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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

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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 has 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 cities 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 India compared to the 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.
What does the underlined word "fertile" mean (Para. 2, Line 2)?
选项 A、Being able to bear child.
B、Being able to support healthy plants to grow.
C、Staying alive.
D、Committing suicide.
答案A
解析 第二段的第一句提到：活着但少生孩子是进化自杀的另一种方法。第二句说现在的人没有过去那么“fertile”了，第三句紧跟着说：除了在一些宗教社区之外，几乎没有几个女人会拥有15个孩子。因此，可以推测出，第二句话说的意思是，现在的人不像过去的人那样能生那么多孩子。因此，选项A正确。剩下的三个选项都和这里的语境没有关系了。选项C和D只是照抄了第一句中的内容，与第二句中的fertile没有关系。
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