Many countries have made it illegal to talk into a hand-held mobile phone while driving. But the latest research provides furthe

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问题     Many countries have made it illegal to talk into a hand-held mobile phone while driving. But the latest research provides further confirmation that the danger lies less in what a motorist’s hands do when he takes a call than in what the conversation does to his brain. Even using a "hands-free" device can impair a driver’s attention to an alarming extent.
    Melina Kunar of the University of Warwick and Todd Horowitz of the Harvard Medical School ran a series of experiments in which two groups of volunteers had to pay attention and respond to a series of moving tasks on a computer screen that were reckoned equivalent in difficulty to driving. One group was left undistracted while the other had to engage in a conversation about their hobbies using a speakerphone. As Dr. Kunar and Dr. Horowitz report in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, those who were making the equivalent of a hands-free call had an average reaction time 212 milliseconds slower than those who were not. That, they calculate, would add 5.7 meters to the braking distance of a car traveling at 100 kph. They found that the group using the hands-free kit made 83 percent more errors in their tasks than those who were not talking.
    They also explored the effect of simply listening to something—such as a radio programme. For this they played a recording of the first chapter of Bram Stoker’s "Dracula." Even though the test subjects were told to pay attention because they would be asked questions about the story afterwards, it had little effect on their reaction time. The research led by Frank Drews of the University of Utah suggests the same thing is true of the idle chatter of a passenger. Dr. Kunar reckons that having to think about responses during a phone conversation competes for the brain’s resources in a way that listening to a monologue does not.
    Punishing people for using hand-held gadgets while driving is difficult enough, even though they can be seen from outside the car. Stopping people making hands-free calls would probably be impossible—especially because more and more vehicles are now being fitted with the necessary equipment as standard. Persuading people to switch their phones off altogether when they get behind the wheel might be the only answer. Who knows, they might even come to enjoy not having to take calls. And they’ll be more likely to arrive in one piece.
In Kunar and Horowitz’s experiments, the subjects who performed tasks while talking______.

选项 A、reacted more quickly and made fewer mistakes
B、reacted more quickly, but made more mistakes
C、reacted more slowly, but made fewer mistakes
D、reacted more slowly and made more mistakes

答案D

解析 第二段Kunar和Horowitz的实验显示,在完成任务同时需要分心说话的受试者反应速度平均慢212毫秒,而且错误率也高出83%。
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