Fair and square
Some monkeys seem to have a highly developed sense of fairness
EVERYBODY loves a fat pay rise. Yet pleasure at your own can vanish if you learn that a colleague has been given a bigger one. Indeed, if he has a reputation for slacking, you might even be outraged. Such behaviour is regarded as all too human, with the underlying assumption that other animals would not be capable of this finely developed sense of grievance. But a study by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, which has just been published in Nature, suggests that it is all too monkey,as well.
The researchers studied the behaviour of female brown capuchin monkeys, which have all the necessary ingredients to capture the public imagination. They look cute. They are good-natured, co-operative creatures, and they share their food readily. Above all, like their finicky female human counterparts, they tend to pay much closer attention to the value of goods and services than males (although why this is so remains a mystery).
Such characteristics make them perfect candidates for Dr Brosnans and Dr de Waals study. The researchers spent two years teaching their monkeys to exchange tokens for food. Normally, the monkeys were happy enough to swap pieces of rock for slices of cucumber. However, when two monkeys were placed in separate but adjoining chambers, so that each could observe what the other was getting in return for its rock, their behaviour became markedly different.
In the world of capuchins, grapes are luxury goods (and much preferable to cucumbers). So when one monkey was handed a grape in exchange for her token, the second was reluctant to hand hers over for a mere piece of cucumber. And if one received a grape without having to provide her token in exchange at all, the other either tossed her own token at the researcher or out of the chamber, or refused to accept the slice of cucumber. Indeed, the mere presence of a grape in the other chamber (in the absence of an actual monkey able to eat it) was enough to induce sullen behaviour in a female capuchin.
Dr Brosnan and Dr de Waal report that such behaviour is unusual in their trained monkeys. During two years of bartering prior to these experiments, failure to exchange tokensfor food occurred in fewer than 5% of trials. And what made the behaviour even more extraordinary was that these monkeys forfeited food that they could seeand which they would have readily accepted in almost any other set of circumstances.
The researchers suggest that capuchin monkeys, like humans, are guided by social emotions. In the wild, they are a co-operative, group-living species. Such co-operation is likely to be stable only when each animal feels it is not being cheated. Feelings of righteous indignation, it seems, are not the preserve of people alone. Refusing a lesser reward completely makes these feelings abundantly clear to other members of the group. However, whether such a sense of fairness evolved independently in capuchins and humans, or whether it stems from the common ancestor that the species had 35m years ago, is, as yet, an unanswered question.
总体介绍
这是2003年9月18日刊登在《经济学家》(The Economist)杂志上的一篇科技类文章。文中主要论述猴子的公平感---像人一样，对不公平待遇有怨恨。从文章的题材上讲，科技类的文章是考研英语阅读的四大题材之一(另外三类是经济评论、文化教育和社会生活)，而且这篇文章谈论的是较新的科学研究成果(《自然》杂志刚发表的文章)，以简介的形式出现于《经济学家》杂志，自然很适合做考研
英语阅读的出题文章。从体裁上看，这是一篇典型的说明文，属于考研英语阅读的常见体裁之一。这篇文章共有6段，520词，如果用作考研英语阅读理解的一篇，则段落和字数都有些偏多。因为该部分
的文章一般要求将字数控制在400词左右;文章段落数一般为4-5段，便于出题。
这篇文章被用于2005年的考研英语阅读理解部分第一篇，距发表时间仅一年多，试题序号为21-25。文中加下划线的部分是被删除的内容。改编后的文章共5段，426词。
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