10.
阅读理解
Many people travel to different places in the world by air.
Usually it takes a long time, perhaps half a day, for passengers to stay in the
plan. So airlines (航空公司) offer passengers food. But it is common that they feel bad about
food taste. Do you agree?
To solve this problem, airlines try hard to improve their
food. They would like to do so because they don't want to lose customers.
However, according to scientific research, part of the
reason why plane food tastes bad is that at high altitude (海拔) we can not taste
things as well as we do on the ground. Also scientists have found that our
noses become very dry even before a plane takes off. As the plane moves up, the
change in air pressure (气压) reduces one third of the sensibility (感觉) of
our taste buds (味蕾). So our taste buds become
senseless. The sad face, however, is that our noses don't know it.
All of these help explain why food on the plane tastes so
bad. They also help explain why airlines choose to offer passengers salty and
spicy (辛辣的) food. Without doing so, the food would be tasteless.
Now there are many researches on this. According to one of
them, some volunteers are asked to lie with their feet higher than their heads
for weeks. And scientists write down their feelings about food taste.
Though scientists try their best, it is not as easy as they
thought. Because they can't deal with the special environment successfully,
such as the change in air pressure, making food taste good is still hard for
them.