A
One evening last summer, 11-year-old Owen and his mom put on white suits and taped their rain boots to their pant legs. Then they each grabbed a wooden pole with a large white cloth attached to it and started dragging the tools through the trees and grass in their Wisconsin backyard.
They were looking for ticks(扁虱虫). Owen's mom, Amy Prunuske, teaches microbiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Wausau. She studies diseases that ticks carry. Owen, though, is known as a citizen scientist. Citizen scientists are people -young or old-who help collect data for research projects. They usually aren't professional scientists, or if they are, not in the field of the project. Still, their work can be incredibly important. Citizen scientists can help trained scientists gather data from all over the world-even from space. They can provide new ideas and new ways of thinking.
Kids often make great citizen scientists because they tend to be curious and good at following precise directions. Sometimes they're even better at these things than adults. And schools are convenient places for scientists to recruit big groups of helpers. As a bonus, citizen science often gets kids more excited about science.
Citizen science takes advantage not just of many sets of eyeballs, but also of many minds. When professional European scientists in Austria were trying to find how best to encourage people to use less energy, they partnered with student citizen scientists. The adult scientists had a long list of questions for people about how much energy they used. Right away, the students noticed some problems the adults hadn't thought of. There were too many questions, the kids said. And some of those questions were too complicated.
The day in the backyard, Owen found two black-legged ticks, animals so tiny they're often hard to see. He and his mom took the pests to a summer program she was teaching. There, he and other young citizen scientists tested the ticks for the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, which causes fever and headaches and can make a person extremely tired.
21. Why did Owen go to catch ticks with his mom?
A. To provide data for professional scientists. B. To prepare for his own future research.
C. To help her study the diseases carried by ticks. D. To prevent ticks from spreading diseases.
22. What do we learn from paragraph 4?
A. Citizen science is mostly carried out at school.
B. Students only help find answers to basic questions.
C. Student scientists are more creative in scientific research.
D. Young citizen scientists help professional scientists a lot.
23. Which of the following is the best title for the text?
A. Scientists Find New Ways of Research. B. Kids Make Great Citizen Scientists.
C. Scientists Need New Ideas from Kids. D. Kids Show Great Interest in Science.
