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  3. The sight of eight long black legs moving over the floor makes some people scream and run—and women are four times more likely t

The sight of eight long black legs moving over the floor makes some people scream and run—and women are four times more likely t

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问题      The sight of eight long black legs moving over the floor makes some people scream and run—and women are four times more likely to take fright than men. Now a study suggests that females are genetically prone to develop fears for potentially dangerous animals.
    David Rakison, a developmental psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, found that baby girls only 11 months old rapidly start to associate pictures of spiders with fear. Baby boys remain merrily indifferent to this connection.
    In an initial training phase Rakison showed to baby girls and boys a picture of a spider together with a fearful face. In the following test phase he let them watch the image of a spider paired with a happy face, and the image of a flower paired with a fearful face.
     Despite the spider’s happy companion, the girls looked significantly longer at it than at the flower. The researchers took this to mean that the girls expected spiders to be linked with fear. The boys looked for an equal time at both images.
     With a different group of babies, Rakison first showed a spider with a happy face, and a flower with a fearful face. Now the girls too looked at both images for the same length of time— implying that they did not have an inborn fear of spiders.
    The results suggest that girls are more inclined than boys to learn to fear dangerous animals. By contrast, says Rakison, modern phobias (恐惧) such as fear of flying or injections show no sex difference.
    He attributes the difference to behavioural differences between men and women among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. A dislike for spiders may help women avoid dangerous animals, but in men evolution seems to have favoured more risk-taking behaviour for successful hunting.
     It makes evolutionary sense to acquire spider fear at a certain age, rather than to be born with it, he adds. "There is little reason for an infant to fear an object unless it can respond to it, for example by crawling away," he says.
     But if being scared of spiders is genetically inclined, is there any point in seeing a psychiatrist? "Even if a person is heavily inclined to develop spider phobia, exposure therapy would still be effective," says Jaime Derringer, a clinical psychologist from Washington University in St. Louis. "But it may be more difficult to eliminate the association between spiders and a fearful response," she says.  
We can learn from David Rakison’s study that ______.
选项 A、people develop fears for dangerous animals by learning
B、people are born with fears for dangerous animals
C、boys do not feel frightened by the pictures of spiders
D、girls are more attracted by beautiful flowers than boys do
答案A
解析 在第6段首句中，关键问是learn，该句表明人类通过学习学会害怕危险的动物，而女孩子比男孩子在这方面的倾向更明显，由此可见，本题应选A。
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