听力训练营Day20

1. For millions of years, co2 levels in the atmosphere have been regulated in parts by a natural partnership between plants and microbes, tiny organisms in the soil.

2.When they are earning, they're far more likely to put money aside for their old age than women are, now this is rather disturbing, because in fact the need for women to save for their old age is far greater than for men.

3. Since women are likely to be the ones left without a partner in old age, they may therefore have to pay for nursing care, because they don't have a spouse to look after them. Furthermore the high divorce rates in North America are creating a poverty cycle for women.

4. But today, I want to begin to look at some contemporary experimental designs for housing, so, I'm going to start with a house which is constructed more or less under the ground. And one of the interesting things about this project is that the owners both professionals but not architects, wanted to be closely involved.

5. Their chief aim was to create some there that was as environmentally-friendly as possible, but at the same time they wanted to live somewhere peaceful, they'd both grown up in a rural area and disliked urban life, so the first thing they did was to look for a site.

6. As I've said, it was a design for a sort of underground house, and it was built into the earth itself, with two storeys, the north, east and west sides were set in the earth, and only the sloping, south-facing side was exposed to light. That was made of a double layer of very strong glass.

7. We’ve been talking about animal cognition, the study of animal intelligence. Now, much of the research in this area is motivated by the search for animal analogues, or parallels to human cognitive processes, And one of the processes we’ve been investigating is metecognition.

8. But recently one group of researchers found a way to solve this problem, they did studies with…with monkeys and dolphins that provide evidence that these animals have the ability to feel uncertainty, to feel unsure about something and…and…well, to know that they are uncertain.

9. And the researcher noted that the dolphin is quite eager to press the paddle when it was sure of the answer, but exhibited hesitation during difficult trials. Next the researcher introduced a third option, a third paddle that would initiate a new trial, giving the dolphin the choice of passing on difficult trials.

10.  In other words, by pressing the pass paddle, the dolphin avoided having to wait and hasten the possibility of a full reward by moving directly to the next trial, so the experiment didn’t necessarily indicate that the dolphin had knowledge of its own uncertainty, just that it wanted to avoid negative consequences.