Kış Uykusu — A2–B1 İngilizce Okuma Parçası

Some animals do not try to live through the cold months. They stop.

When the days grow short, a bear eats as much as it can. Then it finds a good place, lies down, and lets its body slow almost to a stop. Its heart may beat only a few times a minute. Its body grows almost as cold as the ground around it. This is not sleep, although it looks like sleep. In sleep the brain is still working. Here almost everything is turned down.

The reason is food, not cold. An animal that can find food in the cold months has no need to stop. Some animals fly south; others can still hunt. But an animal that lives on plants or insects has a problem: for four or five months there is nothing to eat. Staying awake would cost more energy than it could find.

So it does the only other thing it can. It carries the food with it, inside its own body, as fat. A small ground animal may reach twice its weight before the cold comes and lose all of it by the time the grass returns.

There is a price. While the animal is down, it cannot run away and it cannot look for water. It also cannot fight disease well, because the body’s own guard is slowed down like everything else. Many animals never wake up.

And they do wake, several times, in the middle of the cold months. For a few hours the body warms, the animal moves a little, and then it goes down again. No one is sure why. One idea is that the long cold does something to the brain that only normal sleep can repair, so the animal must warm up in order to sleep, and then stop again.

The Long Stop — Kış Uykusu

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