According to the author, Gladwell's new book Outliers is mainly______.
A. about the importance of social arrangements to personal success
B. A descriptive study of exceptionally talented individuals
C. to discuss why some people have more opportunities than others
D. to explain why Bill Gates is much luckier than others
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What does the author mean when she says "But my son is eleven years old now"?
A. He is a bit too young to go out alone.
B. He is old enough to be given some freedom now.
C. He has reached the legal age for riding a bike.
D. He can't protect himself from road hazards.
All day long, you are affected by large forces. Genes influence your intelligence and willingness to take risks. Social dynamics unconsciously shape your choices. Instantaneous perceptions set off neutral reactions in your head without you even being aware of them.
Over the past few years, scientists have made a series of exciting discoveries about how these deep patterns influence daily life. Nobody has done more to bring these discoveries to public attention than Malcolm Gladwell.
Gladwell's new book Outliers seems at first glance to be a description of exceptionally talented individuals. But in fact, it's another book about deep patterns. Exceptionally successful people are not lone pioneers who created their own success, he argues. They are the lucky beneficiaries of social arrangements.
Gladwell's noncontroversial claim is that some people have more opportunities than others. Bill Gates was lucky to go to a great private school with its own computer at the dawn of the information revolution.
Gladwell's book is being received by reviewers as a call to action for the Obama Age. It could lead policy makers to finally reject policies built on the assumption that people are coldly rational profit-maximizing individuals. It could cause them to focus more on policies that foster relationships, social bonds and cultures of achievement.
Yet, I can't help but feel that Gladwell and others who share his emphasis are preoccupied with the coolness of the discoveries. They've lost sight of the point at which the influence of social forces ends and the influence of the self-initiating individual begins.
Most successful people begin with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so. They were often showered by good fortunes, but relied at crucial moments upon achievements of individual will. These people also have an extraordinary ability to consciously focus their attention. Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons.
Gladwell's social determinism overlooks the importance of individual character and individual creativity. And it doesn't fully explain the genuine greatness of humanity's talents. As the classical philosophers understood, examples of individual greatness inspire achievement more reliably than any other form. of education.
In Paragraph 2, "these deep patterns" refers to all of the following EXCEPT______.
A. genes
B. social dynamics
C. neutral reactions
D. instantaneous perceptions
【B7】
A. led
B. followed
C. watched
D. carded
My husband thinks I am too overprotective. I don't dare to let my children walk anywhere without one of us going along. As you pull out of our neighborhood, there is a shopping center across the street. My son always asks if he can ride his bike or walk over to the drugstore by himself. But crossing that street is just too dangerous. The cars fly around the corner like they're driving in a car race. What if he gets hit? What if some teenage bullies are hanging out in the parking lot?
I want so much to give my children the freedom that I enjoyed having when I was growing up but I hesitate to do so because there are dangers around every corner. Too many kidnaps, too many sex offenders. I went online and discovered there are 41 sex offenders in my area alone.
I honestly don't think my mom worried about such things when her children were young.
Growing up in the 1970s was indeed a different time. I never wore a helmet (头盔) when I rode a bike. We were all over the neighborhood, on our bikes and on foot, coming home for dinner and then back out again until dark. We rode in the back of the truck, didn't wear seatbelts. I walked to and from school every day...
What did the author feel reluctant to let her son do?
A. Meet his friend.
B. Play video games.
C. Ride his bike on streets.
D. Jump on the trampoline.