Science is finally beginning to embrace animals who were, for a long time, considered second-class citizens. As Annie Potts

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问题     Science is finally beginning to embrace animals who were, for a long time, considered second-class citizens.
    As Annie Potts of Canterbury University has noted, chickens distinguish among one hundred chicken faces and recognize familiar individuals even after months of separations. When given problems to solve, they reason: hens trained to pick colored buttons sometimes choose to give up an immediate(lesser)food reward for a slightly later(and better)one. Healthy hens may aid friends, and mourn when those friends die.
    Pigs respond meaningfully to human symbols. When a research team led by Candace Croney at Penn State University carried wooden blocks marked with X and O symbols around pigs, only the O carriers offered food to the animals. The pigs soon ignores the X carriers in favor of the O’s. Then the team switched from real-life objects to a T-shirts printed with X or O symbols. Still, the pigs ventured only toward the O-shirted people: they had transferred their knowledge to a two-dimensional format, a not-inconsiderable feat of reasoning.
    Fairly soon, I came to see that along with our closest living relatives, cetaceans(鲸目动物)too are masters of cultural learning, and elephants express profound joy and mourning with their social companions. Long-term studies in the wild on these mammals helped to fuel a perspective shift in our society: the public no longer so easily accepts monkeys made to undergo painful procedures in laboratories, elephants forced to perform in circuses, and dolphins kept in small tanks at theme parks.
    Over time, though, as I began to broaden out even further and explore the inner lives of fish, chicken, pigs, goats, and cows, I started to wonder: Will the new science of "food animals" bring an ethical revolution in terms of who we eat? In other words, will the breadth of our ethic start to catch up with the breadth of our science?
    Animals activists are already there, of course, committed to not eating these animals. But what about the rest of us? Can paying attention to the thinking and feeling of these animals lead us to make change in who we eat?
What is Paragraph 4 mainly about?

选项 A、The similarities between mammals and humans.
B、The necessity of long-term studies no mammals.
C、A change of public attitude to the treatment of mammals.
D、A new discovery of how mammals think and feel.

答案C

解析 段落主旨题。 A.“The similarities between mammals and humans.”意为“哺乳动物和人类之间的相同 点”,在文中无体现。 B.“The necessity of long-term studies of mammals.”意为“哺乳动物长期研究的必要性”, 在文中无体现。 C.“A change of public attitude to the treatment of mammals.”符合文中第四段“Long—term studies in the wild on these mammals helped to fuel a perspective shift in our society:the public no longer so easily accepts monkeys made to undergo painful procedures in laboratories, elephants forced to perform in circuses,and dolphins kept in small tanks at theme parks”,由 此句可以看出对待哺乳动物公共态度的转变。 D.“A new discOVcry of how mammals think and feel.”意为“一项关于哺乳动物如何思考 和感知的新发现”,在文中无体现。
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