2. 考研
  3. [1] When I first saw Pippa the cheetah, she was sitting pertly on a chair in the tearoom of the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi. I

[1] When I first saw Pippa the cheetah, she was sitting pertly on a chair in the tearoom of the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi. I

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问题     [1] When I first saw Pippa the cheetah, she was sitting pertly on a chair in the tearoom of the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi. I had gone to meet her owners, an English couple who were leaving Kenya and wanted to ensure that their pet would find a good home. Pippa was wearing a harness and was able to sit at a table, looking as if she might have a soft drink through a straw. She was a thoroughly spoiled cub.
    [2] Eighteen months later she had returned to the wild. She was living in the Northern Frontier District where she had been born. She had learned to hunt for herself, had mated with a wild cheetah, and was raising a litter of cubs.
    [3] Pippa’s rehabilitation to the wild required patience, perseverance, love, and the same kind of respect for her as a being that I would have offered a fellow human. I had previously shared this love and respect with Elsa the lioness, whom my husband George and I had raised as a cub. But it was not simply a matter of affection — although there was plenty of that. The rehabilitation process was important as an experiment in developing a means of trying to guarantee the survival of endangered species. The cheetah is one of these; the lion may become one soon.
    [4] I learned many things from Elsa and Pippa. They proved always to be interesting and affectionate companions. And I enjoyed the closeness to nature that the rehabilitation process required. But there were raany times when I was working with Elsa and Pippa, and there have been many times since, when I have wondered about another endangered species, a species generally as ignorant of the threat to its survival as these two cats had been. That species is man.
    [5] Some recent scientific, economic, and political research suggests that the curves for food demand and food supply will cross in a maximum of 60 years. By then, man’s overpopulation, increasing pollution, and the diminishing food supply could threaten to end human life on our planet. Being aware of this research, I could not help wondering what steps man could take to ensure his survival. Could he, for instance, learn from animals something about birth control, inter-creature relationships, or thought communication that would help him avoid extinction?
    [6] Generally, the first reaction to such musings is one of astonishment. The question phrases itself. What can man, the most highly evolved species of animal life, learn from less developed creatures? Astonishment at this question itself suggests a starting place. Perhaps man needs to regain his humility — and his sense of perspective. Perhaps he should look at himself as just another experiment of nature, no more important intrinsically than the thousands of other species evolved on our planet. Man is, after all, a fairly recent development. He has lived on earth only 1. 7 million years — not a very long time compared with the 400 million years of some creatures.
    [7] Man’s achievements during this stay are astounding. Yet they endanger his own survival. As a result, he may disappear as have other species who became too overspecialized, or outlived their environment. Perhaps more than any other creature man is notable for his constant violations of the eternal law of living in harmony with nature. Man kills everything that competes with him for living space or food. He has irreparably damaged his environment. He has forsaken nature’s basic laws, substituting for them his own man-made laws and values. He has, for example, invented money — and now he gauges success, power, and achievement almost exclusively in terms of it. He overestimates his ego and his capacities. He worships status and sacrifices fantastically for it.
    [8] A more rational perspective would see that all organic life is of equal importance. That every species has its role to play. That nothing survives unless it fits into the balance of nature and lives within its environment. That all life must work together to preserve life and maintain ecology.
    [9] But man can also learn more specifically from animals. With his research capacity he can ask himself : How were animals able to maintain the balance of nature for more than 400 million years? Once he has unlocked these secrets, he can try to apply them to his own situation.
    [10] What are some of these secrets? Birth control is one. Animals have very efficient means of controlling their reproduction. We who study animals have learned about it only in the last few years. We don’t yet know how it works, but we do know some facts. Most antelopes, for example, can withhold their young for weeks, even months. They do this in order that births occur with the arrival of the rains, the availability of grazing, and the mothers’ adequate supply of milk for the young.
    [11] Elephants seem able to adjust their reproduction in somewhat the same way. On the Victoria Nile, for instance, one bank is extremely eroded; it provides barely enough food for the elephants living there. The opposite bank, on the other hand, is quite well covered with vegetation. Observations indicate that elephants on the grassy bank calve every four years, while those on the eroded bank do so only every nine.
    [12] My own observations of Elsa and Pippa have revealed some most interesting facts. These cats come into season every five to seven weeks. Once the first litter has been born, they have the capacity to produce a new litter every three and a half months, and some zoo-confined lionesses actually do produce litters this of-ten. But in their natural state, females of these species will not let a male near them — let alone mate with him — while they are engaged in rearing their young to complete independence. Among lions this period lasts two years; among cheetahs it is about seventeen and a half months.
