Early intelligence tests were not without their critics. Man enduring concerns were first raised by the influential journalist W

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问题     Early intelligence tests were not without their critics. Man enduring concerns were first raised by the influential journalist Walter Lippman, in a series of published debates with Lewis Terman, of Stanford University, the father of IQ testing in America. Lippman pointed out the superficiality of the questions, their possible cultural biases, and the risks of trying to determine a person’s intellectual potential with a brief oral or paper-and-pencil measure.
    Perhaps surprisingly, the conceptualization of intelligence did not advance much in the decades following Terman’s pioneering contributions. Intelligence tests came to be seen, rightly or wrongly, as primarily a tool for selecting people to fill academic or vocational niches. In one of the most famous remarks about intelligence testing, the influential Harvard psychologist E. G. Boring declared, "Intelligence is what the tests test." So long as these tests did what they were supposed to do(that is, give some indication of school success), it did not seem necessary or prudent to probe too deeply into their meaning or to explore alternative views of the human intellect.
    Psychologists who study intelligence have argued chiefly about two questions. The first: Is intelligence singular, or does it consist of various more or less independent intellectual faculties? The purists — ranging from the turn-of-the-century English psychologist Charles Spearman to his latter-day disciples Richard J. Herrntein and Charles Murray — defend the notion of a single overarching "g". The pluralists — ranging from L. L. Thurstone, of the University of Chicargo, who posited seven vectors of the mind, to J. P. Guilford, of the University of Southern California, who discerned 150 factors of the intellect — construe intelligence as composed of some or even many dissociable components.
    The public is more interested in the second question: Is intelligence(or are intelligences)largely inherited? This is by and large a Western question. In the Confucian societies of East Asia individual differences in endowment are assumed to be modest, and differences in achievement are thought to be due largely to effort. In the West, however, many students of the subject sympathize with the view that intelligence is inborn and one can do little to alter one’s intellectual birthright.
    Studies of identical twins reared apart provide surprisingly strong support for the "heritability" of psychometric intelligence. That is, if one wants to predict someone’s score on an intelligence test, the scores of the biological parents(even if the child has not had appreciable contact with them)are more likely to prove relevant than the scores of the adoptive parents. By the same token, the IQs of identical twins are more similar than the IQs of fraternal twins. And, contrary to common sense, the IQs of biologically related people grow closer in the later years of life.
Some western students may ascribe one’s failure in study to his______.

选项 A、lower inborn intelligence
B、less effort
C、disadvantaged life environment
D、less concentrated attention

答案A

解析 根据题干中的Some western students将本题出处定位于第4段。文章第4段主要是关于研究智力的心理学家们所争论的第二个问题,即:Is intelligence(or are intelligences)largely inherited?(智力是否很大程度上是天生的?)。该段最后一句指出,许多西方研究智力的学者都认为智力是inborn(天生的),人很难改变。由此可以推断,在这些研究者看来,如果一个人在某方面落后于其他人,他肯定会把自己失败的原因归结于自己的天资不如别人,故答案为A)。
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