2. 外语
  3. It began with some marshmallows(棉花软糖). In the 1960s Walter Mischel, a psychologist then working at Stanford University, started

It began with some marshmallows(棉花软糖). In the 1960s Walter Mischel, a psychologist then working at Stanford University, started

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问题     It began with some marshmallows(棉花软糖). In the 1960s Walter Mischel, a psychologist then working at Stanford University, started a series of experiments on young children. A child was left alone for 15 minutes with a marshmallow or similar treat, with the promise that, if it remained uneaten at the end of this period, a second would be added. Some of the children, who were aged four or five at the time, yielded to temptation before time was up. Others resisted, and held out for the reward.
    Dr. Mischel then followed the children’s progress as they grew up. Those who had resisted, he found, did better at school than those who had given in. As adults they got better jobs, were less likely to use drugs and got into trouble with the law less frequently. Moreover, children’s family circumstances suggested that impulsive behavior was as much learned as inherited. This suggested that it could be unlearned—improving the child in question’s chances in life.
    Study after study has confirmed Dr. Mischel’s insight. However, recent observations, however, raise the possibility that developing self-control is not always an unalloyed(纯粹的)good.
    Work published two years ago by Gene Brody of the University of Georgia, who looked at a group of young black Americans, showed that those who exhibited self-control as teenagers did indeed get the expected benefits. But if such self-controllers came from deprived backgrounds, they developed higher blood pressure, were more likely to be obese and had higher levels of stress hormones than their less-self-controlled peers. That correlation did not apply to people who started farther up the social ladder.
    Dr. Brody and his colleagues have followed this study with one that comes to an equally astonishing conclusion: for people born at the bottom of the social heap, self-control speeds up the process of ageing.
    Dr. Brody and his colleagues followed almost 300 black American teenagers of different backgrounds as they aged from 17 to 22. For the first few years the researchers assessed their volunteers’ levels of self-control, and also looked for signs of depression, aggression and drug use. They assessed, too, those volunteers’ socioeconomic backgrounds. But the last examination, when participants were 22 years old, was different. Then, the researchers took a blood sample, recorded the DNA-methylation(DNA甲基化)patterns of cells in it, and worked out how much these deviated from the pattern expected at that particular age. As the study shows, for people from high-status backgrounds, higher self-control meant lower cellular ages. For those whose background was low-status, the reverse was true.
    Dr. Brody’s findings are both intriguing and worrying. The research into gene methylation suggests changing methylation patterns are a common response to changing circumstances as well as changing age, as the body’s physiology struggles to keep up. Fortunately, people can change their circumstances in rational ways: the lesson of the marshmallows shows that. If Dr. Brody’s result is confirmed, the challenge it poses will be to work out how to avoid the adverse effects of self-control.
What can we know about Dr. Brody’s findings?
选项 A、They are out of the expectation of the researchers.
B、They reveal a connection between gene and age.
C、They contradict with the results of Mischel’s study.
D、They raise a new issue for research in the future.
答案D
解析 事实细节题。定位句指出，如果布罗迪的研究结果得以证实，它所提出的挑战将会是寻找如何规避自控力负面影响的办法，可以说这个研究发现为未来提出了一个新的问题，故答案为D)。A)“它们出乎了研究者的预料”，之前的研究已经证实了发展自控力并不一定会为所有人带来益处，而是因社会背景而异，该研究只是从另一个侧面予以证实，并没有出乎研究者的预料，故可排除；B)“它们揭示了基因与年龄之间的关系”，由定位句可知，该研究发现的是自控力与年龄、社会背景的关系，只是通过基因进行观察，B)表述错误，故可排除；C)“它们与米歇尔的研究发现相矛盾”，米歇尔研究发现的是自控力与终身成就的关系，而布罗迪更多地关注了自控力发展与社会家庭背景的关系，角度不同，但并不矛盾，故排除C)。
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