新视野大学英语视听说教程第四册 Unit 8 Task1: Confident enough to control your fate?
Some people are born with the belief that they are masters of their own lives. Others feel they are at the mercy of fate. New research shows that part of those feelings are in the genes.
Psychologists have long known that people confident in their ability to control their fates are more likely to adjust well to growing old than those who feel they drift on the currents of fate.
Two researchers who questioned hundreds of Swedish twins report that such confidence, or lack of it, is partly genetic and partly drawn from experience.
They also found that the belief in blind luck—a conviction that chance plays a big role in life—is something learned in life and has nothing to do with heredity.
The research was conducted by Nancy Pedersen, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. The results were recently published in the United States in the Journal of Gerontology.
People who are confident of their ability to control their lives have an “internal locus of control”, and have a better chance of being well adjusted in their old age, said Pedersen. An “external locus of control”,believing that outside forces determine the course of life, has been linked to depression in latter years, she said.
“We are trying to understand what makes people different. What makes some people age slowly and others have a more difficult time?” she said.
The study showed that while people have an inborn tendency toward independence and self-confidence, about 70 percent of this personality trait is affected by a person’s environment and lifetime experiences.
Pedersen’s studies, with various collaborators, investigate the aging process by comparing sets of twins, most of whom were separated at an early age.
The subjects were drawn from a list first compiled about 30 years ago, registering all twins born in Sweden since 1886. The complete list, which was extended in 1971, has 95,000 sets of twins.
1. Which of the following is concerned with blind luck?
2. Which of the following is related to an external locus of control?
3. According to the passage, what is true of one’s inborn tendency towards self-confidence?
4. What subjects were mostly used in Pedersen’s studies?
5. What is the main idea of the passage?
Keys: 1.A 2.B 3.C 4.C 5.D
