你见过大象剥香蕉吗?这头大象引起了科学家的注意

It is 2023 now. Recently, a middle-aged Asian elephant named Pang Pha becomes popular. Why? Because she can peel bananas.

Pha was brought to the Berlin Zoo as a baby 38 years ago. At the time, her main caretaker (照看人) often fed her peeled bananas, and the caretaker would peel them in front of her. She might picked up the skill by watching her human caretakers.

The Berlin Zoo reached out to Brecht, a professor of neurobiology (神经生物学) at Humboldt University, and his team told them about their clever elephant, but when researchers arrived to watch her, they found it was hard to get Pha to always peel bananas. 

Researchers learned that they could always get Pha to peel bananas when they offered her brown-speckled (褐色斑点的) bananas. Pha doesn’t open bananas like humans do, by peeling from the stem (茎). Instead, she cracks the banana in half down the centre then slams it on the ground to let the soft fruit inside come out. After shaking the peel off, she eats the banana. 

Researchers watched Pha being fed bananas in the same place as other elephants and noticed she would eat “like a machine”, not wasting time to peel so she could snag more fruit. But when it came down to the last banana, 60 per cent of the time, Pha would save it and peel it.

As for why Pha peels bananas, researchers have no way of finding out. It’s possible she prefers the taste of peeled bananas.

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1. Which of the following words can take the place of the underlined word “snag”?(词义猜测

A    Beat.

B    Eat.

C    Hide.

D    Peel.

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