An English-schoolboy would only ask his friend: "Wassa time, then" To his teacher he would be much more likely to speak in a more standardized accent and ask: "Excuse me, sir, may I have the correct time please" People are generally aware that the phrases and expressions they use are different from those of earlier generations; but they concede less that their own behavior also varies according to the situation in which they find themselves. Not only this, but in many cases, the way someone speak affects the response of the person to whom he is speaking in such a way that "modeling" is seen to occur. This is what Michael Argyle has called "response matching". Several studies have shown that the more one reveals about oneself in ordinary conversation, and the more intimate these details are, the more personal secrets the other person will let out. Response matching has, in fact, been noted between two speakers in a number of ways, including how long someone speaks, the length of pauses, speech rate and voice loudness. The correspondence between the length of reporters’ questions when interviewing President Bush, and the length of his replies has been shown to increase over the duration of his 2005-2007 news conferences. Argyle says this process may be one of imitation. Two American researchers, Jaffe and Feldstein, prefer to think of it as the speaker’s need for balance. Neither of these explanations seems particularly convincing. It may be that response matching can be more profitably considered as an unconscious reflection of speakers’ needs for social integration with one another. This process of modeling the other person’s speech in a conversation could also be termed speech convergence (聚合). It may only be one aspect of a much wider speech change. In other situations, speech divergence (分离) may occur when certain factors encourage a person to modify his speech away from the individual he is dealing with. For example, a retried general’s wife, renowned for her continuous snobbishness (势利), may return her vehicle to the local garage because of inadequate servicing, voicing her complaint in elaborately phrased, yet mechanically unsophisticated language, with a high soft-pitched voice. These superior airs and graces may simply make the mechanic reply with a flourish of almost incomprehensible technical terms, and in a louder, more deeply lowered voice than he would have used with a less angry customer. If one wants to get more personal information from others, the best way is to ______.

A. tell them more general information about oneself
B. tell others more secrets about oneself
C. become their intimate friends by long conversations
D. imitate others in their speeches in more detailed ways