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  3. By education, I mean the influence of the environment upon the individual to produce a permanent change in the habits of behavio

By education, I mean the influence of the environment upon the individual to produce a permanent change in the habits of behavio

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问题     By education, I mean the influence of the environment upon the individual to produce a permanent change in the habits of behavior, of thought and of attitude. It is in being thus susceptible to the environment that man differs from the animals, and the higher animals from the lower. The lower animals are influenced by the environment but not in the direction of changing their habits. Their instinctive responses are few and fixed by heredity.
    When transferred to an unnatural situation, such an animal is led astray by its instincts. Thus the ant-lion whose instinct implies it to bore into loose sand by pushing backwards with abdomen, goes backwards on a plate of glass as soon as danger threatens, and endeavors, with the utmost exertions to bore into it. It knows no other mode of flight or "if such a lonely animal is engaged upon a chain of actions and is interrupted, it either goes on vainly with the remaining actions (as useless as cultivating an unsown field) or dies in helpless inactivity". Thus a net-making spider which digs a burrow and rims it with a bastion of gravel and bits of wood, when removed from a half finished home, will not begin again, though it will continue another burrow, even one made with a pencil.
    Advance in the scale of evolution along such lines as these could only be made by the emergence of creatures with more and more complicated instincts. Such beings we know in the ants and spiders. But another line of advance was destined to open out a much more far-reaching possibility of which we do not see the end perhaps even in man. Habits, instead of being born ready-made (When they are called instincts and not habits at all), were left more and more to the formative influence of the environment, of which the most important factor was the parent who now cared for the young animal during a period of infancy in which vaguer instincts than those of the insects were molded to suit surroundings which might be considerably changed without harm.
    This means, one might at first imagine, that gradually heredity becomes less and environment more important. But this is hardly the truth and certainly not the whole truth. For although fixed automatic responses like those of the insect-like creatures are no longer inherited, although selection for purification of that sort is no longer going on, yet selection for educability is very definitely still of importance. The ability to acquire habits can be conceivably inherited just as much as can definite responses to narrow situations. Besides, since a mechanism is now, for the first time, created by which the individual (in contradiction to the species) can be fitted to the environment, the latter becomes, in another sense, less important.
    Finally, higher animals pass the power of changing their environment by engineering feats and the like, a power possessed to some extent even by the beaver, and preeminently by man. Environment and heredity are in no case exclusive but always supplementary factors.
Based on the example provided in the passage, we can tell that when a spider is removed to a new position where half of a net has been made, it will probably________.
选项 A、find the original net
B、destroy the half-net
C、spin the rest of the net
D、stay away from the net
答案C
解析 本题关键词是spider，问题是：当蜘蛛被移到一个已经织了一半网的新环境时，它会有何举动?定位第二段。根据第二段第四句，一只织网型蜘蛛会挖一个洞穴，然后用沙砾和木屑把洞穴围成一个堡垒，如果中途把它移走。它就不会重新开始，如果把它放在另一个建了一半的洞穴中它就会继续工作，因此选项C“继续织剩下的网(spin the rest of the net)”与原文内容一致，为正确答案。选项A“找到原来的网(find the original net)”、选项B“毁掉织好的半张网(destroy the half-net)”和选项C“远离这张网(stay away from the net)”在文中均没有相关信息，因此均属于无中生有。
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考研英语二

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