TOEFL Listening

🎧 Listening Transcript

Listen to part of a lecture in a biology class. The professor is discussing animal communication. Professor: Today, we're going to talk about how animals communicate, and specifically, we'll focus on a fascinating example: the waggle dance of honeybees. When a foraging bee returns to the hive after finding a good nectar source, it performs a series of movements that convey information about the distance and direction of the food. The dance consists of a figure-eight pattern, with a straight run in the middle. The angle of this straight run relative to the vertical indicates the direction of the food relative to the sun. The duration of the run signals the distance. However, this dance is not just a simple stimulus-response; it's a true symbolic language, because the bee has never seen the food source itself—it only receives information from another bee's movements. Interestingly, recent studies show that bees can also learn and improve their communication over time, suggesting a level of cognitive flexibility we didn't expect.