    [13] When Pippa lost two litters to predators a few days after their birth, she instantly looked for a mate and conceived despite the fact she had hardly recovered from giving birth. Knowing that her unfortunate cubs did not need her anymore, she lost no time in starting a new litter. This also happened with a lioness I knew.
    [14] Judging from this behavior, I can only assume that some kind of psychological block stops mother lions and cheetahs from wanting to mate while they are preoccupied with training their young.
    [15] Another secret of animals’ survival is telepathy. This sense has become atrophied in man, but a definite thought-communication functions in animals. Elsa the lioness frequently sensed when George and I intended to visit her camp, even though it lay 180 miles from our home in Isiolo. On most occasions when we made our irregular visits she was waiting for us. By following her spoor we discovered that she had sometimes walked 50 or 60 miles to meet us.
    [16] The same thing happened when I took Elsa’s two sisters to Nairobi to be flown to the Rotterdam zoo. Elsa stayed behind with George in Isiolo 180 miles away. He did not know when I was coming back; no person knew. But Elsa knew. On the morning of my return she sat down in the entrance drive and would not budge until I arrived in the evening.
    [17] I have known this kind of thought-communication with the animals with whom I’ve lived. When Elsa died, I woke in the night, knowing what had happened, even though I was several hundred miles away. The same thing occurred later with one of Pippa’s cubs.
    [18] I don’t possess this sensitivity with my own kind. I feel far more in tune with what is going on when I am in the bush than when I am in London or Nairobi. We don’t know much yet about this telepathy — from which gland it comes, or how it works. But if men could reawaken or cultivate it in themselves, and then cooperate by trusting each other, rather than fearing and treating one another suspiciously, the world would be a far better place.
    [19] Another secret of the animals is embodied in a basic law of nature which men often ignore. Every animal has around him a security zone. Within that zone he feels safe. Simple observation shows what happens to creatures whose sense of adequate living space has been consistently violated, and who have thus become degenerate. You only have to go to a zoo. There you find animals sitting like prisoners, tucked so close together that it is not surprising they become frustrated and sometimes so tense that they try to break out. Then they have to be destroyed.
    [20] When people see animals in this condition, they get the impression that the animals are either dangerous and aggressive or, if they have fallen into a state of utter despair, that they are lethargic or stupid. But animals that I have known in their natural state are never like this. This illustrates why zoos — even the best zoos — cannot solve the problem of recovering a healthy survival number of presently endangered species.
    [21] The security-zone sense, the need for adequate living space, is not limited to wild animals. Men once possessed it as well. But now our awareness of it has grown so faint that four or five people can live together in one room, a situation which repeatedly occurs in overcrowded slums. People living in these conditions often become aggressive — sometimes even criminal — for the same reason that animals do in zoos.
    [22] Man-made values account not only for man’s reduced awareness of his own security zone. They have also impaired a whole range of relationships which nature had placed in proper perspective. One of these, referred to earlier, is mating. Another is the relationship of mother to young. So many modern human mothers these days prefer to have jobs and put their children in day-care centers or kindergartens, rather than look after them. In nature this happens only in perverted cases. I have watched many animal mothers with their young. They are devoted to them and tend them with affection — and discipline. But they don’t overdo it. Elsa and Pippa loved their cubs, but they also kept strict behavior. There was no nonsense about it.
    [23] Man’s great challenge at this moment is to prevent his exodus from this planet. If he wants to survive — which he can do only if all other forms of life around him survive as well — he simply has to see himself as no more important than his fellow creatures. Since man has a higher intelligence than most animals, he is responsible for insuring their survival and thus maintaining life on our planet.
    [24] I personally doubt that man can recover his original relationship with all other forms of life unless he reappraises his man-made values, returns again to the rules of nature, and then accepts and obeys them.
The main idea of this article is that______.
选项 A、people can teach animals how to survive
B、people can learn survival techniques from animals
C、animals can survive in the wild after living in zoos
D、animals can learn from man how to live in tune with nature
答案B
解析 主旨大意题。文章由猎豹重回野外的故事，引出人类也是濒危动物的事实，探讨人类应如何从动物身上学习如何避免灭绝的问题。第五段最后一句为本文主题句。故答案为[B]项。
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