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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  31
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.
According to paragraph 2, Yale students who took the f itting-in course would be ______.
选项 A、diligent
B、self-confident
C、social-awkward
D、open-minded
答案D
解析 本题考查事实细节。文章第二段以参加适应课程的耶鲁大学学生为例说明性格可以改变。第三句指出，参加了适应课程的耶鲁大学学生比起那些没有参加课程的学生，具有更强的灵活性和积极性，更加可能去接触教授并参加校园生活，总而言之，他们变得更加开放。[D]选项正确。[C]选项反向干扰，第二段第三句指出，参加课程的学生更可能去接触教授并参加校园生活，这是他们擅长社交的表现，并非不善社交。在文中并没有证据说明参加课程的学生具有[A]和[B]选项中提及的品质。
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