要約

どう「要約」するかで、思考の習慣が身についているかどうかがわかります。毎年東大では平易な英文を要約させる問題が出題されます。ずいぶん以前になりますが、highlight markerを利用することの問題点を論じた文があり、今でも教材として、また学習のあり方を伝えるために取り上げています。

以下の英文をまず読んでください。

What specifically makes us human? The complexity of our language? Our problem-solving strategies? You may be shocked by my suggestion that, in some very deep sense, language and some aspects of human problem solving are  no more or less complex than the behaviors of other species. Complexity as such is not the issue. Spiders weave complex webs, bees transmit complex information about sources and quality of nectar, ants interact in complex colonies, beavers build complex dams, chimpanzees have complex problem-solving strategies, just as humans use complex language. Nor are our problem-solving skills so remarkable: there are human beings who have perfectly normal human mental abilities, but who nevertheless are unable to solve certain problems that a chimpanzee can solve.  There is, however, one extremely important difference betweed human and non-human intelligence, a difference which distinguishes us from all other species. Unlike the spider, which stops at web weaving, the human child---and, maintain, only the human child---has the potential to take its own representations as objects of cognitive attention. Normally, human children not only become efficient users of language ; they also have the capacity to become little grammarians. By contrast, spiders, ants, beavers, and probably even chimpanzees do not have the potential to analyze their own knowledge.
[2000 Tokyo] 

下線部について、文章にそくして分かりやすく説明してください。（実際の問いは「次の英文の内容を４０～５０字の日本語で要約せよ」です。こちらもやってみてください。）