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  3. It is hard to box against a southpaw, as Apollo Creed found out when he fought Rocky Balboa in the first of an interminable seri

It is hard to box against a southpaw, as Apollo Creed found out when he fought Rocky Balboa in the first of an interminable seri

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问题     It is hard to box against a southpaw, as Apollo Creed found out when he fought Rocky Balboa in the first of an interminable series of movies. While "Rocky" is fiction, the strategic advantage of being left-handed in a fight is very real, simply because most right-handed people have little experience of fighting left-handers, but not vice versa.
    The orthodox view of human handedness is that it is connected to the bilateral specialization of the brain that has concentrated language-processing functions on the left side of that organ. Because long ago in the evolutionary past, an ancestor of humans underwent a contortion that twisted its head around 180 relative to its body, the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and vice versa. In humans, the left brain is usually dominant. And on average, left-handers are smaller and lighter than right-handers. That should put them at an evolutionary disadvantage. Sporting advantage notwithstanding, therefore, the existence of left-handedness poses a problem for biologists. But Charlotte Faurie thinks he knows the answer.
    As any schoolboy could tell you, winning fights enhances your status. If, in prehistory, this translated into increased reproductive success, it might have been enough to maintain a certain proportion of left-handers in the population, by balancing the costs of being left-handed with the advantages gained in fighting. If that is true, then there will be a higher proportion of left-handers in societies with higher levels of violence, since the advantages of being left-handed will be enhanced in such societies. Dr. Faurie sets out to test this hypothesis. Fighting in modern societies often involves the use of technology, notably firearms, that is unlikely to give any advantage to left-handers. So Dr. Faurie decided to confine his investigation to the proportion of left-handers and the level of violence in traditional societies.
    By trawling the literature, checking with police departments, and even going out into the field and asking people, Dr. Faurie found that the proportion of left-handers in a traditional society is, indeed, correlated with its homicide rate. One of the highest proportions of left-handers, for example, was found among the Yanomamo of South America. Raiding and warfare are central to Yanomamo culture. The murder rate is 4 per 1,000 inhabitants per year. And, according to Dr. Faurie, 22. 6% of Yanomamo are left-handed. In contrast, Dioula-speaking people of Burkina Faso in West Africa are virtual pacifists. There are only 0.013 murders per 1 ,000 inhabitants among them and only 3.4% of the population is left-handed.
    While there is no suggestion that left-handed people are more violent than the right-handed, it looks as though they are more successfully violent. Perhaps that helps to explain the double meaning of the word "sinister".
Paragraph 4 is used to______.
选项 A、illustrate the relationship between left-handers and violence
B、indicate causes for high criminal rate in traditional society
C、compare murder rates in different tribal regions
D、prove left-handers’ inclination to commit crimes
答案A
解析 局部主题题(例证题)。前面两段提到了左撇子在打斗中有优势的问题，第三段提出了一个假设，而弗瑞尔博士开始证明这种假设，第四段具体介绍了研究的发现——在传统社会，左撇子所占的比率确实与凶杀率有关系，随后利用具体数据说明了这个问题。这说明，第四段是用来说明左撇子与暴力之间的关系的。A符合题意，为正确选项。第四段并没有分析传统社会高犯罪率的原因，所以B与文意不符；C只是第四段列举的数据，不能表达第四段的用意；D明显与最后一段第一句话的意思不符。
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