专题05 阅读理解之说明文10篇(第一期)-备战2024年高考英语名校模拟真题速递(安徽专用)

备战2024年高考英语名校模拟真题速递(安徽专用) 第一期 专题05 阅读理解之说明文10篇 （2023上·安徽合肥·高三合肥一中校考阶段练习）In the late 1990s, a scientist named Mark Blumberg stood in a lab at the University of Iowa watching a few sleeping newlyborn rats. He found that the baby rats kept making small, sharp movements in their sleep, and that their closed eyes moved from side to side in a phenomenon known as rapid eye movement (REM). Blumberg knew that the rats were fine, because he knew people do the same during REM sleep. And scientists have long had an explanation for the twitches (抽动) and REM: They are dreaming about their waking life. However, as he dug deeper, he wondered why adult rats spend only about two hours of each night in REM sleep, while baby rats spend an unusual amount of time in REM, often sleeping for sixteen hours a day and dreaming for eight. “If dreams are hints of waking life, adult rats who have more experiences should spend more time in REM sleep. Why do baby rats, whose eyes are still shut, spend so much time in REM sleep when they have too little to dream about?” he wondered. “Why do their eyes, their legs, tails and whiskers move hundreds of thousands of times during their sleep?” In the end, Blumberg concluded that it might be the other way around — perhaps the movements were sending signals to the brain to help it learn about the body. “You wouldn’t think that the body is something a brain needs to learn,” he wrote in a paper. “But we aren’t born with maps of our bodies. We can’t be, because our bodies change by the day. But in waking life, we cannot move only a single muscle. Even the simplest act of swallowing (吞咽) employs more than thirty pairs of nerves and muscles working together. Our small and sharp movements in sleep, by contrast, are exact and precise: They involve muscles one at a time. In other words, such movements allow the muscles and nerves to form one-to-one connections that otherwise would be impossible. It’s a process that’s most important for the brain to learn about