2022年2月26日雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Animal Minds：Parrot Alex

2022年2月26日雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Animal Minds：Parrot Alex

A In 1977 Irene Pepperberg, a recent graduate of Harvard University, did something very bold. At a time when animals still were considered automatons, she set out to find what was on another creature’s mind by talking to it. She brought a one-year-old African gray parrot she named Alex into her lab to teach him to reproduce the sounds of the English language. “I thought if he learned to communicate, I could ask him questions about how he sees the world.”

B When Pepperberg began her dialogue with Alex, who died last September at the age of 31, many scientists believed animals were incapable of any thought. They were simply machines, robots programmed to react to stimuli but lacking the ability to think or feel.Any pet owner would disagree. We see the love in our dogs’ eyes and know that, of course, they has thoughts and emotions. But such claims remain highly controversial. Gut instinct is not science, and it is all too easy to project human thoughts and feelings onto another creature. How, then, does a scientist prove that an animal is capable of thinking – that it is able to acquire information about the world and act on it? “That’s why I started my studies with Alex,” Pepperberg said. They were seated – she at her desk, he on top of his cage – in her lab, a windowless room about the size of a boxcar, at Brandeis University. Newspapers lined the floor; baskets of bright toys were stacked on the shelves. They were clearly a team – and because of their work, the notion that animals can think is no longer so fanciful.

C Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others’ motives, imitating others, and being creative. Bit by bit, in ingenious experiments, researchers have documented these talents in other species, gradually chipping away at what we thought made human beings distinctive while offering a glimpse of where our own abilities came from. Scrub jays know that other jays are thieves and that stashed food can spoil; sheep can recognize faces; chimpanzees use a variety of tools to probe termite mounds and even use weapons to hunt small mammals; dolphins can imitate human postures; the archer fish, which stuns insects with a sudden blast of water, can learn how to aim its squirt simply by watching an experienced fish perform the task.And Alex the parrot turned out to be a surprisingly good talker.

。。。。。余下雅思阅读真题省略！

Questions 1-6

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?

In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE       if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE       if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN    If there is no information on this

1 ________________ Firstly, Alex has grasped quite a lot of vocabulary.

2 ________________ At the beginning of study, Alex felt frightened in the presence of humans.

3 ________________ Previously, many scientists realized that animals possess the ability of thinking.

4 ________________ It has taken a long time before people get to know cognition existing in animals.

5 ________________ As Alex could approximately imitate the sounds of English words, he was capable of roughly answering Irene’s questions regarding the world.

6 ________________ By breaking in other parrots as well as producing the incorrect answers, he tried to be focused.

。。。。。余下雅思阅读真题及答案省略！

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