Dogs greet other dogs nose-first, as it were sniffing each other from fore to (especially) aft. People are not quite so open about the process of sniffing each other out. But there is also evidence that human beings can infer kinship (亲属关系), deduce emotional states and even detect disease via the sense of smell.
Now, Inbal Ravreby, Kobi Snitz and Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel, have gone a step further.
They have shown, admittedly in a fairly small sample of individuals, that friends actually smell alike. They have also shown that people pick friends at least partly on the basis of body odour (气味).
As they report in Science Advances, Dr Ravreby, Dr Snitz and Dr Sobel started their research by testing the odours of 20 pairs of established, non-romantic, same-sex friends. They employed an electronic nose (e-nose) and two groups of specially recruited (招聘的) human “smellers”. The e-nose used a set of metal-oxide gas sensors to assess t-shirts worn by participants.
One group of human smellers were given pairs of these shirts and asked to rate how similar they smelt. Those in the other group were asked to rate the odours of individual t-shirts on five subjective dimensions: pleasantness, intensity, sexual attractiveness, competence and warmth. All three approaches yielded the same result. The t-shirts of friends smelt more similar to each other than did the t-shirts of strangers.
Friends, in other words, do indeed smell alike.
To further understand whether friendship causes similarity of smell, or similarity of smell causes friendship, Dr Ravreby, Dr Snitz and Dr Sobel investigated whether e-nose measurements could predict positive interactions between strangers to develop a new friendship.
They gathered another 17 volunteers, gave them t-shirts to wear to collect their body odours, ran those odours past the e-nose, and then asked the participants to play a game.
Participants were paired up at random and their reactions recorded. After each interaction, they demonstrated how close they felt to their fellow game by overlapping (重叠) two circles (one representing themselves, the other their partner) on a screen. It showed that the more similar the two electronic smell signatures were, the greater the overlap.
【小题1】What is the author’s purpose in mentioning dogs at the beginning of the passage?| A．To raise some doubts. | B．To illustrate a point. |
| C．To introduce the topic. | D．To impress the readers. |
| A．By analyzing the charts | B．By describing the details. |
| C．By comparing the results. | D．By explaining the theories. |
a. Participants were paired randomly.
b. Seventeen volunteers wore t-shirts.
c. Participants overlapped two circles.
d. The researchers ran smells past the e-nose.
| A．b-c-d-a. | B．c-d-a-b. | C．d-c-b-a. | D．b-d-a-c. |
| A．Pleasant body odours attract friends. |
| B．Similar smells strengthen friendship. |
| C．Friendship is based on same interests. |
| D．Friends tend to have similar body odours. |
