ACCORDING TO THE PASSAGE, BIRDS WITH LARGE BEAKS ______. A. TEND T...

75.

According to the passage, birds with large beaks ______.

A. tend to accept invader eggs

B. are able to remove invader eggs

C. tend to damage their own eggs

D. are rejected by birds with small beaks

Passage D

There are more than 500 carnivorous plant species growing naturally in the world, ranging in size from a

fraction of an inch to vines that are over 60 feet tall. While often biologically quite different from each other,

these plants all share a common trait, carnivorousness. This is the ability to capture animals and digest

them. Why have some plant species developed this extraordinary property? Most carnivorous plants grow in

acid soils or water that is poor in mineral salts. In order to survive, these plants have devised ingenious

traps over several thousands of years of evolution. Some use pools of water to drown unlucky visitors,

others have sticky surfaces that work like flypaper, and some have “snap traps” that clamp down on insects

in a matter of milliseconds. The prey captured by these traps supply the vitamins and minerals that other

plants would normally absorb through their roots.

Even though these plants may have diverse appearances and grow in different environments, they are often

closely related to each other. In the 19th Century, Charles Darwin believed that landbased Venus flytraps,

found in North and South Carolina, and aquatic waterwheels, which grow in Europe, Asia and Australia, were

closely related because they both depend on snap traps to catch their prey. A century later, British

researchers looking more closely at the form and structure of the waterwheel, decided that its closest kin

was not the Venus flytrap but the terrestrial sundew. The sundew consumes insects caught with its flypaper

trap.

However, it has recently been proved that Darwin’s hunch was right after all. Scientists at the New York

Botanical Garden studied the DNA of about a dozen carnivorous plants. They concluded that the world’s only

two snap-trapping plants really are sibling species, whereas the sundew is no closer than a cousin, sharing a

more distant common ancestor.