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新喀里多尼亚乌鸦会搭建复杂的工具，目前世界上只有三种动物有这种能力。
测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：
New Caledonia新喀里多尼亚
captive[ˈkæptɪv] adj.被俘的
morsel [ˈmɔ:sl] 一小口食物
阅读马上开始，建议您计算一下阅读整篇文章所用的时间，对照下方的参考值就可以评估出您的英文阅读水平。
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New Caledonian crows, cognitive champions of the avian world, have achieved another amazing feat of creativity: captive birds combined short sticks to make an implement long enough to reach inside a box and extract food.
Scientists from Oxford university and the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany said their captive crows were the only species other than humans and chimpanzees shown to be capable of constructing compound tools.
The researchers describe this “astonishing mental feat” in the journal Scientific Reports.
The crows, which live wild on the South Pacific island of New Caledonia, have been famous for their cognitive abilities since 2002 when Betty, a captive bird in Oxford, worked out that she could fish an otherwise unobtainable treat out of a box by bending wire into a hook — the first animal to demonstrate such ability.
Since then more evidence of the species’s intelligence has accumulated.
In the latest study, eight crows were presented with a selection of short cylinders with slightly different diameters, some hollow and some solid. These sticks were individually too short to reach food hidden deep inside a box, but four of the birds worked out within five minutes how to fit two pieces together into a pole long enough to push the morsel out of an opening in the side of the container.
One made compound tools from three and even four parts, making it “the first demonstration of compound tool construction with more than two elements in any non-human animal”, according to the research paper.
“The finding is remarkable because the crows received no assistance or training in making these combinations. They figured it out by themselves,” said Auguste von Bayern, a member of the research team.
Alex Kacelnik, who founded Oxford’s Behavioural Ecology Group, said: “The results confirm that these crows possess highly flexible abilities that allow them to solve novel problems rapidly, but do not show how they do it. It is possible that they use some form of virtual simulation of the problem, as if different potential actions were played in their brains until they figure out a viable solution, and then do it.”
The study was inspired by an influential experiment reported in the 1920s by Wolfgang Köhler, a German psychologist, in which a chimpanzee called Sultan learnt to stick two bamboo pieces together in order to reach bananas hanging outside his cage. But Sultan took much longer than the crows to work out the solution — more than an hour — and he was coached by a human demonstrator who poked his finger into a hollow bamboo stick.
Prof Kacelnik is now working with technologists at the Technical University of Berlin to investigate crow intelligence. “Similar processes are being modelled on artificial intelligences and implemented in physical robots, as a way to better understand the animals and to discover ways to build machines able to reach autonomous creative solutions to novel problems,” he said.
请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：
A. New Caledonian crows
B. New Zealand crows
C. New South Wales crows
D. New deli crows
答案 (1)
A. Humans
B. New Caledonian crows
C. Gorillas
D. Chimpanzees
答案 (2)
A. Because the crows worked out the solution independently.
B. Because the crows are captive.
C. Because the crows were trained in such a short time.
D. Because the crows live in the wild.
答案 (3)
A. Sultan was actually not a chimpanzee, but a crow
B. Sultan didn't even like banana.
C. Sultan didn't come up with the solution totally by itself.
D. Sultan was the main inspiration for artificial intelligence.
答案 (4)
(1) 答案：A解释：New Caledonian crows, cognitive champions of the avian world
(2) 答案：C解释：Scientists from Oxford university and the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany said their captive crows were the only species other than humans and chimpanzees shown to be capable of constructing compound tools.
(3) 答案：A解释：“The finding is remarkable because the crows received no assistance or training in making these combinations. They figured it out by themselves,” said Auguste von Bayern, a member of the research team.
(4) 答案：C解释：But Sultan took much longer than the crows to work out the solution — more than an hour — and he was coached by a human demonstrator who poked his finger into a hollow bamboo stick.