There are two factors which determine an individual’s intelligence. The first is the sort of brain he is born with. Human brains differ 41 , some being more capable than others. But no matter how good a brain he has to begin with, a (an) 42 will have a low intelligence unless he has opportunities to learn. So the second factor in what happens to the individual is the sort of environment in which he is 43 . If an individual is handicapped environmentally, it is likely that his brain will fail to develop. And he will never 44 the level of intelligence of which he is capable.
The importance of environment in determining an individual’s intelligence can be 45 by the case history of the identical twins, Peter and Mark. Being identical, the twins had identical brain at birth, and their growth processes were the same. When the twins were three months old, their parents died, and they were placed in 46 foster homes. Peter was reared by parents of low intelligence in an isolated community with poor 47 opportunities. Mark was reared in the home of well-to-do parents who had been to college. He was read to as a child, sent to good schools, and given every opportunity to be 48 intellectually. This environmental difference continued until the twins were in their late teens, when they were given tests to 49 their intelligence. Mark’s I.Q. was 125, twenty-five points higher than the 50 , and fully forty points higher than his identical brother. Given equal opportunities, the twins, having identical brains, would have scored at roughly the same level.
A. experiment I. inspired B. individual J. particularly C. attain K. educational D. considerably L. reared E. identity M. stimulated F. average N. measure G. intellectual O. demonstrated H. separate |
TEXT B
Cultural norms so completely surround people, so permeate thought and action that we never recognize the assumptions on which their lives and their sanity rest. As one observer put it, if birds were suddenly endowed with scientific curiosity they might examine many things, but the sky itself would be overlooked as a suitable subject; if fish were to become curious about the world, it would never occur to them to begin by investigating water. For birds and fish would take the sky and sea for granted, unaware of their profound influence because they comprise the medium for every fact. Human beings, in a similarly way, occupy a symbolic universe governed by codes that are unconsciously acquired and automatically employed. So much so that they rarely notice that the ways they interpret and talk about events are distinctively different from the ways people conduct their affairs in other cultures.
As long as people remain blind to the sources of their meanings, they are imprisoned within them. These cultural frames of reference are no less confining simply because they cannot be seen or touched. Whether it is an individual neurosis that keeps an individual out of contact with his neighbors, or a collective neurosis that separates neighbors of different cultures, both are forms of blindness that limit what can be experienced and what can be learned from others.
It would seem that everywhere people would desire to break out of the boundaries of their own experiential worlds. Their ability to react sensitively to a wider spectrum of events and peoples requires an overcoming of such cultural parochialism. But, in fact, few attain this broader vision. Some, of course, have little opportunity for wider cultural experience, though this condition should change as the movement of people accelerates. Others do not try to widen their experience because they prefer the old and familiar, seek from their affairs only further confirmation of the correctness of their own values. Still others recoil from such experiences because they feel it dangerous to probe too deeply into the personal or cultural unconscious. Exposure may reveal how tenuous and arbitrary many cultural norms are; such exposure might force people to acquire new bases for interpreting events. And even for the many who do seek actively to enlarge the variety of human beings with whom they are capable of communicating there are still difficulties.
Cultural myopia persists not merely because of inertia and habit, but chiefly because it is so difficult to overcome. One acquires a personality and a culture in childhood, long before he is capable of comprehending either of them. To survive, each person masters the perceptual orientations, cognitive biases, and communicative habits of his own culture. But once mastered, objective assessment of these same processes is awkward, since the same mechanisms that are being evaluated must be used in making the evaluations.
