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  3. All day long, you are affected by large forces. Genes influence your intelligence and willingness to take risks. Social dynamics

All day long, you are affected by large forces. Genes influence your intelligence and willingness to take risks. Social dynamics

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问题     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 (瞬间 的) 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.
According to the author, Gladwell’s new book Outliers is mainly______.
选项 A、to explain why Bill Gates is much luckier than others
B、a descriptive study of exceptionally talented individuals
C、about the importance of social arrangements to personal success
D、to discuss why some people have more opportunities than others
答案C
解析 根据题干中的Outliers将本题出处定位到第三段。该段提到，Gladwell的新书《突出者>似乎是在描述那些拥有非凡才华的个体。但实际上，它还是一本关于深层模式的书。他认为，异常成功的人并非创造自己成功的单枪匹马的先锋。他们是社会安排的幸运的受益者。由此可知，作者认为《突出者>是一本讲述社会安排对个人成功有重要影响这一深层模式的书，故答案为[C]。[A]是针对第四段第二句Bill Gates的例子设的干扰项；[B]与原文意思相反：“有些人比其他人拥有更多机会”只是Gladwell提出的一个没有引来争议的主张，并未提及原因，也不是书中主要讨论的内容，故排除[D]。
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大学英语四级

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