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  3. (1)Most people dream enthusiastically at night, their dreams seemingly occupying hours, even though most last only a few minutes

(1)Most people dream enthusiastically at night, their dreams seemingly occupying hours, even though most last only a few minutes

admin2016-11-03  67
问题     (1)Most people dream enthusiastically at night, their dreams seemingly occupying hours, even though most last only a few minutes. Most people also read great meaning into their nocturnal(夜间的)visions. In fact, according to a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the vast majority of people in three very different countries—India, South Korea and the United States—believe that their dreams reveal meaningful hidden truths.
    (2)But after so many years of brain research showing that most of our everyday cognitions result from a complex but observable interaction of proteins and neurons and other mostly uncontrolled cellular activity, how can so many otherwise rational people think dreams should be taken seriously? After all, brain activity isn’t mystical but—for the most part—highly predictable.
    (3)The authors of the study—psychologists Carey Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University and Michael Norton of Harvard—offer a few theories. For one, dreams often feature familiar people and locations, which means we are less willing to dismiss mem outright. Also, because we can’t trace me content of dreams to an external source—because that content seems to arise spontaneously and from within—we can’t explain it the way we can explain random thoughts that occur to us during waking hours. If you find yourself sitting at your desk and thinking about a bomb exploding in your office, you might say to yourself, "Oh, I watched 24 last night, so I’m just remembering that episode." But people have a harder time making sense of dreams. Maybe 24 caused the dream, we think—or maybe we’re having a premonition of an attack. We love to interpret dreams widely, and those acts of interpretation give dreams meaning.
    (4)Human beings are irrational about dreams the same way they are irrational about a lot of things. We make dumb choices all the time on the basis of silly information like racial bias or a misunderstanding of statistics—or dreams. Morewedge and Norton quote one of the most famous modern studies to demonstrate our collective folly, from a paper written by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman that was published in Science in 1974. In that paper, Tversky and Kahneman discuss an experiment in which subjects were asked to estimate the percentage of African countries represented in the U.N. Before they guessed, a researcher spun a wheel of fortune in front of them that landed on a random number between 0 and 100. People tended to pick an answer that wasn’t far from the number on the wheel, even though the wheel had nothing to do with African countries.
    (5)As I said, we all make dumb choices based on silly information. That’s why we invest meaning in dreams. That being said, dumb choices aren’t necessarily bad ones. A final finding from the study: When people have dreams about good things happening to their good friends, they are more likely to say those dreams are meaningful than when they have dreams about bad things happening to their friends. Similarly, we invest more meaning in dreams in which our enemies are punished and less meaning in dreams in which our enemies emerge victorious. In short, our interpretation of dreams may say a lot less about some quixotic search for hidden truth than it does about another enduring human quality: optimistic thinking.
Which of the following details shows people’s irrationality and absurdness in dealing with things?
选项 A、People tend to choose the closer number on the wheel when telling the percentage of African countries.
B、People would link the thought of a bomb explosion with last night’s episode of 24.
C、People would rather see their enemies being punished in their dreams.
D、When thinking about a bomb explosion in the office, people tend to interpret it as a premonition.
答案A
解析 第4段描述了一个实验，实验对象被要求估计联合国里非洲成员国所占的比例。在他们回答之前，研究员在他们面前转动了一个轮盘，它最终会停在0到100之间的一个偶然数字上，人们往往在轮盘上就近地找一个答案。即使这轮盘跟非洲国家没有关系。这个例子说明人们在对待事情上的不理智，故正确答案为A。
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