問題詳情

Question 20-30Some animal behaviorists argue that certain animals can remember past events,anticipate future ones, make plans and choices, and coordinate activities within agroup. These scientists, however, are cautious about the extent to which animals canbe credited with conscious processing.(5) Explanations of animal behavior that leave out any sort of consciousness at alland ascribe actions entirely to instinct leave many questions unanswered. Oneexample of such unexplained behavior: Honeybees communicate the sources ofnectar to one another by doing a dance in a figure-eight pattern. The orientation ofthe dance conveys the position of the food relative to the sun's position in the sky,(10)and the speed of the dance tells how far the food source is from the hive. Mostresearchers assume that the ability to perform and encode the dance is innate andshows no special intelligence. But in one study, when experimenters kept changingthe site of the food source, each time moving the food 25 percent farther from theprevious site, foraging honeybees began to anticipate where the food source would(15) appear next. When the researchers arrived at the new location, they would find thebees circling the spot, waiting for their food. No one has yet explained how bees,whose brains weigh four ten-thousandths of an ounce, could have inferred thelocation of the new site.Other behaviors that may indicate some cognition include tool use. Many(20)animals, like the otter who uses a stone to crack mussel shells, are capable of usingobjects in the natural environment as rudimentary tools. One researcher has foundthat mother chimpanzees occasionally show their young how to use tools to openhard nuts. In one study, chimpanzees compared two pairs of food wells containingchocolate chips. One pair might contain, say, five chips and three chips, the other(25)our chips and three chips. Allowed to choose which pair they wanted, thechimpanzees almost always chose the one with the higher total, showing some sortof summing ability. Other chimpanzees have learned to use numerals to labelquantities of items and do simple sums.
20. What does the passage mainly discuss?
(A) The role of instinct in animal behavior
(B) Observations that suggest consciousness in animal behavior
(C) The use of food in studies of animal behavior
(D) Differences between the behavior of animals in their natural environments and in laboratory experiments.

參考答案

答案：B
難度：適中0.5
統計：A(0),B(1),C(1),D(0),E(0)

內容推薦

內容推薦