1 . Over millions of years humans have responded to certain situations without thinking too hard. If our ancestors spotted movement in the nearby forest, they would run first and question later. At the same time, the ability to analyze and to plan is part of what separates us from other animals. The question of when to trust your instinct (直觉)and when to think slow matters in the office as much as in the savannah(草原).
Slow thinking is the feature of a well-managed workplace. Yet instinct also has its place. Some decisions are more connected to emotional responses and less to analysis. In demanding customer-service or public-facing situations, instinct is often a better guide to how to behave.
Instinct can also be improved. Plenty of research has shown that instinct becomes more unerring with experience. In one well-known experiment, volunteers were asked to assess whether a selection of designer handbags were real or not. Some were instructed to operate on instinct and others to deliberate(深思熟虑)over their decision. Instinct worked better for those who owned at least three designer handbags; indeed, it outperformed analysis. The more expert you become, the better your instinct tends to be.
However, the real reason to embrace fast thinking is that it is, well, fast. It is often the only way to get through the day. To take one example, when your inbox floods with new emails at the start of a new day, there is absolutely no way to read them all carefully. Instinct is what helps you decide which ones to answer and which to delete or leave unopened. Fast thinking can also help the entire organization. The value of many managerial decisions lies in the simple fact that they have been made at all. Yet as data explodes, the temptation(诱惑)to ask for one more bit of analysis has become much harder to resist. Managers often suffer from overthinking, turning a simple problem into a complex one.
When to use instinct in the workplace rests on its own form of pattern recognition. Does the decision maker have real expertise in this area? Is this a field in which emotion matters more than reasoning? Above all, is it worth delaying the decision? Slow thinking is needed to get the big calls right. But fast thinking is the way to stop deliberation turning to a waste of time.
1. What does the underlined word “unerring” in Paragraph 3 probably mean?| A．Accurate. | B．Creative. | C．Controllable. | D．Obvious. |
| A．Managers can afford the cost of slow thinking. |
| B．Fast thinking can be a boost to work efficiency. |
| C．Slow thinking will hold us back in the long run. |
| D．Too much data is to blame for wrong decisions. |
| A．To explain how instinct works. |
| B．To compare instinct and slow thinking. |
| C．To highlight the value of instinct in the workplace. |
| D．To illustrate the development of different thinking patterns. |
2 . Who is a genius? This question has greatly interested humankind for centuries.
Let’s state clearly: Einstein was a genius. His face is almost the international symbol for genius. But we want to go beyond one man and explore the nature of genius itself. Why is it that some people are so much more intelligent or creative than the rest of us? And who are they?
In the sciences and arts, those praised as geniuses were most often white men, of European origin. Perhaps this is not a surprise. It’s said that history is written by the victors, and those victors set the standards for admission to the genius club. When contributions were made by geniuses outside the club—women, or people of a different color or belief—they were unacknowledged and rejected by others.
A study recently published by Science found that as young as age six, girls are less likely than boys to say that members of their gender(性别)are “really, really smart.” Even worse, the study found that girls act on that belief: Around age six they start to avoid activities said to be for children who are “really, really smart.” Can our planet afford to have any great thinkers become discouraged and give up? It doesn’t take a genius to know the answer: absolutely not.
Here’s the good news. In a wired world with constant global communication, we’re all positioned to see flashes of genius wherever they appear. And the more we look, the more we will see that social factors(因素)like gender, race, and class do not determine the appearance of genius. As a writer says, future geniuses come from those with “intelligence, creativity, perseverance(毅力), and simple good fortune, who are able to change the world.”
1. What does the author think of victors’ standards for joining the genius club?| A．They’re unfair. | B．They’re conservative. |
| C．They’re objective. | D．They’re strict. |
| A．They think themselves smart. |
| B．They look up to great thinkers. |
| C．They see gender differences earlier than boys. |
| D．They are likely to be influenced by social beliefs |
| A．Improved global communication. |
| B．Less discrimination against women. |
| C．Acceptance of victors’ concepts. |
| D．Changes in people’s social positions. |
| A．Geniuses Think Alike | B．Genius Takes Many Forms |
| C．Genius and Intelligence | D．Genius and Luck |
A typical job for a students would be working
Sometimes students also hold more responsible positions such as managers, or if they are lucky, positions in their area of study,
