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Passage Four
Questions 36 to 40 are based on the following passage:
To call someone bird - brained in English means you think that person is silly or stupid.
But will this description soon disappear from use in the light of recent research? It seems the English may have been unfair in association bird's brains with stupidity.
In an attempt to find out how different creatures see the world, psychologists at Brown University in the USA have been comparing the behaviour of birds and humans. One experiment has involved teaching pigeons to recognize letters of the English alphabet. The birds study in "classrooms", which are boxes equipped with a computer. After about four days of studying a particular letter, the pigeon has to pick out that letter from several displayed on the computer screen. Three male pigeons have learnt to distinguish all twenty - six letters of the alphabet in this way.
A computer record of the birds's fourmonth study period has shown surprising similarities between the pigeons' and human performance. Pigeons and people find the same letters easy, or hard, to tell apart. For example, 92 per cent of the time the pigeons could tell the letter D from the letter Z. But when faced with U and V(often confused by English children), the pigeons were right only 34 per cent of the time.
The results of the experiments so far have led psychologists to conclude that pigeons and humans observe things in similar ways. This suggests that there is something fundamental about the recognition process. If scientists could only discover just what this recognition process is it could be very useful for computer designers. The disadvantage of a presen computer is that it can only do what a human being has programmed it to do and the programmer must give the computer precise, logical instructions. Maybe in the future, though, computers will be able to think like human beings.
36. The writer suggests that the expression "bird - brained" might be out of use soon because it is
A) silly B) impolite C) unnecessary D) inappropriate
37. Psychologists have been experimenting with pigeons to find out whether the brids
A) are really silly or stupid
B) can learn to make ideas known to people
C) see the world as human beings do
D) learn more quickly than children
38. U and V are confused by
A) 92 per cent of pigeons
B) many English children
C) most people learning English
D) 34 per cent of English children
39. There are similarities in observing things by pigeons and humans
A) because pigeons are taught by humans
B) because pigeons have brains more developed than other birds
C) because their basic ways to know the world are the same
D) because pigeons and humans have similar brains
40. The research may help
A) computer designers B) computer salesmen
C) psychologists D) teachers
