英语六级 2023年6月·第3套 · 真题整卷

If you're someone who has turned to snacking on junk food more in the pandemic(大流行病), you're not alone. Investigative reporter Michael Moss says processed food is engineered to hook you, not unlike alcohol, cigarettes, or other harmful substances. His 2013 book, Salt Sugar Fat, explored food companies' aggressive marketing of those products and their impact on our health. In his new book, Hooked, Moss updates the food giants' efforts to keep us eating what they serve, and how they're responding to complaints from consumers and health advocates.

Processed food is inexpensive, it's legal, and it's everywhere. Companies' advertising is cueing us to remember those products and we want those products constantly. So the food environment is one of those key things that makes food even more problematic for so many people. Memory, nostalgia(怀旧) in particular, plays a big role in the foods we crave. Soda companies discovered that if they put a soda in the hands of a child when they're at a ball game with their parents, that soda will forever be associated with that joyous moment. Later in life, when that child wants to experience a joyous moment, they're going to think of soda. Many people seek comfort in the snacks they remember from childhood.

Moss examines the way companies capitalize on our memories, cravings and brain chemistry to keep us snacking.

One of the reasons I came to think that some of these food products are even more powerful, more troublesome than drugs can be is memory. What we eat is all about memory. And we begin forming memories for food at a really early age. And we keep those memories for a lifetime. Knowing this, the food industry spends lots of time trying to shape the memories that we have for their products. One of the features of addiction that scientists studying drug addiction discovered back in the 1990s was that the faster a substance hits the brain, the more apt we are as a result to act impulsively. There's nothing faster than food in its ability to hit the brain. For Moss, this puts the notion of "fast food" in an entirely new light as this isn't limited to fast food chains-almost 90% of food products in grocery stores are processed foods. Everything in the industry is about speed, from manufacturing to packaging.

Overall, Moss outlines the industry's dependence on making their products inexpensive, super delicious, and incredibly convenient for consumers. Now that more and more people care about what they put in their bodies and are wanting to eat healthier, these companies are finding it really difficult to meet that new demand because of their own addiction to making these convenience foods.

Chimpanzees(黑猩猩), human beings' closest animal relatives, share up to 98% of our genes. Yet humans and chimpanzees lead very different lives. Fewer than 300,000 wild chimpanzees live in a few forested corners of Africa today, while humans have colonized every corner of the globe. At more than 7 billion, human population dwarfs that of nearly all other mammals—despite our physical weaknesses.

What could account for our species' incredible evolutionary successes?

One obvious answer is our big brains. It could be that our raw intelligence gave us an unprecedented ability to think outside the box, innovating solutions to thorny problems as people migrated across the globe.

But a growing number of cognitive scientists and anthropologists(人类学家) are rejecting that explanation. They think that, rather than making our living as innovators, we survive and thrive precisely because we don't think for ourselves. Instead, people cope with challenging climates and ecological contexts by carefully copying others.

In a famous study, psychologists Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten showed two groups of test subjects—children and chimpanzees—a mechanical box with a treat inside. In one condition, the box was opaque, while in the other it was transparent. The experimenters demonstrated how to open the box to retrieve the treat, but they also included the irrelevant step of tapping on the box with a stick.

Oddly, the children carefully copied all the steps to open the box, even when they could see that the stick had no practical effect. That is, they copied irrationally: Instead of doing only what was necessary to get their reward, children slavishly imitated every action they'd witnessed.

Of course, that study only included three—and four-year-olds. But additional research has shown that older children and adults are even more likely to mindlessly copy others' actions, and infants are less likely to over-imitate—that is, to precisely copy even impractical actions.

By contrast, chimpanzees in the study only over-imitated in the opaque condition. In the transparent condition—where they saw that the stick was mechanically useless—they ignored that step entirely. Other research has since supported these findings.

When it comes to copying, chimpanzees are more rational than human children or adults.

Where does the seemingly irrational human preference for over-imitation come from? Anthropologist Joseph Henrich points out that people around the world rely on technologies that are often so complex that no one can learn them rationally. Instead, people must learn them step by step, trusting in the wisdom of more experienced elders and peers.

So the next time you hear someone arguing passionately that everyone should embrace nonconformity and avoid imitating others, you might laugh a little bit. We're not chimpanzees, after all.