2. 职称英语
  3. Lately social scientists have begun to ask if culture is found just in humans

Lately social scientists have begun to ask if culture is found just in humans

游客2025-01-02  29
问题    Lately social scientists have begun to ask if culture is found just in humans, or if some animals have a culture too. When we speak of culture, we mean a way of life a group of people have in common.  Culture includes the beliefs and attitudes we learn.  It is the patterns of behaviour that help people to live together. It is also the patterns of behaviour that make one group of people different from another group.
   Our culture Lets us make up for having lost our strength, claws, long teeth, and other defenses. Instead, we use tools, cooperate with one another, and communicate with language. But these aspects of human behaviour, or "culture", can also be found in the lives of certain animals. Animals Can Make Tools
   We used to think that the ability to use tools was the dividing line between human beings and other animals. Lately, however, we have found that this is not the case. Chimpanzees can not only use tools but actually make tools themselves. This is a major step up from simply picking up a handy object and using it. For example, chimps have been seen stripping the leaves and twigs off a branch, then putting it into a termite nest. When the termites bite at the stick, the chimp removes it and eats them off the end--not unlike our use of a fork!
   Animals Can Share Knowledge
   For some time we thought that although human beings learned their culture, animals could not be taught such behaviour. Or even if they could learn, they would not teach one another in the way people do. This too has proven to be untrue. A group of Japanese monkeys was studied at the Kyoto University Monkey Centre in Japan. They were given sweet potatoes by scientists who wanted to attract them to the shore of an island. One day a young female began to wash her sweet potato to get rid of the sand. This practice soon spread throughout the group. It became learned behaviour, not from humans but from other monkeys. Now almost all monkeys who have not come into contact with this group do not. Thus we have a "cultural" difference among animals. Animals Can Communicate With Language
   Even the use of language can no longer separate human culture from animal culture. Attempts to teach apes to speak have failed. However, this is because apes do not have the proper vocal organs. But teaching them language has been very successful if we are willing to accept other forms than just the spoken word. Two psychologists trained a chimpanzee named Washoe to use Standard American Sign Language. This is the same language used by deaf people. In this language, "talk" is made through gestures, and not by spelling out words with individual letter. By the time she was five years old, Washoe had a vocabulary of 130 signs. Also, she could put them together in new ways that had not been taught her originally. This means she could create language and not just mimic it. She creates her own sentences that have real meaning. This has allowed two way talk. it permits more than one-way command and response.
    Of course, there are limits to the culture of animals. As far as we know, no ape has formed social institutions such as religion, law, or economics. Also, some chimps may be able to learn sign language; but this form of language is limited in its ability to communicate abstract ideas. Yet with a spoken language we fan communicate our entire culture to anyone else who knows that language. Perhaps the most important thing we have learned from studies of other animals is that the line dividing us from them is not as clear as we used to think. [br] Which of the following statements best expresses the main idea of the passage?
选项 A、A chimpanzee can learn to use sign language to make sentences.
B、Other animals can invent tools.
C、Sharing and cooperating are no longer signs of only human behaviour.
D、The line dividing human culture from animal culture is not as clear as we might think.
答案 D
解析 本文主要讨论人和其他动物的区别。文中利用研究实例，谈到大猩猩可用手语交流，某些动物会发明工具，还能学会分享与合作，但这些都是个别的观点，真正统领全文的还是最后那句话；我们从这些动物研究中学到的最重要的一点可能是，人与其他动物的分界线不是我们想象的那么清晰。
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