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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  71
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.
The underlined word in Paragraph 2 refers to______.
选项 A、stopped
B、encouraged
C、distracted
D、blinded
答案A
解析 属词义推断题。单词所在句“while”前后是对比关系，因此可知“deter”的意思应与后面的“intimidated”相反，且前半句中提到“没有被…的鸟会对对手发起猛烈的攻击”，因此可知单词大致意思为“被阻碍，被阻止”，故选项A符合题意。选项B(鼓舞)、选项C(分心)、选项D(看不见)均不合题意。
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