文档介绍：2015年考研英语阅读理解模拟试题、答案及解题分析
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It has long been known that the rate of oxidative metabolism (the process that uses oxygen to convert food into energy) in any animal has a profound effect on its living patterns. The high metabolic rate of small animals, for example, gives them sustained power and activity per unit of weight, but at the cost of requiring constant consumption of food and water. Very large animals, with their relatively low metabolic rates, can survive well on a sporadic food supply, but can gen- erate little metabolic energy per gram of body weight. If only oxidative metabolic rate is considered, there- fore, one might assume that smaller, more active, animals could prey on larger ones, at least if they attacked in groups. Perhaps they could if it were not for anaerobic glycolysis, the great equalizer.
Anaerobic glcolysis is a process in which energy is produced, without oxygen, through the breakdown of muscle glycogen into lactic acid and adenosine tri- phosphate (ATP), the energy provider. The amount of energy that can be produced anaerobically is a function of the amount of glycogen present-in all vertebrates about percent of their muscles' wet weight. Thus the anaerobic energy reserves of a verte- brate are proportional to the size of the animal. If, for example, some predators had attacked a 100-ton dinosaur, normally torpid, the dinosaur would have be