单选题 Most people have experienced the feeling, after a taxing mental work-out, that they cannot be bothered to make any more decisions. If they are forced to, they may do so intuitively, rather than by reasoning. Such apathy is of ten put down to tiredness; but a study published recently in Psychological Science suggests there may be more to it than that. Whether reason or intuition is used may depend simply on the decision-maker's blood-sugar level—which is, itself, affected by the process of reasoning.
E.J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister of Florida State University discovered this by doing some experiments on that most popular of laboratory animals, the impoverished undergraduate. They asked 121 psychology students who had volunteered for the experiment to watch a silent video of a woman being interviewed that had random words appearing in bold black letters every ten seconds along the perimeter of the video. This was the part of the experiment intended to be mentally taxing. Half of the students were told to focus on the woman, to try to understand what she was saying, and to ignore the words along the perimeter. The other half were given no instructions. Those that had to focus were exerting considerable serf-control not to look at the random words.
When the video was over, haft of each group was given a glass of lemonade with sugar in it and half was given a glass of lemonade with sugar substitute. Twelve minutes later, when the glucose from the lemonade with sugar in it had had time to enter the students' blood, the researchers administered a decision-making task that was designed to determine if the participant was using intuition or reason to make up his mind.
The students were asked to think about where they wanted to live in the coming year and given three accommodation options that varied both in size and distance from the university campus. Two of the options were good, but in different ways: one was far from the campus, but very large; the other was close to campus, but smaller. The third option was a decoy, similar to ope of the good options, but obviously not quite as good. ff it was close to campus and small, it was not quite as close as the good close option and slightly smaller, if it was far from campus and large, it was slightly smaller than the good large option and slightly farther away.
Psychologists have known for a long time that having a decoy option in a decision-making task draws people to choose a reasonable option that is similar to the decoy. Dr. Masicampo and Dr. Baumeister suspected that students who had been asked to work hard during the video and then been given a drink without any sugar in it would be more likely to rely on intuition when making this decision than those from the other three groups. And that is what happened; 64% of them were swayed by the decoy. Those who had either not had to exert mental energy during the showing of the video or had been given glucose in their lemonade, used mason in their decision-making task and were less likely to be swayed by the decoy.
It is not clear why intuition is independent of glucose. It could be that humans inherited a default nervous system from other mammals that was similar to intuition, and that could make snap decisions about whether to fight or flee regardless of how much glucose was in the body.
Whatever the reason, the upshot seems to be that thinking is, indeed, hard work. And important decisions should not be made on an empty stomach.

单选题 The word "taxing" in the fast paragraph means
【正确答案】 A
【答案解析】[定位] 根据题干直接定位到第1段。
[解析] 第1段第1句中提到人们在经历了脑力劳动之后根本无法集中注意力进行决策活动,结合该段第3句中出现的tiredness一词可以推断出taxing应为“费劲的,累人的”之义,因此选A。
[点睛] 词汇理解题。根据文章大意可以推断出taxing应与taxation“税收”无关,且imposing taxation 和paying taxation意思相近,同义项不为答案,困此可以排除B、C;D与题干的题干的词义相反,故也不对。
单选题 In E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister's study, about students who received no instructions in the video watching were given a glass of lemonade with sugar in it.
【正确答案】 C
【答案解析】[定位] 从题目中的E.J.Masicampo and Roy Baumeister定位到文章第2、3段。
[解析] 第2段第2句表明共有121人参加了本次实验;倒数第2句表明其中一半的人,即约60人在看录像时没有受到任何指示;第3段第1句表明每组60人中,又有一半的人,即约30人在看录像后喝了加糖的柠檬汁。因此答案应选C。
[点睛] 内容推断题。四个选项中的数字只有A的121在原文中直接出现,通常正确选项都需通过一定的计算得出,不会从原文直接得到,故在预读选项时可以首选排除A。
单选题 Which group of students tended to be swayed by the decoy, according to the study?
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】[定位] 从题干的swayed by the decoy定位到第5段。
[解析] 第5段第2句中的students who had been asked to work hard实际指的就是mental-energy exerting students,D的内容是原文该句的同义表达,符合题意,故选D。
[点睛] 细节题。这一类题目涉及两个层次的选盾,首先是在The no-watching-instructions group 和The mental-energy-exerting group之间做出选择。在排除前者之后,再在修饰他们的第二层意思中进行选择。
单选题 Which of the following is NOT true, according to the study?
【正确答案】 C
【答案解析】[定位] 根据各选项内容分别定位至第1段和最后两段。
[解析] 倒数第2段第1句表明直觉不受葡萄糖水平的控制,C的说法与这句不符,故为答案。此外,C中的 certainly太过绝对,通常这种选项的说法都与原文不符。
[点睛] 内容辨析题材。第1段最后提到“凭理性还是直觉可能仅由决策当时的血糖水平决定,血糖水平本身会受推理过程的影响”因此A、B说法正确;文中最后一句指出“做重要的决定时不能空着肚子”因此D说法也正确。
单选题 The last paragraph suggests that
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】[定位] 根据题目直接定位到最后一段。
[解析] 文章最后一句中用should not表建议,表明“做重要的决定时不能空着肚子”,由此可推断空着肚子做出的决定是不合理的,故B对。
[点睛] 推断题。选项C和D是反义项,考生容易误选取其一。而事实上,这两项所提及的intelligent都与文章内容及题目要求无关。