Obstacles = problems, difficulties,

READING PASSAGE 1
troubles
Let’s go Bats
A  Hunt = chase, pursuit

Bats have a problem: how to find their way around in the Occupy = inhabit, conquer
dark they hunt at flight, and cannot use light to help them
find prey and avoid obstacles. You might say that this is a Selection = choice, variety, range
problem of their own making one that they could avoid
Nocturnal = night
simply by changing their habits and hunting by day. But the
daytime economy is already heavily exploited by other Ancestry = origin
creatures such as birds. Given that there is a living to be
made at night, and given that alternative daytime trades are Dominate = control, rule, direct, govern
thoroughly occupied, natural selection has favoured bats
that make a go of the night-hunting trade. It is probable that Scarp = live, survive
the nocturnal trades go way back in the ancestry of all
Mysterious = strange, unexplained,
mammals. In the time when the dinosaurs dominated the
daytime economy, our mammalian ancestors probably only unsolved, old
managed to survive at all because they found ways of
scraping a living at night. Only after the mysterious mass Extinction = death, loss, disappearance,
extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago were
our ancestors able to emerge into the daylight in any extermination
substantial numbers. 
Substantial = large, extensive, significant,
B 
generous, sizable, big, abundant,
Bats have an engineering problem: how to find their way and important
find their prey in the absence of light Bats are not the only
creatures to face this difficulty today. Obviously, the night- Absence = lack, non-existence, deficiency
flying insects that they prey on must find their way about
somehow. Deep-sea fish and whales have little or no light by Scattered = dotted, spread
day or by night. Fish and dolphins that live in extremely
Manoeuvre = move
muddy water cannot see because, although there is light, it is
obstructed and scattered by the dirt in the water Plenty" of Manufacture = build, assemble,
other modern animals make their living in conditions where
seeing is difficult or impossible. construct

C  Consume = use, utilize, spend

Given the questions of how to manoeuvre in the dark, what Prohibitive = high-price, expensive,
solutions might an engineer consider? The first one that
might occur to him is to manufacture light, to use a lantern unaffordable
or a searchlight. Fireflies and some fish (usually with the help
of bacteria) have the power to - manufacture their own light
but the process seems to consume a large amount of energy.
Fireflies use their light for attracting mates. This doesn't
require a prohibitive amount of energy: a male's tiny pinprick
of light can be seen by a female from some distance on a
dark night since her eyes are exposed directly to the light
source itself. However, using light to find one's own way
around requires vastly more energy, since the eyes have to
detect the tiny fraction of the light that bounces off each part
of the scene. The light source must, therefore, be immensely
brighter if it is to be used as a headlight to illuminate the
path, than if it is to be used as a signal to others. In any
event, whether or not the reason is the energy expense, it
seems to be the case that with the possible exception of
some weird deep-sea fish, no animal apart from man uses
manufactured light to find its way about

D What else might the engineer think off Well, blind humans
sometimes seem to have an uncanny sense of obstacles in
their path, ft has been given the name’ facial vision', because
blind people have reported that Ft feels a bit like the sense of
touch, on the face. One report tells of a totally blind boy who
could and his tricycle at good speed round the block near his
home, using facial vision. Experiments showed that, in fact,
facial vision is nothing to do with touch or the front of the
face, although the sensation may be referred to the front of
the face, like the referred pain in a phantom limb The
sensation of facial vision, it turns out really goes in through
the ears. Blind people, without even being aware of the fact
are actually using echoes of their own footsteps and of other
sounds, to sense the presence of obstacles. Before this was
discovered, engineers had already built instruments to
exploit the principle, for example, to measure the depth of
the sea under a ship. After this technique had been invented,
it was only a matter of time before weapons designers
adapted ft for the detection of submarines. Both sides in the
Second World War relied heavily on these devices, under
such code names as Asdic (British) and Sonar (American), as
wall as Radar (American) or RDF (British), which uses radio
echoes rather than sound echoes.

E The Sonar and Radar pioneers Didn’t know it then, but all
the world now knows that bats, or rather natural selection
working on bats, had perfected the system tens of millions of
years earlier, and their radar'" achieves feats of detection
and navigation that would strike an engineer dumb with
admiration It is technically incorrect to talk about bat'radar1,
since they do not use radio waves. It is sonar. But the
underlying mathematical the ones of radar and sonar are
very similar, and much of our scientific understanding of the
details of what bats are doing has’ come from applying radar
theory to them. The American zoologist Donald Griffin, who
was largely responsible for the discovery of sonar in bats,
coined the term 'echolocation' to cover both sonar and radar,
whether used’ by animals or by human instruments.