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  3. When, in the age of automation, man searches for a worker to do the tedious, unpleasant jobs that are more or less impossible to

When, in the age of automation, man searches for a worker to do the tedious, unpleasant jobs that are more or less impossible to

admin2010-05-05  3
问题     When, in the age of automation, man searches for a worker to do the tedious, unpleasant jobs that are more or less impossible to mechanize, he may very profitably consider the ape.
    If we tackled the problem of breeding for brains with as much enthusiasm as we devote to breeding dogs of surrealistic shapes, we could eventually produce assorted models of useful primates, ranging in size from the gorilla down to the baboon, each adapted to a special kind of work. It is not putting too much strain on the imagination to assume that geneticists could produce a super-ape, which is able to understand some scores of words and capable of being trained for such jobs as picking fruit, cleaning up the litter in parks, shining shoes, collecting garbage, doing household chores and even baby-sitting, although I have known some babies I would not care to trust with a valuable ape.
    Apes could do many jobs, such as cleaning streets and the more repetitive types of agricultural work, without supervision, though they might need protection from those egregious specimens of Home sapiens who think it amusing to tease or bully anything they consider lower on the evolutionary ladder. For other tasks, such as delivering papers and laboring on the docks, our man-ape would have to work under human overseers; and, incidentally, I would love to see the finale of the twenty-first century version of On the Waterfront in which the honest but hairy hero will drum on his chest after—literally—taking the wicked labor leader apart.
    Once a supply of nonhuman workers becomes available, a whole range of low IQ jobs could be thankfully given up by mankind, to its great mental and physical advantage. What is more, one of the problems which has annoyed so many fictional Utopias would be avoided: There would be none of the degradingly subhuman Epsilons of Huxley’s Brave New World to act as a permanent reproach to society, for there is a profound moral difference between breeding sub-men and super-apes, though the end products are much the same. The first would introduce a form of slavery, but the second would be a biological triumph which could benefit both men and animals.
Notes:
surrealistic超现实的
primate灵长类动物
gorilla大猩猩
baboon狒狒
chore杂活
care to do sth. (常用于否定句)(=willing to do or agree to do sth.)愿意做某事
trust A with B把B托付给A
egregious (通常指坏人或坏事)异乎寻常的，突出的
Home sapiens人类
finale n.结局
Epsilons 奴隶人名
assorted各色各样的
Utopia乌托邦，理想主义
选项 A、only if it is able to understand scores of words.
B、which do not require any intelligence at all.
C、that are not suitable for human hands to tackle.
D、which are boring and cannot be tackled with machines.
答案D
解析 细节理解题。本题问：根据课文所述，应考虑让猿做什么工作?参看第1段。第2段中有几个语言点应注意：1) for brains意为"为了智力"。2) put a strain on对…考验、负担：The additional work put a great strain on him，(这项额外工作对他是一个很大的负担)。3) ...I would not care to trust with a valuable ape...中care to (do)意为"愿意"，多用于否定句中。例如：He didn’t care to meet these people．(他不愿会见这些人)。trust A with B意为"把B托付给A"。例如：I can’t trust him with my car．(＝I can’t trust my car to him．)(我不能把我的汽车托付给他管)。可见，本文中的句子应译为"我不愿意把我的珍贵的猿托付给(有些孩子)"。有些把该句译为"我不在意把(有些孩子)托付给一头珍贵的猿"，那就与原文含义相悖，可谓差之毫厘，谬以千里了。望在做阅读理解题时，千万不要满足于快读时的一知半解，应力求正确理解原文内涵，并从阅读中获取语言知识。
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