大学英语(一)

Unit five

Text A Fallacies about food

Many primitive peoples believed that by eating an animal they could get some of the good qualities of that animal for themselves. They thought, for example, that eating deer world make them run as fast as the deer. Some savage tribes believed that eating enemies that had shown bravery in battle would make them brave. Man-eating may have started because people were to become as strong and brave as their enemies.

Among civilized people it was once thought that ginger root by some magical power could improve the memory. Eggs were thought to make the voice pretty. Tomatoes also were believed to have magical powers. They were called love apples and were supposed to make people who ate them fall in love.

Later another wrong idea about tomatoes grew up—the idea that they were poisonous. How surprised the people who thought tomatoes poisonous would be if they could know that millions of pounds of tomatoes were supplied to soldiers overseas during World War II.

Even today there are a great many wrong ideas about food. Some of them are very widespread.

One such idea is that fish is the best brain food. Fish is good brain food just as it is good muscle food and skin food and bone food. But on one has been able to prove that fish is any better for brain than many other kinds of food.

Another such idea is that you should not drink water with meals. Washing food down with water as a substitute for chewing is not a good idea, but some water with meals has been found to be helpful. It makes the digestive juices flow more freely and helps to digest the food.

Many of the ideas which scientists tell us have no foundation have to do with mixtures of foods. A few years ago the belief became general that orange juice and milk should never be drunk at the same meal. The reason given was that the acid in the orange juice would make the milk curdle and become indigestible. As a matter of fact, milk always meets in the stomach a digestive juice which curdles it’s the curdling of the milk is the first step in its digestion. A similar wrong idea is that fish and ice cream when eaten at the same meal from a poisonous combination.

Still another wrong idea about mixing foods is that proteins and carbohydrates should never be eaten at the same meal. Many people think of bread, for example, as a carbohydrate

food. It is chiefly a carbohydrate food, but it also contains proteins. In the same way, milk, probably the best single food, contains both proteins and carbohydrates. It is just as foolish to say that one should never eat meat and potatoes together as it is to say that one should never eat bread or drink milk.

Text B

Do animals think?

The question has often been asked, Do animals thinks? I believe that some of them think a great deal. Many of them are like children in their sports. We notice this to be true very often with dogs and cats; but it is true with other animals as well.

Some birds are very lively in their sports; and the same is true with some insects. The ants, hardworking as they are, have their times for play. They run races; they wrestle; and sometimes they have mock fights together. Very busy must be their thoughts while engaged in these sports.

There are many animals, however, that never play; their thoughts seem to be of the more sober kind. We never see frogs engaged in sport. They all the time appear to be very grave. The

same is true of the owl, who always looks as if he were considering some important question.

Animals think much while building their houses. The bird searches for what it can use in building its nest, and in doing this it thinks. The beavers think as they build their dams and their houses. They think in getting their materials, and also in arranging them, and in plastering them together with mud. Some spiders build houses which could scarcely have been made except by some thinking creature.

As animals think, they learn. Some learn more than others. The parrot learns to talk, though in some other respects it quite stupid. The mocking bird learns to imitate a great many different sounds. The horse is not long in learning many things connected with the work which he had to do. The shepherd dog does not know as much about most things as some other dogs, and yet he understands very well how to take care of sheep.

Though animals think and learn, they do not make any real improvement in their ways of doing things, as men do. Each kind of bird has its own way of building a nest, and it is always the same way. And so of other animals. They have no new fashions, and learn none from each other. But men, as you know, are always finding new ways of building houses, and improved

methods of doing almost all kinds of labor.

Many of the things that animals know how to do they seem to know either without learning, or in some way which we cannot understand. They are said to do such things by instinct; but no one can tell what instinct is. It is by this instinct that birds build their nests and beavers their dams and huts. If there things were all planned and thought out just as men plan new houses, there would be some changes in the fashions of them, and some improvements.

I have spoken of the building instinct of beavers. An English gentleman caught a young one and put him at first in a cage. After a while he let him out in a room where there was a great variety of things. As soon as he was let out he began to exercise his building instinct. He gathered together whatever he could find, brushes, baskets, boots, clothes, sticks, bits of coal, etc. , and arranged them as if to build a dam. Now, if he had had his wits about him, he would have known that there was no use in building a dam where there was no water.

It is plain that, while animals learn about things by their senses as we do, they do not think nearly as much about what they learn, and this is the reason why they do not improve more rapidly. Even the wisest of them, as the elephant and the dog,

do not think very much about what they see and hear. Nor is this all. There are some things that we understand, but about which animals know nothing. They have no knowledge of anything that happens outside of their own observation. Their minds are so much unlike ours that they do not know the difference between right and wrong.