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  3. Tenants who don’t pay the rent are a bane of landlords everywhere. And landlords who use heavy tactics to enforce payment are si

Tenants who don’t pay the rent are a bane of landlords everywhere. And landlords who use heavy tactics to enforce payment are si

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问题     Tenants who don’t pay the rent are a bane of landlords everywhere. And landlords who use heavy tactics to enforce payment are similarly a bane of tenants. Nor are these problems confined to human beings. Property-owning cichlid fish seem as ruthless about receiving what they are owed as any 19th-century tenement holder in the Lower East Side of New York.
    The fish in question, Neolamprologus pulcher, inhabit Lake Tanganyika in east Africa. They are cooperative breeders, meaning that dominant individuals do the breeding and subordinates assist in various ways, in exchange for immediate survival-enhancing benefits that may lead to the ultimate prize of becoming dominant themselves. In the case of N. pulcher the main benefit is having somewhere to live. Dwellings, in the form of shelters dug out from sand under rocks, are controlled by dominant pairs. These dominants permit subordinates to share their accommodation, and those subordinates pay for the privilege by keeping the property in good repair and defending the dominants’ eggs and fry against predators.
    Though cooperative breeding by vertebrates has evolved several times, the question of how rental payments are enforced has never been definitively settled. The presumption is that dominants punish subordinate defaulters. But it is hard to prove, by observing wild animals, that this is what is happening.
    What was needed to clear the point up was an experiment. JanNaef and Michael Tabor sky of the University of Bern, in Switzerland, therefore acquired 96 specimens of N. pulcher and created menages of a pair of dominant landlords and a subordinate tenant in sand-bottomed aquaria.
    Left alone, the fish behaved much as they would have done in the wild, with the tenant doing the grunt work of maintaining the hollows in the sand, and good relations pertaining between all. However, if a tenant was prevented for a time from fulfilling its duties, by trapping it behind a partition inserted into the aquarium for that purpose, things changed. When the partition was removed, the landlords attacked it, and it showed a big increase in submissive behaviour for several minutes before things returned to normal.
    Whether similar treatment would be meted out for a failure to defend the landlords’ eggs has yet to be determined. When prevented by a partition from driving away predators, tenants were not subsequently on the receiving end of aggression from landlords—but since there were no eggs to defend at the time, that may not have been part of the contract. The predators in question are not a threat to adult specimens of N.pulcher, only to eggs and fry. It is nevertheless clear from Dr Naef’s and Dr Taborsky’s experiment that, for cichlids at least, the rent must be paid in a timely fashion, or punishment will be faced.
The presumption of dominants punishing subordinate defaulters comes from________.
选项 A、similar research on other animals
B、the observation on wild animals
C、cooperative breeding patterns
D、evidence proved by experiments
答案A
解析 根据题干关键词presumption和dominants punishing subordinate defaulters定位到文章第三段第二句The presumption is that dominants punish subordinate defaulters. (其假设是支配者会惩罚违约的从属者)，而该句是一个结论，对于该假设的来源则需要从前文找答案。该段第一句提到在对脊椎动物合作繁殖的研究中也并没有最终解决租金如何支付的问题，那么对于黄翅燕尾鱼的研究应当是在对其他动物研究基础上提出的类似假设，由此可知选项A为正确答案。B项答非所问，文中提到观察野生动物是为了表明用这种方式来证明假设很困难；C项同样答非所问，共同育种模式也并非支配者会惩罚违约的从属者这个假设的缘由，应排除；原文首先提出了这个假设，然后在第四段中用实验证明，而并非先有实验，后有假设，D项属于次序颠倒，应排除。
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