Professor Smith recently persuaded 35 people, 23 of them women, to keep a diary of all their absent-minded actions for a fortnig

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问题     Professor Smith recently persuaded 35 people, 23 of them women, to keep a diary of all their absent-minded actions for a fortnight. When he came to analyse their embarrassing lapses (差错) in a scientific report, he was surprised to find that nearly all of them fell into a few groupings. Nor did the lapses appear to be entirely random (随机的).
    One of the women, for instance, on leaving her house for work one morning threw her dog her earrings and tried to fix a dog biscuit on her ear. "The explanation for this is that the brain is like a computer," explains the professor. "People programme themselves to do certain activities regularly. It was the woman’s custom every morning to throw her dog two biscuits and then put on her earrings. But somehow the action got reversed in the programme. " About one in 20 of the incidents the volunteers reported were these "programmed assembly failures".
    Altogether the volunteers logged 433 unintentional actions that they found themselves doing—an average of 12 each. There appear to be peak periods in the day when we are at our zaniest (荒谬可笑的). These are two hours some time between eight a.m. and noon, between four and six p.m. with a smaller peak between eight and ten p.m. "Among men the peak seems to be when a changeover in brain ’ programmes’ occurs, as for instance between going to and from work. " Women on average reported slightly more lapses—12. 5 compared with 10. 9 for men—probably because they were more reliable reporters.
    A startling finding of the research is that the absent-minded activity is a hazard of doing things in which we are skilled. Normally, you would expect that skill reduces the number of errors we make. But trying to avoid silly slips by concentrating more could make things a lot worse—even dangerous. (321 words)
Professor Smith discovered that______.

选项 A、certain patterns can be identified in the recorded incidents
B、many people were too embarrassed to admit their absent-mindedness
C、men tend to be more absent-minded than women
D、absent-mindedness is an excusable human weakness

答案A

解析 本题属于细节理解题。第一段的后半部分提到“nearly all of them fell into a few groupings”,由此可知这些随意记下来的行为有一定的特定模式,A正是此意。B有可能是正确的,但不在Professor Smith所研究的范围之内。尽管第三段最后一句说“Women on average reported slightly more lapses”,但作者接着就说“probably because they were more reliable reporters”,因此C的论断是不可靠的。D在文中没有体现。
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