2024届高考英语外刊阅读天天练：综合训练五

高考英语外刊阅读天天练：综合训练五 I. 阅读理解 A. 题源10,000 naps a day: how chinstrap penguins survive on microsleeps 【The Guardian (December 1, 2023)】 Spending your nights sleeping for just four seconds at a time might sound like a form of torture, but not for chinstrap penguins, which fall asleep thousands of times a day, new research finds. Researchers previously looked at penguin sleep in the 1980s, which involved capturing them, putting them in a shelter and watching them. They reported fragmented sleep for short periods of time, which they called “drowsiness”. In the latest research, experts found that this fragmented sleep was sustained for the whole day, showing the penguins are not “nodding off” into deeper sleep. Sleep seems to be ubiquitous among animals, but it makes them vulnerable to predation because they lose the ability to respond quickly to the outside environment. Paul-Antoine Libourel, lead researcher from Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre, said: “Sleep is at the core of animal behaviour, and is also under selective pressure. Most sleep research is conducted in rats, mice and humans, but working on other species shows us at what point sleep is affected by environmental change.” The researchers studied chinstrap penguins in the wild using electroen-cephalogram (EEG) monitoring and continuous video footage. Microsleeps were shown by sleep-related brain activity and eye-closure. They noted a slight increase in the depth of sleep at around noon, when risk of predation could be at its lowest. What’s more, the researchers studied 14 penguins incubating eggs, out of a colony of more than 2,700 breeding pairs. The discovery that these birds are doing thousands of microsleeps lasting only four seconds is “unprecedented, even among penguins,” researchers wrote. Researchers wrote in the paper, published in the journal Sleep Advances: “Taken together, the results challenge the prevalent view of sleep as an essential state on which waking performance depends. The data could be one