单选题 To function well in the world, people need a good sense of where their body is in space and how it's postured. This "position sense" helps us coordinate high-fives, boot a soccer ball or pick up the remote. But that doesn't seem to mean that our brains have an accurate sense of our body's precise proportions. A new study found that people tend to have rather inaccurate mental models of their own hands.
When asked to estimate where the fingertips and knuckles of their hidden hands were, study volunteers were way off. But they were all incorrect in the same directions, guessing that their hands were both shorter and wider than they actually were. The findings come from a study led by Matthew Longo of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. "Our results show dramatic distortions of hand shape, which were highly consistent across participants," Longo said in a prepared statement.
He and his co-author, Patrick Haggard, had subjects place their left hand on a platform (using different orientations in different groups), which was then covered with a board to obscure the hand. The subjects were asked to use their free right hand point with a baton to the location of each knuckle and fingertip of their left hand. The process was filmed and compared to before and after pictures of the hand. On average, the volunteers judged their hands to be 27.9 percent shorter and 69 percent wider than they were measure to be. Underestimation of each finger length, from the thumb to the little finger, increased by about 7 percent in each finger, rendering the little finger quite a bit littler that it really was.
This trend "mirrors similar grades of decreasing tactile acuteness," the authors pointed out, and the results seem to back up models of the human body constructed from the amount of sensory cortex dedicated to various body parts. In these models the hands and face are disproportionately large in comparison to most of the body. But Longo and Haggard are still not sure why the brain has such a distorted perception of our hand proportions.
Longo speculated that these disproportions might occur in other parts of the body as well. "These findings may well be relevant to psychiatric conditions involving body image such as anorexia nervosa, as there may be a general bias toward perceiving the body to be wider than it is," Longo said. "Our healthy participants had a basically accurate visual image of their own body, but the brain's model of the hand underling position sense was highly distorted. This distorted perception could come to dominate in some people, leading to distortions of body image."

单选题 From the first paragraph, we learn that ______.

A. position sense helps people coordinate high and far.
B. brains have accurate sense of our hands' proportions.
C. people have imprecise sense of their hand shape.
D. we do not need good sense of our bodies' proportions.

【正确答案】 C

【答案解析】[解析] 根据题干定位到文章第一段。文中讲到，大脑似乎不能准确感知我们身体的精确比例。最后一句则提到大脑对双手往往有不准确的心理模型，这和C项意思基本吻合。 A项是对第2句的错误解读，文中high-fives和remote分别指的是“击掌”和“遥控器”，不是描述“高”或“远”。B项中accurate与文中意思相反，很容易排除。文中虽说到人要发挥正常机能，就必须有良好的“方位感”，但后文又说到大脑似乎不能准确感知我们身体的精确比例，这说明人类没必要很精确的感知身体的比例，D项中的good与precise差距很多，两者表述并不对等，所以不选。

单选题 In Longo's study, volunteers' estimations of hand shape ______.

A. have different tendency.
B. are basically correct.
C. are longer and wider.
D. have obvious inaccuracy.

单选题 Which of the following is true of Longo's study?

A. Underestimations of thumbs are less than those of little fingers.
B. Participants point the location of left hands with right hands.
C. Subjects of 'different groups place hands in the same direction.
D. Participants estimate the length of the little finger accurately.

单选题 According to Longo and Haggard, the reason for inaccurate sense of hand shape is ______.

A. sensory cortex.
B. tactile acuteness.
C. body models.
D. still unknown.

单选题 Longo would most likely agree that ______.

A. healthy people have precise sense of hand proportions.
B. some people have imprecise sense of body proportions.
C. distorted senses of hand are dominant among all people.
D. people only have inaccurate sense of hand proportions.

【正确答案】 B

【答案解析】[解析] 本题考点出自最后一段。该段第1句便讲到，人们对手的比例感知错误也会发生在身体的其他部位，B项所说的imprecise sense of body proportions与该句子意思吻合，即一些人可能由于受到大脑对于手失真感觉的支配作用对身体也会有失真感。，答案为B项。该段第3句谈到健康的受试者基本上有准确的visual image of their own body，而非A项中的hand proportions，排除A项。C项among all people错误，文中说some people。D项错误，是因为这段第1句已指出这样的比例错误也会发生在身体的其他部位。