单选题
Science is finally beginning to embrace animals who were, for a long time, considered second-class citizens.
As Annie Potts of Canterbury University has noted, chickens distinguish among one hundred chicken faces and recognize familiar individuals even after months of separation. When given problems to solve, they reason: hens trained to pick colored buttons sometimes choose to give up an immediate (lesser) food reward for a slightly later (and better) one. Healthy hens may aid friends, and mourn when those friends die.
Pigs respond meaningfully to human symbols. When a research team led by Candace Croney at Penn State University carried wooden blocks marked with X and O symbols around pigs, only the O carriers offered food to the animals. The pigs soon ignored the X carriers in favor of the O"s. Then the team switched from real-life objects to T-shirts printed with X or O symbols. Still, the pigs ventured only toward the O-shirted people: they had transferred their knowledge to a two-dimensional format,
a not-inconsiderable feat
of reasoning.
Fairly soon, I came to see that along with our closest living relatives, cetaceans (鲸目动物) too are masters of cultural learning, and elephants express profound joy and mourning with their social companions. Long-term studies in the wild on these mammals helped to fuel a perspective shift in our society: the public no longer so easily accepts monkeys made to undergo painful procedures in laboratories, elephants forced to perform in circuses, and dolphins kept in small tanks at theme parks.
Over time, though, as I began to broaden out even further and explore the inner lives of fish, chicken, pigs, goats, and cows, I started to wonder: Will the new science of "food animals" bring an ethical revolution in terms of who we eat? In other words, will the breadth of our ethics start to catch up with the breadth of our science?
Animal activists are already there, of course, committed to not eating these animals. But what about the rest of us? Can paying attention to the thinking and feeling of these animals lead us to make changes in who we eat?
单选题
According to Annie Potts, hens" choice of a later and better reward indicates their ability of ______.
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】[解析] 第二段第二句“When given problems to solve, they reason: ...”。
细节题。题目问的是根据安妮·波茨,母鸡选择稍后更好的奖励表明它们具有什么能力?第二段第二句“当被要求解决问题时,它们会进行推理”,说明母鸡具有逻辑推理的能力。故选C。
单选题
The expression "not-inconsiderable feat" (Para. 3) shows what pigs can do is ______.
【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】[解析] 第三段最后一句“...a not-inconsiderable feat of reasoning. ”。
词汇题。题目问的是第三段中的“not-inconsiderable feat,”表明猪能做的这些事是怎样的?feat在这里是“成就”的意思,inconsiderable“不足取的,不值得考虑的”,前面加上否定词not,意思就变成了“相当大的,重要的”。A项“非凡的”;B项“奇怪的”;C项“独特的”;D项“可理解的”。A项意思最接近,故选A。