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  3. We may all like to consider ourselves free spirits. But a study of the trace

We may all like to consider ourselves free spirits. But a study of the trace

游客2023-07-01  23
问题     We may all like to consider ourselves free spirits. But a study of the traces left by 50,000 cellphone users over three months has conclusively proved that the truth is otherwise.
    "We are all in one way or another boring," says Albert-Laszlo Barabasi at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University in Boston, who co-wrote the study. "Spontaneous individuals are largely absent from the population."
    Barabasi and colleagues used three months’ worth of data from a cellphone network to track the cellphone towers each person’s phone connected to each hour of the day, revealing their approximate location. They conclude that regardless of whether a person typically remains close to home or roams far and wide, their movements are theoretically predictable as much as 93 per cent of the time.
    Surprisingly, the cellphone data showed that individuals’ movements were more or less as predictable at weekends as on weekdays, suggesting that routine is rooted in human nature rather than being an effect of work patterns.
    The cellphone records were processed to identify the most visited locations for each user. Then the probability of finding a given user at his or her most visited locations at each hour through the day was calculated.
    People were to be found in their most visited location for any given hour 70 per cent of the time. Not surprisingly, the figure increased at night, and decreased at lunchtime and in the early evening, when most people were returning home from work.
    The team analysed the randomness(随意性)of people’s traces to show it was theoretically possible to predict the average person’s whereabouts as much as 93 per cent of the time.
    "Say your routine movement is from home to the coffee shop to work: if you are at home and then go to the coffee shop it’s easy for me to predict that you are going to work," says co-author Nicholas Blumm.
    This predictability was not much affected by differences in age, gender, language spoken or whether a person lived in a rural or urban setting. [br] The "spontaneous individuals" are most probably people who ______.
选项 A、rely much on a cellphone in life
B、can live without a cellphone
C、act without much restraint
D、are boring in some way
答案 C
解析 第1段是Barabasi的研究结果，第2段是对第1段的进一步解释，将这两段的内容相比可知，sponta-neous individuals应该与第1段开头提到的free spirits同义，即spontaneous individuals最可能指生活上无拘无束的人，因此，本题应选C。
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