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 balan

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

admin2011-05-16  112
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 some-thing 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.
The author argues that our bodies have stopped evolving because
选项 A、life has been improved by technological advance.
B、the number of female babies has been declining.
C、our species has reached the highest stage of evolution.
D、the difference between wealth and poverty is disappearing.
答案A
解析 在第三段第五句中作者写道：我们不再进化。这是因为机器和社会代替我们进化了。换言之，机器的使用、社会的进步使我们的生活发生了变化，即A技术的进步提高了生活质量。文章称这种现象为“进化方面的自杀”，故应否定。C我们的物种已进化到了最高阶段，B女婴数量一直呈下降趋势和D贫富差距正在消失文中并未提及。
转载请注明原文地址:https://www.kaotiyun.com/show/ixxd777K
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)