Engineering students are supposed to be examples of practicality and rationality, but when it comes to my college education I am an idealist and a fool. In high school I wanted to be an electrical engineer and, of course, any sensible student with my aims would have chosen a college with a large engineering department, famous reputation and lots of good labs and research equipment. But that"s not what I did. I chose to study engineering at a small liberal-arts(文科) university that doesn"t even offer a major in electrical engineering. Obviously, this was not a practical choice; I came here for more noble reasons. I wanted a broad education that would provide me with flexibility and a value system to guide me in my career. I wanted to open my eyes and expand my vision by interacting with people who weren"t studying science or engineering. My parents, teachers and other adults praised me for such a sensible choice. They told me I was wise and mature beyond my 18 years, and I believed them. I headed off to college sure I was going to have an advantage over those students who went to big engineering "factories" where they didn"t care if you had values or were flexible. I was going to be a complete engineer: technical genius and sensitive humanist(人文学者)all in one. Now I"m not so sure. Somewhere along the way my noble ideals crashed into reality, as all noble ideals eventually do. After three years of struggling to balance math, physics and engineering courses with liberal-arts courses, I have learned there are reasons why few engineering students try to reconcile(协调) engineering with liberal-arts courses in college. The reality that has blocked my path to becoming the typical successful student is that engineering and the liberal arts simply don"t mix as easily as I assumed in high school. Individually they shape a person in very different ways; together they threaten to confuse. The struggle to reconcile the two fields of study is difficult. The word "they" in "together they threaten to confuse"(Line 3, Para. 5) refers to ______.
A. engineering and the liberal arts
B. reality and noble ideals
C. flexibility and a value system
D. practicality and rationality
Psychologist George Spilich and colleagues at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, decided to find out whether, as many smokers say, smoking helps them to "think and concentrate". Spilich put young non-smokers, active smokers and smokers deprived(被剥夺) of cigarettes through a series of tests. In the first test, each subject(试验对象)sat before a computer screen and pressed a key as soon as he or she recognized a target letter among a grouping of 96. In this simple test, smokers, deprived smokers and nonsmokers performed equally well The next test was more complex, requiring all to scan sequences of 20 identical letters and respond the instant one of the letters transformed into a different one. Non-smokers were faster, but under the stimulation of nicotine(尼古丁), active smokers were faster than deprived smokers. In the third test of short-term memory, non-smokers made the fewest errors, but deprived smokers committed fewer errors than active smokers. The fourth test required people to read a passage, then answer questions about it. Non-smokers remembered 19 percent more of the most important information than active smokers, and deprived smokers bested those who had smoked a cigarette just before testing. Active smokers tended not only to have poorer memories but also had trouble separating important information from insignificant details. "As our tests became more complex", sums up Spilich, "non-smokers performed better than smokers by wider and wider margins". He predicts, "Smokers might perform adequately at many jobs until they got complicated. A smoking airline pilot could fly adequately if no problems arose, but if something went wrong, smoking might damage his mental capacity". Which of the following statements is true
Active smokers in general performed better than deprived smokers.
B. Active smokers responded more quickly than the other subjects.
C. Non-smokers were not better than other subjects in performing simple tasks.
Deprived smokers gave the slowest responses to the various tasks.