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  3. When DNA Is not Destiny "Personality must be accepted for what it is," Oscar Wilde counseled. "You mustn’t mind that a poet

When DNA Is not Destiny "Personality must be accepted for what it is," Oscar Wilde counseled. "You mustn’t mind that a poet

admin2013-07-11  21
问题                         When DNA Is not Destiny
    "Personality must be accepted for what it is," Oscar Wilde counseled. "You mustn’t mind that a poet is a drunk." We’ll agree with Wilde on the debt that literature owes to alcohol, but he was definitely on shakier ground in implying that a man’s personality is what it is and will remain what it is until he is cold in the ground. Although that belief has found support in both casual observation and science, it suffers from a basic error. Really, people, can we start recognizing that just because something does not change doesn’t mean that it cannot change?
    One hint of the changeability of personality comes from the arrival, finally, of long-term studies that follow people for decades. The influence of genes declines with age in middle and later adulthood, environment plays a larger role than genetics in shaping personality, a hint of the power of accumulated experiences. Such as Yale students who got a brief course in fitting in became, over their college career, more resilient and motivated, more likely to reach out to professors and to participate in university life than students who did not have this experience, a recent study found.
    "Something that seems like a small intervention can have chain effects on things we think of as stable or fixed," says psychology researcher Carol Dweck of Stanford University, "including extroversion, openness to new experience and resilience" all of which are thought to be partly genetic. "More and more research is suggesting that, far from being simply encoded in the genes, much of personality is a flexible and dynamic thing that changes over the life span and is shaped by experience," she argues in the December issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. In particular, traits such as how you cope, how you perceive yourself and others, and how you act in everyday situations are flexible. Even a broad category such as introversion is like Silly Putty once life gets hold of it. DNA is not an inert set of blueprints; it responds to life experiences.
    Ironically, the belief that personality cannot change may be self-fulfilling. "Whether you believe that your core traits, such as intelligence, are fixed, or are things you can develop, matters a great deal," says Dweck. In a recent study, she and colleagues taught a group of students entering junior high that intelligence is changeable. These kids became significantly more conscientious and diligent compared with kids who didn’t receive this lesson " Beliefs about yourself play a causal role in how likely you are to seek out challenges and in how resilient you are," says Dweck. "If you change beliefs, you can change broad traits that many people think of as stable, including openness to experience, conscientiousness and sociability. Beliefs can be changed, and when they are, so is personality." No one claims that genes play no role in shaping personality. But it’s time to junk the old idea that only the part of a trait under environmental, not genetic, control is malleable, the life we lead and the experiences we have reach deep into our double helix.
What conclusion can we draw from the text?
选项 A、People seem to retain the same basic personality from childhood.
B、Environment is the major factor of shaping personality.
C、Personality is under the influence of accumulated experiences.
D、Genes play an important role in people’s life experiences.
答案C
解析 本题考查具体细节。文章探讨性格的可变性。传统观点认为性格由基因控制，不可变化，而文章则标新立异，从环境、经历和观念这三个影响因素展开论述，指出性格是可以改变的。[C]选项正确。[A]选项反向干扰，这是传统观点，并非文中所论述的观点。[B]选项断章取义，文章第二段第一句指出，在成年中后期，环境对于性格的影响超过基因。[D]选项因果颠倒，第三段最后一句指出，DNA会对生活经历产生反应，而非DNA影响生活经历。
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