别伤害蜘蛛
课文学习台
Spare that Spider
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第1段
Why, you may wonder, should spiders be our friends? Because they destroy so many insects, and insects include some of the greatest enemies of the human race. Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world; they would devour all our crops and kill our flocks and herds, if it were not for the protection we get from insect-eating animals. We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat insects but all of them put together kill only a fraction of the number destroyed by spiders. Moreover, unlike some of the other insect eaters, spiders never do the least harm to us or our belongings.
你可能觉得奇怪，蜘蛛为什么应该是我们的朋友呢？因为它们消灭那么多的昆虫，其中就包括人类最危险的天敌。要不是以吃昆虫为生的动物提供给人类以保护，昆虫本可以使人类无法在地球上生存；昆虫将吃掉所有人类的庄稼，并且杀死人类成群的牛羊。我们十分感谢那些吃昆虫的鸟兽，然而鸟兽所消灭的昆虫数目之和，与蜘蛛所消灭的昆虫数目相比，如九牛一毛。此外，蜘蛛与其他吃昆虫的动物不同，蜘蛛实乃人“物”无害。
第2段
Spiders are not insects, as many people think, nor even nearly related to them. One can tell the difference almost at a glance, for a spider always has eight legs and an insect never more than six.
与大家的认知不同，蜘蛛并非昆虫，甚至与昆虫的亲缘关系也不近。人们几乎一眼就能辨别出蜘蛛与昆虫的差异，因为蜘蛛都是8条腿，而昆虫不会超过6条。
第3段
How many spiders are engaged in this work on our behalf? One authority on spiders made a census of the spiders in a grass field in the south of England, and he estimated that there were more than 2,250,000 in one acre; that is something like 6,000,000 spiders of different kinds on a football pitch. Spiders are busy for at least half the year in killing insects. It is impossible to make more than the wildest guess at how many they kill, but they are hungry creatures, not content with only three meals a day. It has been estimated that the weight of all the insects destroyed by spiders in Britain in one year would be greater than the total weight of all the human beings in the country.
有多少蜘蛛在为我们效力呢？一位研究蜘蛛的权威对英国南部一块草坪上的蜘蛛作了一次调查。 他估计每英亩草地上有超过225万只蜘蛛。好比一个足球场那么大的地方，就有600万只不同种类的蜘蛛。蜘蛛每年至少有一半的时间忙着捕杀昆虫。 至于它们究竟捕杀了多少昆虫，我们顶多只能作个粗略猜测；它们食量很大，一天三餐根本满足不了。据估计，在英国，蜘蛛一年里所捕杀的昆虫重量，比全国人口的总体重还要重。
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译文与解析据吴应时整理资料及本站首轮审校稿；词伙与练习提示为本站学习设计。原PDF第16—19页，2022年2月第2版。