Adaptations of Desert Animals
Large animals that inhabit the desert have evolved a number of adaptations to survive the tough condition.
One adaptation is to be light in color, and to reflect rather than absorb the Sun's rays. Desert mammals also depart from the normal mammalian practice of maintaining a constant body temperature. Instead of trying to keep down the body temperature deep inside the body, which would involve the consumption of water and energy, desert mammals allow their temperatures to rise to what would normally be fever height, and temperatures as high as 46 degrees Celsius have been measured in gazelles. The overheated body then cools down during the cold desert night, and indeed the temperature may fall unusually low by dawn, as low as 34 degrees Celsius in the camel. This is an advantage since the heat of the first few hours of daylight is absorbed in warming up the body, and an excessive buildup of heat does not begin until well into the day.
Another strategy of large desert animals is to tolerate the loss of body water to a point that would be fatal for non-adapted animals. The camel can lose up to 30 percent of its body weight as water without harm to itself, whereas human beings die after losing only 12 to 13 percent of their body weight. An equally important adaptation is the ability to recover this water loss at one drink. Desert animals can drink enormous volumes in a short time, and camels have been known to drink over 100liters in a few minutes. The tolerance of water loss is of obvious advantage in the desert, as animals do not have to remain near a water hole but can obtain food from afar. Desert-adapted mammals have the further ability to feed normally when extremely dehydrated: it is a common experience in people that appetite is lost even under conditions of moderate thirst.
Baby Talk
Babies will pay more attention to baby talk than regular speech, regardless of which languages they're used to hearing, according to a study by UCLA's Language Acquisition Lab.
The study found that babies who were exposed to two languages had a(n) (great) interest in infant-directed speech than adult-directed speech. However, some parents' concern is teaching two languages could mean an infant won't learn to speak on time, but the new study shows bilingual babies are developmentally right on track.
In the study, which took place at 17 labs on four continents, researchers observed 333 bilingual babies and 384 monolingual babies, (range) in age from 6 to 9 months and 12 to 15 months. Each baby would sit on a parent's lap while recordings of an English-speaking mother, using infant-directed speech or adult-directed speech, played from speakers on the left or the right. Computer tracking measured each baby looked in the direction of each sound.
According to the study, 6-to 9-month-old babies who had mothers with higher levels of education preferred baby talk more than babies mothers had less education. It is very likely the mothers with higher education levels spoke more to the babies and used infant-directed speech more often.
"Crucially for parents, we found that development of learning and attention is similar infants, whether they're learning one or two languages, "said Megha Sundara, a UCLA linguistics professor. "And, of course, learning a language earlier helps you (learn) it better, so bilingualism is a win-win. "
As the research continues, parents can babble to their babies in one language or two, and rest easy knowing they (not cause) any confusion.
A. drop B. affect C. aware D. differ E. reality F. reveals G. involves H. brilliant l. recognize J. influence K. continuous |
ls It Possible to Think About Something Even If There's No Word for It?
Though people think in language much of the time, it is likely that people think about something even if they don't have a word for it.
Take colors, for example. There are an infinite number of colors that don't all have their own names. If you have a can of red paint and add blue to it very slowly, each will change the color slightly, but there is no one moment when it will stop being red and become purple. The color spectrum (色谱) is . Our language, however, isn't continuous. Our language makes us break the color spectrum up into "red", "purple", and so on.
The language of the Dani of New Guinea only two basic color terms, one for "dark" colors (including blue and green) and one for "light" colors (including yellow and red). Their language breaks up the color spectrum differently from ours. But that doesn't mean they can't see the difference between yellow and red; a study that they can see different colors just as English speakers can.
So our language doesn't force us to see only what it gives us words for, but it can how we put things into groups. One of the jobs of a child learning language is to which things are called by the same word. After learning that the family's St. Bernard is a dog, the child may see a cow and say dog, thinking that the two things count as the same. Or the child may not be that the neighbor's chihuahua also counts as a dog. The child has to learn what range of objects is covered by the word dog. We learn to group things that are similar and give them the same label, but what counts as being similar enough to fall under a single label may in languages.
In other words, the of language isn't so much on what we can think about, or even what we do think about, but rather on how we break up into categories and label them. And in this, our language and our thoughts are probably both greatly influenced by our culture.