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  3. When DNA Is not Destiny "Personality must be accepted for what it is," Oscar Wilde counseled. "You mustn’t mind that a poet

When DNA Is not Destiny "Personality must be accepted for what it is," Oscar Wilde counseled. "You mustn’t mind that a poet

admin2013-07-11  23
问题                         When DNA Is not Destiny
    "Personality must be accepted for what it is," Oscar Wilde counseled. "You mustn’t mind that a poet is a drunk." We’ll agree with Wilde on the debt that literature owes to alcohol, but he was definitely on shakier ground in implying that a man’s personality is what it is and will remain what it is until he is cold in the ground. Although that belief has found support in both casual observation and science, it suffers from a basic error. Really, people, can we start recognizing that just because something does not change doesn’t mean that it cannot change?
    One hint of the changeability of personality comes from the arrival, finally, of long-term studies that follow people for decades. The influence of genes declines with age in middle and later adulthood, environment plays a larger role than genetics in shaping personality, a hint of the power of accumulated experiences. Such as Yale students who got a brief course in fitting in became, over their college career, more resilient and motivated, more likely to reach out to professors and to participate in university life than students who did not have this experience, a recent study found.
    "Something that seems like a small intervention can have chain effects on things we think of as stable or fixed," says psychology researcher Carol Dweck of Stanford University, "including extroversion, openness to new experience and resilience" all of which are thought to be partly genetic. "More and more research is suggesting that, far from being simply encoded in the genes, much of personality is a flexible and dynamic thing that changes over the life span and is shaped by experience," she argues in the December issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. In particular, traits such as how you cope, how you perceive yourself and others, and how you act in everyday situations are flexible. Even a broad category such as introversion is like Silly Putty once life gets hold of it. DNA is not an inert set of blueprints; it responds to life experiences.
    Ironically, the belief that personality cannot change may be self-fulfilling. "Whether you believe that your core traits, such as intelligence, are fixed, or are things you can develop, matters a great deal," says Dweck. In a recent study, she and colleagues taught a group of students entering junior high that intelligence is changeable. These kids became significantly more conscientious and diligent compared with kids who didn’t receive this lesson " Beliefs about yourself play a causal role in how likely you are to seek out challenges and in how resilient you are," says Dweck. "If you change beliefs, you can change broad traits that many people think of as stable, including openness to experience, conscientiousness and sociability. Beliefs can be changed, and when they are, so is personality." No one claims that genes play no role in shaping personality. But it’s time to junk the old idea that only the part of a trait under environmental, not genetic, control is malleable, the life we lead and the experiences we have reach deep into our double helix.
The last sentence implies that life experience______ .
选项 A、can change genetic expression
B、has more influence on personality than genes
C、cannot change traits under genetic control
D、exert profound and full-scale effect on characteristics
答案D
解析 本题考查推理引申。文章最后一句话指出，我们的生活和经历深深影响着我们的双螺旋结构。此处的双螺旋结构代指基因。联系前文，传统观点认为只有处于环境而非基因控制之下的性格特征才可以改变。如果我们生活和经历也深深影响着基因，那么基因影响之下的性格特征也同样会受到影响。[D]选项正确。[A]选项拘泥于最后一句话的表面意思，而且文中仅说明生活经历影响基因，并未指出会改变基因表达。[B]选项无中生有，文中并未比较基因与经历对性格的影响大小。[C]选项反向干扰，文章最后两句指出，环境与基因控制之下的性格特征都可以改变。
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