Зоология на английском. Обязательный материал для чтения на занятиях и дома. Сологуб Л.И. - 28 стр.

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IV. Suggest the English for:

в несколько раз больше; вредные грызуны; верхняя челюсть; ядовитые

железы, задолго до; снимать железы; удовлетворять голод; сравнительно

мало; во многих отношениях; соответствовать чему-либо.

V. Make up a list of words used to describe the structure of the head of a snake.

VI. Explain what the author means when he says; There are comparatively few

venomous snakes.

VII. Make up a model of the text information, sum up what the text has to say

on the following points:

1. The process of swallowing big objects.

2. The mechanism for injecting the venom.

Text 17

I. Read the text and state what It is about.

NUTRITIOH OP INSECTS

Insects eat a wide variety of organic materials. Their diet ranges from dry

dead wood to the living tissues of mammals and reflects the hundreds of

thousands of species and the diverse habitats of this remarkable class of animals.

What an insect -eats and how much it eats largely determine its ecological role

and its economic importance. If the Colorado potato beetle had not begun eating

the leaves of the cultivated potato it would still be an insect of restricted

geographical range and of interest only to coleopterists.

What an insect eats is not always as obvious as one might at first suppose.

Larvae of the fruit fly. Drosophila, live in decaying fruit, but their diet consists

of the yeasts and other microorganisms growing in their fruit. The meadow

grasshoppers (Conocephalinae) were thought to eat primarily the leaves of

grasses and other plants, but observations on the crop contents of these

Orthoptera show that they actually subsist on insects, pollen, flowers, and seeds

of grasses, and hardly ever eat leaves. Anobiid beetles which burrow in wood

feed on the fungi that grow along the walls of the burrows.

Moreover, not everything that an insect ingests as food can serve as a

source of nutrients. Various wood-eating beetles, such as the power-post beetle,

Lyctus, are unable to digest cellulose, the main constituent of their food, and

utilize only the starch, sugars, and nitrogenous materials also present in the