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  3. After taking his dog for a walk one day in the early 1940s, George de Mestral, a Swiss inventor, became curious about the seeds

After taking his dog for a walk one day in the early 1940s, George de Mestral, a Swiss inventor, became curious about the seeds

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问题     After taking his dog for a walk one day in the early 1940s, George de Mestral, a Swiss inventor, became curious about the seeds of the burdock plant that had attached themselves to his clothes and to the dog’s fur. Under a microscope, he looked closely at the hook-and-loop system that the seeds have evolved to hitchhike on passing animals and aid pollination, and he realised that the same approach could be used to join other things together. The result was Velcro: a product that was arguably more than three billion years in the making, since that is how long the natural mechanism that inspired it took to evolve.
    Velcro is probably the most famous and certainly the most successful example of biological mimicry, or "biomimetics". In fields from robotics to materials science, technologists are increasingly borrowing ideas from nature, and with good reason: nature’s designs have, by definition, stood the test of time, so it would be foolish to ignore them. Yet transplanting natural designs into man-made technologies is still a hit-or-miss affair.
    Engineers depend on biologists to discover interesting mechanisms for them to exploit, says Julian Vincent, the director of the Centre for Biomimetic and Natural Technologies at the University of Bath in England. So he and his colleagues have been working on a scheme to enable engineers to bypass the biologists and tap into nature’s ingenuity directly, via a database of "biological patents". The idea is that this database will let anyone search through a wide range of biological mechanisms and properties to find natural solutions to technological problems.
    Surely human intellect, and the deliberate application of design knowledge, can devise better mechanisms than the mindless, random process of evolution. Far from it. Over billions of years of trial and error, nature has devised effective solutions to all sorts of complicated real-world problems. Take the slippery task of controlling a submersible vehicle, for example. Using propellers, it is incredibly difficult to make refined movements. But Nekton Research, a company based in Durham, North Carolina, has developed a robot fish called Madeleine that manoeuvres using fins instead.
    In some cases, engineers can spend decades inventing and perfecting a new technology, only to discover that nature beat them to it. The Venus flower basket, for example, a kind of deep-sea sponge, has spiny skeletal outgrowths that are remarkably similar, both in appearance and optical properties, to commercial optical fibres, notes Joanna Aizenberg, a researcher at Lucent Technology’s Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. And sometimes the systems found in nature can make even the most advanced technologies look primitive by comparison, she says.
The best title for this text might be______.
选项 A、Human Intellect and Design Knowledge
B、The Discovery of Velcro
C、Engineers Depend on Biologists
D、Technology That Imitates Nature
答案D
解析 属主旨题。本文从George de Mestral模仿自然，发明Velcro开始，介绍人类在仿生学方面的科技发展。尽管如此，人类有时还是发现，人类的科技进步还是赶不上自然的巧妙设计。所以答案为D。假设A为答案，那文章应侧重人类智慧和设计知识的相互关系、作用。B项只是一个例子。C项只是仿生学研究中曾经有过的一个过程，如果以它为题目，内容应侧重列举工程师如何、为何依靠生物学家等等。
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