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  3. After taking his dog for a walk one day in the early 1940s, George de Mestral, a Swiss inventor, became curious about the seeds

After taking his dog for a walk one day in the early 1940s, George de Mestral, a Swiss inventor, became curious about the seeds

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问题     After taking his dog for a walk one day in the early 1940s, George de Mestral, a Swiss inventor, became curious about the seeds of the burdock plant that had attached themselves to his clothes and to the dog’s fur. Under a microscope, he looked closely at the hook-and-loop system that the seeds have evolved to hitchhike on passing animals and aid pollination, and he realised that the same approach could be used to join other things together. The result was Velcro: a product that was arguably more than three billion years in the making, since that is how long the natural mechanism that inspired it took to evolve.
    Velcro is probably the most famous and certainly the most successful example of biological mimicry, or "biomimetics". In fields from robotics to materials science, technologists are increasingly borrowing ideas from nature, and with good reason: nature’s designs have, by definition, stood the test of time, so it would be foolish to ignore them. Yet transplanting natural designs into man-made technologies is still a hit-or-miss affair.
    Engineers depend on biologists to discover interesting mechanisms for them to exploit, says Julian Vincent, the director of the Centre for Biomimetic and Natural Technologies at the University of Bath in England. So he and his colleagues have been working on a scheme to enable engineers to bypass the biologists and tap into nature’s ingenuity directly, via a database of "biological patents". The idea is that this database will let anyone search through a wide range of biological mechanisms and properties to find natural solutions to technological problems.
    Surely human intellect, and the deliberate application of design knowledge, can devise better mechanisms than the mindless, random process of evolution. Far from it. Over billions of years of trial and error, nature has devised effective solutions to all sorts of complicated real-world problems. Take the slippery task of controlling a submersible vehicle, for example. Using propellers, it is incredibly difficult to make refined movements. But Nekton Research, a company based in Durham, North Carolina, has developed a robot fish called Madeleine that manoeuvres using fins instead.
    In some cases, engineers can spend decades inventing and perfecting a new technology, only to discover that nature beat them to it. The Venus flower basket, for example, a kind of deep-sea sponge, has spiny skeletal outgrowths that are remarkably similar, both in appearance and optical properties, to commercial optical fibres, notes Joanna Aizenberg, a researcher at Lucent Technology’s Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. And sometimes the systems found in nature can make even the most advanced technologies look primitive by comparison, she says.
We can infer from the last two paragraphs that______.
选项 A、evolution is a mindless, random process
B、sometimes, nature’s systems are more advanced than modern technology
C、engineers who invent new technology always discover that nature has been there first
D、real-world problems can be solved by using design knowledge
答案B
解析 属推断题。倒数第二段第三句指出：自然已经为现实世界各种各样的复杂问题设计了有效的解决方法。末段首句又提到：有些时候，工程师们花了几十年研究、完善一项新技术，结果却发现自然已经在他们之前捷足先登了。由此推知答案为B。A项符合第四段第一句的内容，但不是最后两段的中心思想。C项说法太绝对，always与原文的in some cases矛盾。D与原文第四段第三句不符。
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