单选题
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 20 of the incidents the volunteers reported were these "programmed assembly failures". Altogether the volunteers logged 433 unintentional actions that they found themselves doing—an average of 12 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. (321 words)
单选题
In his study Professor Smith asked the subjects______.
【正确答案】
D
【答案解析】解析：本题属于细节理解题。文章第一段说“Professor Smith recently persuaded…to keep a diary of all their absent—minded actions for a fortnight”，选项D是这句话的同义表述。选项B是强干扰项，但文章只说让他们记录下来自己的“absent—minded actions”，并未特别说让他们对自己所犯的那些尴尬的差错进行报告；选项C是Professor Smith自己所做的事。
单选题
Professor Smith discovered that______.
【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】解析：本题属于细节理解题。第一段的后半部分提到“nearly all of them fell into a few groupings”，由此可知这些随意记下来的行为有一定的特定模式，A正是此意。B有可能是正确的，但不在Professor Smith所研究的范围之内。尽管第三段最后一句说“Women on average reported slightly more lapses”，但作者接着就说“probably because they were more reliable reporters”，因此C的论断是不可靠的。D在文中没有体现。
单选题
"Programmed assembly failures" (Lines 6~7， Para. 2) refers to the phenomenon that people______.
【答案解析】解析：本题属于细节题。正如题干所言，根据文章第三段“There appear to be peak periods in the day when we are at our zaniest(荒谬可笑)．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”，可知答案为A“分神容易在一天的某些特定的时间段发生”。
单选题
It can be concluded from the passage that______.
【正确答案】
D
【答案解析】解析：本题属于推断题。最后一句说“But trying to avoid silly slips by concentrating more could make things a lot worse”，由此可知，有时候越专心，越有可能出错，所以选项D符合文义。选项A太绝对；选项B可由“a hazard of doing things in which we are skilled”这里找到排除的依据；选项C与本文的侧重点无关。