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Science is finally beginning to embrace animals who were, for a long time, considered second-class citizens. As Annie Potts

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问题     Science is finally beginning to embrace animals who were, for a long time, considered second-class citizens.
    As Annie Potts of Canterbury University has noted, chickens distinguish among one hundred chicken faces and recognize familiar individuals even after months of separations. When given problems to solve, they reason: hens trained to pick colored buttons sometimes choose to give up an immediate(lesser)food reward for a slightly later(and better)one. Healthy hens may aid friends, and mourn when those friends die.
    Pigs respond meaningfully to human symbols. When a research team led by Candace Croney at Penn State University carried wooden blocks marked with X and O symbols around pigs, only the O carriers offered food to the animals. The pigs soon ignores the X carriers in favor of the O’s. Then the team switched from real-life objects to a T-shirts printed with X or O symbols. Still, the pigs ventured only toward the O-shirted people: they had transferred their knowledge to a two-dimensional format, a not-inconsiderable feat of reasoning.
    Fairly soon, I came to see that along with our closest living relatives, cetaceans(鲸目动物)too are masters of cultural learning, and elephants express profound joy and mourning with their social companions. Long-term studies in the wild on these mammals helped to fuel a perspective shift in our society: the public no longer so easily accepts monkeys made to undergo painful procedures in laboratories, elephants forced to perform in circuses, and dolphins kept in small tanks at theme parks.
    Over time, though, as I began to broaden out even further and explore the inner lives of fish, chicken, pigs, goats, and cows, I started to wonder: Will the new science of "food animals" bring an ethical revolution in terms of who we eat? In other words, will the breadth of our ethic start to catch up with the breadth of our science?
    Animals activists are already there, of course, committed to not eating these animals. But what about the rest of us? Can paying attention to the thinking and feeling of these animals lead us to make change in who we eat?
The expression "not-inconsiderable feat"(Para. 3)shows what pig can do is________.
选项 A、extraordinary
B、weird
C、unique
D、understandable
答案A
解析 词义理解题。文章第三段引用坎迪斯.克洛尼的实验来证明猪的思维转换能力。根 据题干中的主题词定位于第三段最后一句。这句话中提到：“猪可以将他们的知识转化 为一个二维格式，这是一种______的推理能力。由于之前缺乏对动物的研究，科学家 转向动物研究之后，发现猪的这种推理能力使人们感到惊讶，并认为是不容忽视的。” 由此推出not—inconsiderable feat的含义是“不容小觑的非凡的技能”。A．extraordinary “非凡的，特别的”，与题干主题词意义接近，所以为正确选项。B．weird“奇怪的，怪 诞的”；C．unique“唯一的，独特的，特有的”；D．understandable“能懂的，可理解 的”。这三个选项均不符合文意。
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