IELTS雅思阅读真题

蚂蚁智力

Collective intelligence:：Ants and brain's neurons

STANFORD - An individual ant is not very bright, but ants in a colony,

operating as a collective, do remarkable things.

A single neuron in the human brain can respond only to what the neurons

connected to it are doing, but all of them together can be Immanuel Kant.

That resemblance is why Deborah M. Gordon, StanfordUniversity assistant

professor of biological sciences, studies ants.

"I'm interested in the kind of system where simple units together do behave

in complicated ways," she said.

No one gives orders in an ant colony, yet each ant decides what to do next.

For instance, an ant may have several job descriptions. When the colony

discovers a new source of food, an ant doing housekeeping duty may suddenly

become a forager. Or if the colony's territory size expands or contracts, patroller

ants change the shape of their reconnaissance pattern to conform to the new

realities. Since no one is in charge of an ant colony - including the misnamed

"queen," which is simply a breeder - how does each ant decide what to do?

This kind of undirected behavior is not unique to ants, Gordon said. How do

birds flying in a flock know when to make a collective right turn? All anchovies

and other schooling fish seem to turn in unison, yet no one fish is the leader.

Gordon studies harvester ants in Arizona and, both in the field and in her lab,

the so-called Argentine ants that are ubiquitous to coastal California.

Argentine ants came to Louisiana in a sugar shipment in 1908. They were

driven out of the Gulf states by the fire ant and invaded California, where they

have displaced most of the native ant species. One of the things Gordon is

studying is how they did so. No one has ever seen an ant war involving the

Argentine species and the native species, so it's not clear whether they are

quietly aggressive or just find ways of taking over food resources and territory.

The Argentine ants in her lab also are being studied to help her understand

how they change behavior as the size of the space they are exploring varies.

"The ants are good at finding new places to live in and good at finding food,"

Gordon said. "We're interested in finding out how they do it."

Her ants are confined by Plexiglas walls and a nasty glue-like substance

along the tops of the boards that keeps the ants inside. She moves the walls in

and out to change the arena and videotapes the ants' movements. A computer

tracks each ant from its image on the tape and reads its position so she has a

diagram of the ants' activities.

The motions of the ants confirm the existence of a collective.

"A colony is analogous to a brain where there are lots of neurons, each of

which can only do something very simple, but together the whole brain can

think. None of the neurons can think ant, but the brain can think ant, though

nothing in the brain told that neuron to think ant."

For instance, ants scout for food in a precise pattern. What happens when

that pattern no longer fits the circumstances, such as when Gordon moves the

walls?

"Ants communicate by chemicals," she said. "That's how they mostly

perceive the world; they don't see very well. They use their antennae to smell.

So to smell something, they have to get very close to it.

"The best possible way for ants to find everything - if you think of the colony

as an individual that is trying to do this - is to have an ant everywhere all the

time, because if it doesn't happen close to an ant, they're not going to know

about it. Of course, there are not enough ants in the colony to do that, so

somehow the ants have to move around in a pattern that allows them to cover

space efficiently."

Keeping in mind that no one is in charge of a colony and that there is no

central plan, how do the ants adjust their reconnaissance if their territory

expands or shrinks?

"No ant told them, 'OK, guys, if the arena is 20 by 20. . . .' Somehow there

has to be some rule that individual ants use in deciding to change the shape of

their paths so they cover the areas effectively. I think that that rule is the rate in

which they bump into each other."

The more crowded they are, the more often each ant will bump into another

ant. If the area of their territory is expanded, the frequency of contact decreases.

Perhaps, Gordon thinks, each ant has a threshold for normality and adjusts its

path shape depending on how often the number of encounters exceeds or falls

short of that threshold.

If the territory shrinks, the number of contacts increases and the ant alters

its search pattern. If it expands, contact decreases and it alters the pattern a

different way.

In the Arizona harvester ants, Gordon studies tasks besides patrolling. Each

ant has a job.

"I divide the tasks into four: foraging, nest maintenance, midden [piling

refuse, including husks of seeds] and patrolling - patrollers are the ones that

come out first in the morning and look for food. The foragers go where the

patrollers find food.

"The colony has about eight different foraging paths. Every day it uses

several of them. The patrollers go out first on the trails and they attract each

other when they find food. By the end of an hour's patrolling, most patrollers are

on just a few trails. . . . All the foragers have to do is go where there are the most

patrollers."

Each ant has its prescribed task, but the ants can switch tasks if the

collective needs it. An ant on housekeeping duty will decide to forage. No one

told it to do so and Gordon and other entomologists don't know how that

happens.

"No ant can possibly know how much food everybody is collecting, how

many foragers are needed," she said. "An ant has to have very simple rules that

tell it, 'OK, switch and start foraging.' But an ant can't assess globally how much

food the colony needs.

"I've done perturbation experiments in which I marked ants according to

what task they're doing on a given day. The ants that were foraging for food

were green, those that were cleaning the nest were blue and so on. Then I

created some new situation in the environment; for example, I create a mess

that the nest maintenance workers have to clean up or I'll put out extra food

that attracts more foragers.

"It turns out that ants that were marked doing a certain task one day switch

to do a different task when conditions change."

Of about 8,000 species of ants, only about 10 percent have been studied

thus far.

"It's hard to generalize anything about the behavior of ants," Gordon said.

"Most of what we know about ants is true of a very, very small number of species

compared to the number of species out there."

