P1测谎相机（英文标题待补充）

P2 Ants could Teach Ants 蚂蚁教学

P3 雪崩（英文标题待补充）

 

 

朗阁名师吴苏哲点评

 

1. 本次考试整体程度较难，其中第一篇难度中等，后两篇都较难。

2. 整体分析：涉及社会（P1）自然（P2）和自然（P3）

3. 主要题型：7月的第一场考试在题型上延续了今年考试的风格，配对题考察较多。

 

P1 测谎相机（英文标题待补充）

文章主旨：使用相机来判断人是否说谎

包含选择题、判断题和配对题

参考答案：

待补充

 

P2 Ants could Teach Ants 蚂蚁教学 （16年旧题）

文章主旨: 介绍蚂蚁如何传授知识

包含选择题、配对题和判断题

参考答案:

待补充

参考原文

Ants could Teach Ants

 

The ants are tiny and usually nest between rocks in the south coast of England. Transformed into research subjects at the University of Bristol, they raced along a tabletop foraging for food – and then, remarkably, returned to guide others. Time and again, followers trailed behind leaders, darting this way and that along the route, presumably to memorize landmarks. Once a follower got its bearings, it tapped the leader with its antennae, prompting the lesson to literally proceed to the next step. The ants were only looking for food, but the researchers said the careful way the leaders led followers---thereby turning them into leaders in their own right - marked the Temnothorax albipennis ant as the very first example of a non-human animal exhibiting teaching behavior.

 

"Within the field of animal behavior，we would say an animal is a teacher if it modifies behavior in the presence of another, at cost to itself, so another individual can learn more quickly,” said Nigel R. Franks, professor of animal behavior and ecology, whose paper on the ant educators was published last week in the journal Nature. But defining even common behaviors such as teaching is complex, and it is even harder to understand what is happening in the brains of other animals. So it is no surprise that the paper has sparked debate over what constitutes learning and teaching in the non-human world.

 

“Tandem running is an example of teaching, to our knowledge the first in a non-human animal, that involves bidirectional feedback between teacher and pupil," wrote Franks and graduate student Tom Richardson, who spent countless hours poring over videotape. No sooner was the paper published，of course, than another educator (this one at Harvard) pooh-poohed it. Marc D. Hauser, a psychologist and biologist and one of the scientists who came up with the definition of teaching, said it was unclear whether the ants had learned a new skill or merely acquired new information. Mere communication of information is commonplace in the animal world Hauser noted. Consider a species，for example, that uses alarm calls to warn fellow members about the presence of a predator. Sounding the alarm can be costly, because the animal may draw the attention of the predator to itself. But it allows others to flee to safety.

 

Hauser cited the work of another scientist, Tim Caro, who found that cheetah mothers that take their cubs along on hunts gradually allow their cubs to do more of the hunting ~ going, for example, from killing a gazelle and allowing young cubs to eat to merely tripping the gazelle and letting the cubs finish it off. At one level, Hauser said，such behavior might be called teaching — except the mother was not really teaching the cubs to hunt but merely facilitating various stages of learning. Psychologists study animal behavior in part to understand the evolutionary roots of human behavior, Hauser said. The challenge in understanding whether other animals truly teach one another, he added, is that human teaching involves a "theory of mind" — teachers are aware that students don't know something. He questioned whether Franks's leader ants really knew that the follower ants were ignorant.

 

Could they simply have been following an instinctive rule to proceed when the followers tapped them on the legs or abdomen? And did leaders that led the way to food — only to find that it had been removed by the experimenter — incur the wrath of followers? That, Hauser said, would suggest that the follower ant actually knew the leader was more knowledgeable and not merely following an instinctive routine itself.

 

Franks responded by saying that the two-way communication between the ants was quite different than merely sounding an alarm about a predator. And, he added, the follower ant often did not use the same direct route on its return trip. Once led to food, ants found new paths back to the nest，Franks and Richardson found, and those paths were sometimes more direct than the route that leaders had shown them.

 

In other words, Franks said, the teaching appeared to give follower ants more than just information; it generally increased their knowledge of the foraging environment.

 

Bennett G. Galef Jr., a psychologist who studies animal behavior and social learning at McMaster University in Canada, sided with Franks. He said ants were unlikely to have a "theory of mind" — meaning that leaders and followers may well have been following instinctive routines that were not based on an understanding of what was happening in another ant's brain.

 

P3雪崩（英文标题待补充）

文章主旨: 关于雪崩的科普文

包含判断题，其它题型待补充

参考答案:

待补充

 

考试预测

 

1. 本场考试较难，文章选材涉及社会和自然类题材，考生可在备考时关注相应高频主题词。

2. 此次考试阅读题由两篇新题和一篇旧题组成。考生在刷剑桥雅思的同时，也可以关注近几年的机经。同时，还要注意总结经验，方可在考试时做到以不变应万变。

3. 下场考试的话题可能有关人物传记和环境类话题。

重点浏览14-16年机经。

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