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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. They look cute. They are good-natured, co-operative creatures, and they share their food readily. Above all, like their female human counterparts, they tend to pay much closer attention to the value of "goods and services" than males.
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 exchange 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 (without an actual monkey to eat it) was enough to induce resentment in a female capuchin.
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 ndignation, 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 35 million years ago, is, as yet, an unanswered question.
单选题
In the opening paragraph, the author introduces his topic by
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】在开头的一段,作者说,人人都爱涨工资,但看到同事比你涨得多,尤其是他工作懒散 Part
单选题
The statement "it is all too monkey" (Last line, Paragraph 1 ) implies that
【正确答案】
B
【答案解析】文章开头提到人人都爱涨工资,但看到同事比你涨得多,尤其是他有工作懒散的恶名 时,你会感到愤怒。接下来说,这样的行为被认为是“all too human”(在人身上是太 常见了),因此“it is all too monkey”是套用前句而来的,意思是“在猿猴身上太常见 了”。而这种行为与人类相似,这种行为就是“对不公正待遇表示愤怒”,所以B.“对 不公正待遇表示愤怒也是猿猴的特性”是正确的。A.是“猿猴也会被懒惰的竞争对 手所激怒”;C.是“像人一样,猿猴也会相互嫉妒”;D.是“除了猿猴外,别的动物没 有这种感情”。
单选题
Female capuchin monkeys were chosen for the research most probably because they are
【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】A.是“更趋向于估量它们所得到的东西”。可以从第二段第四句中找到答案:Above all,like their female human counterparts,they tend[O pay much closer attention to the value of“goods and services”than males.说明它们对它们得到的东西是非常关注的。 B.是“对研究人员的指令很专心听”;C.是“在外貌和性格方面都很好”;n是“比公 猿猴更大方”。
单选题
Dr. Brosnan and Dr. de Waal have eventually found in their study that the monkeys