Professor Smith recently persuaded 35 people, 23 of them women, to keep a diary of all their absent-minded actions for a fortnight. When he came to analyze their embarrassing lapses in a scientific report, he was surprised to find that nearly all of them fell into a few groupings. None did the lapses appear to be entirely random.

One of the women, for instance, on leaving her house for work one morning threw her dog her earnings 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 in the programme.” About one in twenty of the incidents the volunteers reported were these “programme assembly failures.”

Altogether the volunteers logged 433 unintentional actions that they found themselves doing—an average of twelve each. There appear to be peak periods in the day when we are at our zaniest. These are two hours some time between eight a.m. and noon, between four and six p.m. with a smaller peak between eight and ten p.m. “Among men the peak seems to be when a changeover in brain ‘programmes’ occurs, as for instance between going to and from work.” Women on average reported slightly more lapses—12.5 compared with 10.9 for men probably because they were more reliable reporters.

A startling finding of the research is that the absent-minded activity is a hazard of doing things in which we are skilled. Normally, you would expect that skill reduces the number of errors we make. But trying to avoid silly slips by concentrating more could make things a lot worse—even dangerous.

51. In this study Professor Smith asked the subjects _______.

A. to keep track of people who tend to forget things

B. to report their embarrassing lapses at random

C. to analyze their awkward experiences scientifically

D. to keep a record of what they did unintentionally

52. Professor Smith discovered that _______.

A. certain patterns can be indentified in the recorded incidents

B. many people were too embarrassed to admit their absent-mindedness

C. men tend to be more absent-minded than women

D. absent-mindedness is an excusable human weakness

53. “Programme assembly failures (Sentence 6, Paragraph 2)” refers to the phenomenon that

people _______.

A. often fail to programme their routines beforehand

B. tend to make mistakes when they are in a hurry

C. unconsciously change the sequence of doing things

D. are likely to mess thing up if they are too tired

54. We learn from the third paragraph that _______.

A. absent-mindedness tends to occur during certain hours of the day

B. women are very careful to perform actions during peak periods

C. women experience more peak periods of absent-mindedness

D. men’s absent-mindedness often results in funny situations

55. It can be concluded from the passage that _______.

A. people should avoid doing important things during peak periods of lapses

B. hazards can be avoided when people do things they are good at

C. people should be careful when programming their actions

D. lapses cannot always be attributed to lack of concentration

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