1 . What is it about kids these days that makes older generations so easily angry? In some way or another, older generations have been disappointed at the youth's decline since the earliest days of civilization. Even Aristotletalked smack abouthow young folks thought they knew everything back in the 4th century BC.
So why do people throw all the shade on the next generation? A study out last month in Science Advances shows that negative opinions about kids aren't always based on their actions; it's more about how adults praise their past and current selves.
In the study, researehers looked at a trio of characteristics in three groups of US adults: respect for elders or authoritarianism（权威主义），intelligence, and enjoyment of reading. The team, led by John Protzko, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, asked the participants whether they thought kids in the modern age shared the same qualities. They found that adults who tested especially strong in one of the categories tended to see children today as weak in il. For example, if an adult got tagged or self-identified as intelligent, they were more likely to see "kids these days" as less intelligent than they used to be. This, Protzko thinks, is because they remembered their younger selves to be smarter, whether true or not. What's more, they only reserved their strong opinion for characteristics they related to.
In another stage of the study, the authors assigned random scores to participants to trick them into thinking how well-read they were. Many of the adults changed their opinions on kid's reading ability as a result, Protzko speculates that there are two reasons for the shift: How memories can go wrong and the lack of objective knowledge of what childhood is really like. "People who are high in a trail are imposing（迫使）their current high standing in that trait back in time, thinking 'Oh this must have been what all kids were like,' " he says. Over the years, the same memory bias（偏见）keeps occurring, making it seem like kids are somehow failing more and more. In fact,（he older a participant was, the more heavily this bias came into play, Protzko says.
While there's still a lot to learn about why adults might see younger generations as mediocre, this researeh can hint that an age-old phrase can boil down to one classic human trail：vanity（自负）.
―From Popular Science
1. What does the underlined phrase in the first paragraph mean?| A．Expressed his a flection for . | B．Talked positively about. |
| C．Spoke ill of. | D．Thought highly of. |
| A．Negative opinions about kids come from their ill behavior. |
| B．Adults always keeps their previous and present glories in mind. |
| C．Adults hold positive opinions about kids for their actions. |
| D．Kids are always blamed by adults who are more outstanding. |
| A．Because adults got tagged or self-indentified as intelligent. |
| B．Because adults thought they themselves much smarter. |
| C．Because adults hold the view that kids were weaker than them. |
| D．Because adults only remembered their own strengths subjectively. |
| A．Adults hold the bias that kids these days are failing. |
| B．Adults probably forgot all kids have the same characteristics. |
| C．That the same memory bias keeps occurring led to kid's failure. |
| D．The participants ignored the bias as they grew older. |
| A．①②--③④⑤ | B．①--②③④---⑤ |
| C．①②③--④---⑤ | D．①---②---③---④⑤ |
2 . By now you’ve probably heard about the “you’re not special” speech, when English teacher David McCullough told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School: "Do not get the idea you're anything special, because you're not." Mothers and fathers present at the ceremony — and a whole lot of other parents across the internet — took issue with McCullough's ego-puncturing words. But lost in the anger and protest was something we really should be taking to heart: our young people actually have no idea whether they're particularly talented or accomplished or not. In our eagerness to elevate their self-esteem, we forgot to teach them how to realistically assess their own abilities, a crucial requirement for getting better at anything from math to music to sports. In fact, it's not just privileged high-school students: we all tend to view ourselves as above average.
Such inflated (膨胀的) self-judgments have been found in study after study, and it's often exactly when we're least competent at a given task that we rate our performance most generously. In a 2006 study published in the journal Medical Education, for example, medical students who scored the lowest on an essay test were the most charitable in their self-evaluations, while high-scoring students judged themselves much more strictly. Poor students, the authors note, "lack insight" into their own inadequacy. Why should this be? Another study, led by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning, offers an enlightening explanation. People who are incompetent, he writes with co-author Justin Kruger, suffer from a "dual burden": they're not good at what they do, and their wry ineptness (笨拙) prevents them from recognizing how bad they are.
In Dunning and Kruger's study, subjects scoring at the bottom of the heap on tests of logic, grammar and humor "extremely overestimated" their talents. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they guessed they were in the 62nd. What these individuals lacked (in addition to clear logic, proper grammar and a sense of humor) was "metacognitive skill" (元认知技巧): the capacity to monitor how well they're performing. In the absence of that capacity, the subjects arrived at an overly hopeful view of their own abilities. There's a paradox (悖论) here, the authors note: “The skills that develop competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain. "In other words, to get better at judging how well we’re doing at an activity, we have to get better at the activity itself.
There are a couple of ways out of this double bind (两难). First, we can learn to make honest comparisons with others. Train yourself to recognize excellence, even when you yourself don't possess it, and compare what you can do against what truly excellent individuals are able to accomplish. Second, seek out feedback that is frequent, accurate and specific. Find a critic who will tell you not only how poorly you're doing, but just what it is that you're doing wrong. As Dunning and Kruger note, success indicates to us that everything went right, but failure is more ambiguous: any number of things could have gone wrong. Use this external feedback to figure out exactly where and when you screwed up.
If we adopt these strategies — and most importantly, teach them to our children — they won't need parents, or a commencement(毕业典礼) speaker, to tell them that they're special. They'll already know that they are, or have a plan to get that way.
1. The underlined phrase "took issue with" in paragraph 1 most probably means .| A．totally approved of | B．disagreed with |
| C．fully understood | D．held discussion about |
| A．we don’t know whether our young people are talented or not |
| B．young people can't reasonably define themselves |
| C．no requirement is set up for young people to get better |
| D．we always tend to consider ourselves to be privileged |
| A．They lack the capacity to monitor how well they are performing. |
| B．They usually give themselves high scores in self-evaluations. |
| C．They tend to be unable to know exactly how bad they are. |
| D．They are intelligently inadequate in tests and exams. |
| A．are not confident about their logic and grammar |
| B．tend to be very competent in their high-scoring fields |
| C．don't know how well they perform due to their stringent self-judgment |
| D．is very careful about their self-evaluations because they have their own limits |
| A．the best way to recognize excellence is to study past success and failure |
| B．through comparison with others, one will know where and when he fails |
| C．we need internal honesty with ourselves and external honesty from others |
| D．neither parents nor a commencement speaker can tell whether one is special |
| A．Special or Not? Teach Kids To Figure It Out |
| B．Let's Admit That We Are Not That Special |
| C．Tips On Making Ourselves More Special |
| D．Tell The Truth: Kids Overestimate their Talents |
