【正确答案】 A

【答案解析】[听力原文]
   Why aren't there more women physicists, and in senior positions? One factor may be unconscious biases that could keep women physicists from advancing—and may even prevent women from going into physics in the first place.
   Amy Bug, a physicist at Swarthmore College, examined the bias question. Her research team trained four actors—two men, two women—to give a 10-minute physics lecture. Real physics classes watched the lecturers. Then the 126 students were surveyed. When it came to questions of physics ability—whether the lecturer had a good grasp of the material, and knew how to use the equipment—male lecturers got higher ratings by both male and female students.
   But when asked how well the lecturer relates to the students, each gender preferred their own. And while female students gave a slight preference to female lecturers, male students overwhelmingly rated the male lecturers as being superior. The research appears in the journal Physics World. Bug says the results may be evidence of inherent biases that could hold women back—along with economic inequalities, such as lower wages and smaller start-up grants, which reduce career acceleration and thus the amount of force available to crack the glass ceiling.
   Q: According to the passage, why are there fewer women physicists than men physicists?
为什么女物理学家和职位较高的女性只占少数呢?一个因素可能是潜意识的偏见，这种偏见阻碍了女物理学家的进步，甚至首先阻碍了女性进入到物理学研究领域。
   斯沃斯莫尔学院的物理学家埃米·巴格对这个偏见问题进行了仔细调查。她的研究团队培训了四名演员——两名男性，两名女性——让他们讲10分钟的物理课。真正的物理班上的学生来听他们的课，然后对这126名学生进行了调查。当涉及物理学知识水平时——授课人是否很好地理解了讲课材料，并知道如何使用教学设备——男学生和女学生都认为男性授课人水平更高。
   但是当询问听课的学生与授课人之间的关系如何时，男女学生分别更喜爱同性别的授课人。尽管女学生对女授课人只是稍稍偏爱一些，而男学生却普遍认为男授课人更优秀。《物理世界》杂志刊登了调查结果。巴格称该结果可能证实了那些会阻碍女性发展的固有偏见，这些固有偏见连同诸如低工资和小额创业补助金之类的经济不平等现象减少了妇女职业晋升的机会、削弱了妇女冲破藩篱的力量。
   ①四项均为名词短语。
   ②三项含有difference。
   结论：结合整体预测可知，本题考查的内容可能与男女之间的差别有关。
   题目问是什么因素导致女物理学家比男物理学家少。文中开头提到，女物理学家之所以比男物理学家少，一个重要的因素是潜意识里的偏见，故本题选A。