专四专八考试

【单选题】

We sometimes think humans are uniquely vulnerable to anxiety, but stress seems to affect the immune defenses of lower animals too. In one experiment, for example, behavioral immunologist Mark Laudenslager, at the University ofDenver, gave mild electric shocks to 24 rats. Half the animals could switch off the current by turning a wheel in their enclosure, while the other half could not. The rats in the two groups were paired so that each time one rat turned the wheel it protected both itself and its helpless partner from the shock. Laudenslager found that the immune response was depressed below normal in the helpless rats but not in those that could turn off the electricity. What he has demonstrated, he believes, is that lack of control over an event, not the experience itself, is what weakens the immune system.
Other researchers agree. Jay Weiss, a psychologist atDuke University School of Medicine, has shown that animals who are allowed to control unpleasant stimuli don’t develop sleep disturbances or changes in brain chemistry typical of stressed rats.But if the animals are confronted with situations they have no control over, they later behave passively when faced with experiences they can control. Such findings reinforce psychologists’ suspicions that the experience or perception of helplessness is one of the most harmful factors in depression.
One of the most startling examples of how the mind can alter the immuue response was discovered by chance. In 1975 psychologist RobertAder at the University of Rochester School of Medicine conditioned mice to avoid saccharin by simultaneously feeding them the sweetener and injecting them with a drag that while suppressing their immune systems caused stomach upsets.Associating the saccharin with the stomach pains, the mice quickly learned to avoid the sweetener. In order to extinguish this dislike for the sweetener,Ader reexposed the animals to sac charin, this time without the drug, and was astonished to find that those mice that had received the highest amounts of sweetener during their earlier conditioning dieD、He could only speculate that he had so successfully conditioned the rats that saccharin alone now served to weaken their immune systems enough to kill them.

According to the passage, the experience of helplessness causes rats to______.A．try to control unpleasant stimuli
B．turn off the electricity
C．behave passively in controllable situations
D．become abnormally suspicious

网考网参考答案：C
网考网解析：
文章第二段第三句“But if the animals are confronted with situations they have no control over，they later behave passively when faced with experiences they can control．”明确说明老鼠如果有过自己控制不了的情况，以后即使在自己能够控制的情况下，其反应也是消极被动的，所以[C]是正确答案。 document.getElementById("warp").style.display="none"; document.getElementById("content").style.display="block"; 查看试题解析出处>>