2. 外语
  3. As the Titanic was sinking and women and children climbed into lifeboats, the musicians from the ship’s band stood and played. T

As the Titanic was sinking and women and children climbed into lifeboats, the musicians from the ship’s band stood and played. T

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问题        As the Titanic was sinking and women and children climbed into lifeboats, the musicians from the ship’s band stood and played. They died when the ship went down. Men stood on the deck and smoked cigarettes. They died, too. This behavior is puzzling to economists, who like to believe that people tend to act in their own self-interest. "There was no pushing," says David Savage, an economist at Queensland University in Australia who has studied witness reports from the survivors. It was "very, very orderly behavior."
       Savage has compared the behavior of the passengers on the Titanic with those on the Lusitania, another ship that also sank at about the same time. But when the Lusitania went down, the passengers panicked. There were a lot of similarities between these two events. These two ships were both luxury ones, they had a similar number of passengers and a similar number of survivors.
       The biggest difference, Savage concludes, was time. The Lusitania sank in less than 20 minutes. But for the Titanic, it was two-and-a-half hours. "If you’ve got an event that lasts two-and-a-half hours, social order will take over and everybody will behave in a social manner,"Savage says. "If you’re going down in under 17 minutes, basically it’s instinctual." On the Titanic, social order ruled, and it was women and children first. On the Lusitania, instinct won out. The survivors were largely the people who could swim and get into the lifeboats.
       "Yes, we’re self-interested," Savage says. But we’re also part of a society. Given time, social norms can beat our natural self-interest. A hundred years ago, women and children always went first. Men were stoic. On the Titanic, there was enough time for these norms to become forceful.
Which of the following is an appropriate title for this passage?
选项 A、Why Didn’t Musicians Play on the Lusitania?
B、Why Did Musicians Play on the Titanic?
C、Why Didn’t Passengers Panic on the Titanic?
D、Why Did Men Smoke on the Titanic?
答案C
解析 文章首段就描述了泰坦尼克号沉没时的情形，并引出经济学家的疑惑。接着通过对泰坦尼克号和路西塔尼亚号沉没的两个事件的对比，总结出导致人们采取社会规范或本能自利的方式逃生的主要原因：时间长短的不同。最后作者总结：如果时间充足的话，社会规范就能够打败我们天生的自私自利。在泰坦尼克号上，有足够的时间让这些规范发挥效力。因此选项C符合文章的主题。ABD三项中提到的都是乘客的一些具体表现，不能概括全文的写作目的，故选C。
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