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  3. Whether or not animals feel is not altogether an easy question to answer.

Whether or not animals feel is not altogether an easy question to answer.

游客2023-11-21  61
问题       Whether or not animals feel is not altogether an easy question to answer. A human being has direct awareness only of the pains which he himself suffers. Our knowledge of the pains even of other beings is only an inference from their words, and to a lesser extent their behaviour. Animals cannot tell us what they feel. We can, of course, study their bodily reactions to the kind of stimuli which would be painful to human beings and this has often been done. When such stimuli are applied to animals their pupils dilate, their pulse rate and blood pressure rise, they may withdraw the stimulated limb and they may make struggling movements. Nevertheless it has been pointed out that none of these reactions can safely be taken as indication that the animal experiences pain because they can all be evoked when the parts of the body stimulated have been isolated from the higher nervous centres. Furthermore, when disease produces such an isolation in human beings the corresponding stimuli are painless. We must therefore look for other evidence as to the capacity of animals to experience pain.
      Basically, all the nervous elements which underlie the experience of pain by human beings are to be found in all mammalian vertebrates at least; this is hardly surprising as pain is a response to a potentially harmful stimulus and is therefore of great biological importance for survival. Is there any reason, then, for supposing that animals, though equipped with all the necessary neurological structures, do not experience pain? Such a view would seem to presuppose a profound qualitative difference in the mental life of animals and men, the difference between the human and subhuman nervous system lies chiefly in the much greater development of the human fore-brain. This would be significant in the present context only if there were reason to believe that it alone was correlated with the occurrence of conscious experiences.  But much of our knowledge of the nervous regulation of consciousness is derived from experiments on animals.
     Nevertheless, we cannot tell what pain means to an animal. We know from our own experience that pains differ greatly in their quality, severity and emotional accompaniments. We know, too, that experiences which in man would be fraught with intense and prolonged emotion cause only brief and fleeting disturbances in animals. The great development of the human forebrain is the basis of man’s capacity for foresight, apprehension, and memory which so profoundly affects his experiences. It would be rash, therefore, to conclude that the pain which animals feel can be in all respects equated with that which human beings experience. [br] We can infer from the first paragraph that ______.
选项 A、animals feel pain because their pupils dilate, their pulse rate and blood pressure rise
B、when body stimuli are isolated from the higher nervous centres, animals won’t withdraw the stimulated limb
C、we will never know whether or not animals feel pain because they cannot speak
D、people conduct a lot of experiments on animals in order to get knowledge of pain
答案 D
解析 本题为推论题，从原文可以看出，人们仍未弄清动物对于疼痛是否感觉，瞳孔扩大等只是表象。所以选项A不准确。选项B并不能从原文得出。选项C中的will never不准确。从第一段“When such stimuli are applied．．．”开始描述在动物身上实验，结合首句，可以得出选项D。
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