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  3. When George Price died in January 1975, his funeral in London was attended by five homeless men: untidy, smelly and cold. Alongs

When George Price died in January 1975, his funeral in London was attended by five homeless men: untidy, smelly and cold. Alongs

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问题     When George Price died in January 1975, his funeral in London was attended by five homeless men: untidy, smelly and cold. Alongside them were Bill Hamilton and John Maynard Smith, both distinguished British evolutionary biologists. All seven men had come to mourn an American scientist who helped to unpick the riddle of why people should ever be kind to one another, who had chosen to give away his clothes, his possessions and his home, and who, when his generosity was exhausted, slashed his own throat with a pair of scissors, aged 52.
    Ever since Charles Darwin had published his theory of evolution in 1859, scientists have pondered whether it can explain the existence of altruism: behavior that decreases an individual’s fitness but which increases the average fitness of the group to which he belongs. Such kindness is not unique to humans but exists also in complex insect societies. Bees, for example, live in colonies headed by a queen and populated by sterile workers. One reading of Darwin’s theory says that, because the workers do not breed, evolution should result in their elimination. Yet this is not what happens in nature.
    In the 1960s, Hamilton proposed that evolution acts on characteristics that favor the survival of close relatives of a certain individual. The bee colonies that survive are those in which sterile workers provide the "fittest" service to their mother. Each worker thus strives to favor the reproductive success of the queen, even at the price of her own reproductive failure.
    Price wanted to describe mathematically how a genetic predisposition to altruism could evolve. He devised a formula, now called the Price equation, that describes how characteristics that can, in some cases, prove disadvantageous, nevertheless persist in the population By slightly changing the variables, he was able to describe populations in which kindness was widespread, everyone benefited and altruism was passed down the generations, and other, more brutal worlds, where charity was abused and kindness died out.
    Ultimately, Price ended up in such a place. In 1967 he moved to London, where he hooked up with Hamilton and derived the equation for which he is famed. At the same time, his interest in altruism blossomed into something less kin-based and more practical: he began to seek out needy strangers. At one stage, he had four homeless men staying in his flat, while he slept in his office. As he became increasingly unwell, both physically and mentally, he redoubled his efforts to help the poor, moving into a dirty cabin where, one freezing night, he committed suicide. Price ultimately became one of the homeless he had set out to save.
It can be inferred that Price’s motivation to help strangers is_____.
选项 A、selfless personality
B、enthusiastic pursuit of science
C、devotion to charity and donation
D、interest in his field of study
答案D
解析 根据出题顺序的原则定位到最后一段。根据题干的help strangers定位到③句“他对利他主义的兴趣延伸到了更没什么血缘关系的人，……他开始寻找需要帮助的陌生人”，这一想法是源自于他对利他主义的兴趣，D项与文意相符。
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