2. 考研
  3. Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females , but this ratio drops to near balan

Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females , but this ratio drops to near balan

admin2018-03-01  69
问题     Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females , but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity, and among 70-year-olds there are twice as many women as men. But the great universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, boy babies survive almost as well as girls do. This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate. More important, another chance for natural selection has been removed. Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby (particularly a boy baby) surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death. Today it makes almost no difference. Since much of the variation is due to genes, one more agent of evolution has gone.
    There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Except in some religious communities, very few women has 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring. Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished. India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand mediocrity of today—everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring—means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to the tribes.
    For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical change. No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the past 100,000 years—even the past 100 years—our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution; they "look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension." No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.
Which of the following is not true according to the first paragraph?
选项 A、Weight used to be a significant factor toward a boy baby’s life.
B、Boy babies’ survival rate is as high as girl babies’.
C、Today it makes almost no difference for the boy’s survival condition.
D、Men used to have a lower survival rate.
答案C
解析 选项C对应第一段倒数第二句，这一句话承接前一句，意思是：如今体重几乎没有太大影响。并没有讲今天男孩的生存状况有任何不同，因此选项C曲解了文意。选项A对应的是第一段的倒数第四句，文中提到：50年前，婴儿(尤其是男婴)存活的机会取决于他的体重，过轻或过重几乎意味着会早早夭折。因此，可以看到，“体重曾经是男孩子存活与否的重要因素”。选项B对应第一段的第四句，是文中意思的同义改写：现在男婴存活率同女婴存活率几乎持平。因此，这个题目的正确答案是C。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/OABZ777K
0

考研英语一

相关试题推荐
随机试题
最新回复(0)