试题出自试卷《宁波大学2010年考博英语真题及答案解析》

A sense of smell is something we are born with. Or is it?
Until recently scientists believed that the commonsense view was wrong: research had suggested that we learn to distinguish between pleasant and unpleasant smells by experience. From early experiments that involved asking children between three and five years old what they thought of certain smells, researchers concluded that children must learn their appreciation of pleasant and unpleasant smells as they get older, rather than being born with it. One of the most surprising results of these tests was that the children said they liked the smell of faeces nearly as often as they said they liked banana.
Psychologist Hilary Schmidt understandably found this research hard to accept. She looked at the way the tests were conducted, and applied lessons from other work on child psychology to design her own experiments. She noted that children younger than five will often answer ‘Yes’ to leading questions even if the answers are contradictory. She therefore decided to set her experiment up as a game. She asked the children if they would give a particular smelly thing to Oscar the Grouch, a popular television character who lives in a dustbin and likes ‘smelly’ things, or to Big Bird, another television character who likes ‘nice’ things. She found that the children distinguished between pleasant and unpleasant smells in much the same way as an adult. With the help of younger and younger subjects, she hopes to shed light on the importance of the inherited component of the sense.
Children younger than seven or eight are notoriously bad at recognizing what an object is from its shape alone. Schmidt points to an experiment she has carried out with children under five who were given a large styrofoam ball and a small, but heavy, lead ball to compare. After they had a chance to feel the two, she took the balls away, and showed them another pair of Styrofoam and lead ball. When she asked them which of the two would be the heavier, they invariably pointed to the Styrofoam ball just because it was bigger. Despite their earlier experience, they had not grasped the idea of what an object is made of—its substance—as well as size and shape. But in other experiments when she introduced odors, she found that children under five understood that smell was an important characteristic of substance, and children could use a scent to recognize substance irrespective of the shape or size in which it was presented to them.
Schmidt has also found that girls are more sensitive to smell than boys. The sex difference is well known in adults, but not in children. Explaining the difference in adults has centered on the suggestion that as girls get older, they tend to take part in activities such as cooking, which train them to distinguish between smells. Another suggestion was that after puberty, female hormones bring about some change in the olfactory equipment. But Schmidt’s observations that the sex difference exists in children does not fit in with either explanation.
31. According to the text, it is well-known that our sense of smell is ______.
32. Which would Hilary Schmidt most probably agree to?
33. Schmidt’s styrofoam and lead ball experiment shows that younger children ______.
34. The word “subjects” (Para. 3) most probably means ______.
35. From the last sentence of the text, we can infer that Schmidt may ______.