《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
criticizing the younger generations, are sure signs of an early funeral. 5
Being successful is a great life-stretcher, and can even override such life-shorteners as
obesity and fondness for drink. (4)____________________ And success must always be measures in personal terms. A hill-shepherd may feel just as successful in his own way as a Nobel Laureate. 6
Long-lived individuals seem to be more concerned with what they do than who they are.
They live outside themselves rather then dwelling on their own personalities. 7
In personal habits, the long-lived are generally moderate. Extremes of diet are not common.
A mixed diet seems to favour longevity. (5)____________________ Many long-lived individuals enjoy nicotine and alcohol—in moderation. 8
Most long-lived people have a sense of self-discipline. (6)___________________ The man
who lives long because he walks a mile a day does so because he does it every day, as part of an organized existence. 9
Over and over, during my researches, it emerged that long life goes with a ―twinkle in the
eye‖. (7)____________________ The sour-faced puritan and the solemn bore soon begin to lose ground, leaving their more amused contemporaries to enjoy the last laugh.
10 Finally, nothing is to be gained by a head-in-the-sand avoidance of the facts of life and death. The healthiest solution is to accept that one‘s span on Earth is limited and then to live every day, in the present, and to the full.
Learn about the text I. In the passage there are a number of sentences missing. Read it through and decide where the sentences below should go. a.
But it is important to make a distinction between calmly relaxed and passively lazy.
b. Puritanical arguments about smoking and drinking have little to support. c.
People who want a long life with an alert old age should never retire.
d. But, in gaining success, individuals should not overstress themselves. e. f.
A sense of humour, impishness, a feeling that life is fun, are strong weapons against aging. Such activities as walking and gardening prolong life spectacularly because they are ―non-intensive‖ forms of all-over bodily movement.
g. That does not imply a harsh military-style masochism but the ordering of life and the
imposition of a pattern on the events of the day. II. Dealing with unfamiliar words
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《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
In the passage the writer uses a number of images to describe particular characteristics or attitudes: a.
an early funeral
b. a great life-stretcher c.
a twinkle in the eye
d. the sour-faced puritan e. i.
a head-in-the-sand avoidance enthusiasm and youthful spirits
Choose their probable meaning from the list below:
ii. a shortened life
iii. a refusal to face reality iv. a love of alcohol and food
v. someone who is morally very strict vi. a good way of living longer vii. ignorance and narrow-mindedness viii. fondness for practical jokes ix. shyness and nervousness Unit 3 Intelligence Test
by Howard Gardner
1
Psychologists who study intelligence have argued chiefly about three questions. The first: Is
intelligence singular, or does it consist of various more or less independent intellectual faculties? The purists—ranging from the turn-of-the century English psychologist Charles Spearman to his latter-day disciples Richard J. Herrntein and Charles Murray—defend the notion of a single overarching ―g,‖ or general intelligence. The pluralists—ranging from L.L. Thurstone, of the University of Chicargo, who posited seven vectors of the mind, to J. P. Guilford, of the University of Southern California, who discerned 150 factors of the intellect—construe intelligence as composed of some or even many dissociable components. 2
The public is more interested in the second question: Is intelligence (or are intelligences )
largely inherited? This is by and large a Western question. In the Confucian societies of East Asia individual differences in endowment are assumed to be modest, and differences in achievement are thought to be due largely to effort. In the West, however, many students of the subject
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《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
sympathize with the view—defended within psychology by Lewis Terman, among others—that intelligence is inborn and one can do little to alter one's intellectual birthright. 3
Studies of identical twins reared apart provide surprisingly strong support for the
―heritability‖ of psychometric intelligence. That is, if one wants to predict someone's score on an intelligence test, the scores of the biological parents (even if the child has not had appreciable contact with them) are more likely to prove relevant than the scores of the adoptive parents. By the same token, the IQs1 of identical twins are more similar than the IQs of fraternal twins. And, contrary to common sense, the IQs of biologically related people grow closer in the later years of life. Still, because of the intricacies of behavioral genetics and the difficulties of conducting valid experiments with human child-rearing, a few defend the proposition that intelligence is largely environmental rather than heritable, and some believe that we cannot answer the question at all. 4
Most scholars agree that even if psychometric intelligence is largely inherited, it is not
possible to pinpoint the sources of differences in average IQ between groups, such as the fifteen point difference typically observed between African-American and white populations. That is because in our society the contemporary—let alone the historical—experiences of these two groups cannot be equated. One could ferret out the differences (if any) between black and white populations only in a society that was truly color-blind. 5
One other question has intrigued lay people and psychologists: Are intelligence tests biased?
