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A Sense of FairnessEverybody 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 inNature, suggests that it is all too monkey, as well.The researchers studied the behaviour of female brown capuchin monkeys. They look cute. They are good-natured, cooperative creatures, and they share their food readily. Above all, like their female human counterparts, they tend to pay much closer attention to the value of "goods and services" than males.Such characteristics make them perfect candidates for Dr. Brosnan"s and Dr. de Waal"s study. The researchers spent two years teaching their monkeys to exchange tokens for food. Normally, the monkeys were happy enough to exchange 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 (without an actual monkey to eat it) was enough to induce resentment in a female capuchin.The researchers suggest that capuchin monkeys, like humans, are guided by social emotions. In the wild, they are a cooperative, group-living species. Such cooperation 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 35 million years ago, is, as yet, an unanswered question. The statement "it is all too monkey" (Last line, Paragraph 1) implies that ______.
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Centers of the Great European CitiesThe centers of the great cities of Europe are meeting places by tradition. People gather there to drink coffee and chat late into the night. A mixture of locals and tourists make for an exciting, metropolitan atmosphere.Squares, plazas(广场) and arcades(拱廊) form the heart of Europe"s cities. Venice in Italy has the Piazza San Marco-a beautiful square surrounded by shops, churches, restaurants and cafes. In Barcelona, Spain, La Bosqueria is a lively market with hundreds of stalls selling all kinds of goods. London"s Covent Garden is filled with fruit and vegetable stalls by day and musicians, acrobats(杂技演员) and artists by night. The government buildings at the center of many cities often are architecturally impressive. In London, they serve as a beautiful backdrop(背景) to the coffee tables that line the streets and the banks of the Thames.These vibrant(有活力的) hearts are the product of centuries of evolution, social historian Joel Garreau told US News and World Report recently. "The reason people think Venice is so great today is you don"t see all the mistakes," said Garreau, "those have all been removed." Most European cities were laid out before the invention of the car, so bars, restaurants and cafes were near to people"s homes. Today, the focus of many Europeans" life has moved away from the centers. They live in the suburbs and outskirts, driving to supermarkets to get their supplies. But on a continent where people treasure convention, there are still those who hold onto traditional ways, living and shopping locally. These people, together with tourists, provide the city centers with their reason for existence.Coffee culture plays a part in keeping these city centers flourishing. This is particularly true of Paris whose citizens are famous enthusiastic conversationalists. This skill is developed over many hours spent chatting over espressos(浓咖啡) and cigarettes.Religion also plays a role in developing sociable atmosphere. People in Roman Catholic countries used to visit the Church on an almost daily basis. Entire communities would gather in the same building and then move out to the markets, cafes and bars in the surrounding streets. An enormous example of this relationship between church and society is the Duomo. The huge marble cathedral in Florence, Italy is surrounded by bakeries and coffee shops, and caters not only to the tourist crowds, but also the local community. Which statement is NOT true of Covent Garden
Controlling Robots with the MindBelle, our tiny monkey, was seated in her special chair inside a chamber at our Duke University lab. Her right hand grasped a joystick(操纵杆) as she watched a horizontal series of lights on a display panel. She knew that if a light suddenly shone and she moved the joystick left or right to correspond to its position, she would be sent a drop of fruit juice into her mouth.Belle wore a cap glued to her head. Under it were four plastic connectors, which fed arrays of microwires-each wire finer than the finest sewing thread-into different regions of Belle"s motor cortex(脑皮层), tile brain tissue that plans movements and sends instructions. Each of the 100 microwires lay beside a single motor neuron(神经元). When a neuron produced an electrical discharge, the adjacent microwire would capture the current and send it up through a small wiring bundle that ran from Belle"s cap to a box of electronics on a table next to the booth. The box, in turn, was linked to two computers, one next door and the other half a country away.After months of hard work, we were about to test the idea that we could reliably translate the raw electrical activity in a living being"s brain-Belle"s