Professor Smith recently persuaded 35 people, 23 of them women, to keep a diary of all their absent-minded actions for a fortnight. When he came to analyse their embarrassing lapses (差错) 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 (随机的). 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 programme 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 programme." About one in twenty of the incidents the volunteers reported were these "programme 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 (荒谬可笑的 ). 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 'programmes' 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.
单选题
In his study Professor Smith asked the subjects _____.
【正确答案】
D
【答案解析】解析：事实细节题。本文第1句中的to keep a diary of all their absent-minded actions就是指to keep a record of what they did unintentionally，题目中的subjects指实验对象，被测试者。
单选题
Professor Smith discovered that _____.
【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】解析：事实细节题。根据第2句中nearly all of them fell into a few groupings可以找到本题答案，题目中的discover是该句中find的同义词，A的patterns与原文中的groupings意义相同。
单选题
"Programme assembly failures" (Line 6, Para. 2) refers to the phenomenon that people _____.
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】解析：语义题。根据第2段最后两句提到，但是不知怎么的这种行为在程序中颠倒了。这些被测试者报告的事件中二十个中有一个属于这种“流水线程序错误”。C的unconsciously与somehow对应，change the sequence of doing things与the action got reversed对应，故本题选C。