湖南省高考英语 专题检测卷（二十七）阅读理解.docVIP

阅读理解 （建议用时：25分钟） A 体裁 议论文 话题 性格和行为的成因 词数 369 (2013·潍坊模拟) People have wondered for a long time how their personalities and behaviors are formed. It’s not easy to explain why one person is intelligent and another is not, or why one is cooperative and another is competitive. Social scientists are, of course, extremely interested in these types of question. They want to explain why we possess certain characteristics and exhibit certain behaviors. There are no clear answers yet, but two distinct schools of thought on the matter have developed. As one might expect, the two approaches are very different from each other, and there is a great deal of debate between proponents of each theory. The argument is often conveniently referred to as nature vs. nurture. Those who support the“nature”side of the conflict believe that our personalities and behavior patterns are largely determined by biological and genetic factors. That our environment has little, if anything, to do with our abilities, characteristics and behavior is central to this theory. Taken to an extreme, this theory maintains that our behavior is predetermined(注定)to such a great degree that we are almost completely governed by our instincts(本能). Proponents of the“nurture”theory, or, as they are often called, behaviorists, claim that our environment is more important than our biologically based instincts in determining how we will act. Behaviorists see humans as beings whose behavior is almost completely shaped by their surroundings. Their view of the human being is quite mechanistic; they maintain that, like machines, humans respond to environmental stimuli(something that helps sb. /sth. to develop better and more quickly)as the basis of their behavior. The social and political connections of these two theories are significant. In the United States, for example, blacks often score below whites on standardized intelligent test. This leads some“nature”proponents to conclude that blacks are genetically worse than