单选题 If gender conflicts continue at their current rate, my partner gloomily observed, men may fade into extinction and women will manage fine without them. What with test-tube babies, cloning, a falling birth-rate, and have-it-all career women prevailing like never before, it seems as if old-fashioned, instinct-driven sexual selection was totally out of fashion. But a study from four British universities suggests it is alive and well, and busy shaping the next generation.
In spite of emancipation, the feminist movement, gender equality, and consistent efforts to avoid gender-stereotyping, men still prefer to marry women who are not too brainy. In the study a high IQ hampered a woman's chance of getting married, with a 40 percent drop in marital prospects for every 16-point rise. The opposite was true for their male class-mates. Top-earning men were 8 per cent more likely to be married than their low-earning peers.
How interesting that we automatically assume that men are put off by cleverness in women. Perhaps the brainy women did not want to get married. Possibly they could not find men clever enough to satisfy them. But these interpretations hardly merit more than a passing thought because this study simply reinforces what we know to be broadly true. that most women do want a committed partner and that most stable marriages occur in a power relation, with the man being the center.
We usually think of competitiveness as a male activity, and so it is mainly, which is all the more reason for it causing stress in a marriage. Our ancestry certainly included a long phase when the males competed for the alpha role, in which the top male took all the advantages and most of the group matings. Most men nurse secret dreams of being "benign" dictators. No man likes his wife to earn more than he does. We see how fragile are the marriages of those in which the female has the whip hand in the shape of fame, success, and wealth. In contrast, marriages where the female status is obviously inferior, including arranged marriages, there is a greater stability.
Women have to accept that coming into our own and achieving the full potential of our (seemingly superior) capacity to use education will undoubtedly make us more inaccessible as partners. More choosy, and therefore less successful.

单选题 "Test-tube babies" and other thing are mentioned in Paragraph 1 to indicate ______.
A. the development of medical technology
B. the radical change of our lifestyle
C. the decreasing birth rate of human society
D. the independence of the female gender

单选题 Conventional sexual selection ______.
A. gets out-of-date B. seems prevalent C. becomes extinct D. remains active

单选题 The statistics in Paragraph 2 illustrate that _____.
A. women's IQ and their marital probability are in direct proportion
B. men's IQ and their marital probability are in inverse proportion
C. man prefer to marry women who are less intelligent
D. women prefer to marry men who are very intelligent

单选题 What might be the meaning of "whip hand" in Paragraph 4?
A. Control B. Desire C. Intelligence D. Commitment

单选题 How is marriage related to power, according to the study?
A. Married men and women all seek power over each other.
B. A powerful husband is the key to the successful marriage.
C. A stable marriage depends on the powerfulness of the wife.
D. Rich men tend to hold absolute power over their wives.