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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.
Which of the following is the most suitable title for the text?
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 本题属于标题题，也就是主题题，需要综合各段主题，考试时，可以放到最后解答。本文各段主题为：第一段：高等动物比低等动物更易受环境影响而改变习惯。第二段：低等动物对人工环境的本能反应会给它们带来负面影响。第三段：环境会影响习惯和本能的形成，使动物更加适应发生巨变的环境。第四段：遗传使动物具备获得习惯的能力，新机制也能使动物适应环境。第五段：环境和遗传因素的关系是相辅相成的。综合以上各段主题，不难看出这篇文章主要讲的是动物的习性受到环境和遗传因素的影响，并探讨了环境和遗传因素的关系。因此，选项B中的“环境(Environment)”和“遗传 (Heredity)”与文章的两个论点一致，为正确答案。选项A“昆虫的进化(Evolution of Insects)”只是文章细节，不属于主题。选项C、D中的“环境影响(The Influence of the Environment)”和“动物本能(The Instincts of Animals)”分别为作者在文中提及的两个分论点，因此均属于以偏概全。
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