Professor Smith recently persuaded 35 people, 23 of them women, to keep a diary of all their absent-minded actions for a fortnig

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问题     Professor Smith recently persuaded 35 people, 23 of them women, to keep a diary of all their absent-minded actions for a fortnight. When he came to analyse their embarrassing lapses (差错) in a scientific report, he was surprised to find that nearly all of them fell into a few groupings. Nor did the lapses appear to be entirely random (随机的).
    One of the women, for instance, on leaving her house for work one morning threw her dog her earrings and tried to fix a dog biscuit on her ear. "The explanation for this is that the brain is like a computer," explains the professor. "People programme themselves to do certain activities regularly. It was the woman’s custom every morning to throw her dog two biscuits and then put on her earrings. But somehow the action got reversed in the programme. " About one in 20 of the incidents the volunteers reported were these "programmed assembly failures".
    Altogether the volunteers logged 433 unintentional actions that they found themselves doing—an average of 12 each. There appear to be peak periods in the day when we are at our zaniest (荒谬可笑的). These are two hours some time between eight a.m. and noon, between four and six p.m. with a smaller peak between eight and ten p.m. "Among men the peak seems to be when a changeover in brain ’ programmes’ occurs, as for instance between going to and from work. " Women on average reported slightly more lapses—12. 5 compared with 10. 9 for men—probably because they were more reliable reporters.
    A startling finding of the research is that the absent-minded activity is a hazard of doing things in which we are skilled. Normally, you would expect that skill reduces the number of errors we make. But trying to avoid silly slips by concentrating more could make things a lot worse—even dangerous. (321 words)
"Programmed assembly failures" (Lines 6~7, Para. 2) refers to the phenomenon that people______.

选项 A、often fail to programme their routines beforehand
B、tend to make mistakes when they are in a hurry
C、unconsciously change the sequence of doing things
D、are likely to mess things up if they are too tired

答案C

解析 本题属于词义理解题。其实它就是第二段中所描述的事情:一位女士平时出门上班之前总是先扔给狗两块饼干,然后再给自己戴上耳饰;但有一天却不知怎么行为程序弄颠倒了:先扔耳饰给狗,接着试图把饼干戴到自己耳朵上。另外,“programmed assembly failures”的字面意思“程序安装错误”,理解其字面意思也有助于选出正确答案C。
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随机试题
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