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Tenants who don’t pay the rent are a bane of landlords everywhere. And landlords who use heavy tactics to enforce payment are si

admin2022-11-16  94
问题     Tenants who don’t pay the rent are a bane of landlords everywhere. And landlords who use heavy tactics to enforce payment are similarly a bane of tenants. Nor are these problems confined to human beings. Property-owning cichlid fish seem as ruthless about receiving what they are owed as any 19th-century tenement holder in the Lower East Side of New York.
    The fish in question, Neolamprologus pulcher, inhabit Lake Tanganyika in east Africa. They are cooperative breeders, meaning that dominant individuals do the breeding and subordinates assist in various ways, in exchange for immediate survival-enhancing benefits that may lead to the ultimate prize of becoming dominant themselves. In the case of N. pulcher the main benefit is having somewhere to live. Dwellings, in the form of shelters dug out from sand under rocks, are controlled by dominant pairs. These dominants permit subordinates to share their accommodation, and those subordinates pay for the privilege by keeping the property in good repair and defending the dominants’ eggs and fry against predators.
    Though cooperative breeding by vertebrates has evolved several times, the question of how rental payments are enforced has never been definitively settled. The presumption is that dominants punish subordinate defaulters. But it is hard to prove, by observing wild animals, that this is what is happening.
    What was needed to clear the point up was an experiment. JanNaef and Michael Tabor sky of the University of Bern, in Switzerland, therefore acquired 96 specimens of N. pulcher and created menages of a pair of dominant landlords and a subordinate tenant in sand-bottomed aquaria.
    Left alone, the fish behaved much as they would have done in the wild, with the tenant doing the grunt work of maintaining the hollows in the sand, and good relations pertaining between all. However, if a tenant was prevented for a time from fulfilling its duties, by trapping it behind a partition inserted into the aquarium for that purpose, things changed. When the partition was removed, the landlords attacked it, and it showed a big increase in submissive behaviour for several minutes before things returned to normal.
    Whether similar treatment would be meted out for a failure to defend the landlords’ eggs has yet to be determined. When prevented by a partition from driving away predators, tenants were not subsequently on the receiving end of aggression from landlords—but since there were no eggs to defend at the time, that may not have been part of the contract. The predators in question are not a threat to adult specimens of N.pulcher, only to eggs and fry. It is nevertheless clear from Dr Naef’s and Dr Taborsky’s experiment that, for cichlids at least, the rent must be paid in a timely fashion, or punishment will be faced.
Which of the following is true of N. pulchers according to the text?
选项 A、The subordinates must pay for their accommodation.
B、Experiments on them have officially come to an end.
C、Duty defaulters will be forced into exile permanently.
D、Landlords’ aggressive punishment can last for hours.
答案A
解析 不管是文章第一段的引入中用到了房东房客这个概念，还是后面描述实验时得出的一部分结论，都证明黄翅燕尾鱼的从属者需要履行职责来换取和房东鱼共享住所的好处，即“付房租”，因此，选项A最符合题意。由第六段可以看出在实验过程中出现了特殊状况，研究者的猜测是鱼之间的“合同”可能有一些权益尚未得到证实，有可能会进行下一步的研究，且文中也没有提到以后不会再进行这方面的研究和实验，所以B项属于无中生有，应排除；文中第五段最后一句指出未能履约者会招来房东鱼的惩罚，并非永久驱逐，故C项应排除；由第五段最后一句可知，房东鱼对租客鱼的攻击惩罚只有几分钟，而非持续几个小时，故D项应排除。
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