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  3. That people have personalities goes without saying. Pet owners will quickly argue that their animals have personalities too. Yet

That people have personalities goes without saying. Pet owners will quickly argue that their animals have personalities too. Yet

admin2015-02-12  66
问题     That people have personalities goes without saying. Pet owners will quickly argue that their animals have personalities too. Yet rather little has been done to find out if such characteristics exist in wild animals. One such study, published recently in Animal Behavior, shows not only that some do, but also that the presence of such traits is skewing the way data are collected by researchers. The animals in question are birds—collared flycatchers, to be specific. A team of researchers monitored the courtship behavior of the birds. The 41 males observed were nesting in boxes long used by the species, and a single attractive female was placed in an enclosure on top of each box.
    First, the team measured the varying intensity of the courtship behaviors displayed by the 33 males that responded to the caged female. After they had collected enough data to act as a baseline, they then attached a white piece of paper to each of the boxes used by these males and watched how the males in question responded to this novelty. They found that roughly half seemed afraid of the paper and reduced their courtship of the female. The other half ignored the paper and continued displaying as they had done before. In the third phase of the experiment a male was placed in the cage over the box where the female had once been, and the amount of aggression towards this male from the nesting male was measured. In general, those males who had not been deterred by the presence of the paper attacked the newly presented competitor with vigor while those who had been intimidated by it seemed reluctant to attack the putative competitor.
    Another part of the study analyzed male willingness to fight in the presence of potential predators, by watching aggressive interactions between nesting males and caged competitors when an unfamiliar human slowly approached the site. Those males who had been afraid of the paper often fled when the human was as much as 20 meters away. Those who had continued their courtship in the presence of the paper again proved their courage and often kept fighting until the observing human was just two meters away. Lastly the team placed traps within the nesting boxes and monitored which birds were caught. They found that the aggressive, risk-taking males were twice as likely as non-risk-takers to be trapped.
    These results are interesting because this is the first time that differences in personality have been shown in wild birds. If birds, as well as mammals, have personalities, it may make it easier to study the evolutionary pressures that give rise to such systematically different ways of behaving within a single species.
Which of the following would be the best title of the text?
选项 A、Personalities of animals
B、The different courtship behaviors of birds
C、How birds react to predators
D、A study on birds’ behaviors
答案D
解析 属主旨思想题。做此类题需要考生概括各段大意并将其融合。文章开篇就引出了一个研究鸟类是否有个性的实验，之后详细介绍了这个实验的操作过程，最后得出结论。因此可知选项D符合题意。选项A文章中并未细致叙述，故错误。选项B属于以偏概全，只涉及一部分内容，故错误。选项C属于夸大其词，文章只是讲到所研究的这种鸟在特定的条件下对掠食者的反应，故错误。
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