文章大意:本文是一篇说明文。只是聪明并不意味着有人会成功。不能因为一个人不够聪明就认为他会失败。作者讨论了智商和毅力对成功的影响。通过对大量研究的综合分析,作者认为聪明并不意味着成功,也并不意味着相对不聪明的人会失败,但成功的关键因素之一是毅力。
Just being intelligent (聪明的) doesn’t mean someone will be successful. And just because someone is less intelligent doesn’t mean that person will fail. That’s one take-home message from the work of people like Angela Duckworth, who works at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Like many other scientists, Duckworth wondered what makes one person more successful than another. When digging deeper, Duckworth found that the people who performed best shared a quality independent of intelligence. They had what she now calls grit (毅力). Duckworth developed a set of questions to test it. She calls it her “grit scale (量表).”
In one study of people 25 and older, she found that as people age, they become more likely to stick with a project. She also found that git increases with education. People who finished college scored higher on the grit scale than people who quit before graduation. People who went to graduate school after college scored even higher.
She then did another study with college students. Duckworth wanted to see how intelligence and grit influenced performance in school. So she compared scores on college-entrance exams, which measure IQ, to school grades and scores on the grit scale. Students with higher grades tended to have more grit. That’s not surprising. Getting good grades takes both smarts and hard work.
But some people counter that this grit means success. Among those people is Marcus Crede, a professor at Iowa State University in Ames. He recently pooled the results of 88studies on grit. Together, those studies tested nearly 67, 000 people. And grit did not predict success, Crede found.
However, he thinks grit is very similar to someone’s ability to set goals, work toward them and think things through before acting.
“Study habits and skills, test anxiety and class attendance are far more strongly connected to school grades than grit,” Crede says. “We can teach students how to study well. We can help them with their test anxiety,” he adds. “I’m not sure we can do that with grit.”
5. What can we know from the first two paragraphs?
A.Intelligence determines success. | B.Not all smart people will succeed. |
C.Duckworth redesigned a grit scale. | D.Grit decides how intelligent one might be. |
6. What might influence a person’s grit according to Angela Duckworth’s findings?
A.Lifestyle. | B.Family. | C.Personality | D.Education. |
7. What does the underlined word “
counter” in paragraph 5 mean?
A.Comment. | B.Disagree. | C.Recognize. | D.Warn. |
8. What can be inferred from the last paragraph?
A.Grit can hardly be taught. | B.Grit can be improved eastly |
C.Grit is strongly related to test anxiety. | D.Grit has nothing to do with school grades. |