Listening
Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture from a Biology class.
Professor: Most animals, including humans,
follow biological cycles that are 24 hours long.
Now what determines these 24-hour cycles?
Do animals have something like a 24-hour clock inside them?
Or our biological cycles determined by external factors,
like the alternation of daylight and darkness?
Well, research suggests that the answer is somewhere in between.
Animals do have an internal clock,
but external cues are important too.
Take flying squirrels, flying squirrels are nocturnal.
They are active during the night and sleep during the day.
But in an experiment,
some of these squirrels were kept in constant darkness.
They were not exposed to any daylight for about a month.
Now did the squirrels continue to follow regular cycles of activity?
Actually they did.
They continued to have regular patterns of sleeping and waking.
This indicates that animals do have an internal clock which regulates their activity cycles.
But the internal clock is not precisely 24 hours long.
Instead of following 24-hour cycles,
the squirrels followed cycles that were about half an hour shorter than that.
So every day they woke up a little bit earlier.
Without external cues,
without sunlight to fine-tune their internal clocks,
the squirrels' biological cycles drifted.
So what happened when the squirrels were exposed to daylight again?
Well, after a month of darkness,
a month of waking up half an hour earlier each day,
the squirrels' activity cycle had shifted a lot.
So at first, their schedules didn't match up with a normal day.
They weren't active during the nighttime as flying squirrels usually are, instead,
they were waking up in the middle of the day.
But after a while, the squirrel cycles began to change.
Gradually, external cues,
the cycle of light and darkness adjusted their internal clocks.
So eventually they were brought back into a normal 24-hour schedule.
Question
Using points and examples from the lecture, explain what determines animals' 24-hour activity cycle.
覆盖考试
| 北美留学考试 | 英联邦留学考试 | 专业问答 |
|---|---|---|
| TOEFL | IELTS | 雅思专业问答 |
| GRE | A Level | 托福专业问答 |
| GMAT | PTE | GRE专业问答 |
| SAT | Interchange | GMAT专业问答 |
| ACT | 英本精英计划 | |
| AP/SSAT/IB | ||
| 美高先修课 | ||
| 美本精英计划 | ||
| 美研精英计划 | ||
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