producing their first waggle dances, they consistently made more errors in the way they reported the angle and distance to the food source than bees raised in mixed-aged territories and thus exposed to the waggle dance since they were born. They also generated looser figure eight patterns, making it harder for the follower bees to get the message. Even when placed back into a territory with mature bees, they never seemed to learn how to communicate information correctly.
These results suggest every honeybee is born with a waggle dance model that gives them a basic understanding of how to dance. By watching their elders, they’ll acquire new rules on how to generate the dance unique to their territory.
This is the first known example of such complex social learning of communication in insects and is a form of animal culture, strikingly similar to the way human language generates new languages to shape itself around the local conditions. While the waggle dance is second to human language in terms of the ability to communicate diverse information through random symbols, the newly-discovered property makes it even more language-like and just that much more mind-blowing.
12. What does the underlined word “ torpedoes ” mean in paragraph 1?
A. Illustrates.
B. Overturns.
C. Fits in with.
D. Gives rise to.
13. On what basis do the follower bees judge the target food’s quality?
A. The dancer’s physical angle.
B. The dancer’s dance duration.
C. The dancer’s dance liveliness.
D. The dancer’s body flexibility.
14. What can we infer about young bees from paragraph 3?
A. They’re absolutely ignorant of the waggle dance.
B. They can’t survive but for contact with mature bees.
C. They enhance dance routines by autonomous trial and error.
D. They can master the local dance by following elders from birth.
15. What does the underlined word “it” in the last paragraph refer to?
A. The waggle dance.
B. Human language.
C. The new property.
D. Diverse information.
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B |
C |
D |
A |