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.
Which of the following is true of Dr. Mischel’s experiment?

选项 A、It probed into the self-control level of little children.
B、It showed that most children couldn’t resist temptation.
C、It exhibited that self-control connects with life achievement.
D、It found out a way to help children develop self-control.

答案C

解析 事实细节题。从定位句可以看出,米歇尔博士追踪了实验中两类不同的孩子:可以抵制诱惑,自控力更强的和不能抵制诱惑,自控力较差的。他发现自控力强的孩子无论在学业上还是日后在事业上都与自控力差的孩子显现出差异,可见,自控力与终身成就有所关联,故答案为C)。A)“它探究了小孩子的自控力水平”,从定位句可知,米歇尔博士的研究只是将能够或不能自控的孩子分开,并没有按自控力水平进行划分,故可排除;B)“它显示出大多数孩子都不能抵制诱惑”,本段提到部分孩子没有抵制住诱惑,但并没有说是大多数,故可排除;D)“它找到了帮助孩子发展自控力的方法”,米歇尔博士追踪了不同自控力孩子的发展情况,但并没有提到发展自控力的方法,故D)与原文意思不符,可以排除。
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