2. 职称英语
  3. Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for ev

Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for ev

游客2023-10-31  65
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 percent 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 fill’s 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 something 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. [br] 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 判断推理题。在第三段作者指出：对于我们，这意味着进化已经结束；生物的理想社会已经到来。奇怪的是，人类在身体方面几乎没有什么进化。没有哪个种群像人类这样遍布自然界各个角落，但在过去10万年——甚至过去100年，我们的生活改变了，但身体并无变化。我们没有进化，其原因是机器和社会为我们完成了进化。故选A。
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