2005年Text 1

Everybody loves a fat pay rise. Yet pleasure at your own can vanish if you learn that a colleague has been given a bigger one. Indeed, if he has a reputation for slacking, you might even be outraged. Such behaviour is regarded as "all too human", with the underlying assumption that other animals would not be capable of this finely developed sense of grievance. But a study by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, which has just been published in Nature, suggests that it is all too monkey, as well.

The researchers studied the behaviour of female brown capuchin monkeys, which have all the necessary ingredients to capture the public imagination. They look cute. They are good-natured, co-operative creatures, and they share their food readily. Above all, like their finicky female human counterparts, they tend to pay much closer attention to the value of "goods and services" than males (although why this is so remains a mystery).

Such characteristics make them perfect candidates for Dr Brosnan's and Dr de Waal's study. The researchers spent two years teaching their monkeys to exchange tokens for food. Normally, the monkeys were happy enough to swap pieces of rock for slices of cucumber. However, when two monkeys were placed in separate but adjoining chambers, so that each could observe what the other was getting in return for its rock, their behaviour became markedly different.

In the world of capuchins, grapes are luxury goods (and much preferable to cucumbers). So when one monkey was handed a grape in exchange for her token, the second was reluctant to hand hers over for a mere piece of cucumber. And if one received a grape without having to provide her token in exchange at all, the other either tossed her own token at the researcher or out of the chamber, or refused to accept the slice of cucumber. Indeed, the mere presence of a grape in the other chamber (in the absence of an actual monkey able to eat it) was enough to induce sullen behaviour in a female capuchin.

Dr Brosnan and Dr de Waal report that such behaviour is unusual in their trained monkeys. During two years of bartering prior to these experiments, failure to exchange tokens for food occurred in fewer than 5% of trials. And what made the behaviour even more extraordinary was that these monkeys forfeited food that they could see-and which they would have readily accepted in almost any other set of circumstances.

The researchers suggest that capuchin monkeys, like humans, are guided by social emotions. In the wild, they are a co-operative, group-living species. Such co-operation is likely to be stable only when each animal feels it is not being cheated. Feelings of righteous indignation, it seems, are not the preserve of people alone. Refusing a lesser reward completely makes these feelings abundantly clear to other members of the group. However, whether such a sense of fairness evolved independently in capuchins and humans, or whether it stems from the common ancestor that the species had 35m years ago, is, as yet, an unanswered question.

21. In the opening paragraph, the author introduces his topic by
[A] posing a contrast.
[B] justifying an assumption.
[C] making a comparison.
[D] explaining a phenomenon.

[答案] C

[解題思路]

本題要求判斷作者在行文中如何引入他的主題，對應(yīng)信息自然在文章的第一段。該段中先介紹了人們對于工資上漲不平等感到憤怒的"人之常情"，緊接著說最近研究表明這種復(fù)雜的情感也可能發(fā)生在猴子的世界中，因此是將人類與猴子進行比較，正確答案為C。A選項的錯誤在于文章并沒有將人類和猴子進行對比，這從"all too human"、"all too monkey"兩個詞組中可以反映出來，同時從下文看來文章的重點都在描述猴子的感情特征，而人類的例子僅僅用于引出話題。注意，"comparison"的意思是"比較"，"contrast"的意思是"對比"。B選項的錯誤在于作者在第一段中提到的所謂"assumption"恰恰是與主題相反。而D選項的錯誤在于作者的意圖并不在于介紹人類義憤這種感情現(xiàn)象。

[題目譯文]

在開頭段中，作者通過怎樣的方法引入他的話題？
[A] 提出對比
[B] 證明一個假設(shè)
[C] 進行比較
[D] 解釋一種現(xiàn)象