These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness.
On what seems !ike a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance 5 of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—or at least object manipulation—the very kinds of activity 10 that led the distinguished zoologist Donald R. Griffin to found the field of cognitive ethology (animal thinking) in 1978: octopuses piling stones in front of their hideyholes, to name one recent example; or dolphins fitting marine sponges to their beaks in order to dig for 15 food on the seabed; or wasps using small stones to smooth the sand around their egg chambers, concealing them from predators. At the same time neurobiologists have been finding that the physical structures in our own brains most commonly held responsible for 20 consciousness are not as rare in the animal kingdom as had been assumed. Indeed they are common. All of this work and discovery appeared to reach a kind of crescendo last summer, when an international group of prominent neuroscientists meeting at the University of 25 Cambridge issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals,’’ a document stating that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” It goes further to conclude that numerous documented 30 animal behaviors must be considered “consistent with experienced feeling states,”
Q.1. Which choice best describes the organization of this passage?
(A) A theory is offered, an experiment is presented, and a critique is offered.
(B) An existing model is discussed, its flaws are examined, and a new model is proposed.
(C) Several examples of animal behavior are presented, and their significance is analyzed.
(D) An assertion is made, and specific examples are provided to support it.
Q.2. In line 21, the author’s focus shifts from
(A) a series of examples to a description of an outcome.
(B) focus on an individual to a consideration of a group.
(C) an examination of a problem to a proposal of a solution.
(D) a discussion of a claim to a questioning of that claim.
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