江蘇 徐維維

在我們的生活中，鸚鵡、八哥會學(xué)人說話不是一件新鮮的事情。 然而，一項研究發(fā)現(xiàn)，澳大利亞的一只麝鴨竟然也能夠模仿人類說話，成為目前已知的第一只會“說話”的鴨子。

?篇幅：355詞 難度：★★★ 建議用時：6分鐘

1Thirty years ago, Ripper sounded as if he had had enough. “You fool,” he repeated in a recently rediscovered recording.

2Besides that shocking sound, Ripper, who was 4 years old at the time, also managed to imitate the sound of closing the door. Researchers have analyzed his voice, as well as those of a different duck that was able to imitate the calls of another species.

3Carel ten Cate, a researcher of animal behavior in the Netherlands, and Peter Fullagar, a now-retired scientist who made the recordings, teamed up to uncover the remarkable imitating ability of Ripper and his species.

4Ripper, a duck native to Australia, looks a little odd, and smells a bit smelly. Most specially, the species has a bit of skin that hangs below the bill and can swell sometimes.The recordings of the bird are the first known examples of any duck or goose species being able to imitate human speech.

5“We do not know how exactly the sounds are being produced or whether vocalization organs of this species are very different from other ducks,” ten Cate said. “What is more important for the duck's ability to imitate is the brain. There must be areas that are capable of storing the sound and using it to model the bird's own sounds,” he added.

6Ripper lived in a nature reserve in the southwest of Canberra in the 1980s, and Fullagar made the recordings on a cassette in July 1987. The researchers interpreted both vocalizations as angry displays, though there's no indication that Ripper actually understood the meaning of his two vocalizations.

7The other unnamed duck imitated the sounds of Pacific black ducks. Ten Cate and Fullagar interviewed other people who raised such ducks, who told the researchers that their ducks imitated the coughs of a little horse and other sounds which didn't seem like that of a duck.

8“The remarkable thing is that they do this spontaneously （自發(fā)地）,” ten Cate said.“It is similar to songbirds, which store the songs of their own species at a young age and then start to produce them when they become adults.”

Reading Check

Language Study

Ⅰ. Difficult sentence in the text

The researchers interpreted both vocalizations as angry displays, though there's no indication that Ripper actually understood the meaning of his two vocalizations. 研究人員將這兩種聲音都解讀為憤怒的表現(xiàn)，盡管沒有跡象表明Ripper真正理解了這兩種聲音的含義。

【點石成金】本句中，though there's no indication that Ripper actually understood the meaning of his two vocalizations為though引導(dǎo)的讓步狀語從句，其中that Ripper actually understood the meaning of his two vocalizations為同位語從句，解釋說明indication的內(nèi)容。

Ⅱ. Text-centered chunks

as well as 也；和

team up 合作

be capable of 有……的能力

live in a nature reserve 生活在一個自然保護區(qū)中

be similar to 和……類似

at a young age 在小時候