托福阅读历年真题精选24

Some animal behaviorists argue that certain animals can remember past events,

anticipate future ones, make plans and choices, and coordinate activities within a 

group. These scientists, however, are cautious about the extent to which animals can 

be credited with conscious processing.

(5)     Explanations of animal behavior that leave out any sort of consciousness at all

and ascribe actions entirely to instinct leave many questions unanswered. One 

example of such unexplained behavior: Honeybees communicate the sources of 

nectar to one another by doing a dance in a figure-eight pattern. The orientation of 

the dance conveys the position of the food relative to the sun's position in the sky, 

(10)and the speed of the dance tells how far the food source is from the hive. Most 

researchers assume that the ability to perform and encode the dance is innate and 

shows no special intelligence. But in one study, when experimenters kept changing 

the site of the food source, each time moving the food 25 percent farther from the 

previous site, foraging honeybees began to anticipate where the food source would 

(15)  appear next. When the researchers arrived at the new location, they would find the 

bees circling the spot, waiting for their food. No one has yet explained how bees, 

whose brains weigh four ten-thousandths of an ounce, could have inferred the 

location of the new site.

Other behaviors that may indicate some cognition include tool use. Many 

(20)animals, like the otter who uses a stone to crack mussel shells, are capable of using 

objects in the natural environment as rudimentary tools. One researcher has found 

that mother chimpanzees occasionally show their young how to use tools to open 

hard nuts. In one study, chimpanzees compared two pairs of food wells containing 

chocolate chips. One pair might contain, say, five chips and three chips, the other 

(25)our chips and three chips. Allowed to choose which pair they wanted, the 

chimpanzees almost always chose the one with the higher total, showing some sort 

of summing ability. Other chimpanzees have learned to use numerals to label 

quantities of items and do simple sums.