2017年6月25日托福阅读真题+题目+答案：Do Some Animals Teach Their Young?

2017年6月25日托福阅读真题+题目+答案：Do Some Animals Teach Their Young?

How can it be determined whether an animal behavior qualifies as teaching? In recent years, the accepted functional definition of teaching has been that proposed by Caro and Hauser (1992). To qualify as teaching, an animal has to meet three requirements. First, it must modify its behavior specifically in the presence of naïve and untaught individuals in such a way as to facilitate their learning. Second, the teacher should incur some immediate cost to itself, or at least no immediate benefit. But of course for teaching to evolve, the teacher needs to reap some benefit in the longer term, such as reduced time feeding young due to having knowledgeable offspring. In addition, as a result of the teacher’s behavior, the pupil should learn something earlier in life or more rapidly than it would otherwise or that it would not learn at all.

1. According to paragraph 1, all of the following are mentioned by Caro and Hauser as requirements for an animal behavior to qualify as teaching EXCEPT:

A) The teacher should change the way it acts in the presence of individuals with less experience.

B) The teacher must not gain anything in the short term from its behavior.

C) The behavior should not result in any advantage for the teacher in the long run.

D) The animal being taught must acquire skills faster than it would without the teaching.

Caro and Hauser described a number of situations where teaching might be occurring involving capturing prey that are difficult to subdue or handle. For example, domestic cats bring dead birds and mice back to the nest and present them to their kittens. As the kittens mature, mother cats carry back live prey and allow the kittens to play with it, but if the prey escapes the mother still catches it again. Finally, the kittens capture prey by themselves with little intervention from the mother. Cheetahs behave similarly. Osprey, which snatch fish from the water in their talons, have been seen apparently teaching their young to forage (search for food). However, in none of these cases was it demonstrated what or how much the young actually learn as a result of the adults’ behavior. This gap has been filled by a study of meerkats conducted by Thornton and McAuliffe (2006), a unique model demonstration of animal teaching.

2. The word “intervention” in the passage is closest in meaning to

A) approval

B) involvement

C) observation

D) interest

3. Paragraph 2 suggests which of the following about scientists’ views before Thornton and McAuliffe’s study?

A) Scientists did not have evidence related to what young animals really learned from adults.

B) Scientists knew of only three animal species that engaged in behavior that qualified as teaching.

C) Scientists strongly believed that there is no gap between what adults teach and what young animals learn.

D) Scientists believed meerkats were better at teaching their young how to capture prey than domestic cats were.

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