考托阅读常用材料推荐之Food Caching

2014年09月02日16:31 来源：小站整理: 参与（0）阅读（3157）

摘要：小站教育为各位考生整理了关于考托阅读的介绍，供各位考托备考的考生们参考使用，希望考生们积极做好备考工作，及时调整好考前状态。从各个考托阅读的介绍中，相信各位考生会获得许多心得体会。另外，大家在考托考试的过程中，也可以参考一下小站教育为大家提供的一系列考托备考内容，相信也一定会帮助大家在考试中取得更大的进步。小站教育老师祝大家在考托考试中取得理想的成绩！

在托福的备考过程中，对于阅读来说，单凭一些技巧是很难提升自己的托福阅读能力的。广泛的托福阅读背景知识积累，才有助于托福阅读速度和准确率的提升。下面我们就为大家提供了Food Caching的阅读材料，希望能为大家的托福备考带来帮助。

Humans may be one of the smartest animals on the planet, but when it comes to remembering where things are, Clark's nutcrackers have us beat.

A relative of jays and crows, nutcrackers hide pine seeds in the ground each autumn so they have a source of food during the Colorado Rocky Mountain winter. They cache as many as 30,000 seeds in 5,000 different locations over a fifteen square mile area. Since they cannot smell the seeds buried in the soil very well, they must use their remarkable spatial memory to find them.

Nutcrackers are not the only animals that cache food. Caching behavior is seen in birds, mammals and even insects. Chickadees store collections of seeds, insects and spiders in the bark of trees or under leaves. Red squirrels cut conifer cones from trees and bury them in plant litter on the forest floor. Harvester ants bring seeds back to their nests and store them in chambers, while honey bees save nectar and pollen in their hive.

Because nutcrackers are one of the best at remembering cache locations, researchers are studying them to find out why they have such great memories. Scientists know that the nutcracker's abilities evolved because of environmental pressure. Nutcrackers with poor memories did not likely survive the harsh mountain winters. Now researchers want to find out how the brains of nutcrackers are different from other brains. They are particularly interested in the hippocampus, a small area of the brain that helps form memories. Finding out how the nutcracker's brain is different from other species may give us clues to why humans have memory problems. It may even lead to a cure for Alzheimer's disease.

人类也许是世界上最聪明的动物之一，但说到记忆，克拉克（新泽西州）的星鸟比我们人类强多了。

星鸟属于松鸟和乌鸦的近亲，它在秋天的时候把松子藏在地底下，这样寒冷冬天的就有食物吃了。它们会储存多达30000颗种子，而且是在十五平方公里内的5000个不同位置。因为不能通过气味辨别埋在土里种子的位置，它们就必须依靠惊人的空间记忆力来找到这些种子。