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  3. We may all like to consider ourselves free spirits. But a study of the traces left by 50,000 cellphone users over three months h

We may all like to consider ourselves free spirits. But a study of the traces left by 50,000 cellphone users over three months h

admin2010-07-24  57
问题     We may all like to consider ourselves free spirits. But a study of the traces left by 50,000 cellphone users over three months has conclusively proved that the truth is otherwise.
    "We are all in one way or another boring," says Alhert-László Barabási at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University in Boston, who co-wrote the study. "Spontaneous individuals are largely absent from the population."
    Barabási and colleagues used three months’ worth of data from a cellphone network to track the cellphone towers each person’s phone connected to each hour of the day, revealing their approximate location. They conclude that regardless of whether a person typically remains close to home or roams far and wide, their movements are theoretically predictable as much as 93 per cent of the time.
    Surprisingly, the cellphone data showed that individuals’movements were more or less as predictable at week ends as on weekdays, suggesting that routine is rooted in human nature rather than being an effect of work patterns.
    The cellphone records were processed to identify the most visited locations for each user. Then the probability of finding a given user at his or her most visited locations at each hour through the day was calculated.
    People were to be found in their most visited location for any given hour 70 per cent of the time. Not surprisingly, the figure increased at night, and decreased at lunchtime and in the early evening, when most people were returning home from work.
    The team analysed the randomness(随意的) of people’s traces to show it was theoretically possible to predict the average person’s whereabouts as much as 93 per cent of the time.
    "Say your routine movement is from home to the coffee shop to work:  if you are at home and then go to the coffee shop it’s easy for me to predict that you are going to work," says co-author Nicholas Blumm.
    This predictability was not much affected by differences in age, gender, language spoken or whether a person lived in a rural or urban setting.
What is the passage mainly about?
选项 A、The new application of cellphones.
B、The predictability of one’s routine.
C、The influence of cellphones on one’s routine.
D、The factors that help determine one’s routine.
答案B
解析 第1段首先提出人们普遍的想法：We may all like to consider ourselves flee spirits。在第2段至第4段，作者通过分析手机数据说明我们并没有自己想象的那么随心所欲，我们的行为是可预测的，最后几段进一步说明这种可预测性，因此，全文的主要内容应该是“可预测性”，由此可见，本题应选B。
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