Did you ever wonder why your favorite foods taste so good? Well, you should thank your taste buds（味蕾）for letting you enjoy the saltiness and the sweetness.
Taste buds are sensory organs（感觉器官）that are found on your tongue and allow you to experience tastes that are sweet, salty, sour and bitter. The average person has about 10,000 taste buds and they’re replaced（替换）every 2 weeks or so. But as a person grows older, some of those taste buds don’t get replaced. An older person may only have 5,000 working taste buds. That’s why certain foods may have a stronger taste for children than they do for adults. Smoking can also reduce the number of taste buds a person has.
But before you give taste buds all the thanks for your favorite flavors（滋味）, it’s important to thank your nose too. The upper part of your nose can receive the chemicals that make your brain create the sensation（感觉）of flavor. So when you have a cold, and your nose is stuffy, you might notice that your food doesn’t seem to have much flavor. If you hold your nose while eating, your taste buds are able to tell your brain something about what you’re eating—that it’s sweet, for instance—but you won’t be able to pick out the exact flavor until you let go of your nose.
So the next time you enjoy an apple or some soup, thank your tongue and your nose! Without them, life wouldn’t have any flavors.
【小题1】How many working taste buds may an old man have?
| A．10,000. | B．5,000. | C．2,000. | D．8,000. |
【小题2】What does the word “reduce” mean in Chinese?
【小题3】What can we learn from the passage?
| A．Taste buds will not work when they hold their noses. |
| B．Adults can enjoy some foods more easily. |
| C．A person can' t smell things that are sweet or bitter. |
| D．Food has a stronger taste for children than for adults. |
【小题4】What will happen if you catch a bad cold?
| A．You can’t taste anything at all. |
| B．Things will taste the same. |
| C．You won’t be able to tell the exact flavor. |
| D．Your brain will create a stronger flavor. |
【小题5】What does the second paragraph mainly tell us?
| A．How to enjoy delicious food. |
| B．What are taste buds. |
| C．How do taste buds work. |
| D．We should thank our noses. |
