首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
We’ve long been eager to believe that mastery of a skill is primarily the result of how much effort one has put in. Extensive pr
We’ve long been eager to believe that mastery of a skill is primarily the result of how much effort one has put in. Extensive pr
admin
2016-07-09
43
问题
We’ve long been eager to believe that mastery of a skill is primarily the result of how much effort one has put in. Extensive practice " is probably the most reasonable explanation we have today not only for success in any line, but even for genius," said the behaviorist John B. Watson almost a century ago. In the 1990s K. Anders Ericsson and a colleague at Florida State University reported data that seemed to confirm this view: What separates the expert from the amateur, a first-rate musician or chess player from a wannabe, isn’t talent: it’s thousands of hours of work.
It’s daunting to imagine putting in that kind of commitment, but we’re comforted nonetheless by the idea that practice is the primary contributor to excellence. That’s true for three reasons:
1. Common sense. It seems obvious that the more time you spend trying to get better at something, the more proficient you’ll become. Common sense, however, isn’t always correct. Researchers have found that only when " achievement" is defined as rote recall do we discover a strong, linear relationship with time. When the focus is on depth of understanding and sophisticated problem solving, time on task doesn’t predict outcome very well at all—either in reading or math.
2. Protestant work ethic. Many people simply don’t like the idea that someone could succeed without having paid his or her dues—or, conversely, that lots of deliberate practice might prove fruitless. Either of these possibilities threatens people’s belief in what social psychologists call a "just world".
3. Nurture over nature. "Innate? Necessarily so!" is what we’ve heard for centuries. Given the tawdry history of biological reductionism(生物还原论), which usually manages to rationalize current arrangements of power as being due to the natural superiority of privileged groups, is it any wonder we remain leery(猜疑的)of attributing success to inherited talent? It’s more egalitarian to declare that geniuses are made, not born. Indeed, that skepticism is bolstered by evidence indicating that students are more likely to embrace learning if they believe their performance results from effort, something under their control, rather than from a fixed level of intelligence that they either possess or lack.
For many of us, then, Andersson’s conclusion has been deeply reassuring: Practice hard and you’ll do well. But along comes a brand-new meta-analysis, a statistical summary of 157 separate comparisons in 88 recent studies, that finds practice actually doesn’t play nearly as significant a role as we’d like to think. " The evidence is quite clear that some people do reach an elite level of performance without copious(丰富的)practice, while other people fail to do so despite copious practice," wrote Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick, and Frederick Oswald in Psychological Science. In fact, they calculated that, overall, the amount of deliberate practice in which someone engages explains only 12 percent of the variance in the quality of performance, which means 88 percent is explained by other factors.
But what other factors? It’s common to assume that if practice matters less than we thought, then inborn ability matters more—as if there are only two contributors to excellence and they’re reciprocally related. That’s not necessarily true, however. The question posed by Macnamara and her colleagues was appropriately open-ended: "We have empirical evidence that deliberate practice, while important, does not largely account for individual differences in performance. The question now is what else matters. " And there are many possible answers. One is how early in life you were introduced to the activity—which, as the researchers explain, appears to have effects that go beyond how many years of practice you booked. Others include how open you are to collaborating and learning from others, and how much you enjoy the activity. That last one—intrinsic motivation—has a huge empirical base of support in workplaces, schools, and elsewhere. We’ve long known that the pleasure one takes from an activity is a powerful predictor of success. For example, one group of researchers tried to sort out the factors that helped third and fourth graders remember what they had been reading. They found that how interested the students were in the passage was thirty times more important than how "readable" the passage was. All of these factors overlap(重叠)and serve as catalysts for one another, which means that even if practice does predict success to some degree, that doesn’t mean it caused the success. Maybe the right question to ask is: Why do some people decide to practice a lot in the first place? Could it be because their first efforts proved mostly successful?
What is the main subject of the passage?
选项
A、Practice doesn’t make perfect.
B、Talent is more important than effort.
C、Various factors contribute to success.
D、Some people are born to be successful.
答案
C
解析
主旨题。文章以人们普遍存在的想法“努力就能成功”开篇,然后论证了这种想法的局限性,最后文章点明,成功的因素不仅限于天赋和努力,还有很多其他因素决定了一个人能否成功,故答案为[C]。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/hH7O777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
Bythetwenty-firstcentury,morepeoplewillbedescendantsofthenon-Westerngroupsthatanthropologistshavetraditionally
______isconsideredalandmarkandamodelofthe20thcenturypoetry.
______wasthefirstimportantEnglishwomannovelist.
Theincreaseininternationalbusinessandinforeigninvestmenthascreatedaneedforexecutiveswithknowledgeofforeignl
Schoolsarehighlybureaucraticorganizations.Manyteachersrelyin【M1】______therulesandregulationsofschoolstomaintain
Howmenfirstlearnedtoinventwordsisunknown;inotherword,theoriginoflanguageisamystery.Allwereallyknowis【M1】
Theword"screen"hasmanydifferentmeaningssuchasinafirescreen,atelevisionscreen.Thisiscalled______.
Weoftenreadinnovelshowaseeminglyrespectablepersonorfamilyhassometerriblesecretwhichhasbeenconcealedfromstr
PASSAGEFOURWhydoscientistsexaminethegenomesofastronauts?
随机试题
X企业发行普通股2000万股,每股面值1元,每股发行价格为5元,X企业按发行收入的1%支付发行手续费、咨询费等费用。假定股票发行成功,发行收入已经全部收到,发行费用已经全部支付。则X企业应贷记“资本公积——股本溢价”7900万元。()
关于鱼鳞病,下列说法错误的是
急性肾小球肾炎的主要临床表现为
门静脉高压症手术治疗最主要的目的是
对大比例尺数字地形图进行质量检验时,采用量距法实地随机抽检相邻地物点的距离,每幅图应选取的边数最少为()条。
不能选用硅酸盐水泥的环境条件为()。
科目汇总表不仅可以起到试算平衡的作用,而且可以反映账户之间的对应关系。
我方A公司在英国B化工厂考察期间,对其部分产品很感兴趣,于是洽谈并签订购买合同,决定按实物样品作为合同中交收货物的品质依据。这种表示品质的方法是:
在新文化运动中,首先提出“民主”与“科学”口号的是()
WhoseinterestsdoestheCouncilofMinistersrepresent?
最新回复
(
0
)