Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
A forager bee that finds a field of mustard in flower has a problem, and it is not a problem of flying. She must tell her sisters where the field is. She must do it inside a hive that is nearly dark, on an upright wall of wax, with no map and no words.
Her answer is the waggle dance. She runs a short straight line across the comb, shaking her body from side to side, then loops back and repeats it. Two details carry the message. Straight up on the comb stands for the direction of the sun outside, so a run tilted forty degrees to the right of straight up means forty degrees to the right of the sun. The length of the run stands for distance: the farther the field, the longer the waggle. Her followers see very little in the dark, so they keep close and read the figure through their antennae. It is a remarkable piece of compression, a direction and a distance packed into a few seconds of shaking.
The Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch worked this out over years of patient experiments, and in 1973 he shared a Nobel Prize for his studies of animal behaviour. In some quarters his account was met with incredulity. A few researchers argued that the recruits simply followed the scent of flowers clinging to the dancer, and that the dance was mere excited fuss. The objection was fair, and it led to sharper tests. Decades later, scientists fitted bees with tiny radar tags and tracked their flights. The recruits flew off in the direction the dance had shown, though scent helped them over the last stretch to the flowers.
Which of the following best expresses the central idea of the passage?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → The waggle dance turns the direction and distance of food into a code, a claim that held up when it was tested.
The passage explains how the dance tells other bees where food is, and how this idea was tested.
- The angle of the run shows the direction of the food, measured from the sun. The length of the run shows the distance. So the dance works like a code, a set of signs with fixed meanings.
- Some researchers doubted it and said scent did the work. Later, radar tags showed that the recruits did fly where the dance pointed. The claim held up, which means it stayed true when tested.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: A forager’s real difficulty lies in the darkness of the hive, which she gets around by relying on touch. — Incorrect. Too narrow: The dark hive and the use of antennae are only one detail. The passage is about the whole dance and how it was tested.
Option 3: Karl von Frisch’s years of patient work on bees won him a share of the Nobel Prize in 1973. — Incorrect. Too narrow: The prize is one fact in the third paragraph. The passage is about how the dance works and how the idea was tested.
Option 4: The quarrel over scent showed that von Frisch’s account of the dance had been largely mistaken from the start. — Incorrect. Contradicted: The radar studies showed that the recruits flew in the direction the dance had shown. So von Frisch’s account was supported, not proved wrong.