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  3. By education, I mean the influence of the environment upon the individual to produce a permanent change in the habits of behavio

By education, I mean the influence of the environment upon the individual to produce a permanent change in the habits of behavio

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问题     By education, I mean the influence of the environment upon the individual to produce a permanent change in the habits of behavior, of thought and of attitude. It is in being thus susceptible to the environment that man differs from the animals, and the higher animals from the lower. The lower animals are influenced by the environment but not in the direction of changing their habits. Their instinctive responses are few and fixed by heredity.
    When transferred to an unnatural situation, such an animal is led astray by its instincts. Thus the ant-lion whose instinct implies it to bore into loose sand by pushing backwards with abdomen, goes backwards on a plate of glass as soon as danger threatens, and endeavors, with the utmost exertions to bore into it. It knows no other mode of flight or "if such a lonely animal is engaged upon a chain of actions and is interrupted, it either goes on vainly with the remaining actions (as useless as cultivating an unsown field) or dies in helpless inactivity". Thus a net-making spider which digs a burrow and rims it with a bastion of gravel and bits of wood, when removed from a half finished home, will not begin again, though it will continue another burrow, even one made with a pencil.
    Advance in the scale of evolution along such lines as these could only be made by the emergence of creatures with more and more complicated instincts. Such beings we know in the ants and spiders. But another line of advance was destined to open out a much more far-reaching possibility of which we do not see the end perhaps even in man. Habits, instead of being born ready-made (When they are called instincts and not habits at all), were left more and more to the formative influence of the environment, of which the most important factor was the parent who now cared for the young animal during a period of infancy in which vaguer instincts than those of the insects were molded to suit surroundings which might be considerably changed without harm.
    This means, one might at first imagine, that gradually heredity becomes less and environment more important. But this is hardly the truth and certainly not the whole truth. For although fixed automatic responses like those of the insect-like creatures are no longer inherited, although selection for purification of that sort is no longer going on, yet selection for educability is very definitely still of importance. The ability to acquire habits can be conceivably inherited just as much as can definite responses to narrow situations. Besides, since a mechanism is now, for the first time, created by which the individual (in contradiction to the species) can be fitted to the environment, the latter becomes, in another sense, less important.
    Finally, higher animals pass the power of changing their environment by engineering feats and the like, a power possessed to some extent even by the beaver, and preeminently by man. Environment and heredity are in no case exclusive but always supplementary factors.
The author may probably agree that________.
选项 A、man could see the end of a much more far-reaching possibility of evolution
B、habits has been increasingly influenced by the environment
C、selection for educability is definitely more important than that of purification
D、a new mechanism has been created by scientists
答案B
解析 本题题干无具体关键词，问题是：本文作者同意什么观点?根据题目顺序和自然段顺序基本一致的原则可以定位第三、四段。第三段第四句指出，习惯越来越被看成是环境造成的影响(left more and more to the formative influence of the environment)，选项B中的“increasingly”与原文的more and more属于同义替换；“influenced by the environment”也和原文formative influence of the environment属于相同含义，因此为正确答案。第三句说人类看不到更深远可能性的进化结果(we do not see the end perhaps even in man)，由此可见，选项A“人类可以看到(man could see)更深远的进化可能性的结果”，与原文内容相反，属于正反混淆。第四段第三句提到了进化的单一性和可塑性，但没有对两者进行比较，因此选项C“进化的可塑性绝对比单一性更重要”属于主观推导。原文第四段第五句说已经建立了新机制，但没有指出是谁建立了新机制，因此选项D“科学家创造出一种新的机制”属于无中生有。
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