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  3. Tenants who don’t pay the rent are a bane of landlords everywhere. And landlords who use heavy tactics to enforce payment are si

Tenants who don’t pay the rent are a bane of landlords everywhere. And landlords who use heavy tactics to enforce payment are si

admin2022-11-16  98
问题     Tenants who don’t pay the rent are a bane of landlords everywhere. And landlords who use heavy tactics to enforce payment are similarly a bane of tenants. Nor are these problems confined to human beings. Property-owning cichlid fish seem as ruthless about receiving what they are owed as any 19th-century tenement holder in the Lower East Side of New York.
    The fish in question, Neolamprologus pulcher, inhabit Lake Tanganyika in east Africa. They are cooperative breeders, meaning that dominant individuals do the breeding and subordinates assist in various ways, in exchange for immediate survival-enhancing benefits that may lead to the ultimate prize of becoming dominant themselves. In the case of N. pulcher the main benefit is having somewhere to live. Dwellings, in the form of shelters dug out from sand under rocks, are controlled by dominant pairs. These dominants permit subordinates to share their accommodation, and those subordinates pay for the privilege by keeping the property in good repair and defending the dominants’ eggs and fry against predators.
    Though cooperative breeding by vertebrates has evolved several times, the question of how rental payments are enforced has never been definitively settled. The presumption is that dominants punish subordinate defaulters. But it is hard to prove, by observing wild animals, that this is what is happening.
    What was needed to clear the point up was an experiment. JanNaef and Michael Tabor sky of the University of Bern, in Switzerland, therefore acquired 96 specimens of N. pulcher and created menages of a pair of dominant landlords and a subordinate tenant in sand-bottomed aquaria.
    Left alone, the fish behaved much as they would have done in the wild, with the tenant doing the grunt work of maintaining the hollows in the sand, and good relations pertaining between all. However, if a tenant was prevented for a time from fulfilling its duties, by trapping it behind a partition inserted into the aquarium for that purpose, things changed. When the partition was removed, the landlords attacked it, and it showed a big increase in submissive behaviour for several minutes before things returned to normal.
    Whether similar treatment would be meted out for a failure to defend the landlords’ eggs has yet to be determined. When prevented by a partition from driving away predators, tenants were not subsequently on the receiving end of aggression from landlords—but since there were no eggs to defend at the time, that may not have been part of the contract. The predators in question are not a threat to adult specimens of N.pulcher, only to eggs and fry. It is nevertheless clear from Dr Naef’s and Dr Taborsky’s experiment that, for cichlids at least, the rent must be paid in a timely fashion, or punishment will be faced.
The word "duties" in Paragraph 5 probably refers to________.
选项 A、digging underwater caves to store food
B、keeping both landlords and eggs safe
C、driving away predators soon enough
D、maintaining the property in good repair
答案D
解析 根据题干关键词duties和Paragraph 5可定位到文章第五段第二句，该句指出However, if a tenant was prevented for a time from fulfilling its duties, by trapping it behind a partition inserted into the aquarium for that purpose, things changed. (但是，如果将隔板插入鱼缸以挡住租客鱼，使其一段时间内无法履行其职责，情况就会发生变化)，这里的duties指的是第二段最后一句中提到的维持住所良好状态、保护支配者的鱼卵和鱼苗这类型的任务，由此可知D项为正确答案。由文章第二段可知，挖洞穴是为了做成住所，A项中的储存食物属于偷换概念，应排除；同理，由第二段最后一句可知，其任务是“维持住所良好状态、保护支配者的鱼卵和鱼苗”，B项中landlords不在被保护范围之内，也属于偷换概念，应排除；第六段提到，在没有卵的情况下，租客鱼由于被隔板阻挡未能赶走捕食者，但并未受到房东鱼的惩罚，且随后提到这可能不是合约的一部分，故赶走捕食者是不是租客鱼的职责之一，原文并未对此明确提出，故选项C应排除。
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