2024届高三英语一轮复习时文阅读理解专项训练1

为何只有人类会说话？ 在生物学界，人类是一种灵长目人科人属的动物，与黑猩猩，长臂猿等同属人科的灵长目动物。然而与其他灵长类动物相比，人类能够更好的控制自己的声音声调，可以用流畅的语言进行交流。造成这些差异的原因究竟是什么？为何只有人类可以熟练的掌握语言？让我们一起来看看吧。 A crying baby, a screaming adult, a teenager whose voice cracks — people could have sounded this shrill (刺耳的) all the time, a new study suggests, if not for a key step in human evolution. Humans have vocal cords, muscles in the top of the throat, which vibrate to produce sound. But unlike all the other studied primates (灵长类动物) , humans don't have small bits of tissue above the vocal cords called vocal membranes (声带膜) . That unique part helps people control their voices well enough to produce sounds that form spoken language. To find out how vocal membranes affected spoken sounds, a team from Kyoto University took throats from chimpanzees that had died of natural causes and put the parts into devices, pushing air through the throats to see how the vocal cords and membranes would react. In the experiment, the researchers found that their vocal membranes and vocal cords vibrated together. Vocal membranes make it easier for some animals to shout loudly and shrill. Researchers said these vocal membranes make it harder for other primates to control the voices they make. Without these membranes, humans' vocal source is more stable, allowing better voice control and production of long and even-toned sounds. A key thing that distinguishes human speech from animal sounds is our precise control over the sounds we make. In humans, that sort of shrill can happen when we put extreme amounts of pressure on our voice, like when we scream — or when teens struggle with controlling their growing vocal cords. But those are rare cases. Researchers also said that our mouths and tongues could help control the tones on which language is based. 1.Why does the human voice sound less shrill? A.Humans have no vocal membranes. B.Vocal cords of humans are very narrow. C.Muscles in the human throat can har