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Multiple choice

Eliges la opción correcta (A–D) sobre un detalle, una idea o la intención del autor.

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Practicar Multiple choice gratis13 preguntas originales de esta destreza, con corrección al instante.

Qué evalúa

Elegir la opción correcta (A–D) sobre detalles, ideas o propósito del autor.

Claves

Estrategia paso a paso

Trampas habituales

Ejemplo resuelto

'My point is not that a good memory is harmful' → descarta la opción 'to argue that a good memory is harmful'.

Preguntas de ejemplo

Intenta responder antes de abrir la solución. Las preguntas están en el idioma del examen.

Pregunta 1

Dificultad media≈ 2 min

Reading Passage 3 – Too Much of a Good Thing? Rethinking Choice Overload

A Few findings in behavioural science have travelled as far beyond the laboratory as the claim that too much choice is bad for us. Its best-known source is an experiment carried out in an upmarket food store, in which shoppers encountered a tasting table displaying either six or twenty-four varieties of jam. The larger display attracted more passers-by, but those who stopped at it were dramatically less likely to buy anything: only around one in thirty went on to make a purchase, compared with roughly one in three of those who had seen the smaller selection. The result seemed to confirm what many people already suspected, and within a few years it was being cited in books on marketing, management and personal happiness as evidence that modern consumers were being paralysed by abundance.

B The appeal of the idea is easy to understand. It runs against a central assumption of classical economics – that additional options can never make a rational person worse off, since he or she can always ignore them – and findings that overturn such assumptions tend to attract attention. It also flatters a widespread intuition that contemporary life, with its endless menus, streaming catalogues and comparison websites, has become exhausting in ways that earlier generations were spared. A theory that both surprises experts and confirms the suspicions of ordinary people is unusually well placed to spread.

C Yet attempts to reproduce the effect have produced a far more mixed picture than its popularity would suggest. When researchers pooled the results of some fifty experiments on choice overload in a statistical review published in 2010, they found that the average effect was close to zero. In some studies, larger assortments did reduce people's willingness to choose or their satisfaction with what they had chosen; in others, they had the opposite effect; and in many, they made no measurable difference at all. This does not mean that the original finding was mistaken. It means, rather, that whatever produced it is not a general law of human behaviour but something that appears only under certain conditions.

D Identifying those conditions has become the main task of subsequent research. A later review argued that four factors largely determine whether more options will overwhelm people. The first is the complexity of the choice set itself: options that differ in many ways at once, or that are presented in a disorganised manner, are harder to compare. The second is the difficulty of the decision task, which increases, for instance, under time pressure. The third is the degree of uncertainty people feel about their own preferences; someone who knows exactly what they want is barely affected by the number of alternatives. The fourth is the person's goal: those who intend only to browse respond quite differently from those who must reach a decision. Seen in this light, the jam shoppers – unfamiliar with most of the flavours, offered no means of organising them, and under no obligation to buy – were close to an ideal case for producing the effect.

E What follows for those who design the choices other people face? The obvious conclusion – that offering fewer options is always safer – is, I would suggest, precisely the wrong one. Cutting a range may help shoppers who arrive with no clear idea of what they want, but it is likely to frustrate those with particular needs, who may simply take their business elsewhere. A more productive response is to address the conditions that make large assortments difficult: grouping options into meaningful categories, providing simple ways of comparing them, or allowing people to narrow the field gradually. Well-organised bookshops and libraries have long done exactly this, and nobody seriously proposes that they would serve readers better by stocking fewer titles.

F There is, admittedly, one respect in which the original theory seems to have identified something durable. Several studies have found that people who habitually try to identify the best possible option – 'maximisers', in the jargon of the field – report lower satisfaction with their decisions than those who are content with one that is good enough, and that this gap tends to widen as the number of options grows. If so, the costs of abundance may fall less on the act of choosing than on how people feel afterwards, and less on consumers in general than on a particular type of person.

G The story of choice overload is, in the end, a useful reminder of how scientific ideas can outrun their evidence. A single memorable experiment, reported with an attractive simplicity, became a widely accepted truth long before anyone had established how often, or why, the effect occurred. The more recent work has not so much refuted the original insight as replaced a slogan with an explanation – a less quotable outcome, perhaps, but a considerably more useful one.

Questions 27–31. Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

29. According to paragraph D, which person is least likely to be affected by a large number of options?

  1. A. someone choosing under time pressure
  2. B. someone who is only browsing
  3. C. someone who knows exactly what they want
  4. D. someone faced with options that differ in many ways
Ver respuesta y explicación

Respuesta correcta: C. someone who knows exactly what they want

Explicación

C. 'Someone who knows exactly what they want is barely affected by the number of alternatives.' A and D describe conditions that make choice harder (time pressure, complex options). B is a trap: browsers 'respond quite differently', but the text does not say they are unaffected.

Pregunta 2

Dificultad media≈ 2 min

Reading Passage 3 – The Myth of the Solitary Genius

A Popular accounts of scientific discovery have a remarkably consistent shape. A single exceptional individual, frequently misunderstood by contemporaries, perceives what others have overlooked and, in a moment of illumination, transforms an entire field. The apple falls in Newton's garden; Archimedes leaps from his bath. Such narratives are durable precisely because they are satisfying: they supply a protagonist, a climax and a moral about the power of individual brilliance. Whether they describe how knowledge is actually produced is another matter, and a considerable body of historical and sociological scholarship suggests that, at best, they capture a fragment of a far more collective process.

