雅思阅读考试练习素材下载之蜜蜂与杀虫剂

　　雅思阅读材料之蜜蜂与杀虫剂

　　IN THE winter of 2006 beekeepers in America noticed something odd—lots oftheir hives were dying for no obvious reason. As the months passed, reports ofsimilar phenomena began coming in from their European counterparts. Mystifiedscientists coined the label “colony collapse disorder” (CCD) to describe whatwas happening. Since then, much brow-sweat has been expended trying to work outjust what CCD really is.

　　2006年冬，美国养蜂人注意到奇怪的现象，他们的蜜蜂成批死掉，原因不明。几个月后，类似的现象也出现在欧洲同行的报告上。困惑的科学家们给这个现象贴上了“蜂群衰竭失调”(CCD)的标签。自那时起，为揭开CCD的面纱，人们不知道多少次抹去额头的汗水。

　　Dying bees are a problem, and not just for apiarists. Bees pollinate manyof the world’s crops—a service estimated to be worth $15 billion a year inAmerica alone. And there is no shortage of theories to explain the insects’decline. Climate change, habitat destruction, a paralysing virus, fungalinfection and even a plague of parasitic mites have all been proposed. But oneof the leading ideas is that the bees are suffering from the effects ofneonicotinoids, a class of commonly used pesticides, introduced in the 1990s,which are toxic to insects but much less so to mammals.

　　蜜蜂之死不仅令养蜂家头痛。蜜蜂给世界上的很多庄稼授粉，仅在美国，这种服务每年价值150亿美元。尽管对蜜蜂数量下降的原因提出了形形色色的理论，如气候变化、栖息地遭破坏、麻痹病毒、霉菌感染，甚至还有寄生虫肆虐。但其中一个主导观点是蜜蜂正在遭受新烟碱的侵害，二十世纪九十年代人们引入这种杀虫剂，它对昆虫有毒，但对哺乳动物的毒性较小，使用范围广泛。