Answer the questions of the exam according to what you’ve listened.
- 1) What are carnivorous plants?
- 2) What do they eat?
- 3) Is there any of them here in
Argentina?
- 4) Can they live without eating animals?
- 5) How do they absorb the nutrients from
the animals they hunt?
After reading the questions, listen to the podcast that is included in this page:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B81tvqCKNJ8IWDg5U0hZeXZlS3c/view?usp=sharing
and try to gather information enough to answer to the questions. Have a brief coversation with your partners about wha you have listened to and try to find the answers to the questions. Having done the conversation, listen to the podcast again and answer to the questions with the information you have gathered.
Have a brief conversation with your partners about the topic "do plants have any feelings, thoughts or sensations?"
After that, read the following passage of an article:
A CARROT IS
strapped to an
examining table. After the experimenter wires it up to a galvanometer, he
pinches the vegetable with forceps. The machine registers "infinitesimal
twitches, starts, and tremors," according to one report. The year is 1914,
the scientist is named Jagadish Chandra Bose, and a journalist in the
room writes, apparently without irony: "Thus can science reveal the
feelings of even so stolid a vegetable as the carrot."
Today,
that conclusion — and the experiment — seems absurd. Whatever is happening
inside a carrot, it's not a "feeling" in any sense we'd understand.
For that, a carrot would need a brain, or at least a central nervous system,
which it most certainly does not have. The scientific consensus is clear:
Plants do not experience the world the way we do.
"We
can't equate human behavior to the ways in which plants function in their
worlds," writes Daniel Chamovitz, who runs a plant biology lab at Tel
Aviv University and surveys the field in a new book, What a
Plant Knows. (He considers that title a kind of
literary shorthand, even a provocation, rather than a serious suggestion that
plants can think.)
In
hindsight it's easy to look back on Bose's experiments as novelty science. But
Bose was widely respected, a serious scientist who would soon be knighted for
his achievements. And the question of the humanness of plants has a history
that stretches far before him, and well after. Three generations
of Darwins experimented on the surprising capabilities of plants.
Unlikely figures from other realms dove in, too: former CIA operatives, a
Presbyterian minister, even Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.
Plants
might not have minds, but the researchers weren't entirely misdirected in
wondering just how deep plants' abilities run. Over the last decade,
researchers have discovered that even primitive green algae can sense changes
in light direction and intensity; that a pea plant in drought conditions can
communicate its stress to its soilmates and warn them to prepare for
hard times. It has again become tempting to dangle the possibility: Does this
mean plants could be conscious? The question may be revealing, but not for the
reasons one might think. Today, a glance back at the long, strange inquiry into
plant consciousness finds that it might not explain much about plants, but it
can tell us a lot about what's going in the world outside the flowerpot.
(Extract from http://theweek.com/articles/467913/plants-have-feelings
)
After having read the extract, look in the dictionary for the words you didn't understand, or ask the teacher for it. Once you have done it, ask your partners if they think that carnivorous plants have feelings, thoughts or sensations.
Look carefully at this two images
What do you think they represent? what do you think the plants were feeling or thinking at the moment the photograph was taken?
Put some text to the images in order to clarify what they mean, or express what you think the plants were feeling, or thinking in the moment of the photograph, ex:
