高考◆英语◆湖北省題庫下載題庫

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From the moment that an animal is born it has to make decisions . It has to decide which of the things around it are for eating , and which are to be avoided ; when to attack and when to run away . The animal is , in fact , playing a very dangerous game with its environment , a game in which it must make decision—a matter of life or death . 

Animals’ ability to act reasonably is believed to come partly from what we may call “genetic (遗传性的)learning” , which is different from the individual (个体的) learning that an animal does in the course of its own lifetime . Genetic learning is learning by a species —animals of the same kind—as a whole , and it is achieved by selection of those members of each generation that happen to act in the right way . However , the role of genetic learning depends upon how similar the future environment is to the past . The more important individual experience is likely to be , the less important is genetic learning as a means of getting over the problems of the survival game . Because most animals live in ever changing evironments from one generation to the next , it is not surprising to find that very few species indeed depend wholly upon genetic learning . 

In the great majority of animals , their particular ways of acting in a new environment are a compound (复合体) of individual experience added to the action patterns animals are born with .That is why animals can survive .