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  3. Part Ⅱ Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning)Directions: In this part, y

Part Ⅱ Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning)Directions: In this part, y

游客2024-05-13  16
问题 Part Ⅱ Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning)
Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions on Answer Sheet 1.
   For questions 1-7, mark
   Y (for YES)              if the statement agrees with information given in the passage;
   N (for NO)               if the statement contradicts the information given in the passage;
   NG (for NOT GIVES)   if the information is not given in the passage.
   For questions 8-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.
The New Science of Siblings
     For a long time, researchers have tried to nail down just what shapes us—or what, at least, shapes us most. And over the years, they’ve had a lot of eureka moments (突发灵感的时刻). First it was our parents, particularly our mothers. Then it was our genes. Next it was our peers, who show up last but hold great sway. And all those ideas were good ones—but only as far as they went. Somewhere, there was a sort of temperamental(捉摸不定的)dark matter exerting an invisible gravitational pull of its own. More and more, scientists are concluding that this unexplained force is our siblings.
     From the time they are born, our brothers and sisters are our scolds, protectors, tormentors, playmates, counselors, sources of envy, objects of pride. Our spouses arrive comparatively late in our lives; our parents eventually leave us. Our siblings may be the only people we’ll ever know who truly qualify as partners for life. Siblings are with us for the whole journey.
     At research centers in the U. S. , Canada, Europe and elsewhere, scientists are gaining intriguing insights into the people we become as adults. Does the student struggling with a professor who plays favorites summon up the coping skills acquired from dealing with a sister who was Daddy’s girl? Do husbands and wives benefit from the inter-gender negotiations they waged when their most important partners were their sisters and brothers? Today serious work is revealing exactly how our brothers and sisters influence us.
     Why childhood fights between siblings can be good
     By the time children are 11, they devote about 33% of their free time to their siblings—more time than they spend with friends, parents, teachers or even by themselves. Adolescents, who have usually begun going their own way, devote at least 10 hours a week to activities with their siblings. Siblings are like the nurses on the warD.  All that proximity breeds an awful lot of intimacy—and an awful lot of friction.
     Laurie Kramer, professor of applied family studies at the University of Illinois has found that, on average, sibs between 3 and 7 years old engage in some kind of conflict 3.5 times an hour. Kids in the 2-to-4 age group top out at 6.3—or more than one clash every 10 minutes, according to a Canadian study.
     But as much as all the fighting can set parents’ hair on end, there’s a lot of learning going on too, specifically about how conflicts, once begun, can be settleD.  Shaw and his colleagues conducted a years-long study and found that the kids who practiced the best conflict-resolution skills at home carried those abilities into the classroom. "Siblings have a socializing effect on one another," Shaw says. "Unlike a relationship with friends, you’re stuck with your sibs. You learn to negotiate things day to day."
     It’s that permanence, researchers believe, that makes siblings a rehearsal tool for later life. Somewhere in there is the early training for the e-mail joke that breaks an office silence or the husband who signals that a fight is over by asking his wife what she thinks they should do about that fast-approaching vacation anyway. "Sibling relationships are where you learn all this," says developmental psychologist Susan McHale of Penn State University. "They are relationships between equals."
     How not being Mom’s favorite can have its advantages
     Parents feel a lot of guilt over the often evident if rarely admitted preference they harbor for one child over another. If favorites exist, however, it may be not the parents’ fault, but evolution’s.
     It is found that 65% of mothers and 70% of fathers exhibited a preference for one child—in most cases, the older one. What’s more, the kids know what’s going on. They all say, "Well, it makes sense that they would treat us differently, because he’s older or we’re a boy and a girl." But at a deeper level, second-tier children may pay a price. "They tend to be sadder and have more self-esteem questions," Conger says. "They feel like they’re not as worthy, and they’re trying to figure out why."
     It’s no accident that employees in the workplace instinctively know which person to send into the lion’s den of the corner office with a risky proposal or a bit of bad news. And it’s no coincidence that the sense of hurt feelings and adolescent envy you get when that same colleague emerges with the proposal approved and the boss’s applause seems so familiar. But what you summon up with the feelings you first had long ago is the knowledge you gained then too—that the smartest strategy is not to compete for approval but to strike a partnership with the favorite and spin the situation to benefit yourself as well.
    Why your sibling is—or isn’t—your best role model
    It’s no secret that brothers and sisters emulate one another or that the learning flows both up and down the age ladder. Younger siblings mimic the skills and strengths of older ones. Older sibs are prodded(刺激，督促) to attempt something new because they don’t want to be shown up by a younger one who has already tried it. More complex—and in many ways more important—are those situations in which siblings don’t mirror one another but differentiate themselves—a phenomenon psychologists call de-identification.
     De-identification has an important function: pushing some sibs away from risky behavior. Siblings pass on dangerous habits to one another in a depressingly predictable way. But some kids break the mold—and for surprising reasons. Joseph Rodgers, a psychologist, found that while older brothers and sisters often do introduce younger ones to the habit, the closer they are in age, the more likely the younger one is to resist. Apparently, their proximity in years has already made them too similar.
    How a sibling of the opposite sex can affect whom you marry
    Far subtler and often far sweeter  than the risk-taking modeling that occurs among all sibs is the gender modeling that plays out between opposite-sex ones. Brothers and sisters can be fierce de-identifiers. In a study of adolescent boys and girls, the boys unsurprisingly scored higher in such traits as independence and competitiveness while girls did better in characteristics like sensitivity and helpfulness. What was less expected is that when kids grow up with an opposite-sex sibling, such exposure doesn’t temper (使变淡) gender-linked traits but stress them. Both boys and girls are closer still to gender stereotype and even seek friends who conform to those norms.
    The guys who had older sisters had more involving interactions and were liked significantly more by their new female acquaintances. Women with older brothers were more likely to strike up a conversation with the male stranger and to smile at him more than he smiled at her.
    How those early bonds can grow stronger with age
    One of the greatest gifts of the sibling tie is that while warmth grows over time, the conflicts often become less and less. Indeed, siblings who battled a lot as kids may become closer as adults—and more emotionally skilled too, often clearly recalling what their long-ago fights were about and the lessons they took from them.
    Such powerful connections become even more important as the inevitable illnesses or widowhood of late life leads us to lean on the people we’ve known the longest. Even siblings who drift apart in their middle years tend to drift back together as they age. "The relationship is especially strong between sisters,’ who are more likely to be predeceased(比…先死) by their spouses than brothers are, says Judy Dunn, a developmental psycholo- gist. "When asked what contributes to the importance of the relationship now, they say it’s the shared early childhood experiences, which cast a long shadow for all of us."
    Of course, siblings are one of nature’s better brainstorms, and all the new studies on how they make us who we are one of science’s. But the rest of us, outside the lab, see it in a more primal way. In a world that’s too big, too scary and too often too lonely, we come to realize that there’s nothing like having a band of brothers  and sisters—to venture out with you. [br] Younger siblings emulate the skills and strengths of older ones because they think they are more knowledgeable than themselves.
选项 A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案 C
解析 根据题干关键词younger siblings，emulate，skill，strengths定位到原文第三标题下第一段。根据第二句：年幼的孩子模仿年长孩子的技能和长处，但其模仿的原因文中并未提及。
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