3.Now you can make polar bears your pen friends.First you need to find one,then tranquilize (使鎮(zhèn)靜) it and quickly give it a necessary tool before it wakes up.It's an awkward first encounter — how many friendships do you know start with tranquilizers? — and admittedly a one-sided correspondence,but soon they'll be sending messages daily.
Every morning,Jon Aars,a senior researcher at the Norwegian Polar Institute,receives a bunch of emails from several female polar bears,letting him know where they are.Each year,Aars and his colleagues equip around 70 polar bears with a tracking collar (項(xiàng)圈) which continuously logs their movement.Once a day the collar makes a satellite call,sending the last 24 hours of data back to the Institute. "Data about their movement is very important in understanding how they might respond to climate change," Aars explains.
A warm climate means a vast amount of sea ice is melting.Several seal species — polar bears' main food — rely on sea ice,and more often than not,where sea ice can be found,so can polar bears.But these creatures are being forced to move. "We have seen that bears move much further north," Aars explains.
The collar can also record body temperature,which can tell scientists if a bear has moved inside a habitat — an indication that the animal is going to give birth.Sea ice loss is also having an impact on where polar bears are born. "Important areas where they used to go to give birth to cubs (幼獸) are more or less lost," says Aars. "Bears are now swimming as far as 200 kilometers to reach an island habitat," he adds, "something they did not need to do 20 years ago."
Aars hopes his research can reveal how to help his pen friends hold out a little longer. "What is important for us is that all this data tells us how they will respond in the future," he adds.
(1)What does the author intend to do in Paragraph 1?
A.Provide some key facts about polar bears.
B.Explain how to deal with wild polar bears.
C.Suggest ways to save tranquilized polar bears.
D.Describe how to get polar bears ready for tracking.
(2)What is the collar mainly used for?
A.Guiding polar bears to sea ice.
B.Protecting polar bears from being hunted.
C.Labeling polar bears ready to give birth.
D.Collecting data on polar bears' movement.
(3)How does climate change affect polar bears?
A.They are forced to move south.
B.They have trouble finding food.
C.Their habitats are too hot to live in.
D.Their cubs fail to adapt to the climate.
(4)What can be the best title for the text?
A.Polar bears — creatures on sea ice
B.Climate change — sea ice loss speeding up
C.Another wake-up call — polar bears facing extinction
D.Emails from the edge — polar bears sending messages to scientists