การฟัง TOEFL

🎧 บทถอดเสียง

Listen to part of a lecture in an environmental science class. Today we're going to talk about a fascinating insect: the honeybee. But we're not going to focus on honey production or pollination. Instead, let's consider the honeybee's dance language, a form of communication that was first described by Karl von Frisch in the 1940s. Von Frisch discovered that when a foraging bee returns to the hive, it performs a series of movements, or dances, that convey information about the location of food. The round dance, for example, indicates that food is close by, within about 50 meters of the hive, but it doesn't give a precise direction. The waggle dance, however, is more complex. The bee moves in a figure-eight pattern, and the straight part of the dance, where the bee waggles its abdomen, points in the direction of the food relative to the sun. The duration of the waggle run indicates the distance. But here's an interesting twist: recent research has shown that bees can also learn this dance from other bees. Young bees that watch experienced dancers improve their accuracy over time. So, this behavior is not purely instinctive; it involves a social learning component. This challenges the traditional view that animal communication is entirely innate. Now, let's think about the implications for our understanding of animal cognition.