大学英语精读第二册 Unit 9 What Is Intelligence, Anyway.docVIP

Asimov explains why there is much more in intelligence than just being able to score high on intelligence tests. Unit Nine What Is Intelligence, Anyway? What is intelligence, anyway? When I was in the army I received a kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that and for two hours they made a nig fuss over me. (It didnt mean anything. The next day I was still a buck private with KP as my highest duty.) All my life Ive been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that Im highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think so, too. Actually, though, dont such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by the people who make up the intelligence tests - people with intellectual bents similar to mine? For instance, I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car. Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, Id prove myself a moron. And Id be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute. Its worth is determined by the society I live in. Its numerical evaluation is determined by a small subsection of that society which has managed to foist itself on the rest of us as an arbiter of such matte