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  3. To call someone bird-brained in English means you think that person is silly or stupid. But will this description soon disappear

To call someone bird-brained in English means you think that person is silly or stupid. But will this description soon disappear

admin2017-03-25  51
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 associating 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 per cent 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 per cent 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.
Psychologists have been experimenting with pigeons to find out whether the birds______.
选项 A、are really silly or stupid
B、can learn to make ideas known to people
C、see the world as human beings do
D、learn more quickly than children
答案C
解析 根据文中第二段的“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．”可知，美国布朗大学的心理学家将鸟类和人类的行为进行了比较，试图发现不同的生物对世界的领悟程度。据此可知，心理学家用鸽子做实验是为了发现鸟类与人类在领悟世界方面是否相同。C项正确。
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