2. 外语
  3. Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balanc

Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balanc

admin2016-11-17  66
问题     Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity, and among 70-year-olds there are twice as many women as men. But the great universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, boy babies survive almost as well as girls do. This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate. More important, another chance for natural selection has been removed. Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby (particularly a boy baby) surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death. Today it makes almost no difference. Since much of the variation is due to genes, one more agent of evolution has gone.
    There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Except in some religious communities, very few women have 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring. Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished. India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand mediocrity of today—everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring—means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to the tribes.
    For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical change. No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the past 100,000 years—even the past 100 years—our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution: they "look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension". No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.
What does the example of India illustrate?
选项 A、Wealthy people tend to have fewer children than poor people.
B、Natural selection hardly works among the rich and the poor.
C、The middle class population is 80% smaller than that of the tribes.
D、India is one of the countries with a very high birth rate.
答案B
解析 本文第二段最后两句话表示这个国家给大城市的一部分人提供了财富，而其余的部落民族却一贫如洗。今天众多的普通人，每个人在存活子女的数量方面都一样，这意味着：与部落相比，自然选择在印度的中上阶层已失去了80％的效应。这与B中的“自然选择在富人与穷人中已很难起作用”的意思相吻合，故应选B。A富人生的孩子没有穷人生得多，与上面的表述相矛盾。C中等阶层的人口比部落人口少80％和D印度是个高出生率的国家，文中都未提及。
转载请注明原文地址:https://www.kaotiyun.com/show/Q8Rd777K
本试题收录于： 公共英语四级笔试题库公共英语（PETS）分类
0

公共英语四级笔试

公共英语（PETS）

相关试题推荐
随机试题
最新回复(0)