阅读理解 Few things say "forget I'm here" quite so eloquently as the pose of the shy—the averted gaze, the hunched shoulders, the body pivoted away from the crowd. Shyness is a state that can be painful to watch, worse to experience and, in survival terms at least, awfully hard to explain. In a species as hungry for social interaction as ours, a trait that causes some individuals to shrink from the group ought to have been snuffed out pretty early on. Yet shyness is commonplace. "I think of shyness as one end of the normal range of human temperament," says professor of pediatrics William Gardner of Ohio State University.
But normal for the scientist feels decidedly less so for the painfully shy struggling merely to get by, and that's got a lot of researchers looking into the phenomenon. What determines who's going to be shy and who's not? What can be done to treat the problem? Just as important, is it a problem at all? Are there canny advantages to being socially averse that the extroverts among us never see? With the help of behavioral studies, brain scans and even genetic tests, researchers are at last answering some of those questions, coming to understand what a complex, and in some ways favorable, state shyness can be.
For all the things shyness is, there are a number of things it's not. For one, it's not simple introversion. If you stay home on a Friday night just because you prefer a good book to a loud party, you're not necessarily shy—not unless the prospect of the party makes you so anxious that what you're really doing is avoiding it. "Shyness is a greater than normal tension or uncertainty when we're with strangers," says psychologist Jerome Kagan of Harvard University. "Shy people are more likely to be introverts, but introverts are not all shy."
Still, even by that definition, there are plenty of shy people to go around. More than 30% of us may qualify as shy, says Kagan, a remarkably high number for a condition many folks don't even admit to. There are a lot of reasons we may be so keyed up. One of them, new research suggests, is that we may simply be confused.
In a study published early this year, Dr. Marco Battaglia of San Raffaele University in Milan, Italy, recruited 49 third—and fourth—grade children and administered questionnaires to rank them along a commonly accepted shyness scale. He showed each child a series of pictures of faces exhibiting joy, anger or no emotion at all and asked them to identify the expressions. The children who scored high on the shyness meter, it turned out, had a consistently hard time deciphering the neutral and the angry faces.

单选题 6.In paragraph 2, the writer intends to______.

单选题 7.Why is it considered strange that there are so many shy people?

【正确答案】 B

【答案解析】属推断题。第一段第三至五行指出：像我们这样一个渴望社会交往的物种，使人们离开群体的这一性格特点(害羞)本该在人类早期就彻底消失。但害羞却很常见。这句话中的oughtto have been和yet都流露出令人感到奇怪的感觉。因为害羞本不是社会动物应该具有的性格特点，所以有那么多人害羞就令人奇怪了。因而答案选B。A项与原文内容不符。俄亥俄州立大学的教授William Gardner认为害羞是人类正常性格范畴的一部分。C在原文没有提到，文章没有明确说我们的祖先不害羞。D是在原文基础上的主观臆断，文章只是说害羞本该在人类早期就彻底消失。

单选题 8.Which of the following people would psychologists certainly consider to be shy?

单选题 9.It is suggested that shy people might be confused because______.

【正确答案】 B

【答案解析】属推断题。为什么害羞的人有时会迷惑不解是通过末段的试验来证明的。文章最后一句指出：结果，最害羞的人总是很难辨认出介于高兴和愤怒之间的表情以及愤怒的表情。故推知答案为B。A项中的misinterpret与原文不符，而且“其他人的面部表情”范围过大。C项站不住脚，因为内向并不能成为害羞的人迷惑不解的原因。D项文章未提。只是第三段中“有些人甚至不承认害羞”的借题发挥。