天才儿童

TIME: 5-7'

HOW IQ BECOMES IQ

In 1904 the French minister of education, facing limited resources for

schooling, sought a way to separate the unable from the merely lazy. Alfred

Binet got the job of devising selection principles and his brilliant solution put a

stamp on the study of intelligence and was the forerunner of intelligence tests

still used today. He developed a thirty-problem test in 1905, which tapped

several abilities related to intellect, such as judgment and reasoning. The test

determined a given child's mental age'. The test previously established a norm

for children of a given physical age. For example, five-year-olds on average get

ten items correct, therefore, a child with a mental age of five should score 10,

which would mean that he or she was functioning pretty much as others of that

age. The child's mental age was then compared to his physical age.

A large disparity in the wrong direction (e.g., a child of nine with a mental

age of four) might suggest inability rather than laziness and means that he or

she was earmarked for special schooling. Binet, however, denied that the test

was measuring intelligence and said that its purpose was simply diagnostic, for

selection only. This message was however lost and caused many problems and

misunderstandings later.

Although Binet's test was popular, it was a bit inconvenient to deal with a

variety of physical and mental ages. So, in 1912, Wilhelm Stern suggested

simplifying this by reducing the two to a single number. He divided the mental

age by the physical age and multiplied the result by 100. An average child,

irrespective of age, would score 100. a number much lower than 100 would

suggest the need for help and one much higher would suggest a child well ahead

of his peer.

This measurement is what is now termed the IQ (intelligence quotient)

score and it has evolved to be used to show how a person, adult or child,

performed in relation to others. The term IQ was coined by Lewis m. Terman,

professor of psychology and education of Stanford University, in 1916. He had

constructed an enormously influential revision of Binet's test, called the

Stanford-Binet test, versions of which are still given extensively.

The field studying intelligence and developing tests eventually coalesced

into a sub-field of psychology called psychometrics (psycho for ‘mind' and

metrics for 'measurements'). The practical side of psychometrics (the

development and use of tests) became widespread quite early, by 1917, when

Einstein published his grand theory of relativity, mass-scale testing was already

in use.

Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare (which led to the sinking of the

Lusitania in 1915) provoked the United States to finally enter the first world war

in the same year. The military had to build up an army very quickly and it had

two million inductees to sort out. Who would become officers and who enlisted

men? Psychometricians developed two intelligence tests that helped sort all

these people out, at least to some extent. This was the first major use of testing

to decide who lived and who died since officers were a lot safer on the battlefield.

The tests themselves were given under horrendously bad conditions and the

examiners seemed to lack common sense. A lot of recruits simply had no idea

what to do and in several sessions most inductees scored zero! The examiners

also came up with the quite astounding conclusion from the testing that the

average American adult's intelligence was equal to that of a thirteen-year-old!

Nevertheless, the ability for various authorities to classify people on

scientifically justifiable premises was too convenient and significant to be

dismissed lightly, so with all good astounding intentions and often over

enthusiasm, society's affinity for psychological testing proliferated.

Back in Europe, Sir Cyril Burt, professor of psychology at University College

London from 1931 to 1950, was a prominent figure for his contribution to the

field. He was a firm advocate of intelligence testing and his ideas fitted in well

with English cultural ideas of elitism. A government committee in 1943 used

some of Burt's ideas in devising a rather primitive typology on children's

intellectual behavior. All were tested at age eleven and the top 15 or 20 per cent

went to grammar schools with good teachers and a fast pace of work to prepare

for the few university places available. A lot of very bright working-class children,

who otherwise would never have succeeded, made it to grammar schools and

universities.

The system for the rest was however disastrous. These children attended

lesser secondary or technical schools and faced the prospect of eventual

education oblivion. They felt like dumb failures, which having been officially and

scientifically branded. No wonder their motivation to study plummeted. It was

not until 1974 that the public education system was finally reformed. Nowadays

it is believed that Burt has fabricated a lot of his data. Having an obsession that

intelligence is largely genetic, he apparently made up twin studies, which

supported this idea, at the same time inventing two co-workers who were

supposed to have gathered the results.

Intelligence testing enforced political and social prejudice and their results

were used to argue that Jews ought to be kept out of the United States because

they were so intelligently inferior that they would pollute the racial mix. And

blacks ought not to be allowed to breed at all. Abuse and test bias controversies

continued to plaque psychometrics.

Measurement is fundamental to science and technology. Science often

advances in leaps and bounds when measurement devices improve.

Psychometrics has long tried to develop ways to gauge psychological qualities

such as intelligence and more specific abilities, anxiety, extroversion, emotional

stability, compatibility with marriage partner and so on. Their scores are often

given enormous weight. A single IQ measurement can take on a life of its own if

teachers and parents see it as definitive. It became a major issue in the 70s

when court cases were launched to stop anyone from making important

decisions based on IQ test scores. the main criticism was and still is that current

tests don't really measure intelligence. Whether intelligence can be measured at

all is still controversial. some say it cannot while others say that IQ tests are

psychology's greatest accomplishments.

全球变暖

A Canary in the Coal Mine

The Arctic seems to be getting warmer. So what?

A. “Climate change in the Arctic is a reality now!” So insists Robert Corell, an

oceanographer with the American Meteorological Society. Wild-eyed

proclamations are all too common when it comes to global warming, but in this

case his assertion seems well founded.

B. At first sight, the ACIA’s (American Construction Inspectors Association)

report’s conclusions are not so surprising. After all, scientists have long

suspected that several factors lead to greater temperature swings at the poles

than elsewhere on the planet. One is albedo — the posh scientific name for how

much sunlight is absorbed by a planet’s surface, and how much is reflected.

Most of the Polar Regions are covered in snow and ice, which are much more

reflective than soil or ocean. If that snow melts, the exposure of dark earth

(which absorbs heat) acts as a feedback loop that accelerates warming. A

second factor that makes the poles special is that the atmosphere is thinner

there than at the equator, and so less energy is required to warm it up. A third

factor is that less solar energy is lost in evaporation at the frigid poles than in the