“How Smart Are Animals?” Notes - Summarizing Informational Text - Part 2

Summarize - briefly restate in your own words the central ideas and important details in a text

Using the central ideas and details to assist you, write a brief summary IN YOUR OWN WORDS for the section What Is Intelligence? (p. 109-110).

We humans recognize a “smart” person when we meet one;
we know who is a “brain” and who is not. In school, we take
IQ tests, which are supposed to give a numerical measure
of our “intelligence.” But these days, the whole concept of
intelligence is being reevaluated. The older, standard IQ tests
measure only a limited range of mental abilities, concentrating
on mathematics and language skills. Creativity, which most
people would agree is a critical element in the meaningful
application of intelligence, has not traditionally been evaluated
by such tests, and other important mental skills have also
been ignored. But things are changing. Many scientists believe
that dozens of different talents are a part of intelligence. In
fact, more than a hundred factors of intelligence have been
written about in scientific literature. Psychologists are now
developing tests that measure intelligence more accurately
and more broadly. The SOI (Structure of Intellect) test, for
example, evaluates five main factors of intelligence: cognition
(comprehension), memory, evaluation (judgment, planning,
reasoning, and critical decision making), convergent
production (solving problems where answers are known), and
divergent production (solving problems creatively). Each of
these is broken down further into many subcategories.
But what about animals? We can’t hand them a pencil
and paper and give them a test, and we can’t ask them what
they’re thinking. We must find other ways of measuring their
“smarts.” And that’s not the only problem. Since the lives of
animals are so different from ours, we can’t apply human
standards to them. We must develop different ideas of what
animal intelligence might be.