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

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

游客2024-01-21  22
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-László 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."
    Barabási 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] A phone user’s location is shown by ________.
选项 A、which cellphone tower he is connected to
B、which cellphone network he is connected to
C、how often he uses the phone every day
D、the content of his every phone call
答案 A
解析 原文该句中，cellphone towers是关键词，句中的to track…及其后的内容表明Barabdsi是通过记录手机信号在各个时段连接到哪个信号塔，从而推测手机用户的大概位置。本题应选A。在原句中，each person’s phone connected to是修饰先行词cellphone towers的定语从句，先行词cellphone towers在从句中为connected to的宾语，cellphone network不是connected to的宾语，因此，B是对原文结构的错误理解；C中的how often和D中的content都缺乏原文依据。
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