【正确答案】
D
【答案解析】[听力原文] Well, it looks like everybody's here. Some of you are Sociology majors, I know, and others of you are in the Biology Department, so I think the first thing I should do is give you all an idea of what sociobiology is all about. It's a relatively new field. The word 'sociobiology' didn't even exist until 1946, and it wasn't really noticed until after 1975, when the great zoologist Edward O. Wilson, who studies insects, discussed it in his book. It was after this book was published that sociobiology really exploded into an exciting new field of research. What is it that Dr. Wilson writes in his book? Well, briefly, Wilson wanted to use the theories of biological evolution and natural selection—you know, Darwin's theories—and apply them to explain the development of social behaviors Wilson's research was mostly on ants, and he was interested in the reasons for their complex social behaviours, like division of labor, like mating and parenting—and he was especially interested in the idea of altruistic behaviour, of altruism. Now, you should already know that word. 'Altruism' is the act of helping someone else when the action does not seem to help you yourself. Now, ants—what we call the 'social insects'—are perfect altruists. Almost all the members of their colonies are female workers who never get a chance to reproduce. Instead, they spend their lives defending and taking care of the nest and their queen and the queen's offspring. It's only the queen who gets to pass along her genes to the next generation. Wilson wondered why this was, why such a system would evolve, why an organism would give up its own genes to accept another's. He knew that there must be some advantage to this, so he set out to discover what that advantage might be. I'm sure you all know the old riddle about 'what came first, the chicken or the egg?'—and also the slightly humorous idea that 'a chicken is just an egg's way of producing another egg'. Well, that's essentially what the basis of Wilson's theory is—that an organism is just a gene's way of producing another gene. Dr. Wilson thought that the genes of all the members of an ant colony are so similar that a worker ant is really taking care of its own genes when it takes care of the queen's offspring. And if such a colony is more successful, if it has a better chance of surviving, because of this specialization of labor—because the workers specialize in working and the queen specializes in laying eggs—then evolution will support this altruistic behaviour. Which fact is true of Edward O. Wilson? 本段录音三道题选项中重复出现的evolution，sociobiology，behaviour和insects提示，录音很可能与生物社会学中的某种进化行为有关，可能涉及的主题是昆虫的行为等。 选项均为描述he的句子，结合其中的wrote，coined the word，won和research表明，本题可能考查有关he的事实细节，可能涉及he所取得的成就或研究的方向等。录音一开始提到，动物学家爱德华·威尔逊是研究昆虫的，并在他的书中探讨了“生物社会学”的概念，整篇演讲中并未提及该书名或者其是否获得诺贝尔奖，故答案为D。