2. 职称英语
  3. To call someone bird-brained in English means you think that person is silly

To call someone bird-brained in English means you think that person is silly

游客2025-03-30  2
问题    To call someone bird-brained in English means you think that person is silly or stupid. But will this description soon disappear from use in the light of recent research? It seems the English may have been unfair in association bird’s brains with stupidity.
   In an attempt to find out how different creatures see the world, psychologists at Brown University in the USA have been comparing the behaviour of birds and humans. One experiment has involved teaching pigeons to recognize letters of the English alphabet. The birds study in "classrooms", which are boxes equipped with a computer. After about four days of studying a particular letter, the pigeon has to pick out that letter from several displayed on the computer screen. Three male pigeons have learnt to distinguish all twenty-six letters of the alphabet in this way.
   A computer record of the birds’ four-month study period has shown surprising similarities between the pigeons’ and human performance. Pigeons and people find the same letters easy, or hard, to tell apart. For example, 92 percent of the time the pigeons could tell the letter D from the letter Z. But when faced with U and V (often confused by English children), the pigeons were right only 34 percent of the time.
   The results of the experiments so far have led psychologists to conclude that pigeons and humans observe things in similar ways. This suggests that there is something fundamental about the recognition process. If scientists could only discover just what this recognition process is it could be very useful for computer designers. The disadvantage of a present computer is that it can only do what a human being has programmed it to do and the programmer must give the computer precise, logical instructions. Maybe in the future, though, computers will be able to think like human beings. [br] The writer suggests that the expression "bird-brained" might be out of use soon because it is______.
选项 A、silly
B、impolite
C、unnecessary
D、inappropriate
答案 D
解析 根据文中第一段的“To call someone bird-brained in English means you think that person is silly or stupid．But will this description soon disappear from use in the light of recent research?It seems the English may have been unfair in association bird’s brains with stupidity．”可知，在英语中，如果称某人的大脑像鸟脑袋一般，意思就是这个人没有头脑或非常愚蠢。不过最近的一项研究显示，这个用于形容人的词语可能很快会不再使用了。看来英国人将鸟的大脑与愚蠢联系在一起或许是不公平的。据此可知，作者认为， “bird-brained”可能不再使用的原因是这个用词不恰当。D项正确。
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