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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 conceivably inherit 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 not more important. And finally, less not the higher animals that possess 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.
Which of the following is the most suitable title for the passage?
选项 A、The Evolution of Insects
B、Environment and Heredity
C、Education: The Influence of the Environment
D、The Instincts of Animals
答案B
解析 这是一篇科技性的文章，主要是为了说明两个生物和遗传学中重要的概念；先天的“本能”(instinct)和后天的“习惯” (habit)，以及它们之间相互的关系。选项A可以排除掉。文章的主题显然不是讨论昆虫的进化。选项C，D都分别是文章讨论的一个侧面。也可以排除。所以应该选B《环境和遗传》。
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