Day 1

英文重现

Biologists have advanced two theories to explain why schooling of fish occurs in so many fish species. Because schooling is particularly widespread among species of small fish, both theories assume that schooling offers the advantage of some protection from predators.

——GMAT OG 2015, Reading Comprehension, Passage 1

解析

1.单词“school”在此处属于熟词僻义，作名词时意思是“（鱼、鲸等的）群”，作动词时意思是“成群地游”。“advanced”也属于熟词僻义，在这里是动词“advance”的过去分词，意思是“提出”。词组“protect...from sth.”意为“保护；使……免于”，在句子中用的是“protect”的名词形式。

2.第一个句子中，动词“explain”的宾语为“why”引导的宾语从句“why schooling of fish occurs in so many fish species”；第二个句子中“because”引导原因状语从句，“assume”后面为“that”引导的宾语从句。

词义辨析

参考翻译

生物学家提出了两种理论来解释为什么鱼的成群游动会发生在这么多的鱼类里。因为成群游动在小型鱼类里尤为普遍，所以两种理论都设想，成群游动能为（鱼群）不受捕食者的攻击提供一些保护性优势。

实战演练

Biologists have advanced two theories to explain why schooling of fish occurs in so many fish species. Because schooling is particularly widespread among species of small fish, both theories assume that schooling offers the advantage of some protection from predators.

Proponents of theory A dispute the assumption that a school of thousands of fish is highly visible. Experiments have shown that any fish can be seen, even in very clear water, only within a sphere of 200 meters in diameter. When fish are in a compact group, the sphere of visibility overlap. Thus, the chance of a predator finding the school is only slightly greater than the chance of the predator finding a single fish swimming alone. Schooling is advantageous to the individual fish because a predator's chance of finding any particular fish swimming in the school is much smaller than its chance of finding at least one of the same group of fish if the fish were dispersed throughout an area.

According to the passage, both theory A and theory B have been developed to explain how

(A) fish hide from predators by forming schools.

(B) forming schools functions to protect fish from predators.

(C) schooling among fish differs from other protective behaviors.

(D) small fish are able to make rapid decisions.

(E) small fish are able to survive in an environment densely populated by large predators.

答案：B

答案解析

题目问的是两个理论都是被用来解释什么的，由“theory A and theory B”的意思可定位到原文的第一个句子“Biologists have advanced two theories to explain why schooling of fish occurs in so many fish species”，该句子提到这两种理论是用来解释为什么鱼会聚群的。根据后一句中提到的两种理论都设想成群游动会提供一些保护性优势，可得出选项B“解释聚群如何能保护鱼不被捕食”是正确的。选项A“鱼通过聚群来躲避捕食者”比较容易选错，它错在“hide from”，鱼并非通过聚群就可以躲开捕食者（不被发现）。选项C“鱼的聚群和其他保护性行为不同”、选项D“小鱼能够快速做出决定”，以及选项E“小鱼能够在捕食者众多的环境中生存”，都明显不符合文章主旨。