The smell from an old lady’s armpits can raise your spirits, a scientist in Pennsylvania claims. Her work also suggests that in

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问题     The smell from an old lady’s armpits can raise your spirits, a scientist in Pennsylvania claims. Her work also suggests that in contrast, the scent of a young child does nothing to improve your mood.
    Studies using animals have shown that smell is vital for conveying information. Rodents can detect and transmit fear through smell, for instance, and animals often identify a high - ranking member of a group by its smell. A recent study has shown that people can distinguish the body odor of both happy and fearful people. But the impact of body odor on people’s mood has hardly been explored at all.
    Denise Chen of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia hoped to find out more. So she recruited 30 volunteers in six different categories: girls and boys aged between three and eight, young adult women and men in their early twenties and elderly women and men in their seventies. The volunteers all gave samples of their body odor by strapping a gauze pad under each armpit and keeping it there for 10 hours.
    The participants were not allowed to use any perfumes or deodorants, or eat strong - smelling foods, in the four days before the samples were collected. They could shower, but only with unscented soap and shampoo. Odors were also collected from the homes of all the donors and combined into a neutral control smell.
    Chen then asked 308 university students to complete a 36 - part questionnaire that assessed how positive their mood was. Then they smelled the gauze pads from one of the gauze pads from
one of the six categories of people—without being told what the smells were. After this, the students answered the students answered around.
    People who had inhaled the samples taken from old women’s armpits respond significantly more positively, Chen found. "Old women had an uplifting effect" she says. The smell of young men, on the other hand, produced a depressive effect. In general, Chen will report in a future issue of the journal physiology and Behavior.
    Jeannette Haviland, of Rutgers University in New Jersey, who also worked on the project, says it’s possible that hormones make the body of young people signal aggression. But hormonal changes may make the odor of older people, especially women, signal that they are approachable. Alternatively, it could be that women in their golden years are generally happy, and that their odor can transmit this mood. " The air-borne chemicals that we collected from them— ’ I’eau de grandmere(smell of grandmother)’—may indicate that state," says Haviland.
Chen tried to collect the samples of body odor______.

选项 A、among three groups of volunteers
B、for four consecutive days
C、unaffected
D、at random

答案C

解析 细节题。文章第三、四段介绍了采集的方法将志愿者分为6个组,采集每人的体味样本10小时,样本采集前四天内不能使用香水或除臭剂,也不能吃味道很浓的食物等。A,B和D都与原文不符:C“不受影响”符合第四段中提到的not allowed to use anyperfumes or deodorants,or eat strong-smelling foods in the four days before,是对原文这段话的总结,故选C。
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