How many Facebook Mends do you have? For some, the answer can be a signal of social success, and the numbers claimed can be enor

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问题    How many Facebook Mends do you have? For some, the answer can be a signal of social success, and the numbers claimed can be enormous: Facebook permits 5,000 of them (though these might include products and companies as well as people). But Robin Dunbar, a psychologist at Oxford University, has long reckoned that claims of vast numbers of Facebook friends do not say much about actual human relationships.
   Dr. Dunbar is the originator of Dunbar’s number, a rough measure of the number of stable relationships that individuals can maintain. He found a correlation between the average size of each species’s neocortex (a recently evolved part of the brain) and that of their social groups. 【F1】Deducing the results to humans, he reckoned, meant they should have social circles—of close friends and relatives, and frequently seen acquaintances—of about 150 people.
   Things have changed a bit since Neolithic and Roman times, though, and many wonder what effects modem technology might have on the size of such circles. 【F2】Perhaps there is indeed a cognitive limit, imposed by the brain’s internal architecture, on how large a social structure can be maintained. But there may also be another limit: time. Mamtaining 150 friendships face-to-face consumes a lot of that. Gathering together many times this number of connections online, though, is an easy thing.
   Previous attempts to decide between these possibilities have tended to come down on the cognitive-limit side of the fence. 【F3】But they have been criticized for looking at unrepresentative groups of people: students (inevitably), scientists and particularly heavy users of social networks. The latest try, in which Dr. Dunbar carried on a survey organized by a biscuit-maker, has overcome that. It is the first national-scale, randomly sampled study to investigate the matter.
   【F4】The survey asked 2,000 people, chosen because they were regular social-network users, and a further 1,375 adults in full-time employment who might or might not have been such users, how many friends they had on Facebook. The results showed, to no surprise whatsoever on the part of Dr. Dunbar, that the average number in the two groups were Dunbar-sized numbers: 155 and (when those who did not use Facebook at all were excluded) 187, respectively.
   【F5】These results, then, confirm that what constrains an individual’s number of friends is neurological. Even though social networks could help people handle far more social interactions than Dunbar’s number describes, it seems the human brain simply cannot keep up.
【F2】

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答案对于个人能维持多大规模的社交圈,这种认知上的限度很可能是受大脑内部结构影响的。

解析 ①本句为there be句型,主语为a cognitive limit。②句子中间插入了一个过去分词短语imposed by…,充当非谓语成分修饰主语a limit,说明认知上的限度受大脑内部结构影响。③句尾的介宾短语on how large…can be maitained说明这种限度是有关人类能维持多大规模的社交圈。其中can be maintained是省略引导词的定语从句,修饰a social structure。
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