试题出自试卷《首都经济贸易大学2014年考博英语真题》

It is well known that teenage boys tend to do better（1）math than girls, that male high school students are more likely than their female counterparts（2） advanced math courses like calculus, that virtually all the great mathematicians（3）men. Are women born with（4）mathematical ability? Or does society’s sexism slow their progress? In 1980, two Johns Hopkins University researchers tried（5）the eternal nature/nurture debate. Julian Stanley and Camilla Benbow（6）10,000 talented seventh and eighth graders between 1972 and 1979. Using the Scholastic Aptitude Test, in which math questions are meant to measure ability rather than knowledge, they discovered（7）sex differences.（8）the verbal abilities of the males and females（9）differed, twice as many boys as girls scored over 500（on a scale of 200 to 800）on mathematical ability; at the 700 level, the ratio was 14 to 1. The conclusion: males have（10）superior mathematical reasoning ability.
Benbow and Stanley’s findings,（11）were published in “Science”, disturbed some men and（12）women. Now there is comfort for those people in a new study from the University of Chicago that suggests math（13）not, after all, a natural male domain. Prof. Zalman Usiskin studied 1,366 tenth graders. They were selected from geometry classes and tested on their ability to solve geometry proofs, a subject requiring（14）abstract reasoning and spatial ability. The conclusion（15）by Usiskin: there are no sex differences in math ability.