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  3. Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balan

Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balan

admin2010-08-21  34
问题     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 70-year-olds 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 cites 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 Indian compared with other 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.  
The word "diminished" (Para. 2) probably means" ______."
选项 A、decreased
B、increased
C、changed
D、gone away
答案A
解析 词义判断题。文章第二段指出，对人类进化不利的另一个因素是现在出生的人口比以前少，而且人们拥有的后代人数几乎相等，因此人与人之间的差异缩小了，大自然利用这种差异进行优胜劣汰的机会都减少了。所以diminished是“减少”的意思，故正确答案为A项。
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