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  3. Professor Smith recently persuaded 35 people, 23 of them women, to keep a diary of all their absentminded actions for a fortnigh

Professor Smith recently persuaded 35 people, 23 of them women, to keep a diary of all their absentminded actions for a fortnigh

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问题      Professor Smith recently persuaded 35 people, 23 of them women, to keep a diary of all their absentminded actions for a fortnight. When he came to analyze their embarrassing lapses in a scientific report, he was surprised to find that nearly all of them fell into a few groupings. Nor did the lapses appear to be entirely random.
     One of the women, for instance, on leaving her house for work one morning threw her dog her earrings and tried to fix a dog biscuit on her ear. "The explanation for this is that the brain is like a computer," explains the professor. "People program themselves to do certain activities regularly. It was the woman’s custom every morning to throw her dog two biscuits and then put on her earrings. But somehow the action got reversed in the program." About one in twenty of the incidents the volunteers reported were these "program assembly failures."
     Altogether the volunteers logged 433 unintentional actions that they found themselves doing--an average of twelve each. There appear to be peak periods in the day when we are at our zaniest, These are two hours some time between eight a.m. and noon, between four and six p.m. with a smaller peak between eight and ten p.m. "Among men the peak seems to be when a changeover in brain ’programs’ occurs, as for instance between going to and from work." Women on average reported slightly more lapses--12.5 compared with 10.9 for men--probably because they were more reliable reporters.
     A startling finding of the research is that the absent-minded activity is a hazard of doing things in which we are skilled. Normally, you would expect that skill reduces the number of errors we make. But trying to avoid silly slips by concentrating more could make things a lot worse——even dangerous.  
"Program assembly failures" (Para. 2) refers to the phenomenon that people ______
选项 A、often fail to program their routines beforehand
B、tend to make mistakes when they are in a hurry
C、unconsciously change the sequence of doing things
D、are likely to mess things up ff riley are too tired
答案C
解析 在文章第二段中，Professor Smith指出那个女士之所以"threw her dog her earrings and tried to fix a dog biscuit on her ear”，是因为"somehow how the action got reversed in the program"，然后，作者进一步总结到"About one in twenty of the incidents the volunteers reported were these‘program asse
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