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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2024-10-29  42
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] Which of the following is the best title for the text?
选项 A、Animals and Pain
B、Human Beings and Pain
C、Painful Stimuli and Reactions
D、Nerve System and Pain
答案 A
解析 本题为推断主旨题，纵观全文，第一段首句引出animals然后引出pain，最后一句“We must therefore look for other evidence as to the capacity of animals to experience pain．”接着第二段最后一句和第三段第一句都明确指出animals和pain在文中的关系。所以选项A正确。
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