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Homeostasis, an animal’s maintenance of certain internal variables within an acceptable range, particularly in extreme physical environments, has long interested biologists. The desert rat and the camel in the most water-deprived environments, and marine vertebrates in an all-water environment, encounter the same regulatory problem: maintaining adequate internal fluid balance.
For desert rats and camels, the problem is conservation of water in an environment where standing water is nonexistent, temperature is high, and humidity is low. Despite these handicaps, desert rats are able to maintain the osmotic pressure of their blood, as well as their total body-water content, at approximately the same levels as other rats. One countermeasure is behavioral: these rats stay in burrows during the hot part of the day, thus avoiding loss of fluid through panting or sweating, which are regulatory mechanisms for maintaining internal body temperature by evaporative cooling (evaporative cooling: 蒸发冷却). Also, desert rats’ kidneys can excrete a urine having twice as high a salt content as sea water.
Camels, on the other hand, rely more on simple endurance. They cannot store water, and their reliance on an entirely unexceptional kidney results in a rate of water loss through renal function significantly higher than that of desert rats. As a result, camels must tolerate losses in body water of up to thirty percent of their body weight. Nevertheless, camels do rely on a special mechanism to keep water loss within a tolerable range: by seating and panting only when their body temperature exceeds that which would kill a human, they conserve internal water.
Marine vertebrates experience difficulty with their water balance because though there is no shortage of seawater to drink, they must drink a lot of it to maintain their internal fluid balance. But the excess salts from the seawater must be discharged somehow, and the kidneys of most marine vertebrates are unable to excrete a urine in which the salts are more concentrated than in seawater. Most of these animals have special salt-secreting organs outside the kidney that enable them to eliminate excess salt.
263. It can be inferred from the passage that some mechanisms that regulate internal body
temperature, like sweating and panting, can lead to which of the following?
(A) A rise in the external body temperature
(B) A drop in the body’s internal fluid level
(C) A decrease in the osmotic pressure of the blood
(D) A decrease in the amount of renal water loss
(E) A decrease in the urine’s salt content
OG解释
263.
To answer this question, you must use information contained in the passage to draw an inference about the effects of certain regulatory mechanisms in animals. Choice B is the best answer. The passage states that camels conserve internal water by sweating and panting only when they reach very high body temperatures. Since camels conserve internal water by not panting and sweating, it can be inferred that sweating and panting decrease the body’s internal fluid level. Choice A can be eliminate because the passage suggests that a rise in body temperature can result in panting and sweating, not vice versa. Choices C and D can be eliminated because there is no information in the passage to suggest that internal body temperature regulation methods result in a decrease in osmotic pressure of the blood or in the amount of water lost through the kidneys. Choice E is incorrect because the passage mentions the salt content of desert rats’ urine, but does not suggest that the salt content decreases in response to body temperature regulation mechanisms.
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发表于 2005-1-30 13:21:00
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