单选题
Hope may be the lovely, lyrical, inspiring thing
many people believe it is-"the thing with feathers," as Emily Dickinson called
it. But to scientists, it's also a more dull thing as well: a skill, a tool, a
simple choice that is a lot less accidental or lucky. As psychologist Shane
Lopez, a senior scientist at the Gallup organization argues in his new book,
Making Hope Happen, it's also much more attainable than it seems.
In both children and adults, there can be a hard-to-deny link between a
robust sense of hope and either work productivity or academic achievement. In
studies of this idea, hope is measured by a widely accepted psychological survey
and productivity is measured by grades earned, sales made, widgets manufactured
etc.. When Lopez and his colleagues recently gathered up a large body of this
research and subjected it all to a meta-analysis, they came up with what they
believe are very solid numbers: "Our finding was that hope accounts for about
14% of work productivity and 12% of academic achievement. "
Hoping, Lopez stresses, is a lot different from wishing, though the two are
often mixed. The super- bestseller The Secret is based on the vaguely defined
and not-exactly peer-reviewed "law of attraction," which in this case
means that just having positive thoughts about wealth, love, success and more
can draw all of those things to you. "This wonderful future will happen for you
if you just sit back and wish hard enough," Lopez says. But
wishing, he explains is only an element of hope-it is, in a sense, hope without
a plan. And that often leads nowhere. Effective hoping, Lopez says, is a very
deliberate, three-step process. First there is selecting a goal, whether
short-term or long term. Then you have to consider the gap between where you are
now and where you will be when you achieve the goal, and lay out a series of
sequential, short-term goals that will allow you to close that gap. Finally,
there is the execution, establishing a plan for when you will begin to implement
those steps and where and how you will execute them. It's far
too much to say that effective hoping is the only—or even the biggest—part of
what it takes to succeed. If 14% of business productivity can be attributed to
hope, which means 86% is dependent on raw talent, capricious business cycles,
the quality of the product you're selling, and often pure luck. But even if hope
is just one ingredient in all of that, it's a catalyzing, energizing one-the gas
in the tank, the fuel rod in the reactor, the Mentos in the Pepsi. Hope may be
the thing with feathers-but it's also the thing with power.
单选题
Hope is believed to be "the thing with feathers" because ______.
A. it can inspire us.
B. it is dull and dumb.
C. it is weak and fragile.
D. it can not be attained.
【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】[解析] 该题为信息细节题，考查对引语的理解。第一段第1句话揭示了希望是一种振奋人心的(inspiring)的东西，随后说许多人认为希望是长着羽毛的鸟儿，故选A项。
B项dull在文章中是科学家们对希望的一种态度，从连接词but可以看出科学家对希望的态度与前面“长着羽毛”(the thing with feathers)恰恰相反，由此可排除。C项的weak and fragile在文中没有提到。第一段最后一句话提到Making Hope Happen这本书认为希望是“更容易实现的”，所以D项是错误选项。
单选题
We can know from paragraphs 1 and 2 that ______.
A. scientists believe hope is accidental, thus can not be attained.
B. there is a hard-to-deny link between study and work.
C. hope actually contributes to success in study and work.
D. hope plays a rather vital role in both work and study.