课文
Why, you may wonder, should spiders be our friends?
你可能会觉得奇怪， 蜘蛛怎么会是我们的朋友呢？
Because they destroy so many insects, and insects include some of the greatest enemies
of the human race.
因为它们能消灭那么多的昆虫，其中包括一些人类的大敌。
Insects would make it impossible for us to live in the world; they would devour all our
crops and kill our flocks and herds, if it were not for the protection we get from insect-
eating animals.
昆虫就会使我们无法在地球上生活下去，昆虫会吞食我们的全部庄稼，杀死我们的成群的
牛羊，要不是人类受一些食虫动物的保护，
We owe a lot to the birds and beasts who eat insects but all of them put together kill
only a fraction of the number destroyed by spiders.
我们要十分感谢那些吃昆虫的鸟和兽，然而把它们所杀死的昆虫全部加在一起也只相当于
蜘蛛所消灭的一小部分。
Moreover, unlike some of the other insect eaters, spiders never do the least harm to us
or our belongings.
此外，蜘蛛不同于其他食虫动物，它们丝毫不危害我们和我们的财物。
Spiders are not insects, as many people think, nor even nearly related to them.
许多人认为蜘蛛是昆虫，但它们不是昆虫，甚至与昆虫毫无关系。
One can tell the difference almost at a glance, for a spider always has eight legs and an
insect never more than six.
人们几乎一眼就能看出二者的差异，因为蜘蛛都是 8 条腿，而昆虫的腿从不超过 6 条。
How many spiders are engaged in this work on our behalf?
有多少蜘蛛在为我们效力呢？
One authority on spiders made a census of the spiders in a grass field in the south of
England, and he estimated that there were more than 2,250,000 in one acre; that is
something like 6 million spiders of different kinds on a football pitch.
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