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Vadamalai Elangovan and Ganapathi Marimuthu showed that high moonlight intensity inhibits the activity of the greater short-nosed fruit bat (Cynopterus sphinx), a result explicable in terms of benefits and costs: greater lunar intensity may not enable the bats to increase foraging success enough to offset the higher chance of detection by predatory owls or hawks. Most other nocturnal mammals respond to lunar intensity variations similarly to greater short-nosed fruit bats, but mongoose lemurs (Eulemur mongoz) display the opposite pattern, as their heavy reliance on visual foraging results in a different balance of reward and risk.
Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?
Explanation
Choice B is the best answer because it most accurately describes the overall structure of the text. The text begins by describing a study’s finding about greater short-nosed fruit bats—namely, that high moonlight intensity inhibits the bats’ activity—and also accounts for that finding, stating that this occurs because the potential increase in foraging success that greater lunar intensity enables doesn’t offset these bats’ increased vulnerability to predators (whose vision is also implied to become more acute under intense moonlight). The text goes on to characterize this finding as representative of a general pattern, stating that many nocturnal mammals behave similarly in response to changes in lunar intensity. The text concludes by describing an exception to this pattern, explaining that mongoose lemurs display an opposite tendency because they rely heavily on visual foraging. This strategy presumably would allow them to derive more benefit from greater lunar intensity than many other nocturnal mammals would, resulting in a "different balance of reward and risk" than exists for other nocturnal mammals. Therefore, the overall structure of the text is best described as a description and account of a finding, a characterization of that finding as representative of a pattern, and then a description and account of an exception to that pattern.
Choice A is incorrect. Although the text discusses two different responses to variations in moonlight intensity, explaining that as moonlight intensity increases, greater short-nosed fruit bats and many other nocturnal mammals decrease their foraging activity but mongoose lemurs increase their foraging activity, it doesn’t leave one of these responses unexplained. The text accounts for both the typical response to increased lunar intensity (reduced activity due to predation risk) and the exception (increased activity due to a reliance on visual foraging) by making reference to a cost-benefit framework. Choice C is incorrect. Although the text presents a study′s finding about the effect of increased lunar intensity on greater short-nosed fruit bats’ activity before going on to contrast this behavior with the fact that mongoose lemurs display the opposite response to increased lunar intensity, the text doesn’t explicitly invoke other studies and doesn’t attribute this difference in observed behavior to the fact that the study of greater short-nosed fruit bats used different methods than studies of mongoose lemurs did. Rather, the text explains that the different observed behaviors can be attributed to differences in species’ foraging strategies. Choice D is incorrect. Although the text characterizes the behavior of mongoose lemurs in response to increased lunar intensity as an exception to a pattern of behavior observed in other nocturnal mammal species, this exception doesn’t cast any doubt on the explanation that is offered for the general pattern observed among other species. Instead, the text uses the same cost-benefit framework to explain why increased lunar intensity is associated with decreased activity by greater short-nosed fruit bats and other nocturnal mammals but with increased activity by mongoose lemurs.