mere thoughts-into signals that could direct the actions of a robot. We had assembled a multi-jointed robot arm in this room, away from Belle"s view, which she would control for the first time. As soon as Belle"s brain sensed a lit spot on the panel, electronics in the box running two real-time mathematical models would rapidly analyze the tiny action potentials produced by her brain cells. Our lab computer would convert the electrical patterns into instructions that would direct the robot arm. Six hundred miles north, in Cambridge, Mass, a different computer would produce the same actions in another robot arm built by Mandayam A. Srinivasan. If we had done everything correctly, the two robot arms would behave as Belle"s arm did, at exactly the same time. Finally the moment came. We randomly switched on lights in front of Belle, and she immediately moved her joystick back and forth to correspond to them. Our robot arm moved similarly to Belle"s real arm. So did Srinivasan"s. Belle and the robots moved in synchrony (同步), like dancers choreographed(设计舞蹈动作) by the electrical impulses sparking in Belle"s mind.In the two years since that day, our labs and several others have advanced neuroscience, computer science and microelectronics to create ways for rats, monkeys and eventually humans to control mechanical and electronic machines purely by "thinking through," or imagining, the motions. Our immediate goal is to help a person who has been unable to move by a neurological(神经的) disorder or spinal cord(脊髓) injury, but whose motor codex is spared, to operate a wheelchair or a robotic limb. Which of the following is NOT true of the robot built by Srinivasan
More than one-third of the Chinese in the United States live in California, predominantly in San Francisco.
Bill Gates: Unleashing Your CreativityI"ve always been an optimist and I suppose that is rooted in my belief that the power of creativity and intelligence can make the world a better place.For as long as I can remember, I"ve loved learning new things and solving problems. So when I sat down at a computer for the first time in seventh grade, I was hooked. It was a chunky old teletype machine and it could barely do anything compared to the computers we have today. But it changed my life.When my friend Paul Allen and I started Microsoft 30 years ago, we had a vision of "a computer on every desk and in every home," which probably sounded a little too optimistic at a time when most computers were the size of refrigerators. But we believed that personal computers would change the world. And they have.And after 30 years, I"m still as inspired by computers as I was back in seventh grade.I believe that computers are the most incredible tool we can use to feed our curiosity and inventiveness to help us solve problems that even the smartest people couldn"t solve on their own.Computers have transformed how we learn, giving kids everywhere a window into all of the world"s knowledge. They"re helping us build communities around the things we care about and to stay close to the people who are important to us, no matter where they are.Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it "tap-dancing to work". My job at Microsoft is as challenging as ever, but what makes me "tap-dance to work" is when we show people something new, like a computer that can recognize your handwriting or your speech, or one that can store a lifetime"s worth of photos, and they say, "I didn"t know you could do that with a PC!"But for all the cool things that a person can do with a PC, there are lots of other ways we can put our creativity and intelligence to work to improve our world. There are still far too many people in the world whose most basic needs go unmet. Every year, for example, millions of people die from diseases that are easy to prevent or treat in the developed world.I believe that my own good fortune brings with it a responsibility to give back to the world. My wife, Melinda, and I have committed to improving health and education in a way that can help as many people as possible.As a father, I believe that the death of a child in Africa is no less poignant or tragic than the death of a child anywhere else and that it doesn"t take much to make an immense difference in these children"s lives.I"m still very much an optimist, and I believe that progress on even the world"s toughest problems is possible—and it"s happening every day. We"re seeing new drugs for deadly diseases, new diagnostic tools, and new attention paid to the health problems in the developing world.I"m excited by the possibilities I see for medicine, for education and, of course, for technology. And I believe that through our natural inventiveness, creativity and willingness to solve tough problems, we"re going to make some amazing achievements in all these areas in my lifetime. Bill Gates compares his hard work on a PC to "tap-dancing to work".
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