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课时作业18 A taste of English humour Ⅰ.阅读理解 (2017·四川省德阳五中月考) American researchers found females are the more talkative sex because of a special “language protein”in the brain. The study, conducted by neuroscientists(神经学家) and psychologist from the University of Maryland, concluded that women talked more because they had more of the Foxp2 protein. The research, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that higher levels were found among humans that were women but in rats that were males. Their findings came after it was previously claimed that ladies speak about 20,000 words a day— over 13,000 more than men. “This study is one of the first to report a sex difference in the expression of a languageassociated protein in humans or animals，” said Prof Margaret McCarthy, who led the study. In their study, the researchers attempted to determine what might make male rats more vocal than their female friends. They separated fourdayold rats from their mothers and then counted the number of times they cried out in the “ultrasonic (超声波的) range”， the frequencies higher than humans can hear, over five minutes. While both sexes called out hundreds of cries, the males called out twice as often，they found. But when the pups were returned to their mother's cage, she fussed_over her sons first. Tests conducted on the parts of the brain known to be associated with vocal calls showed the male pups have up to twice as much Foxp2 protein as the females. The researchers then increased the production in the brains of female pups and reduced it in males. This led to the female rats crying out more often and their mothers showing more interest to them. In contrast, males became less “talkative”． | 
