2. 外语
  3. In the early 20th century, a horse named Clever Hans was believed capable of counting and other impressive mental tasks. After y

In the early 20th century, a horse named Clever Hans was believed capable of counting and other impressive mental tasks. After y

admin2012-05-17  6
问题     In the early 20th century, a horse named Clever Hans was believed capable of counting and other impressive mental tasks. After years of great performance, psychologists discovered that though Hans was certainly clever, he was not clever in the way everyone expected. The horse was cunningly (聪明地) picking up on tiny, unintentional bodily and facial cues given out not only by his trainer, but also by the audience. Aware of the "Clever Hans" effect, Lisa Lit at the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues wondered whether the beliefs of professional dog handlers might similarly affect the outcomes of searchers for drugs and explosives. Remarkably, Dr. Lit found, they do.
    Dr. Lit asked 18 professional dog handlers and their dogs to complete brief searches. Before the searches, the handlers were informed that some of the search area might contain up to three target scents (气味), and also that in two cases those scents would be marked by pieces of red paper. What the handlers were not told was that none of the search areas contained the scents of either drugs or explosives. Any "detections" made by the teams thus had to be false.
    The findings reveal that of 144 searches, only 21 were clean (no alerts). All the others raised one alert or more. In total, the teams raised 225 alerts. While the sheer number of false alerts struck Dr. Lit as fascinating, it was where they took place that was of greatest interest.
    When handlers could see a red piece of paper, allegedly marking a location of interest, they were much more likely to say that their dogs signaled an alert. The human handlers were not only distracted on almost every occasion by the stimulus aimed at them, but also transmitted that distraction to their animals — who responded accordingly. To mix metaphors, the dogs were crying "wolf at the unconscious signal of their handlers.
    How much that matters in the real world is unclear. But it might. If a handler, for example, unconsciously "profiled" people being sniffed (嗅) by a drug- or explosive-detecting dog at an airport, false positives could abound (大量存在). That is not only bad for innocent travelers, but might distract the team from catching the guilty.  
According to Dr. Lit, the most significant about the experiment was______.
选项 A、the way the dogs raised alerts
B、the location of the false alerts
C、the average time of the searches
D、the number of the false alerts
答案B
解析 根据题干中的Dr. Lit和most significant将本题出处定位到第3段末句。该句提到，虽然错误警报的次数让Lit博士觉得有趣，但最让他感兴趣的是错误警报发出的地点。由此可知，对Lit博士来说，这个实验最有意义的地方是错误警报发生的地点，故答案为[B]。文中提到the teamsraised 225 alerts，但并未提及警犬发出警报的方式，且不是Lit博士的关注点，故排除[A]。[C]在文中未提及，故排除。文中提到Lit博士对警报的次数感兴趣，但这不是他最感兴趣的地方，也就不是该实验最有意义的地方，故排除[D]。
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大学英语四级

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