Studies show that humans and cats have been living together for about 9,500 years. Dogs have lived with humans longer than cats, and dogs have been trained to do what people want them to do.
As cat owners know well, cats do not follow humans in the same way dogs do. As a result, many people have come to think that maybe cats do not understand human language. A report shows that cats understand human language well enough to recognize their own names. The report tells a series of experiments with house cats in Japan. In these tests, people said four words that were similar to cats' names, and each word had the same number of syllables and some of the same sounds.
The cats seemed to lose interest after the speaker said a few of the words. Then the person said the cats' names. The cats moved their ears when they heard their names. They also moved their feet.
In another part of the experiment，Japanese researchers went to a cat café, a business where humans can come to spend time with cats. They compared house cats to cats that live at the cat cafe. When people said the names of the cats staying in the cat café, these house cats reacted as much to the names of the cats living at the cat cafe just as to their own names. The researchers thought this was because visitors may give food to the cats when they reacted.
The researchers hope that the findings from their study will help both cats and people. They add that perhaps cats can learn words to warn them of dangerous things or places.
【小题1】What does the report show?| A．Dogs can recognize their names. | B．Cats know nothing about humans. |
| C．Cats understand some human language. | D．Dogs have lived with humans shorter than cats. |
| A．They moved their ears. | B．They made a big noise. |
| C．They moved off the speaker. | D．They touched the speaker with their feet. |
| A．To take care of cats. | B．To do an experiment with cats. |
| C．To buy some cat food. | D．To drink coffee. |
| A．The cats like to live with human beings. | B．The cats can understand what human says. |
| C．The cats and dogs both are friends of human. | D．Human like dogs better than the cats. |
