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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.
Which of the following is true about habits according to the text?
选项 A、They are natural endowments to living creatures.
B、They are more important than instincts to all animals.
C、They are subject to influence of the environment.
D、They are destined to open out a much more far-reaching possibility in the evolution of human beings.
答案C
解析 本题关键词是habits，问题是：关于习惯的说法哪一项是正确的?需要定位全文。原文第三段第四句明确指出：习惯越来越多地受到环境影响(Habits were left more and more to the formative influence of the environment)，因此选项C“它们受到环境的影响”与原文内容属于相同含义，为正确答案。选项A“对于生物而言。它们是大自然的馈赠(natural endowments)”，文中没有相关信息，属于无中生有。选项B“相比其他物种，它们对昆虫更为重要(more important than instincts to all animus)”，文中没有将昆虫的习惯和其他动物的习惯相比较，属于主观推导。根据第三段第三句，别的进化方式(another line of advance)注定会开拓出别的可能性，而选项D“它们注定可以在人类的进化历程中，开拓出更为深远的可能性”，这里的它们指的是习惯，与原文内容不一致，属于偷换概念。
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