考研英語閱讀理解命題思路透析和真題揭秘(27)

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.

22. The statement "it is all too monkey" (Last line, Paragraph 1) implies that
[A] monkeys are also outraged by slack rivals.
[B] resenting unfairness is also monkeys' nature.
[C] monkeys, like humans, tend to be jealous of each other.
[D] no animals other than monkeys can develop such emotions.

[答案] B

[解題思路]

　　本題可以采用排除法。首先可以排除D選項，因為該選項的觀點在文章中并沒有提及。C選項談到的"嫉妒"觀點也與本文無關。A、B選項的意思看上去都符合文章的內容，其中A選項是具有很強干擾性的錯誤選項，因為相比之下B選項的表述更加精確和有概括性，因為作者描述人類和動物對于懶散對手的憤怒情感都是為了說明猴子也具有像人類一樣對于不公平現象不滿的本性。

[題目譯文]

"it is all too monkey"（第一段最后一行）這句話暗示          。
[A] 猴子也會對懶散的對手感到很憤怒
[B] 反對不公也是猴子的本性
[C] 猴子就像人類一樣會互相嫉妒
[D] 除了猴子以外，沒有其他動物能產生這種情感