学进去

Anne of Green Gables has been a favorite book of teenagers all over the world since it came out in 1908. It tries to teach us how to grow up to be a happy and useful person.

Anne is an 11-year-old girl who has no parents and arrives in the town of Avonlea, Canada. She helps Mathew and Marilla Cuthbert, a brother and sister, on their farm.

At first, Mathew and Marilla hope to adopt (收养) a boy, not a thin girl. Will she be of any use on the farm?It seems unlikely: Anne is very creative, talkative and easily distracted (分心的). That’s not what is needed on a farm.

However, she tries her best to prove (证明) herself. On the one hand, she works really hard. On the other hand, she doesn’t lose her great sense of fun and this is why readers love the story. She doesn’t become “a good girl”, if “good girl” means knowing only how to work but live unhappily. We see Anne’s love for life everywhere. She knows how to enjoy herself, whether it’s by eating ice cream or trying on a new dress.

Many stories for children are written to tell them how to be good. Usually, it means doing one’s work but not having any fun. That’s not the kind of story Anne of Green Gable wants to tell. The book gives readers a helping hand rather than try to scare them into being “good” girls.

①Humans usually communicate with each other with words. However, sometimes our hands can also show people what we mean. The same thing happens to the apes (猿) as well.

②Apes have their own gestures (手势) to show what they mean. Chimpanzees and bonobos are two kinds of apes that are the closest to humans. In fact, they have up to 80 different gestures to express themselves. Though the two kinds of apes use different signs in some ways, they share over 90% of the same gestures.

③Two researchers wondered whether humans could understand the gestures of apes. They created a game for people to play online. People needed to watch short videos of apes making a gesture and then chose the correct meaning of the gesture out of four possible answers.

④The result surprised the researchers a lot. They found that those people could choose the correct meaning over 50% of the time. For some gestures, they could even choose the correct meaning about 80% of the time. One example was the gesture of wiping the mouth. People could guess it correctly by choosing “give me that food”. And “big loud scratch (抓挠)” means “help pick insects off me”. But how could this happen?

⑤ ▲ . One possibility is that the gestures came from our ancestors, which we shared with the apes. Another possibility is that the gestures are a natural result of having similar body shapes and communicating similar ideas. It’s also possible that the gestures simply look like the actions they are asking for.

⑥It’s necessary to carry out further research to study how humans can understand the gestures of apes. And scientists also wonder how humans understand other animals, like dogs.