墨尔本PTE素材库——Cats’ Cunning Extends beyond the Hunt

墨尔本PTE素材库——Cats’ Cunning Extends beyond the Hunt

中文批注

心理学家Takagi，漫步进了一家日本的猫Café。顾客可以和店里的猫猫亲密互动，享受一个小时的免费时光。这个类型的店在日本十分受欢迎，因为日本很多公寓严禁住户饲养宠物。但是Takagi并不是一位普通的顾客，她并不是因为喜爱猫猫而来的，而是为了来探查猫猫们的想法。

这篇文章里生词不少，大致都整理如下。如果大家有时间，可以摘抄一下，用来扩张自己的词汇量哦！同时，也要注意不同词性的用法，千万不要用错语境，闹出笑话哦~

澳大利亚语言学院定期整理PTE相关的内容素材，整合成墨尔本PTE素材库，以供大家在平日学习之余，也有不少的PTE相关素材可以参考学习哦！类似于这篇音频，有不少相对较难、以及平时不常用到的学术词汇，大家需要做个积累，至少不能影响自己的阅读理解哦！

【Key Vocabulary】

Cunning：狡猾的

Psychologist：心理学家

Stroll：闲逛，漫步

Cuddle：拥抱，依偎

Forbid：禁止，不准，严禁。

Feline：猫科的

Probe：探查，调查

Mystery：秘密，神秘

Overwhelming：压倒性的，势不可挡的。

Familiarity：熟悉，精通

Critter：人，家畜。

Interpreter：翻译者。

Intuitive：直觉的，凭直觉获知的。

Ambush：埋伏，伏击，伏兵。

Demonstrations：示范，演示。

Bouncing：跳跃的，巨大的，活泼的。V. 弹跳(bounce的ing形式)

Stare：凝视，盯着看。

Vice versa：反之亦然。

Amiss：有毛病的，有缺陷的。

Domestication：驯养，教化。

Knack：诀窍，本领。

Eventually：最终

Experiment：实验

Hunch：预感，大块，肉峰。Vt.耸肩，预感到，弯腰驼背。Vi.隆起，向前移动。

Full Transcript

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.
—Jason G. Goldman

(Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/cats-cunning-extends-beyond-the-hunt/)