考研英语阅读材料汇编之科技类(2)bookish
阅读是考研英语的重要题型之一，也是保障英语成绩的关键题目。因此，考研学子们要充分重视英语阅读，除了平时多多阅读英语杂志、报纸外，还需要针对阅读进行专项训练。小编整理了关于考研英语阅读题源的系列文章 考研英语阅读材料汇编之科技类(2)，请参考!
Who s the Smart Sibling?
Ten weeks ago, Bo Cleveland and his wife embarked on a highly unscientific experiment-
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they gave birth to their first child. For now, Cleveland is too exhausted to even consider having
another baby, but eventually, he will. In fact, hes already planned an egalitarian strategy for
raising the rest of his family. Little Arthur won t get any extra attention just becau he s the
firstborn, and, says his father, he probably won t be much smarter than his future .siblings; either.
It s the sort of thing many parents would say, but it s a bit surprising coming from Cleveland,ferraz
who studies birth order and IQ at Pennsylvania State University. As he knows too well, a study
published recently in the journal Science suggests that firstborns do turn out sharper than their
brothers and sisters, no matter how parents try to compensate. Is Cleveland wrong? Is Arthur
destined to be the smart sibling just becau he had the good luck to be born first?
For decades, scientists have been squabbling over birth order like siblings fighting over a toy. Some of them say being a first-, middle- or lastborn has significant effects on intelligence. Others say that s nonn, The spat goes back at least as far as Alfred Adler, a Freud-era psychologist who argued that firstborns had an edge. Other psychologi
sts found his theory easy to believe middle and youngest kids already had a bad rap, thanks to everything from primogeniture laws to the Prodigal Son. When they t out to confirm the birth-order effects Adler had predicted, they found some evidence. Dozens of studies over the next veral decades showed small differences in IQ; scholastic-aptitude tests and other measures of achievement So did anecdata suggesting that firstborns were more likely to win Nobel Prizes or become (ahem) prominent psychologists.
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But even though the scientists were turning up birth-order patterns easily, they couldn t
pin down a cau. Perhaps, one theory went, the mother s body was somehow attacking the later
offspring in uterus. Maternal antibody levels do increa with each successive pregnancy. But
there s no evidence that this leads to differences in intelligence, and the new study in Silence,
bad on records from nearly a quarter of a million young Norwegian men, strikes down the
antibody hypothesis. It looks at kids who are the eldest by accident-tho who older siblings
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die in infancy--as well as tho who are true firstborns. Both groups rack up the same high
scores on IQ tests. Whatever is lowering the latterborns scores, it isn t prenatal biology, since
being raid as the firstborn, not actually being the firstborn, is what counts.秋季运动会广播稿
The obvious culprits on the nurture side are parents. But it s hard to think that favoritism toward firstborns exists in modem society. Most of us no longer view condborn as cond best, and few parents will admit to treating their kids differently. In surveys, they generally say they give their children equal attention. Kids concur, reporting that they feel
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they re treated fairly.
Maybe, then, the problem with latterborns isn t nature or nurture-maybe there simply isn t a problem. Not all the rearch shows a difference in intelligence. A pivotal 2000 study by Joe Rodgers ,now a professor emeritus at the University of Oklahoma, found no link between birth order and smarts. And an earlier study of American families found that the youngest kids, not the oldest, did best in school. From that work, say psychologist Judith Rich Harris, a prominent critic of birth-order patterns, it s clear that the impression that the firstborn is more often the academic achiever is fal.
Meanwhile, many of the studies showing a birth-order pattern in IQ have a big, fat,
jenna presleymethodological flaw. The Norwegian Science study is an example, says Cleveland: It s
comparing Bill, the first child in one family; to Bob, the cond child in another family. That
would be fine if all families were identical, but of cour they aren t. The study controls for
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variables such as parental education and family size. But Rodgers, the Oklahoma professor,
notes that there are hundreds of other factors in play; and becau it s so hard to discount
all of them, he s not sure whether the patterns in the Science article are real. 589
No one is more nsitive to that criticism than the Norwegian scientists. In fact, they
already have an answer ready in the form of a cond paper. Soon to be published in the
journal Intelligence, it s, similar to the Science study except for one big thing: instead of
