专题37 植物痛苦时会哭吗-2023年高考英语外刊阅读及模拟强化训练

Do Plants "Cry" in Distress? We should be careful with what "crying" means here. 植物痛苦时会“哭”吗？ 文章选自《今日心理学》 主题语境：人与自然 子语境：植物 原文出处：Psychology Today 语篇类型：说明文 关键词：plant；animal；pain；sense 篇章导读：我们每天都在越来越多地了解一些动物有多聪明：类人猿、章鱼、一些鸟类、狗、猫。但是其他动物呢？蜗牛？蚊子？他们看起来确实不那么聪明。不过还是比植物聪明。因为很难证明植物是聪明的。但是事实真的这样吗？ 原汁原味外刊阅读及模拟强化训练 We are learning more and more every day about just how smart some animals are: apes, octopuses, some species of birds, dogs, cats. But how about other animals? Snails? Mosquitos? They sure seem less smart. Still smarter than plants though. Because it would be difficult to argue that plants are intelligent. Or would it? In a new study, it was shown that plants emit sounds when they are distressed. And these sounds are very different depending on whether they have recently been cut or whether they don't have enough water. The sounds are not audible to the human ear, as they are between 20 and 100 kilohertz, which is above the threshold of human hearing (which usually has the upper limit of 15-17 kilohertz). These are fascinating results. But we should be careful with what the study shows and what it doesn't. It is tempting to frame these results as "crying" and that is exactly what the popular science press has been doing. Plants don't suffer in silence: they are screaming with pain. This is a beautiful illustration of how easily we slip into anthropomorphizing not just animals, but also plants. Anthropomorphism is the attitude of attributing human-like features and mental states to animals (and plants). It has been widely discredited in biology as an unproductive method for finding out more about animal cognition (and also about how plants function). (A much more promising method would be the exact opposite of anthropomorphism, what could be called zoomorphism, when we attribute features and mental states that we know from the study of animals to humans.) Anthropomorphism makes it easier to relate to findings like