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  3. Motorists are easily distracted from watching the road ahead by an urge to phone friends, send text messages and search for song

Motorists are easily distracted from watching the road ahead by an urge to phone friends, send text messages and search for song

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问题    Motorists are easily distracted from watching the road ahead by an urge to phone friends, send text messages and search for songs on portable music-players. The "distracted driving" has plagued the American roads in recent years. This year, the American Government moves towards enacting legislation to prohibit using hand-held devices while driving. A bill introduced in July by Charles Schumer, a senator from New York, would encourage individual states to ban motorists’ use of hand-held phones by threatening to withhold 25% of federal highway funds from those that failed to do so.
   【R1】__________
   Your correspondent’s in-car navigation system can transfer his mobile phone’s incoming calls to the vehicle’s audio system and play them automatically. Using simple voice commands, he can also dial out, hands-free, to a dozen or so people listed in his phone’s address book.
   【R2】__________
   As many motorists do when trying to multi-task while driving, he unconsciously slows down—and, in the process, quite possibly becomes a greater hazard to other road users. If the conversation gets tense or complicated, he may be consciously forced to pull over to the side of the road and stop. Both hands may be on the steering wheel, and the eyes scanning the road ahead and the mirrors all round, but the brain is elsewhere.
   Cognitive researchers at Carnegie Mellon University reckon that just listening to a conversation can reduce activity in the region of the brain associated with spatial- and visual-information processing (the part used for driving) by as much as 37%. 【R3】__________This is what causes motorists to miscalculate distances and drive too close to the car ahead.
   Modem motorists may live in a multitasking age, but few people can actually do two things at once without skimping on one, or both, of them. It takes a great deal of training and practice to become a genuine multi-tasker. Concert pianists, who strive for complete independence of movement for each hand, are among the very few to achieve it. Everyone else does time-sharing, constantly switching from one task to another. But the switching itself takes time—typically a second or so—while the brain refocuses attention back to the previous task. 【R4】__________How often have you heard drivers claim they never saw the object they hit?
   The issue is thus not whether America should ban the use of mobile phones while driving. That is really a no-brainer. 【R5】__________ Great progress has been made in developing driver aids that push gently a distracted motorist who is drifting out of lane, or getting too close to the car ahead and failing to notice it is braking hard.
   [A] Get interrupted during that dead instant (a sudden splash of mud on the windscreen will suffice) and the brain can revert to what it was doing before—say, operating a phone instead of checking the road ahead—and thereby overlook the pedestrian who has stepped out onto the road.
   [B] Although there is no physical distraction, he finds himself having to compensate for the extra cognitive workload involved in even a hands-free telephone conversation.
   [C] Banning the use of hand-held phones and other gizmos while driving is all well and good. But, in doing so, the inference is that it is then fine for motorists to use hands-free devices to make calls while on the road. But hands-free has problems, too.
   [D] But legislation alone can’t deal with the problem of distracted drivers, who with a moment’s inattention can turn their vehicles into lethal weapons.
   [E] The last thing motorists need is yet more gadgets in vehicles to distract them still further. But if the technology is used to augment their attention, rather than challenge it, then perhaps the growth of driver distraction may yet be contained.
   [F] Moreover, cheap technology can be added to motor vehicles that block certain phone functions, such as texting and dialing, while the operator is driving. The bigger issue is how to devise still better means for guiding a motorist’s attention.
   [G] Cognitive distraction causes drivers to focus on a narrow space ahead, with little awareness of what is going on around them—something researchers call "inattentional blindness".
【R4】
选项
答案A
解析 空格前指出。一般人通常都是在多任务之间转换，而任务间的转换也需要时间(switching itself takes time)：通常需要一秒钟左右，之后人的大脑才会将注意力转回到之前的任务上。言下之意，驾驶员驾车时从分神到重新专注于开车是需要一定时间的，而这期间很有可能会发生意外。空格后提及驾驶员常说他们根本没看到自己撞到的物体。A开头的Get interrupted during that dead instant和revert to what it was doing before对应空格前的内容；末尾的overlook the pedestrian(没有看到行人)则与空格后的内容呼应。故本题选A。
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