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TPO5托福听力Lecture1原文文本
Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in a sociology class.
Professor: Have you ever heard the one about alligators living in New York sewers? The story goes like this: a family went on vacation in Florida and bought a couple of baby alligators as presents for their children, then returned from vacation to New York, bringing the alligators home with them as pets.
But the alligators would escape and find their way into the New York sewer system where they started reproducing, grew to huge sizes and now strike fear into sewer workers. Have you heard this story? Well, it isn’t true and it never happened. But despite that, the story has been around since the 1930s. Or how about the song ‘twinkle, twinkle little star’, you know, ‘twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are’. Well we’ve all heard this song.
Where am I going with this? Well, both the song and the story are examples of memes. And that’s what we would talk about, the theory of memes. A meme is defined as a piece of information copied from person to person. By this definition, most of what you know, ideas, skills, stories, songs are memes. All the words you know, all the scientific theories you’ve learned, the rules your parents taught you to observe, all are memes that have been passed on from person to person.
So what? You may say. Passing on ideas from one person to another is nothing new. Well, the whole point of defining this familiar process as transmission of memes is so that we can explore its analogy with the transmission of genes. As you know, all living organisms pass on biological information through the genes.
What’s a gene? A gene is a piece of biological information that gets copied or replicated, and the copy or replica is passed on to the new generation. So genes are defined as replicators. Genes are replicators that pass on information about properties and characteristics of organisms. By analogy, memes also get replicated and in the process pass on cultural information from person to person, generation to generation. So memes are also replicators.
To be a successful replicator, there are three key characteristics: longevity, fecundity and fidelity. Let’s take a closer look. First, longevity. A replicator must exist long enough to be able to get copied, and transfer its information. Clearly, the longer a replicator survives, the better its chances of getting its message copied and passed on. So longevity is a key characteristic of a replicator. If you take the alligator story, it can exist for a long time in individual memory, let’s say, my memory. I can tell you the story now or ten years from now, the same with the twinkle, twinkle song. So these memes have longevity because they are memorable for one reason or another.
Next, fecundity. Fecundity is the ability to reproduce in large numbers. For example, the common housefly reproduces by laying several thousand eggs, so each fly gene gets copied thousands of times. Memes, well, they can be reproduced in large numbers as well. How many times have you sung the ‘twinkle, twinkle song’ to someone? Each time you replicated the song, and maybe passed it along to someone who did not know it yet, a small child maybe.
And finally, fidelity. Fidelity means accuracy of the copying process. We know fidelity is an essential principle of genetic transmission. If a copy of a gene is a bit different from the original, that’s called a genetic mutation. And mutations are usually bad news. An organism often cannot survive with a mutated gene. And so a gene usually cannot be passed on, unless it’s an exact copy.
For memes however, fidelity is not always so important. For example, if you tell someone the alligator story I told you today, it probably won’t be word for word exactly as I said it. Still, it will be basically the same story, and the person who hears the story will be able to pass it along. Other memes are replicated with higher fidelity though, like the twinkle, twinkle song.
It had the exact same words 20 years ago as it does now. Well, that’s because we see songs as something that has to be performed accurately each time. If you change a word, the others will usually bring you in line. They’ll say, ‘that’s not how you sing it’, right? So, you can see how looking at pieces of cultural information as replicators, as memes, and analyzing them in terms of longevity, fecundity and fidelity, we can gain some insight about how they spread, persist or change.
TPO5托福听力Lecture1题目文本
Question 1 of 6
What is the main purpose of the lecture?
A. To introduce a method that can help students remember new information.
B. To introduce a way to study how information passes from one person to another.
C. To explain the differences between biological information and cultural information.
D. To explain the differences between stories, songs, and other pieces of information.
Question 2 of 6
Why does the professor tell the story about alligators?.
A. To explain the difference between true and false stories.
B. To draw an analogy between alligator reproduction and cultural transmission.
C. To give an example of a piece of information that functions as a meme.
D. To show how a story can gradually change into a song.
Question 3 of 6
According to the professor, which of the following are examples of meme transfer?Click on 2 answers.
A. Telling familiar stories.
B. Sharing feelings.
C. Composing original music.
D. Learning a scientific theory.
Question 4 of 6
What example does the professor give of a meme’s longevity?.
A. A story has been changing since it first appeared in the 1930s.
B. A person remembers a story for many years.
C. A gene is passed on through many generations without changing.
D. A song quickly becomes popular all over the world.
Question 5 of 6
What does the professor compare to a housefly laying many eggs?
A. A child learning many different ideas from or her parents.
B. Alligators reproducing in New York sewers.
C. Different people remembering different versions of a story.
D. A person singing the “Twinkle, twinkle” song many times.
Question 6 of 6
Why does the professor say this?.
A. To explain why some memes do not change much.
B. To ask the students for their opinion about songs as memes.
C. To acknowledge a problem with the meme theory.
D. To ask the student to test an idea about memes.
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