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B Chimps(黑猩猩) will cooperate in certain ways, like gathering in war parties to protect their territory. But beyond the minimum requirements as social beings, they have little instinct (本能) to help one another. Chimps in the wild seek food for themselves. Even chimp mothers regularly decline to share food with their children. Who are able from a young age to gather their own food. In the laboratory, chimps don’t naturally share food either. If a chimp is put in a cage where he can pull in one plate of food for himself or, with no great effort, a plate that also provides food for a neighbor to the next cage, he will pull at random ---he just doesn’t care whether his neighbor gets fed or not. Chimps are truly selfish. Human children, on the other hand are extremely corporative. From the earliest ages, they decide to help others, to share information and to participate a achieving common goals. The psychologist Michael Tomasello has studied this cooperativeness in a series of expensive with very young children. He finds that if babies aged 18 months see an worried adult with hands full trying to open a door, almost all will immediately try to help. There are several reasons to believe that the urges to help, inform and share are not taught .but naturally possessed in young children. One is that these instincts appear at a very young age before most parents have started to train children to behave socially. Another is that the helping behaviors are not improved if the children are rewarded. A third reason is that social intelligence. Develops in children before their general cognitive（认知的）skills, at least when compared with chimps..In tests conducted by Tomtasell, the children did no better than the chimps on the physical world tests, but were considerably better at understanding the social world The cure of what children’s minds have and chimps’ don’t in what Tomasello calls what. Part of this ability is that they can infer what others know or are thinking. But that, even very young children want to be part of a shared purpose. They actively seek to be part of a “we”, a group that intends to work toward a shared goal. 58. What can we learn from the experiment with chimps? A. Chimps seldom care about others’ interests. B. Chimps tend to provide food for their children. C. Chimps like to take in their neighbors’ food. D. Chimps naturally share food with each other. 59. Michael Tomasello’s tests on young children indicate that they____. A. have the instinct to help others B. know how to offer help to adults C. know the world better than chimps D. trust adults with their hands full 60. The passage is mainly about ____. A. the helping behaviors of young children B. ways to train children’s shared intentionality C. cooperation as a distinctive human nature D. the development of intelligence in children C El Nifio, a Spanish term for “the Christ child”, was named by South American fisherman sho noticed that the global weather pattern, which happens every two to seven years, reduced the amount of fishes caught around Christmas. El Nifio sees warm water, collected over several years in the western Pacific, flow back eastwards when winds that normally blow westwards weaken, or sometimes the other way round. The weather effects both good and bad, are felt in many places. Rich countries gain more from powerful Nifio, on balance, than they lose. A study found that a strong Nifio in **97 helped American’s economy grow by 15 billion, partly because of better agricultural harvest, farmers in the Midwest gained from extra rain. The total rise in agricultural in rich countries in growth than the fall in poor ones. But in Indonesia extremely dry forests are in flames. A multi-year drought (干旱）in south-east Brazil is becoming worse. Though heavy rains brought about by El Nino may relieve the drought in California, they are likely to cause surface flooding and other disasters. The most recent powerful Nino, in **97-98, killed around 21,000 people and caused damage worth $36 billion around the globe. But such Ninos come with months of warning, and so much is known about how they happen that governments can prepare. According to the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), however, just 12% of disaster-relief funding in the past two decades has gone on reducing risks in advance, rather than recovery and rebuilding afterwards. This is despite evidence that a dollar spent on risk-reduction saves at least two on reconstruction. Simple improvements to infrastructure (基础设施）can reduce the spread of disease. Better sewers (下水道）make it less likely that heavy rain is followed by an outbreak of the disease of bad stomach. Stronger bridges mean villages are less likely to be left without food and medicine after floods. According to a paper in **11 by Mr Hsiang and co-authors, civil conflict is related to El Nino’s harmful effects—and the poorer the country, the stronger the link. Though the relationship may not be causal, helping divided communities to prepare for disasters would at least reduce the risk that those disasters are followed by killing and wounding people. Since the poorest are least likely to make up for their losses from disasters linked to El Nino, reducing their losses needs to be the priority. 61. What can we learn about El Nino in Paragraph 1? A. It is named after a South American fisherman. B. It takes place almost every year all over the world. C. It forces fishermen to stop catching fish around Christmas. D. It sees the changes of water flow direction in the ocean. 62. What may El Ninos bring about to the countries affected? A. Agricultural harvests in rich countries fall. B. Droughts become more harmful than floods. C. Rich countries’ gains are greater than their losses. D. Poor countries suffer less from droughts economically.(责任编辑：haoxuee) 学友请微信搜索好学网，或加公众号 haoxueecom 获取更多学习资讯！ |
