四川省广汉市2017高考英语一轮复习 阅读理解编练.docVIP

四川广汉市2017高考英语阅读理解一轮编练题 【2016高考英语阅读理解训练】阅读下面短文，选择最佳答案。 People have wondered for a long time how their personalities and behaviour are formed. It is 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 questions. They want to explain why we possess certain characteristics and exhibit certain behaviour. 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 controversy(争论) is often conveniently referred to as “nature and nurture”. Those who support the “nature” side of the conflict believe that our personalities and behaviour patterns are largely determined by biological factors. That our environment has little, if anything, to do with our abilities, characteristics and behaviour is central to this theory. Taken to an extreme, this theory states that our behaviour is predetermined 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, behaviourists, claim that our environment is more important than our biologically based instincts in determining how we will act. A behaviourist, B.F. Skinner, sees humans as beings whose behaviour is almost completely shaped by their surroundings. The behaviourists’ view of the human being is quite mechanistic. They state that, like machines, humans respond to environmental stimuli (刺激) as the basis of their behaviour. Socially and politically, the consequences of these two theories are far-reaching. In the US, for example, blacks often score below whites on standardized intelligence tests. This leads some “nature” proponents to conclude that blacks are genetically lower in status than whites.