字神帝國英語天地

今日主題：Cats' Cunning Extends Beyond the Hunt / 貓咪的“狡猾”超越獵人？

洪欣老師推薦：托福聽力最好的課外教材：60-Second Science

 康康精選托福會考的主題，堅持每天精聽一定會進步的哦!!

 建議方法：

1. 先聽兩三遍 (不看文稿)
2. 再一句一句聽寫 (每句都要聽寫數遍，直到寫出85%以上的字)
3. 最後check文稿，看哪聽不出來，單字沒背過，還是發音不熟。
4. 堅持天天聽，就能每天進步哦。

 MP3音檔 (按右鍵可下載聽)：喜歡的同學，幫忙推或按讚哦~~

http://online1.tingclass.net/voaspe/2016/20160711sa_mind.mp3

 只有音檔怎夠，聽不地方，不用怕，康康幫你準備好中英文稿了：

 中英文稿：

Psychologist Saho Takagi, a graduate student at Kyoto University in Japan, strolls into one of Japan's many cat cafes. These establishments allow customers to pay an hourly fee for the chance to cuddle some cats. They're popular in Japan because so many apartment buildings forbid pet ownership. But Takagi isn't a typical customer. She's not there for feline affection, but to probe their minds.
日本京都大學一名研究生，心理學家，Saho Takagi，漫步走進日本一家以貓咪為主題的咖啡館，在這些場所，顧客只需支付每小時的費用，就可享受小貓們的陪伴。這些咖啡館在日本非常流行，因為許多公寓禁止養寵物。但Saho Takagi並不是一個典型的顧客，她來這兒並不是為了獲得貓咪的情感，而是來調查它們的想法。

The psychology of domestic cats is still something of a mystery, despite our overwhelming familiarity with the critters. They have many skills, she tells me through an interpreter, that are not well known even to their owners.

儘管我們絕大多數都熟悉小動物，但家貓的心理仍是一個未解之謎。她通過一名翻譯告訴我，貓咪們有許多技能，它們的主人甚至都不清楚。

Takagi and her colleagues wanted to see whether domestic cats have an intuitive understanding of cause-and-effect, but to make it a fair test, they decided to let the cats use their ears instead of only their eyes. Cats are ambush hunters, and rely on their sense of hearing to locate their prey.

Takagi和她的研究團隊想了解家貓是否對因果關係存在直觀的理解，要想進行一場公平的測試，他們決定讓貓咪用聽覺來測試，而非僅僅靠視力。貓咪可以伏擊獵人，並依靠他們的聽覺來定位獵物。

The cats—30 of them, mostly from cat cafes, plus a few pets—were shown a series of demonstrations. For example, a researcher would shake a box, accompanied by the sound of an object bouncing around inside. Then the cat would be allowed to see inside the container.
在這30隻貓咪中——大多來自以貓為主題的咖啡館，再加上幾隻寵物貓——它們做了一系列的展示。例如研究人員會晃動一個盒子，伴隨著裡面發出一個物體蹦來蹦去的聲音，然後讓貓查看盒子的內部。

If the cat expects to find a ball inside the box, it would stare longer if the box turned out to be empty, rather than if the ball was there as expected. Psychologists call this a "violation of expectation" response. If they expected a ball and were surprised not to find one—or vice versa—it suggests that cats have certain expectations about the physical realities of the world.
如果貓咪期待在盒子裡找到一個球，而結果證明盒子裡面是空的，它會長時間盯著盒子。心理學家稱之為“期望悖反”反應。如果它們期望會有一個球，但驚奇地發現並沒有球——或反之——這表明貓對物理現實世界有一定的預期。

And the cats did stare longer at those containers that violated their expectations, as if to suggest that they realized that something in the situation was amiss. The findings were published in the journal Animal Cognition. [Saho Takagi et al., There's no ball without noise: cats' prediction of an object from noise]
並且貓咪確實會長時間盯著這些盒子，如果結果與它們的期望悖反，這似乎表明它們意識到一些不對頭的情況。這項研究結果發表在《動物認知》雜誌上。

Takagi suspects that this ability might be related to cats' hunting skills. Despite years of domestication, we initially kept them around as a form of pest control, so it makes sense that cats would have retained their knack for hunting.
Takagi懷疑這種能力可能與貓的捕獵技能有關。儘管經過了多年的馴化，我們最初將它們養在身邊是作為“害物防治”的一種形式，因此貓會保留它們的捕獵本領，所以這是有道理的。

Next, Takagi wants to see just how much information domestic cats can extract about objects, like quantity or size, based on what they hear. Eventually, she hopes to do similar experiments with wild cats as well, to see whether her hunting hunch is right .
接下來， Takagi想要弄明白根據它們所聽到的，家貓對目標對象可以提取多少信息，如數量或體積。最終，她希望對野生貓科動物做類似的實驗，以查看她的狩獵預感是否正確。