英语四级改革后新题型 长篇阅读2.docVIP

A:What do we mean by being ‘talented or gifted’? The most obvious way is to look at the work someone does and if they are capable of significant success, label them as talented. The purely quantitative route — ‘percentage definition’— looks not at individuals, but at simple percentages, such as the top five percent of the population, and labels them — by definition — as gifted. This definition has fallen from favor, eclipsed by the advent of IQ tests, favored by luminaries such as Professor Hans Eysenck, where a series of written or verbal tests of general intelligence leads to a score of intelligence.B:The IQ test has been eclipsed in turn. Most people studying intelligence and creativity in the new millennium now prefer a broader definition, using a multifaceted approach where talents in many areas are recognized rather than purely concentrating on academic achievement. If we are therefore assuming that talented, creative or gifted individuals may need to be assessed across a range of abilities, does this mean intelligence can run in families as genetic or inherited tendency? Mental dysfunction — such as schizophrenia — can, so is an efficient mental capacity passed on from parent to child?C:Animal experiments throw some light on this question, and on the whole area of whether it is genetics, the environment or a combination of the two that allows for intelligence and creative ability. Different strains of rats show great differences in intelligence or ‘rat reasoning’. If these are brought up in normal conditions and then run through a maze to reach a food goal, the ‘bright-strain make far fewer wrong turns that the ‘dull-ones’. But if the environment is made dull and boring the number of errors becomes equal. Return the rats to an exciting maze and the discrepancy returns as before — but is much smaller. In other words, a dull rat in a stimulating environment will almost do as well as bright rat who is bored in a normal one. This principle applies to humans too