Cultural assumptions are evident in early intelligence tests. Some class biases are obvious—who except the wealthy could readily answer a question about polo2? Others are more subtle. Suppose the question is what one should do with money found on the street. Although ordinarily one might turn it over to the police, what if one had a hungry child? Or what if the police force were known to be hostile to members of one‘s ethnic group? Only the canonical response to such a question would be scored as correct. 6
Psychometricians have striven to remove the obviously biased items from such measures. But
situation biases that are built into the test itself are far more difficult to deal with. For example, a person‘s background affects his or her reaction to being placed in an unfamiliar locale, being instructed by someone dressed in a certain way, and having a printed test booklet thrust into his or 12
See ―Background and Cultural Notes 2.‖ See ―Background and Cultural Notes 3.‖
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《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
her hands. And as the psychologist Claude M. Steele has argued that the biases prove even more acute when people know that their academic potential is being measured and that their racial or ethnic group is widely considered to be less intelligent than the dominant social group. 7
The idea of bias touches on the common assumption that tests in general, and intelligence
tests in particular, are inherently conservative instruments—tools of the Establishment. It is therefore worth noting that many testing pioneers thought of themselves as progressives in the social sphere. They were devising instruments that could reveal people of talent even if those people came from remote and apparently inferior backgrounds. And occasionally, the tests did discover intellectual diamonds in the rough. More often, however, they picked out the privileged. The still unresolved question of the causal relationship between IQ and social privilege has stimulated many a dissertation across the social sciences. 8
Paradoxically, one of the clearest signs of the success of intelligence tests is that they are no
longer widely administered. In the wake of legal cases about the propriety of making consequential decisions about education on the basis of IQ scores, many public school officials have become test-shy. By and large, the testing of IQ in the schools is restricted to cases involving a recognized problem (such as a learning disability) or a selection procedure (determining eligibility for a program that serves gifted children). 9
Despite this apparent setback, intelligence testing and the line of thinking that underlies it
have actually triumphed. Many widely used scholastic measures, chiefly among them the SAT (renamed the Scholastic Assessment Test a few years ago), are thinly disguised intelligence tests that correlate highly with scores on standard psychometric instruments. Virtually no one raised in the developed world today has gone untouched by Binet‘s1 seemingly simple invention of a century ago.
Background and Culture Notes
1. Howard Gardner is the John H and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Adjunct Professor of Psychology, Harvard University. He is best known for his theory of multiple intelligence, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be accessed by standard psychometric instruments. Gardner is the author of eighteen books and several hundred articles.
2. IQ, abbreviation for intelligence quotient, designates the ratio between mental age and chronological age. Mental age refers to the level of understanding and performance that a person has reached; while chronological age refers to a person‘s age from his birth to a specific point. 1
See ―Background and Cultural Notes 4.‖
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《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
3. Polo is a game in which players riding horses use wooden hammers with long handles to hit a ball into a opposing team‘s goal 马球
4. Alfred Binet (1857-1911), French psychologist, was the outstanding pioneer in the development of the modern intelligence test. With his student, Theodore Simon, Binet invented the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale (1905), which was soon adopted in many countries. I. Choose the best answer for each of the following comprehension questions
1. What can you infer from the sentence ―One could ferret out the differences (if any) between
black and white populations only in a society that was truly color-blind‖? (para. 4) A. Some Americans are unable to distinguish between certain colors. B. Blacks and whites are treated equally in the United States. C. There is still racial discrimination in the United States. D. Whites are more intelligent than blacks.
2. How would you interpret the sentence ―What if one had a hungry child?‖ (para. 5) A. What would be his/her answer if he/she had a hungry child? B. What would he/she think if he/she had a hungry child? C. What would he/she want if he/she had a hungry child?
D. What would he/she do with the money if he/she had a hungry child?
3. By ―Paradoxically, one of the clearest signs of the success of intelligence tests is that they are no longer widely administered.‖ the author means ________. (para. 8)
A. Since the tests are biased, it is a good thing that the tests are no longer widely used. B. Testing pioneers gained success as the traditional IQ tests are no longer administered. C. People are happy that they don't need to take IQ tests.
D. Public school officials won't be accused of administering IQ tests too widely. 4. Why do public school officials become test-shy about administering IQ tests? A. They are not sure whether the test results are reliable or not. B. They will be sued if they've made decisions on the basis of IQ scores. C. Decisions mainly based upon IQ scores are wrong. D. They don‘t know how to get rid of the biases of IQ tests.
5. The author‘s attitude towards intelligence testing is largely ________. A. critical objective indifferent biased II. Fill in the following blanks according to your comprehension of the text.
Three questions that psychologists are mainly concerned with are _______________________,
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