专题06 阅读理解之说明文10篇（第一期）-2023高考英语安徽省名校模拟真题速递

2023高考英语安徽省名校模拟真题速递 第一期 专题06 阅读理解之说明文10篇 （2023·安徽合肥·统考一模）Honeybees understand that “nothing” can be “something” that has numerical meaning, showing that they have a primitive grasp of the concept of zero, according to a newly-published study in Science. Previous experiments have shown that honeybees have some facility for numbers, because they were able to count landmarks (地标) as they searched around for a sweet reward. But in these tests, the insects couldn’t count very high-only to about four. Still, that made researchers in Australia and France want to explore what else the bees could do with numbers. Scarlett Howard at RMIT University in Melbourne attracted bees to a wall where they were presented with two square cards. Each card had a different number of black symbols, such as dots or triangles. Howard trained one group of bees to understand that sugar water would always be located under the card with the least number of symbols. “They could come and see two circles versus (与. . . 相对) three circles, or four triangles versus one triangle,” she explains. The bees quickly learned to fly to the card with the fewest symbols, But then they got another test, The researchers presented the bees with a card that had a single symbol and a blank card that had nothing on it. The bees seemed to understand that “zero” was less than one, because they flew toward the blank card more often than you’d expect if they were choosing at random. “When we showed them zero-versus six, they did that at a much higher level than zero versus one,” Howard says. “So what tells us is that they consider zero as an actual quantity along the number line.” Aurore Avargues-Weber, a researcher with the University of Toulouse, points out even very young children have trouble understanding that zero is a number. “It’s easy for them to count ‘one, two, three, four,’ but zero, it’s not something to count,” she explains. What’s more, the brains of bees are incredibly tiny brains compared with the brains