2008雅思阅读8分泛读计划(二)

　　幽灵题里的POWER SPACE 海底火山都考过了 就剩下天才儿童还没出现了 先读一篇关于IQ的文章 看看背景知识够不够。

　　TIME: 5-7

　　HOW IQ BECOMES IQ

　　In 1904 the French minister of education, facing limited resources for schooling, sought a way to separate the unable from the merely lazy. Alfred Binet got the job of devising selection principles and his brilliant solution put a stamp on the study of intelligence and was the forerunner of intelligence tests still used today. He developed a thirty-problem test in 1905, which tapped several abilities related to intellect, such as judgment and reasoning. The test determined a given childs mental age. The test previously established a norm for children of a given physical age. For example, five-year-olds on average get ten items correct, therefore, a child with a mental age of five should score 10, which would mean that he or she was functioning pretty much as others of that age. The childs mental age was then compared to his physical age.

　　A large disparity in the wrong direction might suggest inability rather than laziness and means that he or she was earmarked for special schooling. Binet, however, denied that the test was measuring intelligence and said that its purpose was simply diagnostic, for selection only. This message was however lost and caused many problems and misunderstandings later.

　　Although Binets test was popular, it was a bit inconvenient to deal with a variety of physical and mental ages. So, in 1912, Wilhelm Stern suggested simplifying this by reducing the two to a single number. He divided the mental age by the physical age and multiplied the result by 100. An average child, irrespective of age, would score 100. a number much lower than 100 would suggest the need for help and one much higher would suggest a child well ahead of his peer.

　　This measurement is what is now termed the IQ score and it has evolved to be used to show how a person, adult or child, performed in relation to others. The term IQ was coined by Lewis m. Terman, professor of psychology and education of Stanford University, in 1916. He had constructed an enormously influential revision of Binets test, called the Stanford-Binet test, versions of which are still given extensively.

　　The field studying intelligence and developing tests eventually coalesced into a sub-field of psychology called psychometrics . The practical side of psychometrics became widespread quite early, by 1917, when Einstein published his grand theory of relativity, mass-scale testing was already in use.

　　Germanys unrestricted submarine warfare provoked the United States to finally enter the first world war in the same year. The military had to build up an army very quickly and it had two million inductees to sort out. Who would become officers and who enlisted men? Psychometricians developed two intelligence tests that helped sort all these people out, at least to some extent. This was the first major use of testing to decide who lived and who died since officers were a lot safer on the battlefield. The tests themselves were given under horrendously bad conditions and the examiners seemed to lack common sense. A lot of recruits simply had no idea what to do and in several sessions most inductees scored zero! The examiners also came up with the quite astounding conclusion from the testing that the average American adults intelligence was equal to that of a thirteen-year-old