Why we need to protect polar bears - IELTS Reading with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation

Luyện tập đề IELTS Reading Practice với passage Why we need to protect polar bears được lấy từ cuốn sách IELTS Mock Test Vol 16 - Test 1 - Passage 1 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking, kèm list từ vựng IELTS cần học trong bài đọc.

Làm Bài Xem giải thích Từ vựng

Why we need to protect polar bears - IELTS Reading with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation

📖 Bài đọc (reading passage)

Why we need to protect polar bears
Climate change poses a mounting danger to polar bears, and were they to vanish, the effects would reach well beyond the Arctic itself. Few animals are so precisely suited to the punishing cold of the far north, where the thermometer can sink to around -40°C. Part of what makes this possible is a layer of fat, in places almost ten centimetres thick, sitting just beneath the skin. Carry a comparable amount of such tissue and a human being would be classed as obese, with diabetes and heart trouble the probable result — and yet none of these afflictions touches the bear.

Some light was thrown on this puzzle by research that Reidar Solheim and his team published in 2015. Setting the animal's genetic make-up against that of the brown bear — a warmer-climate cousin and the polar bear's nearest kin — the group was able to pin down the genes behind the species' survival in so harsh a place. Among these was APOB, a gene that drives down concentrations of low-density lipoproteins, or LDLs, the so-called 'bad' cholesterol. Because it is faults in this very gene that raise a person's heart-disease risk, the polar bear could prove a valuable model for studying that condition in ourselves.

There is a second disorder the bear's genome might help resolve, one that falls most heavily on the elderly: osteoporosis, in which the bones grow less dense — a decline brought on, as a rule, by too little exercise, a shortage of calcium, or plain starvation. Bone is not fixed tissue; it is forever being rebuilt, laid down or broken down according to how well an animal is nourished and how much strain the skeleton must bear. Every pregnancy, though, puts the female polar bear through an ordeal. When autumn arrives she hollows out a den in the snow and stays inside for the whole winter, giving birth there and remaining with her cubs. Roughly six months of going without food follow, during which she must sustain both herself and her young from her own dwindling stores of calcium and energy. Her bones, remarkably, stay every bit as dense and strong.

In 2009 the physiologists Marika Toft and Elias Brandt offered a way of making sense of this contradiction. What they found was that a bear, before ever beginning her den, would build extra density into her bones in advance; and that when she came out half a year later alongside her cubs, no meaningful thinning of the bone could be detected. Brown bears passing the winter in hibernation lack this trick, and are left to rebuild their skeletons wholesale once spring returns. Should the way polar bears remodel their bone ever be worked out, the gains might extend to astronauts, and to the many patients confined to their beds.

For all that such medical promise should weigh in any argument for conservation, it ought not to be the whole of the case. Our instinct is to shield the creatures we credit with intelligence and feeling — elephants, say, or the primates — whereas the bear tends to strike people as dull-witted and, more often than not, aggressive. Reports from the field tell against that picture, hinting among other things at a real talent for solving problems. At the Nordvik Arctic Centre, a male bear named Sisu was repeatedly seen turning a branch into a lever, working it to bring down a fish that had been hung beyond his reach. The same knack, if less strikingly, has turned up in the wild: one male, in a calculated bid to reach a researcher stationed on a platform three metres above him, took a run-up and hurled himself onto a row of barrels.

Further work — an investigation carried out by Johanna Kreft in 2010, for one — has caught the animals in bouts of careful, purposeful handling of objects. Bears in her study would gather items into heaps and then topple them, for all the world as if the whole thing were a sport. Behaviour of this kind, she argues, is nimble and thought-through, and it points to reserves of creativity and problem-solving that the species had never been given credit for.

Emotion, too, shows through, though here again the proof is only anecdotal. A bear that has just let a kill slip away will often lash out at the surrounding ice and snow, apparently in annoyance. Stranger still are the bonds the animals sometimes strike up with other species — romping, for instance, with the sled dogs of the Arctic. One polar bear reared by hand, a female called Luna, grew so attached to her keeper, Tomas Reinholt, that the two of them will even swim side by side — astonishing behaviour, given that wild polar bears are quite prepared to hunt human beings.

Were the warming climate to drive the species out of existence, we would forfeit not just the medical advances they may yet make possible but, more grievously, a magnificent and clever animal.

❓ Câu hỏi (questions)

Polar bears are extremely well suited to surviving in very cold conditions.

A polar bear's thick fat causes it to become diabetic.

Solheim's team compared the polar bear with a close relative from milder surroundings.

Defects in the APOB gene have been found to cause heart disease in brown bears.

A female polar bear will leave her den at intervals over the winter months to feed.

Female polar bears increase how dense their bones are before constructing a den.

Brown bears do not need to restore their bones once winter ends.

Why polar bears deserve protection

Bears are commonly assumed to lack intelligence and to be 
8.
            
﻿
.
This assumption, however, may be mistaken. Consider the following:
• At an Arctic wildlife centre, one bear was seen working a branch into a 
9.
            
﻿
 in order to reach a 10.
            
﻿
 that had been suspended above it.
• In the wild, a bear devised a way of getting up to a platform on which a 
11.
            
﻿
 was standing.
• Bears have been seen deliberately arranging and then toppling things, in play resembling a 
12.
            
﻿
.
There are also signs that bears feel emotion. For instance:
• After an unsuccessful hunt, a bear may move in a way that seems to express 
13.
            
﻿
.
• They are capable of forming bonds with animals of other kinds.

🔥 Answer key (đáp án và giải thích)

True

Giải thích chi tiết

Xem full giải thích

IELTS Reading Practice

Gồm làm đề, xem giải thích chi tiết, học từ vựng của những bài thi IELTS Reading phổ biến nhất trên thị trường

Artifical artists - IELTS Reading with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation

Luyện tập đề IELTS Reading Practice với passage Artifical artists được lấy từ cuốn sách IELTS Mock Test Vol 13 - Test 1 - Passage 3 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking, kèm list từ vựng IELTS cần học trong bài đọc.

The power of play - IELTS Reading with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation

Luyện tập đề IELTS Reading Practice với passage The power of play được lấy từ cuốn sách IELTS Mock Test Vol 14 - Test 3 - Passage 3 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking, kèm list từ vựng IELTS cần học trong bài đọc.

Why zoos are good - IELTS Reading with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation

Luyện tập đề IELTS Reading Practice với passage Why zoos are good được lấy từ cuốn sách IELTS Mock Test Vol 14 - Test 4 - Passage 2 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking, kèm list từ vựng IELTS cần học trong bài đọc.

Assessing the threat of marine debris - IELTS Reading with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation

Luyện tập đề IELTS Reading Practice với passage Assessing the threat of marine debris được lấy từ cuốn sách IELTS Mock Test Vol 14 - Test 4 - Passage 3 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking, kèm list từ vựng IELTS cần học trong bài đọc.

Bringing cinnamon to Europe - IELTS Reading with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation

Luyện tập đề IELTS Reading Practice với passage Bringing cinnamon to Europe được lấy từ cuốn sách IELTS Mock Test Vol 13 - Test 2 - Passage 1 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking, kèm list từ vựng IELTS cần học trong bài đọc.