2. 职称英语
  3. In the early 20th century, a horse named Clever Hans was believed capable of

In the early 20th century, a horse named Clever Hans was believed capable of

游客2024-02-21  60
问题     In the early 20th century, a horse named Clever Hans was believed capable of counting and other impressive mental tasks. After years of great performance, psychologists discovered that though Hans was certainly clever, he was not clever in the way everyone expected. The horse was cunningly (聪明地) picking up on tiny, unintentional bodily and facial cues given out not only by his trainer, but also by the audience. Aware of the "Clever Hans" effect, Lisa Lit at the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues wondered whether the beliefs of professional dog handlers might similarly affect the outcomes of searchers for drugs and explosives. Remarkably, Dr. Lit found, they do.
    Dr. Lit asked 18 professional dog handlers and their dogs to complete brief searches. Before the searches, the handlers were informed that some of the search area might contain up to three target scents (气味), and also that in two cases those scents would be marked by pieces of red paper. What the handlers were not told was that none of the search areas contained the scents of either drugs or explosives. Any "detections" made by the teams thus had to be false.
    The findings reveal that of 144 searches, only 21 were clean (no alerts). All the others raised one alert or more. In total, the teams raised 225 alerts. While the sheer number of false alerts struck Dr. Lit as fascinating, it was where they took place that was of greatest interest.
    When handlers could see a red piece of paper, allegedly marking a location of interest, they were much more likely to say that their dogs signaled an alert. The human handlers were not only distracted on almost every occasion by the stimulus aimed at them, but also transmitted that distraction to their animals — who responded accordingly. To mix metaphors, the dogs were crying "wolf at the unconscious signal of their handlers.
    How much that matters in the real world is unclear. But it might. If a handler, for example, unconsciously "profiled" people being sniffed (嗅) by a drug- or explosive-detecting dog at an airport, false positives could abound (大量存在). That is not only bad for innocent travelers, but might distract the team from catching the guilty.  [br] How does the author see Dr. Lit’s findings?
选项 A、They may not be useful in real situations.
B、They should raise our concern in real life.
C、They will be widely applied in the near future.
D、They should be backed up by further evidence.
答案 B
解析 末段首句提到，that(指代Dr．Lit的发现)在现实世界中有多重要还不清楚。随后用But转折提到：但可能会很重要。后文举例说明警犬训练员对需要搜索对象的无意识定型可能会影响警犬在机场的搜寻工作，造成不良后果，由此可推断出，作者认为Dr．Lit的研究发现可能在现实生活有很重要的意义，应该引起人们的注意，故答案为[B]。作者提到该研究发现在现实世界中可能会很重要，结合后面举的机场的例子可知，这些发现可能会在现实情况中发挥作用，故排除[A]。[C]和[D]在文中未提及。
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