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　　医学考博阅读理解习题 (1)

　　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 70yearolds there are twice as many women as men. But the great

　　universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, boy 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 have 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 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 amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they

　　will look just like us.

　　1.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 defective gene.

　　2.What does the example of India illustrate?

　　[A] Wealthy people tend to have fewer children than poor people.

　　[B] Natural selection hardly works among the rich and the poor.

　　[C] The middle class population is 80% smaller than that of the tribes.

　　[D] India is one of the countries with a very high birth rate.

　　3.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 declining

　　[C] our species has reached the highest stage of evolution

　　[D] the difference between wealth and poverty is disappearing

　　4.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

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