Unit 5 Meeting your ancestors language points课时作业

I.阅读理解

　　A conversation in which neither party is listening to the other was classified as a "duologue" by Abraham Kaplan，a philosopher who died in 1993.A duologue，he suggested，is more than a monologue but less than a dialogue."Multiply a duologue by a roomful of people，" he added jokingly，"and you have a conference." Two psychologists have now given his ideas some substance，by showing that people do indeed often fail to notice when the conversations they are engaged in have been temporarily reduced to nonsense.

　　Bruno Galantucci of Yeshiva University in New York and Gareth Roberts of Haskins Laboratories in New Haven，Connecticut，are interested in how and why languages evolve.The mainstream view of why people communicate is that they are trying to transmit information faithfully.The "information" may not be true，of course.But even lies，this view holds，are told in the hope that they will be understood.Sometimes faithful transmission is indeed the intention，as when a pilot communicates，according to strict rules，with a control tower.According to Dr Galantucci and Dr Roberts，however，transmitting information efficiently takes a lot of effort and is the exception rather than the rule.In normal conversation，they report in a paper in PLOS ONE，people are surprisingly deaf to incoherence.

　　They demonstrated this by asking pairs of student volunteers to chat using an instant­messaging program.These volunteers，who had never met，did so sitting in separate rooms.They were given the task of identifying the differences in colour between two versions of a cartoon(each could see only one version).Unbeknown to them，though，another pair were performing the same task at the same time，with a different cartoon.While the two conversations were going on，the researchers switched between them so that a student would suddenly and without warning find himself chatting to someone from the other pair.There were four such crossings during the 15­minute experimental period，each lasting 30 seconds.Afterwards the volunteers were asked to establish if they had noticed anything strange about their conversation.

　　Having repeated the experiment with variations to allow for the fact that students who volunteer for psychology experiments tend to be cautious about dirty tricks，Dr Galantucci and Dr Roberts reported that between 27% and 42% of participants did not notice that their conversations had been switched.Instead，those participants had simply talked in a confused way regardless.Of course，exchanging instant messages is not quite the same as talking，so the two researchers have not definitively proved that many dialogues are actually duologues.But this research certainly adds to the suspicion that even supposedly purposeful communication often isn't.

1.According to Abraham Kaplan，a duologue .