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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  29
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] What did the cellphone data show about "routine"?
选项 A、One’s routine affects his work pattern.
B、Our routine affects our human nature.
C、One’s work pattern determines his routine.
D、Our human nature determines our routine.
答案 D
解析 第4段末尾的routine is rooted in human nature表明routine“植根于”human nature，这也可以理解为routine来源于human nature，由此可见，D的说法与原文相符，故为本题答案。原文并没有提及routine会不会反过来对work pattern和human nature产生影响，因此，A和B描述的关系不存在。第4段末尾的rather than…表明routine受human nature的影响，而不受work patterns的影响。因此，C不正确。
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