TEXT D Some animal behaviorists
argue that certain animals can remember past events, anticipate future ones,
make plans and choices, and coordinate activities within a group. These
scientists, however, are cautious about the extent to which animals can be
credited with conscious processing. Explanations of animal
behavior that leave out any sort of consciousness at all and ascribe actions
entirely to instinct leave many questions unanswered. One example of such
unexplained behavior: Honeybees communicate the sources of nectar to one another
by doing a dance in a figure-eight pattern. The orientation of the dance conveys
the position of the food relative to the sun’s position in the sky, and the
speed of the dance tells how far the food source is from the hive. Most
researchers assume that the ability to perform and encode the dance is innate
and shows no special intelligence. But in one study, when experimenters kept
changing the site of the food source, each time moving the food 25 percent
farther from the previous site, foraging honeybees began to anticipate where the
food source would appear next. When the researchers arrived at the new location,
they would find the bees circling the spot, waiting for their food. No one has
yet explained how bees, whose brains weigh four ten-thousandths of an ounce,
could have inferred the location of the new site. Other
Behaviors that may indicate some cognition include tool use. Many animals, like
the otter who uses a stone to crack mussel shells, are capable of using objects
in the natural environment as rudimentary tools. One researcher has found that
mother chimpanzees occasionally show their young how to use tools to open hard
nuts. In one study, chimpanzees compared two pairs of food containing chocolate
chips. One pair might contain, say, five chips and three chips, the other four
chips and three chips. Allowed to choose which pair they wanted, the chimpanzees
almost always chose the one with the higher total, showing some sort of summing
ability. Other chimpanzees have learned to label quantities of items and do
simple sums. It can be inferred from the statement about mother chimpanzees and their young (lines 21—23) that young chimpanzees have difficulty ______.
A.communicating with their mothers B.adding quantities C.making choices D.opening hard nuts