本篇文章是前程百利小编为大家整理科学美国人文章，这篇文章很适合作为托福听力的背景知识来运用，对于背景知识大家要学会积累，而且背景材料的分析也很重要，请看下文分析。
原文：
Crown-of-thorns sea stars are an "underwater swarm of locusts" that devour coral—unless the coral is protected by a layer of seaweed. Christopher Intagliata reports
Warmer, more acidic oceans are already damaging corals in the South Pacific. But the corals also have more visible foes: such as crown-of-thorns sea stars. "It's an underwater swarm of locusts with a stomach that can be turned wrong side out and digest you as it walks across." Mark Hay, a marine ecologist at Georgia Tech. "You just look in front of them and there's good corals, and you look behind them and there's these white skeletons."
Hay says the corals in Fiji's marine protected areas are particularly vulnerable to attack. So he and his colleague Cody Clements took a closer look at the underwater ecosystem there. And they discovered something weird. Neighboring seaweeds usually compete for resources with corals to the point where they will whip corals with their fronds and poison them with toxins. But the researchers found that, in this case, the seaweeds were saving the corals, blocking the marauding sea stars. "And so these competitors were really acting as kind of bodyguards for the corals, once things got bad." Hay and Clements replicated those observations in underwater experiments, in which even fake seaweed did the trick—suggesting that seaweed is simply passively blocking the predators. The findings appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The marine reserves in Fiji are relatively small. And they border lots of degraded reefs, which Hay suspects are playgrounds for baby sea stars. When the stars get older and hungrier, he says, pristine corals are right next door. "They kind of act like little piles of candy that you put out in the kindergarten. Everybody just recruits to them, and eats them quickly." The reserves don’t have much seaweed, either, so the coral lack their bodyguards—except for an interested human:
"In one of the villages there's a guy that's particularly supportive of the marine protected area named Aquila. And he has sort of a floating wheelbarrow, and he goes out every now and then and fills it up with crown-of-thorns starfish and he comes back and builds a fire and burns them, on the shore, to keep them from regenerating." This study suggests Aquila’s system of killing the starfish to save the coral is on the right track. And Hay says his aggressive management style might be worth emulating elsewhere in Fiji: to ensure that marine protected areas still have something to protect in years to come.
专业词汇
Locusts n. 蝗虫过境(电影名)
Devour vt. 吞食;毁灭;凝视
Seaweed n. 海藻，海草
Acidic adj. 酸的，酸性的;产生酸的
Thorn n. 刺;[植] 荆棘
Vulnerable adj. 易受攻击的，易受…的攻击;易受伤害的;有弱点的
Bodyguard n. 保镖
长难句解析：
1. Neighboring seaweeds usually compete for resources with corals to the point where they will whip corals with their fronds and poison them with toxins.
难句类型：
Where引导的定语从句
句子主干：
Neighboring seaweeds usually compete for resource
难句拆分：
where they will whip corals with their fronds and poison them with toxins，Where引导的定语从句，作the point定语。
2. But the researchers found that, in this case, the seaweeds were saving the corals, blocking the marauding sea stars radicals.
难句类型：
That引导的宾语从句
句子主干：
the researchers found that
难句拆分：
in this case，插入语;that the seaweeds were saving the corals, blocking the marauding sea stars radicals，That引导的宾语从句作found的宾语。
文本结构特点：
本篇文章主要讲的是海藻拯救珊瑚。海藻通过分泌毒素到珊瑚，然后避免海星吞食珊瑚，最后海藻拯救了珊瑚。
好了，以上就是前程百利小编为大家整理的备考托福听力背景材料以及专业词汇的学习。希望能在备考托福的路上助大家一臂之力。最后，小编预祝大家在托福考试中取得好成绩。
您还可能关注：
