1 . Directions: Fill in each blanks with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need. (E=AB, F=AC, G=AD, H=BC, I=BD)

A. assessed       B. aware        C. emerged       D. identified     E. ordinary F. replicated       G. reward       H. responsibility       I. survivors

We Could Be Heroes

Altruism has long been an evolutionary mystery. Why would anyone choose to help somebody not related to them, with no promise of     1    ? The usual answer is that such behaviour is an adaptation: for example, groups in which it     2     would have been more united, and hence more successful. But what about acts of extreme altruism? Can we ever understand why some people risk — and sometimes lose — their lives for a stranger?

To try to answer this question, Samuel Oliner, a sociologist, and his wife Pearl set up the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Institute at Humboldt State University in 1982. In one of their first studies, still the largest of its kind, they interviewed and psychologically     3     406 people who had risked their lives to rescue Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe, along with 72 people who had lived in occupied areas but had done nothing out of the     4    . A number of things became clear. The rescuers were much more sympathetic than the non-rescuers, and they also supported values of fairness, compassion and personal     5     towards strangers that they said they had learned from their parents.

What’s more, they were unusually tolerant: the people they     6     as their “in group” consisted of the whole of humanity, not just their own kind. As Kristen Monroe at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied the psychology of Holocaust rescuers, puts it: “Where the rest of us see a stranger, an altruist sees a fellow human being.”

Samuel Oliner says his finding has held up in all their follow-up studies. It has also been     7    by psychologists Eva Fogelman, whose father, too, owed his wartime survival to the generosity of Polish farmers. Fogelman has spent much of her career studying the psychological effects of the Holocaust on     8     and their families. In her book Conscience and Courage, she recalls her conversations with about 300 rescuers of Jews: I began after a while to wait for the recital of one or more of those well-known passages: a loving home; an altruistic parent or beloved caretaker who served as a role model for altruistic behavior, a tolerance for people who were different.”