摘要：Rhinoceros horns(犀牛角), a big business. Traditional Chinese medicine uses them to treat certain diseases, even though there are no

和平区高三英语期末考试C篇

阅读理解，

Rhinoceros horns(犀牛角), a big business. Traditional Chinese medicine uses them to treat certain diseases, even though there are no actual therapeutic (治疗的)properties beyond comfort. And crafsmen carve them into dagger handles. A kilogram can thus command as much as $60.000 .So there is a tremendous appeal for poachers to hunt the animals, since almost all rhinoceros populations are endangered,several critically,This is a serious problem.

Some conservationists therefore suggest that a way to reduce pressure on the animals might be to flood the market with fakes. This, they hope, would reduce the value of real horns and consequently the motivation to hunt rhinos. That would require a fake to be good. But Fritz Vollrath ,a zoologist at Oxford University thinks his skills as a forger伪造者 are up to the challenge. As he writes in Scientific Reports, he and his colleagues from Fudan University in Shanghai have come up with a cheap and easy - to - make fake, strikingly similar to the real thing. The main ingredient of Dr. Wu's forged horns is horse hair. Despite their differing appearances, horses and rhinos are reasonably closely related. Horses do not have horns, of course, but technically neither do rhinos. The horns of rhinoceroses are composed of haird fibers bounded tightly together using a mixture of dead cells.

Examination under a microscope showed that hairs collected from horses' tails had a similar structure to those found in the horns of rhinos, except that horse hairs had a special layer absent in those of the rhinos. But the researchers were able to remove this with a solution of lithium bromide(溴化锂溶液)

. They bundled (捆绑)the treated horse hairs as tightly as they could in a mixture of a special glue and then left the bundles in an oven to dry. The result was a material that, with some polishing, looked like a rhino horn. Whether to launch indistinguishable fakes onto the rhino - horn Whether to launch indistinguishable fakes onto the rhinoceros horn market would truly reduce prices and demand remains to be tested, but it might. It is an old trick in warfare to leave the enemy with forged worthless money. Something similar may yet help save rhinos.

中文翻译

犀牛角，这是一桩大买卖。传统中医用犀牛角治疗某些疾病，尽管除了安慰剂效应外，实际上并无治疗功效。还有些人把犀牛角雕刻成匕首柄。因此，一公斤犀牛角能卖到高达六万美元。由于几乎所有犀牛种群都濒临灭绝，这对偷猎者来说极具诱惑，促使他们捕杀犀牛。这是个严重的问题。

因此，一些环保人士建议，减轻犀牛生存压力的一个办法或许是让市场充斥着犀牛角仿制品。他们希望，这样能降低真犀牛角的价值，进而减少猎杀犀牛的动机。

这就要求仿制品得做得逼真。牛津大学的一位动物学家认为自己的伪造技术足以应对这一挑战。正如他在《科学报告》中所写，他和来自上海复旦大学的同事们研制出一种既便宜又容易制作的仿制品，与真犀牛角极为相似。吴博士的仿犀牛角主要成分是马毛。尽管马和犀牛外形不同，但它们在亲缘关系上相当接近。当然，马没有角，但严格来说犀牛也并非真正意义上的长角。犀牛角是由角蛋白纤维通过死细胞混合物紧密黏合而成。在显微镜下观察发现，从马尾收集的毛发与犀牛角中的毛发结构相似，只是马毛有一层犀牛角所没有的特殊层。但研究人员能用硼砂溶液去除这一层。他们用一种特殊胶水尽可能紧密地黏合处理过的马毛，然后把这些毛束放在烤箱里烘干。最后得到的材料，经过打磨后看起来就像犀牛角。在犀牛角市场推出难以辨别的仿制品是否真能降低价格和需求还有待验证，但也有可能实现。在战争中，给敌人留下伪造的毫无价值的货币是个老把戏。类似的办法或许能拯救犀牛。

来源：Xin神英语