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  3. Men are generally better than women on tests of spatial ability, such as mentally rotating an object through three dimensions or

Men are generally better than women on tests of spatial ability, such as mentally rotating an object through three dimensions or

admin2022-08-06  69
问题     Men are generally better than women on tests of spatial ability, such as mentally rotating an object through three dimensions or finding their way around in a new environment. But a new study suggests that under some circumstances a woman’s way of navigating is probably more efficient.
    Luis Pacheco-Cobos of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and his colleagues discovered this by following mushroom gatherers from a village in the state of Tlaxcala for two rainy seasons. Two researchers, each fitted with GPS navigation devices and heart-rate monitors, followed different gatherers on different days. They recorded the weight of the mushrooms each gatherer collected and where they visited. The GPS data allowed a map to be made of the routes taken and the heart-rate measurements provided an estimate of the amount of energy expended during their travels.
    The results, to be published in Evolution and Human Behaviour, show that the men and women collected on average about the same weight of mushrooms.  But the men travelled farther, climbed higher and used a lot more energy—70% more than the women. The men did not move any faster, but they searched for spots with lots of mushrooms. The women made many more stops, apparently satisfied with, or perhaps better at finding, patches of fewer mushrooms.
    Previous work has shown that men tend to navigate by creating mental maps of a territory and then imagining their position on the maps. Women are more likely to remember their routes using landmarks. The study lends support to the idea that male and female navigational skills were honed differently by evolution for different tasks. Modern-day hunter-gatherers divide labor, so that men tend to do more hunting and women more gathering. It seems likely that early humans did much the same thing.
    The theory is that the male strategy is the most useful for hunting prey; chasing an antelope, say, would mean running a long way over a winding route. But having killed his prey, the hunter would want to make a beeline for home rather than retrace his steps exactly. Women, by contrast, would be better off remembering landmarks and retracing the paths to the most productive patches of plants.
    The research suggests that in certain circumstances women are better at navigating than men, which might lend some comfort to a man desperately searching for an item in a supermarket while his exasperated wife methodically moves around the aisles filling the shopping trolley. He is simply not cut out for the job, evolutionarily speaking.
By referring to evolution, the author intends to show that
选项 A、men and women are different in spatial conception and ability.
B、males are born with the hunter’s mentality and females the gatherer’s.
C、different ways of navigation can date back to the ancient times.
D、early humans have decided the division of labor for men and women.
答案C
解析 根据evolution定位到第四段。第四段讲到男女导航方式honed differently by evolution，因男女分工的不同，人类早期可能就已经发展出不同的导航方式，所以正确答案为C项。文中没有提及A项与evolution的关系，所以排除；B项和D项的内容正确，但没有体现作者提到evolution的意图。
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