2. 外语
  3. It began with some marshmallows(棉花软糖). In the 1960s Walter Mischel, a psychologist then working at Stanford University, started

It began with some marshmallows(棉花软糖). In the 1960s Walter Mischel, a psychologist then working at Stanford University, started

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问题     It began with some marshmallows(棉花软糖). In the 1960s Walter Mischel, a psychologist then working at Stanford University, started a series of experiments on young children. A child was left alone for 15 minutes with a marshmallow or similar treat, with the promise that, if it remained uneaten at the end of this period, a second would be added. Some of the children, who were aged four or five at the time, yielded to temptation before time was up. Others resisted, and held out for the reward.
    Dr. Mischel then followed the children’s progress as they grew up. Those who had resisted, he found, did better at school than those who had given in. As adults they got better jobs, were less likely to use drugs and got into trouble with the law less frequently. Moreover, children’s family circumstances suggested that impulsive behavior was as much learned as inherited. This suggested that it could be unlearned—improving the child in question’s chances in life.
    Study after study has confirmed Dr. Mischel’s insight. However, recent observations, however, raise the possibility that developing self-control is not always an unalloyed(纯粹的)good.
    Work published two years ago by Gene Brody of the University of Georgia, who looked at a group of young black Americans, showed that those who exhibited self-control as teenagers did indeed get the expected benefits. But if such self-controllers came from deprived backgrounds, they developed higher blood pressure, were more likely to be obese and had higher levels of stress hormones than their less-self-controlled peers. That correlation did not apply to people who started farther up the social ladder.
    Dr. Brody and his colleagues have followed this study with one that comes to an equally astonishing conclusion: for people born at the bottom of the social heap, self-control speeds up the process of ageing.
    Dr. Brody and his colleagues followed almost 300 black American teenagers of different backgrounds as they aged from 17 to 22. For the first few years the researchers assessed their volunteers’ levels of self-control, and also looked for signs of depression, aggression and drug use. They assessed, too, those volunteers’ socioeconomic backgrounds. But the last examination, when participants were 22 years old, was different. Then, the researchers took a blood sample, recorded the DNA-methylation(DNA甲基化)patterns of cells in it, and worked out how much these deviated from the pattern expected at that particular age. As the study shows, for people from high-status backgrounds, higher self-control meant lower cellular ages. For those whose background was low-status, the reverse was true.
    Dr. Brody’s findings are both intriguing and worrying. The research into gene methylation suggests changing methylation patterns are a common response to changing circumstances as well as changing age, as the body’s physiology struggles to keep up. Fortunately, people can change their circumstances in rational ways: the lesson of the marshmallows shows that. If Dr. Brody’s result is confirmed, the challenge it poses will be to work out how to avoid the adverse effects of self-control.
Dr. Brody’s new study with young black Americans reveals that______.
选项 A、developing self-control is not beneficial at all
B、teenagers can benefit from developing self-control
C、the effect of self-control relates to social background
D、self-control causes high blood pressure and obesity
答案C
解析 事实细节题。定位句指出，在自控力强的人群中，如果来自较为贫困的家庭，则强自控力可能使血压更高，更可能肥胖，并且压力激素水平更高，而对于来自较高社会阶层家庭的人则不存在这种情况，可见，高自控力的影响与不同的社会背景有关，故答案为C)。A)“发展自控力根本没有任何益处”，尽管本段提到高自控力对于来自较贫困家庭的人可能意味着提高一些疾病的风险，而高社会阶层的人群并没有这种情况，但是上文第二段也指出，自控力强的人社会成就要优于自控力弱的人，故自控力并非没有益处，A)不符合文意，故可排除；B)“青少年可以从发展自控力中获益”，布罗迪博士的研究恰恰说明，对于不同社会背景的人来说，自控力的影响是不同的，B)以偏概全，故可排除；D)“自控力会导致高血压和肥胖”，定位句指出，只有来自贫困家庭的人才会出现这种情况，对于社会阶层高的人则不存在这种情况，故可排除。
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