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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".
Dr. Faurie takes traditional societies as the subject of investigation because in them______.
选项 A、high rate of crimes of violence is documented
B、the proportion of left-handers is relatively high
C、left-handers’ advantage is given full play
D、left-handers are much more violent than right-handers
答案C
解析 细节题。题干中的“Dr．Faurie”出自文章第_二段。第三段首先提到了一个假设，接着指出，弗瑞尔博士开始证明这种假设，随后解释说，现代社会的打斗通常涉及技术的应用，这就不可能使左撇子获得任何优势，所以弗瑞尔博士决定把他的研究限定于传统社会。这说明，原因是：在传统社会，左撇子在打斗中有战略优势。C符合题意，为正确选项。文中没有比较传统社会和现代社会的犯罪率哪一个更高，所以A与文意不符；B属于not given类型；D与最后一段第一句话的意思不符，并且与题目的要求不符。
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