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  3. Tenants who don’t pay the rent are a bane of landlords everywhere. And landlords who use heavy tactics to enforce payment are si

Tenants who don’t pay the rent are a bane of landlords everywhere. And landlords who use heavy tactics to enforce payment are si

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问题     Tenants who don’t pay the rent are a bane of landlords everywhere. And landlords who use heavy tactics to enforce payment are similarly a bane of tenants. Nor are these problems confined to human beings. Property-owning cichlid fish seem as ruthless about receiving what they are owed as any 19th-century tenement holder in the Lower East Side of New York.
    The fish in question, Neolamprologus pulcher, inhabit Lake Tanganyika in east Africa. They are cooperative breeders, meaning that dominant individuals do the breeding and subordinates assist in various ways, in exchange for immediate survival-enhancing benefits that may lead to the ultimate prize of becoming dominant themselves. In the case of N. pulcher the main benefit is having somewhere to live. Dwellings, in the form of shelters dug out from sand under rocks, are controlled by dominant pairs. These dominants permit subordinates to share their accommodation, and those subordinates pay for the privilege by keeping the property in good repair and defending the dominants’ eggs and fry against predators.
    Though cooperative breeding by vertebrates has evolved several times, the question of how rental payments are enforced has never been definitively settled. The presumption is that dominants punish subordinate defaulters. But it is hard to prove, by observing wild animals, that this is what is happening.
    What was needed to clear the point up was an experiment. JanNaef and Michael Tabor sky of the University of Bern, in Switzerland, therefore acquired 96 specimens of N. pulcher and created menages of a pair of dominant landlords and a subordinate tenant in sand-bottomed aquaria.
    Left alone, the fish behaved much as they would have done in the wild, with the tenant doing the grunt work of maintaining the hollows in the sand, and good relations pertaining between all. However, if a tenant was prevented for a time from fulfilling its duties, by trapping it behind a partition inserted into the aquarium for that purpose, things changed. When the partition was removed, the landlords attacked it, and it showed a big increase in submissive behaviour for several minutes before things returned to normal.
    Whether similar treatment would be meted out for a failure to defend the landlords’ eggs has yet to be determined. When prevented by a partition from driving away predators, tenants were not subsequently on the receiving end of aggression from landlords—but since there were no eggs to defend at the time, that may not have been part of the contract. The predators in question are not a threat to adult specimens of N.pulcher, only to eggs and fry. It is nevertheless clear from Dr Naef’s and Dr Taborsky’s experiment that, for cichlids at least, the rent must be paid in a timely fashion, or punishment will be faced.
Jan Naef and Micheal Taborsky’s experiment________.
选项 A、was to demonstrate the breeding pattern of N. pulchers
B、provided a simulation environment with specimens
C、used partitions to trap tenants and leave landlords unprotected
D、achieved the goal that they had set without doubt
答案B
解析 根据题干中的人名和关键词experiment可定位到文章第四段。由第四段最后一句可知扬.纳伊夫和迈克尔.塔博斯基收集了96个黄翅燕尾鱼的样本，还在铺满沙子的鱼缸里将其分组，模拟出了由房东鱼和租客鱼构成的比较单位，可以称之为全真模仿环境，由此可知B项为正确答案。由第三段和第四段第一句可知，实验本身是为了验证是否存在不按时交租会招来惩罚的假设，故选项A应排除；由第四段第二句可知，实验中实验者用隔板故意让租客鱼无法及时履行职责来构建冲突，但其职责并不包括保护房东鱼，故C项细节错误，应排除；由第六段可知，实验对于一些情况尚未证实，所以并没有达到设定的目标，选项D正反混淆，应排除。
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