Professor Reason recently persuaded 35 people to keep a diary of all their absent-minded actions for two weeks. When he came to analyze their embarrassing errors, he was surprised to find that nearly all of them fell into a few groups.
One of the women, for instance, on leaving her house for work one morning threw her pet dog her earrings and tried to fix a dog biscuit on her ear. “The explanation for this is that the brain is like a computer,” explains the professor. “People programme themselves to do certain activities regularly.” It was the woman’s custom every morning to throw her dog two biscuits and then put on her earrings. “But somehow the action got reversed（颠倒）in the programme.” About one in twenty of the incidents the volunteers reported were these “programme assembly failures.”
Twenty percent of all errors were “test failures” — mainly due to not verifying the progress of what the body was doing. A man about to get his car out of the garage passed through the back yard where his garden jacket and boots were kept, put them on — much to his surprise. A woman reported, “I got into the bath with my socks on.”
The commonest problem was information “storage failures”. People forgot the names of people whose faces they knew, went into a room and forgot why they were there, mislaid something, or smoked a cigarette without realizing it.
The research so far suggests that while the central processor of the brain is liberated from second-to-second control of a well-practiced routine, it must repeatedly switch back its attention at important decision points to check that the action goes on as intended. Otherwise the activity may be gotten by another frequently and recently used programme, resulting in embarrassing errors.
小题1:The purpose of the professor’s research is to __________.
A．show the difference between men and women
B．sort and explain some errors in human actions
C．find the causes which lead to computer failures
D．compare computer functions with brain working小题2:Which of the following might be grouped under “programme assembly failures”?
A．A woman went to a shop and forgot what to buy.
B．A man returning home after work left his key in the lock.
C．A lady fell as she was paying attention to each step her feet were taking.
D．An old man, with his shoes on, was trying to put on his socks.小题3:The underlined word “verifying” (in paragraph 3) can be replaced by “_______”.
A．improving
B．changing
C．checking
D．stopping小题4:According to the passage, the information “storage failure” refers to “_______”.
A．information collecting system being destroyed
B．one’s total memory being removed
C．the loss of part of one’s memory for a time
D．the separation of one’s action from words
