Questions 81-86 are based on the following passage.
Every summer, Jean Piaget retreats to his cabin in the Alps, where he spends most of his days analyzing the mass of research data generated over the past year at his Center for Genetic Epistemology. During long walks along the mountain trails, he mulls over the latest experimental results, and in the cool mountain evenings, he formulates his conclusions. With the approach of fall, he will descend from the mountain, manuscript for a book and several journal articles in hand. This time-honored procedure of careful observation followed by seclusion for thought and synthesis, has enabled him to become the most prolific, if not the most famous psychologist of the century.
Piaget has only been widely known in this country since the 1960s, when his works were translated from their original French. But he has been recognized as an expert in the field of cognitive development in Europe since the 1930s. In fact, Piaget's publishing career can be traced to the year 1906, when as a child of ten, he published his careful notes on the habits of an albino sparrow he observed near his home in Switzerland. After his precocious debut as an ornithologist, he took an after-school job at the local natural history museum, soon becoming an expert on mollusks. At the age of sixteen he was recommended for a curator's position at the natural history museum in Geneva, but declined in favor of continuing his education.
He studied natural science at the University of Neuchatel, obtaining his doctorate at the age of twenty-one. His readings in philosophy stimulated an intense interest in epistemology - the study of humans acquire knowledge. Convinced that cognitive development had a genetic basis, Piaget decided that the best way to approach epistemology would be through its behavioral and biological components. Psychology appeared to be the discipline that best incorporated this approach.
Questions 87-95 are based on the following passage.
My Views on Gambling
Most of life is a gamble. Very many of the things we do involve taking some risk in order to achieve a satisfactory result. We undertake a new job with no idea of the more indirect consequences of our action. Marriage is certainly a gamble and so is the bringing into existence of children, who could prove sad liabilities. A journey, a business transaction, even a chance remark may result immediately or ultimately in tragedy. Perpetually we gamble - against life, destiny, chance, the unknown - call the invisible opponent what we will. Human survival and progress indicate that usually we win.
So the gambling instinct must be an elemental one. Taking risks to achieve something is a characteristic of all forms of life, including humanity. As soon as man acquired property, the challenge he habitually issued to destiny found an additional expression in a human contest. Early may well have staked his flint axe, his bearskin, his wife, in the hope of adding to his possessions. The acquirement of desirable but nonessential commodities must have increased his scope enormously, while the risk of complete disaster lessened.
So long as man was gambling against destiny, the odds were usually in his favor, especially when he used commonsense. But as the methods of gambling multiplied, the chances of success decreased. A wager against one person offered on average even chances and no third party profited by the transaction. But as soon as commercialized city life developed, mass gambling become common. Thousands of people now compete for large prizes, but with only minute chances of success, while the organizers of gambling concerns enjoy big profits with, in some cases, no risk at all. Few clients of the betting shops, football pools, state lotteries, bingo sessions, even charity raffles, realize fully the flimsiness of their chances and the fact that without fantastic luck they are certain to lose rather than gain.
Little irreparable harm results for the normal individual. That big business profits from the satisfaction of a human instinct is a common enough phenomenon. The average wage-earner, who leads a colorless existence, devotes a small percentage of his earnings to keeping alive with extraordinary constancy the dream of achieving some magic change in his life. Gambling is in most cases a non-toxic drug against boredom and apathy and may well preserve good temper, patience and optimism in dreary circumstances. A sudden windfall may unbalance a weaker, less intelligent person and even ruin his life. And the lure of something for nothing as an ideal evokes criticism from the more rigidly upright representatives of the community. But few of us have the right to condemn as few of us can say we never gamble - even it is only investing a few pence a week in the firm's football sweep or the church bazaar "lucky dip."
Trouble develops, however, when any human instinct or appetite becomes overdeveloped. Moderate drinking produces few harmful effects but drunkenness and alcoholism can have terrible consequences. With an unlucky combination of temperament and circumstances, gambling can only become an obsession, almost a form of insanity, resulting in the loss not only of a man's property but of his self-respect and his conscience. Far worse are the sufferings of his dependants, deprived of material comfort and condemned to watching his deterioration and hopelessness. They share none of his feverish excitement or the exhilaration of his rare success. The fact that he does not wish to be cured makes psychological treatment of the gambling addict almost impossible. He will use any means, including stealing, to enable him to carry on. It might be possible to pay what salary he can earn to his wife for the family maintenance but this is clearly no solution. Nothing - education, home environment, other interest, wise discouragement - is likely to restrain the obsessed gambler and even when it is he alone who suffers the consequences, his disease is a cruel one, resulting in a wasted, unhappy life.
（责任编辑:秩名）
