問題詳情

        How do you gear yourself up for a big test, an important presentation, or any otherhigh-pressure situation? Maybe your internal monologue goes something like this: “OK,this is really important. A lot is riding on this. Don’t screw this up. How well I do on thisreally matters.” Reminding yourself of the high stakes makes intuitive sense as amotivational strategy—but it will actually impede your performance. Instead of spurringyou to new heights, it’s likely to increase anxiety and undermine your confidence.Research shows that reminding yourself how unimportant the event is in the big schemeof things is a better tactic, and psychologists have come up with a variety of innovativeways to help us do so.        Geoffrey Cohen, a professor at the Stanford University School of Education,conducted a series of experiments designed to reduce test-taking pressures felt byminorities but which wound up revealing a great strategy for everyone. In a 2006 studypublished in the journal Science, Cohen and his co-authors gave a group ofseventh-graders an in-class assignment in which they were presented with a list of valuesand asked to choose which one was most important to them. The list included phraseslike “relationships with friends and family,” “religious values,” “athletic ability,” and“being good at art.” The students then wrote a paragraph about why their value wasimportant to them. (The control group in the study chose a value that was not importantto them, and wrote a paragraph about why the value might matter to someone else.)        This brief writing assignment significantly improved the grades ofAfrican-American students, and reduced the racial achievement gap by 40 percent. Why?The exercise affirmed students’ “self-integrity,” Cohen explains, buttressing theirself-worth and alleviating the stress they felt about being evaluated. Cohen and anothergroup of co-authors investigated whether a similar approach would help female collegestudents taking an introductory physics course who might be feeling vulnerable tonegative messages about women in science. Once again, students chose their most
cherished values from a list and then wrote about why these values were important tothem. Conducted just twice during the 15-week course, this intervention had a big impact,“substantially” reducing the difference between men and women in learning andperformance and lifting women’s grades from the C range to the B range. These results,reported in the journal Science in 2010, were especially pronounced for women who saythey believe the stereotype that men do better than women in physics.        Perhaps the most inventive way to get students to focus on the bigger picture ofwhat matters to them was introduced by a group of researchers from Germany andAustria in an article published in the European Journal of Social Psychology last year.They asked university students to think about their ancestors by drawing a family tree orby writing an essay imagining how their forebears lived and what advice they would givethem. The students who thought and wrote about their ancestors did better on subsequentintelligence tests than members of the control group (who were asked to think insteadabout their most recent trip to the supermarket).        Why would reflecting on our great-great-grandparents help us perform better? Theauthors of the study note that such musings “mostly remind us about eventful andsuccessful lives. Normally, our ancestors managed to overcome a multitude of personaland societal problems, such as severe illnesses, wars, loss of loved ones or severeeconomic declines. So, when we think about them, we are reminded that humans whoare genetically similar to us can successfully overcome a multitude of problems andadversities.” So the next time you have to prepare for a high-pressure event, rememberthat compared to world wars and great depressions, a test or a presentation should be asnap.
35. Which is the main idea of the passage?
(A)Good preparation ensures good results.
(B)High expectations lead to highperformance.
(C)Knowing oneself truly is the foundation ofall knowledge.
(D)Not taking things too seriously canenhance performance.

參考答案

答案：D
難度：簡單0.701754
統計：A(0),B(5),C(10),D(40),E(0) #
個人：尚未作答書單：閱讀測驗、Chomsky:competence(knowing) and performance(doing)

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