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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  43
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.
U and V are confused by______.
选项 A、92 per cent of pigeons
B、many English children
C、most people learning English
D、34 per cent of English children
答案B
解析 根据文中第三段的“But when faced with U and V(often confused by English children)，the pigeons were fight only 34 percent of the time．”可知，当面对字母U和V时(英国儿童常常混淆这两个字母)，每次鸽子的识别正确率只有34％。据此可知B项正确。
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