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(单词翻译)
This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin. This will just take a minute.
Stand at the bottom of a big hill and you can exhaust yourself just thinking about climbing it. But a new study suggests it's not as bad as it looks. Because people tend to overestimate1 the steepness of slopes, and not because we're lazy.
Psychologists have long assumed that our misperception of slope was biased2 by fatigue3 or even fear of falling. If we see going up or down a hill as difficult, our perception could be influenced by our point of view.
But researchers at Ohio State University have found it isn't so. The scientists asked 200 passersby4 to estimate the angle of a set of stairs, and another 200 to do the same for an escalator—which, of course, requires no effort to ascend5. In each case, half the subjects looked from the bottom and half from the top.
The results: viewers consistently overestimated6 the slant7 of each slope by about 20 degrees. The work appears in the journal Psychological Science.
The researchers are not sure what drives this angular disparity. Perhaps it's because our visual system evolved to be overly sensitive to even slight departures from the horizontal, to help keep us upright. Because 'not falling down' is the first step to making it up that hill.
Thanks for the minute. For Scientific American's 60-Second Science, I'm Karen Hopkin.
1 overestimate | |
v.估计过高,过高评价 | |
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2 biased | |
a.有偏见的 | |
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3 fatigue | |
n.疲劳,劳累 | |
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4 passersby | |
n. 过路人(行人,经过者) | |
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5 ascend | |
vi.渐渐上升,升高;vt.攀登,登上 | |
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6 overestimated | |
对(数量)估计过高,对…作过高的评价( overestimate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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7 slant | |
v.倾斜,倾向性地编写或报道;n.斜面,倾向 | |
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