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  3. If you find it hard to like James Inhofe—the Senator from Oklahoma who famously called climate change the "greatest hoax perpetr

If you find it hard to like James Inhofe—the Senator from Oklahoma who famously called climate change the "greatest hoax perpetr

admin2016-03-10  51
问题     If you find it hard to like James Inhofe—the Senator from Oklahoma who famously called climate change the "greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people"—remember this: He was once five. That matters, because Inhofe wasn’t merely a lot younger back then, he was a lot wiser—at least where the environment is concerned. That, according to a study from the Teacher Training College in Bilbao Spain, is true not just of the gentleman from Oklahoma, but all of us.
    Educators and people who work with small children know that they’re anarchists(无政府主义者)by nature, but children also live in a world full of rules. Some of those rules are taught—raise your hand in class, don’t interrupt other people: some seem more innate—don’t hit other children, don’t hurt animals. As reported in a story, psychologists like to posit the difference between telling a kindergartener that the teacher has suspended the rule against eating snacks in class and telling the same child that the teacher has suspended the no-hitting rule. In the first case, the child will grab the nearest cookie. In the second, the child will typically hesitate and refuse to hit, and may even say the teacher is wrong.
    To test where living things fall on this do-no-harm spectrum, Training College researcher Jose Domingo Villaroel assembled a sample group of 118 boys and girls, ages 4 to 7, from local public schools. He started with the basics, showing the kids two sets of four pictures each—a dog, a tree, a bird and a flower: and the sun, clouds, a car and a motorcycle—and asked which of them was alive and which not. As it turned out, the youngest kids particularly would often exclude the tree from the living things category but include the car or the motorcycle.
    Villaroel next asked them to respond to two situations. In the first they were presented with a set of social rules(rules against nose-picking and eating sloppily)and a set of interpersonal rules(don’t take other kids’ toys or hurt other kids). In the second they were presented the same social rules and a set of environmental rules(don’t step on flowers, don’t carve your name into a tree with a knife). In both cases they were asked to pick which rules were the worse ones to break. In both cases the social rules were abandoned first.
    It was perhaps unsurprising that kids understand intuitively why harming other children is a worse offense than showing bad manners. Even at an early age children have a growing sense of empathy, and they understand what it would feel like to be hit themselves or have a toy taken away. But children aren’t flowers or trees, and yet they showed them equal concern—and that included the kids who didn’t realize that plant life is life at all.
    The study is hardly airtight. It’s possible that the children did not give a hoot about the flowers and were just parroting rules they’d been taught or had observed. But they were taught the good-manners rule too. Villaroel wasn’t concerned with whether they understood right and wrong as absolutes, but rather in degrees—which thing was more right or more wrong. And on that metric, nature scored a big win.
    There’s a whole lot of developmental ground covered between the time you’re a five-year-old pre-schooler and a 55-year-old policymaker, and our better angels don’t always survive the trip. But it’s encouraging to know we start out with them—and it’s worth trying to hang onto them as long as we can.
The study from the Teacher Training College in Bilbao Spain shows that______.
选项 A、some people were much wiser when they were young
B、climate change is a subject that affects every member of human society
C、climate change is the greatest hoax to people from all over the world
D、people pay less attention to the environment when they become older
答案D
解析 细节题。作者在第一段以参议员詹姆斯·英霍夫关于环境变化“是对美国人民的最大骗局”的著名论断为例，指出如果在其儿童时期，他会在环境问题上更明智，而这也是西班牙某教师培训学院的一项实验结果。[D]表述准确，故为答案。
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