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2024-09-16  16
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] What does the example of India illustrate?
选项 A、Wealthy people tend to have fewer children than poor people.
B、Natural selection hardly works among the rich and the poor.
C、The middle class population is 80 percent smaller than that of the tribes.
D、India is one of the countries with a very high birth rate.
答案 B
解析 事实细节题。在第二段最后两句，作者列举印度为例子：这个国家给少数居住在大城市的人提供了财富，而仍然留在部落中的人却只有贫困。而今天人的均质性——每一个人都同样地生存并拥有同样数目的后代——说明，如果与部落人相比较，自然选择已丧失了它在印度中上层阶级中80％的作用。这两句暗示，今天穷人富人同样地生活着并繁衍后代，自然选择“优胜劣汰”的作用已不是那么明显了。A，C，D选项的内容文中未提到。
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