考研英语阅读例题：Humancommunication：Gesturepolitics人类的交流：肢体语言.docVIP

Human communication：Gesture politics肢体语言[2010.10.28] The Economist IT IS received wisdom that humanity owes a lot of its evolutionary success to its remarkable ability to communicate. So much so, in fact, that few have bothered to test this hypothesis in any systematic way. Now, a group of researchers led by Andrew King, of the Royal Veterinary College in Britain, has tried to plug this gaping hole. Their first results have just been published in Biology Letters. ? ?Hunter-gatherers’ practice of scouring their surroundings for edible plants is responsible for half of the name anthropologists have bestowed on them. And for good reason. With hunting likely to have been an intermittent diversion, effective foraging would have been crucial to tiding early humans over to the next woolly mammoth. So Dr King and his colleagues conducted a study to see how, if at all, communication enhances foraging prowess. ? ?They recruited 121 visitors to, rather appropriately, the London Zoo, and split them into 43 groups. Each group contained between two and seven people. Some were single-sex and some mixed. Some were composed of family and friends whereas others brought together complete strangers. Half the groups were allowed to communicate freely. The rest were told to exchange no verbal signals or gestures of any kind.? Unsurprisingly, the groups that were allowed to communicate proved the more effective foragers. They were much likelier than their non-communicating peers to converge on the greenest patches. What did come as something of a surprise, however, was the nature of the communication that mattered. The researchers monitored noise levels and hand gestures. Noise levels served as a proxy for verbal communication; gestures, for the non-verbal sort. Dr King found that the only thing which explained the probability of lighting on the best patch was gesture use, which peaked just before consensus was reached. Noise levels remained more or less constant the whole time, suggest