When a 13-year-old Virginal girl started sneezing, her parents thought it was merely a cold. But when the sneezes continued for hours, they called in a doctor. Nearly two months later the girl was still sneezing, thousands of times a day, and her case had attracted worldwide attention. Hundreds of suggestions, ranging from poured in. But nothing did any good. Finally, she was taken to Dr. Leo Kanner, one of the world's top authorities on sneezing, who solved the problem with great speed. He used neither drugs nor surgery for, curiously enough, the clue for the treatment was found in an ancient superstition about the amazing bodily reaction we call the sneeze.It was all in her mind, he said, a view which Aristotle, some 3,000 years earlier, would have agreed with heartily. Dr. Kanner simply gave a modern psychological interpretation to the ancient belief that too much Sneezing was an indication that the spirit was troubled; and he began to treat the girl accordingly. "Less than two days in a hospital room, a plan for better scholastic and vocational adjustment, and reassurance about her unreasonable fear of tuberculosis quickly changed her from a sneezer to an ex-sneezer," he reported. Sneezing has always been a subject of wonder, awe and puzzlement. Dr Kanner has collected thousands of superstitions concerning it. The most universal one is the custom of begging for the blessing of God when a person sneezes-- a practice Dr. Kanner traces back to the ancient belief that a sneeze was an indication that the sneezer was possessed of an evil spirit. Strangely, people over the world still continue the custom with the traditional, "God bless you" or something else. When scientists look at the sneeze, they see a remarkable mechanism which, without any conscious help from you, takes on a job that has to be done. When you need to sneeze you sneeze, this being nature's clever way of getting rid of an annoying object from the nose. The object may be just some dust in the nose which nature is trying to remove. Dr. Kanner cured the girl by _ . A) using Aristole's method B) giving her psychological treatment C) practicing superstition D) treating her tuberculosis
B
(Question)
One evening in February 2007, a student named Paula Ceely brought her car to a stop on a remote road in Wales. She got out to open a metal gate that blocked her path. That's when she heard the whistle sounded by the driver of a train. Her Renault Clio was parked across a railway line. Seconds later, she watched the train drag her car almost a kilometre down the railway tracks. Ceely's near miss made the news because she blamed it on her GPS . She had never driven the route before. It was dark and raining heavily. Ceely was relying on her GPS, but it made no mention of the crossing. "I put my complete trust in the device and it led me right into the path of a speeding train." she told the BBC. Who is to blame here? Rick Stevenson, who tells Ceely's story in his book When Machines Fail Us, points the finger at the limitations of technology. We put our faith in digital devices, he says, but our digital helpers are too often not up to the job. They are filled with small problems. And it's not just GPS devices: Stevenson takes us on a tour of digital disasters involving everything from mobile phones to wireless keyboards. The problem with his argument in the book is that it's not clear why he only focuses on digital technology, while there may be a number of other possible causes. A map-maker might have left the crossing off a paper map. Maybe we should blame Ceely for not paying attention. Perhaps the railway authorities are at fault for poor signalling system. Or maybe someone has studied the relative dangers and worked out that there really is something specific wrong with the GPS equipment. But Stevenson doesn't say. It's a problem that runs through the book. In a section on cars, Stevenson gives an account of the advanced techniques that criminals use to defeat computer-based locking systems for cars. He offers two independent sets of figures on car theft; both show a small rise in some parts of the country. He says that once again not all new locks have proved reliable. Perhaps, but maybe it's also due to... What is the real concern of the writer of this article? A) The major causes of traffic accidents and car thefts. B) The relationship between human and technology. C) The shortcomings of digital devices we use. D) The human unawareness of technical problems.
(Answer)
D
Can you believe your eyes? A recent experiment suggests that the answer to that question may depend on your age. Martin Doherty, a psychologist at the University of Stirling in Scotland, led the team of scientists. In this experiment, Doherty and his team tested the perception of some people, using pictures of some orange circles. The researchers showed the same pictures to two groups of people. The first group included 151 children aged 4 to 10, and the second group included 24 adults aged 18 to 25. The first group of pictures showed two circles alone on a white background. One of the circles was larger than the other, and these people were asked to identify the larger one. Four-year-olds identified the correct circle 79 percent of the time. Adults identified the correct circle 95 percent of the time. Next, both groups were shown a picture where the orange circles, again of different sizes, were surrounded by gray circles. Here's where the trick lies in. In some of the pictures, the smaller orange circle was surrounded by even smaller gray circles -- making the orange circle appear larger than the other orange circle, which was the real larger one. And the larger orange circle was surrounded by even bigger gray circles -- so it appeared to be smaller than the real smaller orange circle. When young children aged 4 to 6 looked at these tricky pictures, they weren't fooled -- they were still able to find the bigger circle with roughly the same accuracy as before. Older children and adults, on the other hand, did not do as well. Older children often identified the smaller circle as the larger one, and adults got it wrong most of the time. As children get older, Doherty said, their brains may develop the ability to identify visual context. In other words, they will begin to process the whole picture at once: the tricky gray circles, as well as the orange circle in the middle. As a result, they're more likely to fall for this kind of visual trick. When asked to find the larger circle, _ . A) children at 6 got it wrong 79 % of the time with no gray ones around B) only adults over 18 got it right 95% of the time with gray ones around C) children at 4 got it right about 79 % of the time with gray ones around D) adults got it right most of the time with gray ones around
C