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  3. People have wondered for a long time how their personalities and behaviors are formed. It’s not easy to explain why one person i

People have wondered for a long time how their personalities and behaviors are formed. It’s not easy to explain why one person i

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问题     People have wondered for a long time how their personalities and behaviors are formed. It’s not easy to explain why one person is intelligent and another is not, or why one is cooperative and another is competitive.
    Social scientists are, of course, extremely interested in these types of question. They want to explain why we possess certain characteristics and exhibit certain behaviors. There are no clear answers yet, but two distinct schools of thought on the matter have developed. As one might expect, the two approaches are very different from each other, and there is a great deal of debate between proponents of each theory. The controversy is often conveniently referred to as "nature/nurture".
    Those who support the "nature" side of the conflict believe that our personalities and behavior patterns are largely determined by biological and genetic factors. That our environment has little, if anything, to do with our abilities, characteristics and behavior is central to this theory. Taken to an extreme, this theory maintains that our behavior is predetermined to such a great degree that we are almost completely governed by our instincts.
    Proponents of the "nurture" theory, or, as they are often called, behaviorists, claim that our environment is more important than our biologically based instincts in determining how we will act. Behaviorists see humans as beings whose behavior is almost completely shaped by their surroundings. Their view of the human being is quite mechanistic; they maintain that, like machines, humans respond to environmental stimuli as the basis of their behavior.
    The social and political implications of these two theories are profound. In the United States, for example, blacks often score below whites on standardized intelligent test. This leads some "nature" proponents to conclude that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Behaviorists, in contrast, say that the differences in scores are due to the fact that blacks are often deprived of many of the educational and other environmental advantages that whites enjoy, and that, as a result, they do not develop the same responses that whites do.
    Neither of these theories can yet fully explain human behavior. In fact, it is quite likely that the key to our behavior lies somewhere between these two extremes. That the controversy will continue for a long time is certain.
What can we learn about the behaviorists?
选项 A、They believe human beings are mechanical.
B、They compare our behaviors to the machines.
C、They suggest that we react to the environment as the machines do.
D、They uphold that the mechanistic theory can be applied on us as well.
答案C
解析 第4段末句中的like machines，humans respond…表明作者并非单纯把人类比作机器，而是把人类对环境的反应与机械对环境的反应作对比，由此可见，C为正确的理解。A片面地理解原文，没有具体指出人类在哪方面与机械相似；B的两个比较的对象与原文不符，原文比较的是人类对刺激的反应(即人类的行为)和机械对刺激的反应，而非B中的人类行为与机械本身作对比；作者只是从某一方面将人类与机械作对比，这并不意味着任何与机械有关的原理都适用于人类，D过于宽泛了。
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