考研英语阅读理解命题思路透析和真题揭秘(11)

2000年Passage 2
 
Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity, and among 70-year-olds there are twice as many women as men. But the great universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, by babies survive almost as well as girls do. This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate. More important, another chance for natural selection has been removed. Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby (particularly a boy baby)surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death. Today it makes almost no difference. Since much of the variation is due to genes one more agent of evolution has gone.
 
There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Except in some religious communities, very few women has 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring. Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished. India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand mediocrity of today everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to the tribes.
 
For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical change No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the past 100,000 years -even the past 100 years-our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution: they "look at an organic being as average looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension." No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.

58. Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?
[A] Sex Ration Changes in Human Evolution
[B] Ways of Continuing Man's Evolution
[C] The Evolutionary Future of Nature
[D] Human Evolution Going Nowhere

[答案] D

[解题思路]

纵观全文，主要讨论的是人类已经停止了进化的问题，由此可以对各个选项进行排除。A选项关于性别问题在第一段中有所提及但却不是文章的重点。B选项的话题正好与文章相反，也是错误选项。C选项的话题范围太大，文章针对的只是人类，而不是大自然的进化。而D则正好契合原文的主题。

[题目译文]

下面哪一项是本文的最佳标题？
[A] 人类进化中的性别比例变化
[B] 人类进化继续的办法
[C] 自然的进化前景
[D] 人类进化毫无发展

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