2021年3月8日雅思阅读机经

Any pet owner would disagree. We see the love in our dogs’ eyes and know  that, of course, Spot  has thoughts and emotions. But such claims remain  highly controversial. Gut instinct  is not science, and it  is all too easy to project human thoughts and feelings onto another creature. How,then, does a scientist prove that an animal is capable of thinking—that it is able to acquire information about the world and act on it?

“That’s why I started my studies with Alex,” Pepperberg said. They were seated—she at her desk,  he  on  top  of his cage—in  her lab,  a windowless  room  about  the  size of a  boxcar,  at Brandeis  University.

Newspapers lined  the floor;  baskets of bright  toys were stacked on the shelves. They were clearly a team—and because of their work, the notion that animals can think is no longer so fanciful.

Certain  skills are  considered   key  signs of higher mental  abilities:  good memory,   a grasp  of  grammar and symbols,   self-awareness, understanding others’ motives, imitating others, and being creative. Bit by  bit,  in  ingenious  experiments,  researchers have documented these talents  in  other species,  gradually  chipping  away at what we thought made human beings distinctive  while  offering  a glimpse  of where our own abilities came from. Scrub jays know  that other jays are thieves and that stashed food can spoil; sheep can recognize faces; chimpanzees use a variety of tools to probe termite mounds and even use weapons to hunt *all  mammals;  dolphins  can imitate  human postures;  the archerfish, which stuns insects with a sudden blast of water, can learn how to aim its squirt simply  by watching an experienced fish perform the task. And  Alex the parrot turned out to be a surprisingly good talker.

Thirty  years after  the Alex  studies  began, Pepperberg and a changing collection of assistants  were still giving him English lessons. The humans, along with two younger parrots, also served as Alex’s flock, providing the social input all parrots  crave. Like any flock, this one—as  *all as it was—had its  share of drama.  Alex  dominated  his fellow   parrots, acted huffy at times around Pepperberg,  tolerated the other female  humans, and fell to pieces over a male assistant who dropped by for a visit. (“If you were a man,” Pepperberg said, after noting Alex’s aloofness toward me, “he’d be on your shoulder in a second, barfing cashews in your ear.”)