InThe Birth Order Book: Why You Are the Way You Are(2004), Dr. Kevin Leman notes that 21 of the first 23 Americans in space were first-born males or only children. More than half of United States presidents have been first-borns or first-born boys. It"s a pretty significant finding historically, because families used to be bigger than they are today.In addition to being high achievers, older children also generally have higher IQs (智商) than younger ones. Researchers have noted that the more kids a family has, the lower each child"s individual IQ tends to be. They give a few reasons for this.Parents only have so much time, attention, and money. The more kids they have, the more these things are divided. First-borns initially get the entire parental-time pie. What"s more, the ratio of grown-ups to kids decreases with each new baby. So the younger ones are surrounded by more children"s language on average than the older kids.Some researchers think parental attention is the key to personality birth-order differences. In his bookBorn to Rebel, psychologist Frank Sulloway says competition for Mom and Dad"s attention is the thing that really shapes our personalities and, in fact has shaped history. He argues that we adapt our personalities as part of our strategy to seek favor from Mom and Dad. Younger siblings (兄弟姐妹) tend to become rebels. Sulloway studied political activists and found that later-born activists were more radical than their first-born peers.The conclusion of his book is that sibling competition for parental attention can affect society as a whole in times of revolution. Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, and Fidel Castro were all younger siblings, for example.As compelling as this all is, it"s also something we should probably take with caution, there are other things that happen to us in life besides the addition of siblings to our families. A parent can die; a hurricane can leave us homeless; we can catch a life-threatening disease. Any one of these things will probably have more of an effect on our personalities than the presence of siblings.A 2002 study bore this out. After interviewing 535 undergraduates, researchers concluded that personality differences related to birth order were "folklore", although IQ and achievement differences were widely supported by research. Which of the following statements is proposed by researchers
A. Later-borns do not compete for attention.
B. First-horns tend to become rebels.
C. Later-borns are prone to diseases.
D. First-borns achieve more than younger ones.
"The world"s environment is surprisingly healthy. Discuss." If that were an examination topic, most students would tear it apart, offering a long list of complaints, from local smog (烟雾) to global climate change, from the felling (砍伐) of forests to the extinction of species. The list would largely be accurate, the concern legitimate. Yet the students who should be given the highest marks would actually be those who agreed with the statement. The surprise is how good things are, not how bad.After all, the world"s population has more than tripled during this century, and world output has risen hugely, so you would expect the earth itself to have been affected. Indeed, if people lived, consumed and produced things in the same way as they did in 1900 (or 1950, or indeed 1980), the world by now would be a pretty disgusting place: smelly, dirty, toxic and dangerous.But they don"t. The reasons why they don"t, and why the environment has not been ruined, have to do with prices, technological innovation, social change and government regulation in response to popular pressure. That is why today"s environmental problems in the poor countries ought, in principle, to be solvable.Raw materials have not run out, and show no sign of doing so. Logically, one day they must: the planet is a finite place. Yet it is also very big, and man is very ingenious. What has happened is that every time a material seems to be running short, the price has risen and, in response, people have looked for new sources of supply, tried to find ways to use less of the material, or looked for a new substitute. For this reason prices for energy and for minerals have fallen in real terms during the century. The same is true for food. Prices fluctuate, in response to harvests, natural disasters and political instability; and when they rise, it takes some time before new sources of supply become available. But they always do, assisted by new farming and crop technology. The long term trend has been downwards.It is where prices and markets do not operate properly that this benign (亲戚) trend begins to stumble, and the genuine problems arise. Markets cannot always keep the environment healthy. If no one owns the resource concerned, no one has an interest in conserving it or fostering it. fish is the best example of this. Fish resources are diminishing because ______.
A. no new substitutes can be found in large quantities
B. they are not owned by any particular entity
C. improper methods of fishing have ruined the fishing grounds
D. water pollution is extremely serious