D. He enjoys working as a journalist.
27. What’s the writer’s intention of writing this passage? A. To express gratitude to Mrs. Virginia. B. To give an oral report on selecting a career. C. To show challenges he met as a reporter. D. To look for his previous classmates.
C
Life on Earth evolve（进化）through the passing on of genes. How does culture evolve? The evolution biologist, Richard Dawkins, coined the term “meme” in his book The Selfish Gene. According to Dawkins, while genes are the pieces of biological information from our parents which determines our appearance and how we grow, memes are units of cultural information—ideas and beliefs—that “pass from brain to brain”. Like genes, memes must compete for survival—if a meme cannot gain our attention, it disappears.
Basically, any shared idea related to culture is a meme. Myths, for example, are memes. Every society has its own stories that have survived, with some variations, for hundreds or thousands of years. The mythological dragon in Chinese culture is an idea that has been successfully passed between people for generation, and is therefore also a meme.
Historically, memes have spread very gradually by word of mouth. Within Internet culture, though, a successful idea can be shared between millions of people within a few hours. Internet memes (which may, for example, take the form of an image, a video or a website) may not last long, but they are particularly catching. They are shared, “liked”, copied and thus rapidly grown.
Then why do some ideas succeed in gaining our attention while others fail to attract us? It’s difficult to say, but humour is generally a factor（因素）. People are most likely to forward somethi