2016年12月3日亚太SAT阅读真题原文Passage3

　　2016年12月3日SAT考试已经结束。新航道SAT培训时间与你分享12月3日的SAT考情。2016年12月3日亚太SAT阅读真题：篇：2016年12月3日亚太SAT阅读真题回忆-A Room with a View、第二篇：2016年12月3日亚太SAT阅读真题回忆-Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife（双篇哦）。本篇接着介绍第三篇SAT真题原文及解析。

　　3、第三篇


　　题材：科学

　　Madness of crowds, single ants beat colonies at easy choices

　　
梗概


　　个科学题材文章是Ed Yong2013年7月30日发表在《国家地理》杂志上的一篇文章。作者认为以前人们几乎都认为蚁群的力量要大于单个蚂蚁的战斗力量，尤其是在处理比较困难的问题时，比如建造救生筏，攻击大型猎物，吓退大象。但是，作者在文章中支持了一个新的观点：如果蚂蚁筑巢地址选择得好，单兵作战能力实际上优于群体作战能力。

　　原文：

　　Virtually every article or documentaryabout ants takes a moment to fawn over their incredible collectiveachievements. Together, ant colonies can raise gardens and livestock, buildliving rafts, run vaccination programmes, overpower huge prey, deter elephants,and invade continents. No individual could do any of this; it takes a colony topull off such feats.

　　But ants can also screw up. Like allanimal collectives, theyface situations when the crowd’s wisdom turns into foolishness(本文主旨句，基本本句可直接排除很多选项).

　　Takao Sasaki and Stephen Pratt from Arizona State University found onesuch example among house-hunting Temnothorax ants. When they need to find a new nest, workers spread outfrom their colony to search for good real estate(考察本句中选取该蚂蚁的原因).In earlier work, Sasaki and Pratt have shown that, as a group, the ants arebetter at picking the best of two closely matched locations, even if most ofthe workers have only seen one of the options. It’s a classic example of swarmintelligence, where a colony collectively computes the best solution to a task.

　　But Sasaki showed that this only happens if their choice is difficult.If one nest site is clearly better than the other, individual ants actuallyoutperform colonies. When a worker finds a new potential home, it judges thesite’s quality for itself. Temnothoraxants love dark nests, in particular; with fewer holes, it’s easier to controltheir temperature or defend them(考察本句中表述的该蚂蚁的习性).If the worker decides that it likes the spot, it returns to the colony andleads a single follower to the new location. If the follower agrees, it doesthe same. Through these “tandem-runs”(考察该短语所表达的效果),sites build up support, and better ones do so more quickly than poorer ones.When enough ants have been convinced of the worth of a site, their migrationgathers pace. Workers just start picking up their nestmates and carrying themto the new site.

　　As the light difference between the nests got bigger and the task becameeasier, the ants, whether as individuals or colonies, made more accuratechoices. The team expected as much. But to their surprise(重点实验结果，理解该句可直接定位答案，排除选项若干),the single workers showed the greatest improvements and eventually outperformedtheir collective peers. In the easiest tasks, they chose the darker nest 90percent of the time, while the colonies peaked at 80 percent accuracy.

　　To understand why this happens, consider how the ants choose theirnests. If an individual is working by herself, she might visit a few sites in arow and gauge the difference between them. If they’re very similar, there’s agood chance she’ll make the wrong decision. But the colony doesn’t work off therecommendations of any individual; it relies on a quorum, just like the up- anddown-voting system of social websites like Reddit. Together, the colony can amplify small differences(解释神奇结果的原因，然而木有考)between closely-matched sites and smooth out bad choices from errantindividuals.

　　Still, this system(考察该词在语境中的含义)isn’t perfect. If many ants happen to find a bad site very quickly, they mightreach a quorum before other workers have time to rouse support for a betteralternative. “A bad choice can happen even if one site is much better than theother, because the ants at the bad site will have no information at all aboutthe existence of the much better alternative,” says Sasaki.

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