Video Transcript
Complete the sentence. Even in very hot temperatures,
desert animals like camels and Arabian oryx regulate body temperature by very rarely
blank. (A) Reproducing, (B) staying still,
(C) moving, (D) breathing, (E) sweating.
This question is asking us about an
adaptation of these two desert animals. An adaptation is a characteristic
of an organism that makes it well suited to its environment and gives it a better
chance of survival.
In hot temperatures, humans can
regulate their body temperature by sweating. We can secrete sweat from special
sweat glands in our skin. When we do this, a droplet of sweat
can sit on the surface of the skin. This sweat droplet can absorb heat
from our skin, which helps to lower the temperature of our body. The hotter it is, the more sweat we
produce to cool us down.
Sweating is an adaptation that
we’ve developed to deal with hot temperatures. However, the problem with sweating
is that our body loses water in the process. For desert animals like camels and
the Arabian oryx, they need to conserve water because water is very scarce in the
desert. So these animals very rarely sweat
and have other ways to regulate their temperature. For instance, camels have large
humps, which store fat that can regulate body temperature. During the day, when it is very
hot, this fat absorbs a lot of the heat from the body to cool the camel down. Then at night, when it gets cold,
this heat can be released from the fat to warm the camel up. This way, the camel’s temperature
stays within a certain range so it can be healthy.
Getting back to our question, in
the statement “even in very hot temperatures, desert animals like camels and Arabian
oryx regulate body temperature by very rarely blank,” the correct option to fill in
the blank is given by answer choice (E), sweating.
