93. Reading Skills Comprehension: Bats at Night

Bats at Night

Read the given passages carefully and answer the questions that follow:

1. Most bats are active only at night. They come out at night to find food. For centuries men who studied bats wondered how they found their way in the dark. How could a bat with no light able to find a flying insect and catch it in flight?

2. Many people used to think that bats had unusually keen eyesight and could see by light too faint for human eyes to detect. Scientists now know that a bat’s ability to navigate depends not on its eyes, but on its ears and vocal organs.

3. Way back in the 1780s, an Italian zoologist named Spallanzani did an experiment. He blundered some bath and released them into a room crisscrossed with silk threads. The bats flew through the maze without touching the threads. When he plugged their ears, they became entangled in the threads. Spallanzani felt that bats used their ears rather than their eyes to find their way in the dark.

4. In 1920 a scientist suggested that bats sent out signals that were beyond the range of human hearing. Such sounds are called ultrasonic. In 1941, two other scientists decided to use a new electronic instrument that detected ultrasonic sounds in an experiment with bats.

5. The machine showed that the bats were uttering high-pitched cries and that they were constantly squeaking as they flew through a maze of wires that had been set up in the dark. When they taped the bats’ mouths shut, the animals blundered badly.

6. A bat sends out signals—high-pitched squeaks that bounce off anything in its path. A sound back, or reflected. It is an echo. The bat used echoes to locate things in the dark. Scientists call this echolocation, and it is like our systems of radar.

1.Attempt any eight of the following questions on the basis of the passage you have read:

(i) Why do bats come out at night?

 (ii) What did many people use to think about how bats found their ways in the dark?

(iii) What have scientists now discovered?

(iv) What did Spallanzani find after releasing some blinded bats into a room crisscrossed with silk threads? What did he find after plugging their ears?

(v) What did a scientist suggest in 1920?

(vi) What did the new electronic instrument show?

(vii) What did the scientists find when they taped the bats’ mouth?

(viii) Why do bats use echoes?

 (ix) Find the word in para 4, which means me as ‘found’. 

Answers:-

(i)Bats come out at night to find food.

(ii) Many people used to think that bats had unusually keen eyesight and could see by light too faint for human eyes to detect.

(iii) Scientists have now discovered that a bat’s ability to navigate depends not on its eyes, but on its ears and vocal organs.

(iv) Spallanzani found that the bats flew through the maze without touching the threads. When he plugged their ears, they became entangled in the threads. He felt that bath used their ears rather than their eyes to find their way in the dark.

(v)In 1920 a scientist suggested that the bats sent out signals that were beyond the range of human hearing.

(vi)The new electronic instrument showed that the bats were uttering high-pitched cries and that they were constantly squeaking as they flew through a maze of wires that had been set up in the dark.

(vii)When the scientists taped the bats’ mouth, they found that the animals blundered badly. 

(viii) Bats use echoes to locate things in the dark.

(ix) Detected

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