考研英语阅读理解中的文章，很多来自一些外刊杂志方面的题材。接下来，北京文都考研网为扩宽2020考研学子的知识面，整理了考研英语经济学人:饥饿游戏 ，供考生参考。
2020考研英语经济学人:饥饿游戏
How to train rare animals to avoid predators
如何训练稀有动物以躲避捕食者
Those that do not learn, die
不学习者只有死路一条
More than a score of Australian mammals have been exterminated by feral cats. These predators, which arrived with European settlers, still threaten native wildlife—and are too abundant on the mainland to eliminate, as has been achieved on some small islands which were previously infested with them.
澳大利亚已经有超过20种哺乳动物因野猫而灭绝了。这些伴随着欧洲殖民者而来的掠食者仍然威胁着当地的野生动物，并且正如一些曾受野猫侵扰的小岛那样，由于它们在澳洲大陆上的数量过于庞大而难以被消灭。
But Alexandra Ross of the University of New South Wales thinks she has come up with a different way to deal with the problem. As she writes in a paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology, she is giving feline-awareness lessons to wild animals involved in re-introduction programmes, in order to try to make them cat-savvy.
但新南威尔士大学的亚历山德拉·罗斯认为她想到了一种与众不同的方法来解决这一问题。正如她发表在《应用生态学杂志》上的一篇论文所写的那样，她正在给参与重新引入计划的野生动物上一门警惕猫科动物的课程，以便让它们对猫有所了解。
Many Australian mammals, though not actually extinct, are confined to fragments of cat-free habitat. That offers the possibility of taking colonists from these refuges to places where a species once existed but is no more.
澳大利亚的许多哺乳动物虽说还没有完全灭绝，但却被困在了一些支离破碎的无猫栖息地里。这也为把这些殖民者从这些避难地带到它们曾经生存但如今不再生存的地方提供了一种可能性。
This will, however, put the enforced migrants back in the sights of the cats that caused the problem in the first place. Training the migrants while they are in captivity, using stuffed models and the sorts of sounds made by cats, has proved expensive and ineffective.
但这将使这些被迫迁徙的动物重新回到导致问题出现根源的猫的视线中。事实证明，利用猫的填充模型以及猫发出的各种声音来训练被困住的迁徙者的方法是既昂贵且无效的。
Ms Ross therefore wondered whether putting them in large naturalistic enclosures with a scattering of predators might serve as a form of boot camp to prepare them for introduction into their new, cat-ridden homes.
因此，罗斯想知道，能否将它们置于大型的、散布着掠食者的自然围场中，以一种新兵训练营的模式，让它们为进入新的、被猫占领的家园做好准备。
She tested this idea on greater bilbies, a type of bandicoot that superficially resembles a rabbit. She and her colleagues raised a couple of hundred bilbies in a huge enclosure that also contained five feral cats.
她首先用大兔耳袋狸(一种看上去像兔子的袋狸科动物)来验证这一想法。她和她的同事在一个巨型围场饲养了几百只兔耳袋狸，并在其中放入了五只野猫。
As a control, she raised a nearly identical population in a similar enclosure without the cats. She left the animals to get on with life for two years, which, given that bilbies breed four times a year and live for around eight years, was a substantial period for them.
作为对照，她在另一个类似的围场中饲养了几乎同样数量的兔耳袋狸，但不放入猫。考虑到兔耳袋狸每年繁殖四次，平均寿命约为8年，她让这些兔耳袋狸独自生活了两年，两年对于它们来说已经是相当长的一段时间了。
After some predation and presumably some learning she abstracted 21 bilbies from each enclosure, fitted radio transmitters to them and released them into a third enclosure that had ten hungry cats in it. She then monitored what happened next.
经过一些捕食训练和学习，她从每个围场中抽取了21只兔耳袋狸，给它们装上了无线电发射器，然后把它们全部放入第三个围场中，并在其中放入了10只饥肠辘辘的野猫。随后，她开始观察接下来发生的事情。
The upshot was that the training worked. Over the subsequent 40 days, ten of the untrained animals were eaten by cats, but only four of the trained ones.
结果证明，训练是起作用的。在接下来的40天里，有10只未经训练的兔耳袋狸被野猫捕食，但只有4只受过训练的兔耳袋狸被捕食。
One particular behavioural difference she noticed was that bilbies brought up in a predator-free environment were much more likely to sleep alone than were those brought up around cats. And when cats are around, sleeping alone is dangerous.
她还注意到一个特别的行为差异，相比那些伴随着猫在身边长大的兔耳袋狸，那些在无捕食者环境中长大的兔耳袋狸更喜欢独自睡觉。在有猫出没的环境下独自睡觉是一件很危险的事情。
How well bilbies that have undergone this extreme training will survive in the wild remains to be seen. But Ms Ross has at least provided reason for hope.
接受过这种极端训练的兔耳袋狸能否在野外生存还有待观察。但至少罗斯让我们有理由充满希望。
【重难点词汇】
predator [ˈpredətər] n. 捕食者;食肉动物;掠夺者
exterminate [ɪk'stɝmə'net] vt. 消灭;根除
feral ['fer(ə)l] adj. 野生的;凶猛的;阴郁的
abundant [ə'bʌndənt] adj. 丰富的;充裕的;盛产
infest [ɪn'fɛst] vt. 骚扰;寄生于;大批出没;大批滋生
fragment ['fræɡmənt] n. 碎片;片段或不完整部分 vt. 使成碎片 vi. 破碎或裂开
enclosure [ɪn'kloʒɚ] n. 附件;围墙;围场
undergo [,ʌndɚ'ɡo] vt. 经历，经受;忍受
以上是北京文都考研网给出的“2020考研英语经济学人:饥饿游戏 ”，希望对备考2020考研英语的考生有所帮助!祝2020考研顺利!
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