题目内容
Which of the following is true about the traffic accidents？
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What is going on in a bilingual child’s brain according to the new study？
Part A
Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. (40 points)
Placing a human being behind the wheel of an automobile often has the same curious effect as cutting certain fibres in the brain.
The result in either case is more primitive behaviour. Hostile feelings are apt to be expressed in an aggressive way.
The same man who will step aside for a stranger at a doorway will, when behind the wheel, risk an accident trying to beat another motorist through an intersection. The importance of emotional factors in automobile accidents is gaining recognition. Doctors and other scientists have concluded that the highway death toll resembles an epidemic and should be investigated as such.
Dr. Ross A. McFarland, Associate Professor of Industrial Hygiene at the Harvard University School of Public Health, said that accidents “now constitute a greater threat to the safety of large segments of the population than diseases do. ”
Accidents are the leading cause of death between the ages of 1 and 35. About one third of all accidental deaths and one seventh of all accidental injuries are caused by motor vehicles.
Based on the present rate of vehicle registration, unless the accident rate is cut in half, one of every 10 persons in the country will be killed or injured in a traffic accident in the next 15 years.
Research to find the underlying causes of accidents and to develop ways to detect drivers who are apt to cause them is being conducted at universities and medical centres. Here are some of their findings so far:
A man drives as he lives. If he is often in trouble with collection agencies, the courts, and police, chances are he will have repeated automobile accidents. Accident repeaters usually are egocentric, exhibitionistic, resentful of authority, impulsive, and lacking in social responsibility. As group, they can be classified as borderline psychopathic personalities, according to Dr. McFarland.
The suspicion, however, that accident repeaters could be detected in advance by screening out persons with more hostile impulses is false. A study at the University of Colorado showed that there were just as many overly hostile persons among those who had no accidents as among those with repeated accidents.
Psychologists currently are studying Denver high school pupils to test the validity of this concept. They are making psychological evaluations of the pupils to see whether subsequent driving records will bear out their thesis.
The author believes that, behind the wheel of an automobile, some people act
A．A third.B．Two thirds.C．Half of the total.D．Almost all.
A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may help resolve this question by getting to the point of what is going on in a bilingual child’s brain, how a second language affects the way he thinks, and thus in what circumstances being bilingual may be helpful. Agnes Kovacs and Jacques Mehler at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste say that some aspects of the cognitive development of infants raised in a bilingual household must be undergoing acceleration in order to manage which of the two languages they are dealing with.
The aspect of cognition in question is part of what is termed the brain’s “executive function”. This allows people to organise, plan, prioritise activity, shift their attention from one thing to another and suppress habitual responses. Bilingualism is common in Trieste which, though Italian, is almost surrounded by Slovenia. So Dr. Kovacs and Dr. Mehler looked at 40 “preverbal” seven-month-olds, half raised in monolingual and half in bilingual households, and compared their performances in a task that needs control of executive function.
First, the babies were trained to expect the appearance of a puppet on a screen after they had heard a set of meaningless words invented by the researchers. Then the words, and the location of the puppet, were changed. When this was done, the babies who speak only one language had difficulty overcoming their learnt response, even when the researchers gave them further clues that a switch had taken place. The bilingual babies, however, found it far easier to switch their attention — counteracting the previously learnt, but no longer useful response.
Monitoring languages and .keeping them separate is part of the brain’s executive function, so these findings suggest that even before a child can speak, a bilingual environment may speed up that function’s development. Before rushing your offspring into bilingual kindergartens, though, there are a few cautions. For one thing, these extraordinary cognitive benefits have been demonstrated so far only in “crib” bilinguals — those living in households where two languages are spoken routinely. The researchers speculate that it might be the fact of having to learn two languages in the same setting that requires greater use of executive function. So whether those benefits apply to children who learn one language at home, and one at school, remains unclear.
Who are probably pushing young children to study a new language？
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