英语听力：2013-07-10 《恐龙的战争》3 顽强防御—11

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The land is covered in vast forests offerns, pines, and monkey puzzle trees. Many of these plants have almost nonutritional valuel. 

 

The hardest job in the animal world, thedinosaur world, was not T-Rex’s job. Digesting meat is a piece of cake. It’svery, very simple. Digesting plant fiber¹ is the hardest job in the world. 

 

To gain enough nutrients² to growindestructibly large, Sauroposeidon has to consume huge amounts of vegetation. 

 

They were like walking vacuum cleaners. 

 

If you’ve got 40 or 50 tons of flesh tofeed and you eat low-quality food, you have to put away hundreds of pounds,maybe a ton of this stuff, every day. 

 

When growing is your best defese, gainingweight is serious business. So Sauroposeidon does away with time-consumingtasks like chewing.

 

If you could just swallow that stuff andlet your giant stomach mash³ it up for you, you could move in a lot more foodper unit time and you could get a lot bigger. 

 

Sauroposeidon’s 52 chisel-like teeth areperfectly designed for the job. They can rake leaves and twigs⁴ straight off atree. 

 

They’ve got these big teeth that are justcropping devices. They just bite down on a branch and either take the wholebranch or strip the leaves and needles off and then swallow it down. 

 

To be able to digest this huge volume offood and grow big enough to avoid attack requires a stomach as large as a ton. That’sas big as a swimming pool, and it’s filled with acid so concentrated it candissolve iron. 

 

It had to be able to hold maybe a ton ormore of plant material at a time, and we’re talking about something …

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