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  3. When DNA Is not Destiny "Personality must be accepted for what it is," Oscar Wilde counseled. "You mustn’t mind that a poet

When DNA Is not Destiny "Personality must be accepted for what it is," Oscar Wilde counseled. "You mustn’t mind that a poet

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问题                         When DNA Is not Destiny
    "Personality must be accepted for what it is," Oscar Wilde counseled. "You mustn’t mind that a poet is a drunk." We’ll agree with Wilde on the debt that literature owes to alcohol, but he was definitely on shakier ground in implying that a man’s personality is what it is and will remain what it is until he is cold in the ground. Although that belief has found support in both casual observation and science, it suffers from a basic error. Really, people, can we start recognizing that just because something does not change doesn’t mean that it cannot change?
    One hint of the changeability of personality comes from the arrival, finally, of long-term studies that follow people for decades. The influence of genes declines with age in middle and later adulthood, environment plays a larger role than genetics in shaping personality, a hint of the power of accumulated experiences. Such as Yale students who got a brief course in fitting in became, over their college career, more resilient and motivated, more likely to reach out to professors and to participate in university life than students who did not have this experience, a recent study found.
    "Something that seems like a small intervention can have chain effects on things we think of as stable or fixed," says psychology researcher Carol Dweck of Stanford University, "including extroversion, openness to new experience and resilience" all of which are thought to be partly genetic. "More and more research is suggesting that, far from being simply encoded in the genes, much of personality is a flexible and dynamic thing that changes over the life span and is shaped by experience," she argues in the December issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. In particular, traits such as how you cope, how you perceive yourself and others, and how you act in everyday situations are flexible. Even a broad category such as introversion is like Silly Putty once life gets hold of it. DNA is not an inert set of blueprints; it responds to life experiences.
    Ironically, the belief that personality cannot change may be self-fulfilling. "Whether you believe that your core traits, such as intelligence, are fixed, or are things you can develop, matters a great deal," says Dweck. In a recent study, she and colleagues taught a group of students entering junior high that intelligence is changeable. These kids became significantly more conscientious and diligent compared with kids who didn’t receive this lesson " Beliefs about yourself play a causal role in how likely you are to seek out challenges and in how resilient you are," says Dweck. "If you change beliefs, you can change broad traits that many people think of as stable, including openness to experience, conscientiousness and sociability. Beliefs can be changed, and when they are, so is personality." No one claims that genes play no role in shaping personality. But it’s time to junk the old idea that only the part of a trait under environmental, not genetic, control is malleable, the life we lead and the experiences we have reach deep into our double helix.
Carol Dweck probably agrees that______.
选项 A、gene plays a decisive role in shaping personality
B、personality tends to remain fixed and stable
C、intelligence can be expanded through hard work
D、characteristics is largely affected by personal belief
答案D
解析 本题考查人物观点。Carol Dweck的观点集中于第三段与第四段，可以总结为以下三点：①性格是可变的；②环境与经历都会对性格产生影响；③个人观念转变会改变性格。[D]选项是对观点③的改写，为正确项。[A]和[B]选项反向干扰，文章第二段第二句指出，在成年的中后期，环境在塑造性格过程中发挥的作用比基因更大；第三段第二句指出，性格中的大部分是可变而动态的，会随着生命周期而改变，也会由经历而塑造，而非保持稳定不变。[C]选项具有一定干扰性，文章第四段虽然指出智力可以扩展，但扩展的方式是转变观念而并未明确提及勤奋努力。
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