Inglese: esame di stato (questions, summary and composition)

Soluzione dell'esame di stato della sessione ordinaria del 2007.
Si tratta del testo di attualità in lingua straniera, inglese, per i licei linguistici: comprensione e produzione in lingua straniera.
A questo link trovate il testo completo della prova d'esame:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XPC1OX0M
Mentre da qui potete scaricare la soluzione del compito (risposte, riassunto e tema):
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=L2H8JOA3

Testo:
They may look like toys, but these robots have helped to back one theory of the origins of language. Sometime between seven million years ago, when we shared our last common ancestor with chimps, and 150,000 years ago, when anatomically modern humans emerged, true language came into being. One idea of how it emerged from the “primordial soup” of communication in the animal kingdom, whether primitive signalling between cells, the dance of bees, territorial calls and birdsong, goes as follows. ....

Domande:

1. When did language start?
2. When did humans’ utterances begin to originate communication?
3. Which was the crucial element for language to evolve? 
4. What allowed researchers to study the behaviour of robots over generations? 
5. Where is the study described? 
6. Which elements were used with the breeding robots? 
7. Which was the function of poison? 
8. Why did food constitute a downside?
9. How did the researchers make the simulation more realistic? 
10. What have the experiments proved?

Poi si deve fare un riassunto ed un piccolo tema riguardante la comunicazione.

Risposte:

1. Language started between seven million years ago, when we shared our last common ancestor with chimps, and 150,000 years ago, when anatomically modern humans emerged. 
2. Humans’ utterances began to originate communication when information transfer was beneficial for both speaker and listener. 
3. The crucial element for language to evolve was cooperation. 
4. The researchers studied the changing behaviour of robots over generations, thanks to mutating and mixing their software. So they noticed that the more successful traits were passed down to future generations. 
5. The study is described in the journal Current Biology. 
6. "Food" and "poison" were used with the breeding robots. 
7. The function of poison was to increase the informations transmission among robots and also the efficiency of food foraging. 
8. Food constituted a downside because ,announcing food, rival robots could then compete for the same resource. 
9. The researchers made the simulation more realistic by having different tribes of robots, where each tribe contained robots that were more similar (in terms of software) than robots of rival tribes and they found that communication evolves rapidly when colonies contain genetically similar (related) individuals. 
10. The experiments proved that the role of cooperation is fundamental for the evolution of language.