雅思阅读 47: The Ocean's Hit Parade（海洋金曲排行榜）

改编由 Science / Hebrew University & University of St Andrews（2025年2月）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adq7055

Reading Passage

A. Every winter, male humpback whales gather in the warm, shallow waters off Hawaii, French Polynesia or eastern Australia and sing. Their songs are not simple calls; they are elaborate compositions that can last twenty minutes or more, built from repeated phrases and themes, and all the males in a given population sing essentially the same version in any given season. What is more remarkable is that the shared tune changes over time. One year, a population might sing a slow, melancholic refrain; the next, a faster, brighter pattern has replaced it entirely, and every male has somehow learned the new song. Females do not sing these long, structured songs; they produce shorter, more varied calls associated with feeding and calf-rearing. This cultural transmission — a behaviour learned from peers and passed between generations and across thousands of kilometres of open ocean — has long made humpback song one of the most striking examples of non-human culture on Earth, comparable in its spread and evolution to a pop song sweeping through a human city.

B. In February 2025, an international team led by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of St Andrews reported a deeper similarity between whale song and human language. Using a statistical method originally developed to segment the speech of human infants — who must decide, without knowing words, where one sound ends and the next begins — the researchers analysed recordings of humpback songs from the South Pacific. They found that the song could be broken down into recurrent units, and that the transitions between those units followed the same probabilistic patterns found in human speech: sequences that occur together are more likely to follow one another, and the boundaries between units cluster at predictable intervals. The finding does not mean whales have grammar or vocabulary in the human sense, and the team was careful not to claim that whale song carries semantic content. But it does suggest that two evolutionarily distant species, separated by some ninety million years of independent history, arrived at the same statistical architecture when they needed to transmit complex sequential sounds culturally. The researchers now plan to test whether the same segmentation method works on the songs of killer whales and the calls of bats, to see whether the effect is specific to humpbacks or general to cultural sound-learning.

C. The mechanism by which songs spread is even more remarkable. In the South Pacific, a single male off Western Australia might introduce a new variation. As whales migrate between feeding grounds in the Antarctic and breeding lagoons in the tropics, some of them encounter males from the eastern Australian population and sing to them. Within a single breeding season, the eastern Australian males abandon their old tune and adopt the new one. The new song then travels eastward — from Australia to New Zealand, to Tonga, to the Cook Islands, and eventually to French Polynesia and Ecuador — like a pop hit spreading across a continent. Researchers have documented this "song revolution" repeatedly: an entire ocean basin's male population changes its song within about two years, with no genetic change and no environmental trigger. The process is horizontal, not vertical: males learn from other males they meet on migration, not from their fathers, and the rate of transmission tracks the distance between breeding grounds rather than relatedness between populations. No human cultural movement has yet spread across ten thousand kilometres of open sea in so short a time.

D. The evolutionary function of this behaviour remains debated. The most widely accepted explanation is sexual selection: females choose males with the most current, complex or correctly delivered song, and males therefore rush to adopt the latest version. But why females prefer novelty over tradition is unclear. Some researchers argue that a male who can learn and reproduce a rapidly changing song demonstrates cognitive flexibility and therefore good genes — an honest signal of neural quality. Others point out that the uniformity itself matters: a male who sings the "wrong" song is recognisably an outsider, and a population that shares a song is signalling that it belongs together, potentially reducing within-group aggression. In 2025, a separate study near Okinawa, Japan, quantified song similarity between northwestern Pacific populations and found that song resemblance tracked the degree of physical contact between groups, supporting the idea that song functions as a cultural badge of identity rather than purely as a mating signal.

E. The conservation implications are only now being drawn. Humpbacks were hunted to a fraction of their pre-whaling numbers — perhaps as few as five thousand individuals worldwide — before a global moratorium in 1966; most populations have since recovered to perhaps a third of their earlier numbers, but a few, including the Arabian Sea humpback, remain critically endangered. Because song is learned rather than innate, a population that loses its singers loses its culture as well — there is no instinctive song to fall back on, and orphaned young raised in captivity have never been observed to sing spontaneously. This has led marine biologists to argue that cultural traits, not just numbers of individuals, should be protected. Shipping noise, which masks the frequencies at which whales sing, and underwater construction, which fragments breeding grounds, can interfere with transmission even when the whales themselves are unharmed. The 2025 statistical study concludes with a caution: the commonalities between whale song and human speech are not merely a curiosity. They are evidence that culture, in the full sense of learned, transmitted, evolving tradition, is not unique to our species — and that it deserves the same protection we would extend to a language on the verge of silence. Shipping lanes that cut across breeding grounds, the researchers add, do not merely make it harder for whales to hear one another; they break the transmission chain on which the next generation's song depends.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. A hidden parallel with human language ii. How a new song crosses an entire ocean iii. Why males adopt the latest tune — and what it means iv. Why whale culture matters for conservation v. The history of commercial whaling vi. How the humpback was first classified vii. A comparison with birdsong anatomy

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. What is distinctive about humpback whale song within a single breeding season? A. Every male sings a completely unique song. B. All males in a population sing essentially the same version. C. Only females sing. D. The song is only performed underwater at night.

6. What method did the 2025 study use to analyse whale song? A. A radar system developed by the military. B. A statistical technique originally designed to segment infant speech. C. DNA sequencing of whale brains. D. Direct interviews with whale trainers.

7. How does a new song typically spread across the South Pacific? A. It travels westward against the ocean current. B. It spreads eastward, from Australia to French Polynesia and beyond. C. It stays in one lagoon for a decade. D. It is carried by migrating turtles.

8. Why do researchers argue that cultural traits should be protected? A. Because whale song is innate and cannot be relearned. B. Because if singers are lost, there is no instinctive song to fall back on. C. Because songs are used to navigate shipping lanes. D. Because whales refuse to breed in silence.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. All males in a population sing essentially the same song in a given season.
10. The 2025 study concluded that whales use human-like grammar and vocabulary.
11. A new song can spread across an entire ocean basin within about two years.
12. The Okinawa study found no relationship between song similarity and physical contact.
13. Humpback whales are the only whale species known to produce cultural song.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The 2025 study found that humpback song shares a (14) __________ structure with human language, and that a new "song (15) __________" can spread across the entire South Pacific within about two years.

答案与解析

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