陕西2014年成人学位英语阅读理解过关练习65题
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Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males for every 100 females, but this ratio(比率) drops to near balance at the age of maturity(成熟期), and among 70-year-olds there are twice as many women as me. But this situation is being changed. Now, boy babies survive(幸存) almost as well as girls do.. This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess(过多) of boys in those 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 (especially 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 difference is due to genes, one more agent(原动力) of evolution(进化) has gone.
There is another way to commit evolution suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are asproductive as in the past. Except in some particular areas, few women have 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have the same number of children. Again, differences between people and the chance for natural selection to take advantage of it have become smaller.
For us, this means that evolution is over; the biology Utopia(乌托邦) 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 a savage 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 surprised our children may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.
29．What used to be the danger in being a man according to the first paragraph?
A．A lack of mates.
B．A fierce competition
C．A lower survival rate.
D．A poor gene.
30．The author argues that our bodies have stopped evolving because __________.
A．life has been improved by technological advance
B．the number of female babies has been going down
C．our species has reached the highest stage of evolution
D．the difference between wealth and poverty is disappearing
31．What does the underlined word “productive” most probably mean in the second paragraph?
A．useful
B．producing babies
C．well-educated
D．caring
32．Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?
A．Sex Ratio Changes in Human Evolution
B．Ways of Continuing Man’s Evolution
C．The Evolutionary Future of Nature
D．Human Evolution Going Nowhere
参考答案：CABD
责编：cll