B One persistent difficulty for the heroic narrative is the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery. In 1922 two American social scientists, William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, compiled a list of nearly 150 cases in which the same discovery or invention had been made independently by two or more people at around the same time. The sociologist Robert Merton later argued that such 'multiples', far from being curious coincidences, were the normal pattern of science, and that singletons – discoveries made only once – were the cases that required explanation. Calculus was developed by both Newton and Leibniz; the theory of evolution by natural selection was arrived at by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, whose ideas were presented together in 1858; oxygen was isolated within a few years of each other by Carl Scheele and Joseph Priestley. If discoveries tend to occur once the necessary ideas, instruments and questions are in place, the individual who happens to make them first looks less like the sole cause than like the most visible point of a wider convergence.

C It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that individuals are interchangeable. The fact that a discovery would probably have been made eventually does not mean that it would have been made in the same form, or at the same time, and the differences can matter a great deal. Darwin's decades of accumulated evidence gave the theory of natural selection a persuasive force that a brief paper alone might not have achieved, and historians continue to debate how far the timing and character of particular breakthroughs depended on the temperament of those involved. The more defensible position is not that genius is a fiction, but that it operates within, and depends upon, conditions that the heroic narrative tends to leave out.

D Those conditions are partly material. Scientific work has long relied on instrument makers, technicians, assistants and, in many historical cases, family members whose contributions went largely unrecorded. The laboratory notebooks of eminent researchers frequently reveal the hands of others in experiments later credited to a single name. Correspondence, too, played a decisive role: much of the intellectual exchange of early modern science took place through letters, in which ideas were tested, criticised and refined long before they appeared in print. When Newton wrote to Robert Hooke in 1675 that he had seen further 'by standing on the shoulders of giants', he was, whatever his private motives, describing something real.

E The tendency to attribute collective achievements to individuals is not merely a feature of popular history; it is built into the reward structures of science itself. Prizes are typically awarded to a small number of named people, and the most famous of them, the Nobel Prize, may be shared by no more than three individuals in any one category. Funding bodies, too, frequently require a single 'principal investigator' to be named on each grant, so that responsibility – and recognition – is concentrated in one person even when the work is distributed across a large group. Merton identified what he called the 'Matthew effect', whereby researchers who are already well known receive disproportionate credit for work done jointly with less established colleagues. Such mechanisms do not simply reflect the perception that science is the work of exceptional individuals; they actively reinforce it.

F Contemporary research, meanwhile, has moved decisively in a collaborative direction. Analyses of millions of scientific papers have found that the proportion written by teams has risen steadily over the past half-century in almost every field, and that team-authored papers are, on average, more frequently cited. In some areas of physics and genomics, individual papers now list hundreds or even thousands of authors, and a growing number of journals now ask for a statement describing what each of them actually contributed. It is tempting to read this as a break with the past, but the argument of this article suggests otherwise: modern authorship lists arguably make visible a collaborative reality that was always present, but which earlier conventions of credit allowed to remain hidden.

G None of this is to deny the importance of exceptional ability, nor to suggest that the stories of individual scientists are without value. They can inspire, and they convey something genuine about the persistence and imagination that research demands. The danger lies in mistaking a convenient narrative for an accurate description. A public that believes progress depends on rare lone geniuses may be less inclined to support the infrastructure – the training, the institutions, the long-term funding – on which discovery actually depends. And young researchers who measure themselves against an impossible ideal of solitary brilliance may conclude, wrongly, that science has no place for them.

Questions 27–30. Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

27. According to the writer, popular stories of discovery have lasted because

  1. A. they are usually based on reliable historical sources.
  2. B. their structure is one that people find rewarding.
  3. C. scientists themselves have encouraged them to spread widely.
  4. D. they accurately reflect the role of sudden inspiration in research.
Ver respuesta y explicación

Respuesta correcta: B. their structure is one that people find rewarding.

Explicación

B. Such narratives 'are durable precisely because they are satisfying: they supply a protagonist, a climax and a moral'. The writer questions their accuracy, so A and D are wrong, and nothing is said about scientists spreading them (C).

Pregunta 3

Dificultad difícil≈ 2 min

Reading Passage 3 – In Defence of Forgetting

A It has become something of a commonplace to treat forgetting as the regrettable price we pay for having a memory at all: an unavoidable leakage, to be minimised by mnemonic techniques, dietary supplements or, increasingly, by delegating recollection to our devices. The assumption underlying this view – that the ideal memory would be a complete and permanent record – is seldom examined. Yet a substantial and still expanding body of work in cognitive psychology and neuroscience implies that it may be fundamentally misconceived. On this alternative account, forgetting is not merely what happens when the machinery of memory falters; it is, in a great many cases, an active and adaptive process, without which remembering itself would be considerably less useful.

B The empirical study of forgetting is conventionally dated to the 1880s, when Hermann Ebbinghaus, using himself as his sole subject, committed to memory long lists of nonsense syllables and measured how much he could relearn after intervals ranging from twenty minutes to a month. The resulting 'forgetting curve' – steep at first, then flattening progressively – has been replicated often enough to be regarded as one of psychology's more robust findings. It is customarily cited as a measure of the brain's fallibility. That reading is not wrong, exactly, but it is partial. A curve of this shape is equally consistent with a system that provisionally retains incoming information for long enough to establish whether it recurs, and then discards most of what does not. Seen in this light, rapid early loss looks less like a defect than like a sensible allocation of finite resources.

C Recent neurobiological research lends some weight to this interpretation. Experiments on animals have identified molecular mechanisms that appear to weaken the connections between neurons actively rather than simply allowing them to decay, and in some studies, interfering with these mechanisms has made it harder, not easier, for animals to adjust when the location of a reward is changed. Caution is warranted in extrapolating from rodents to humans, and the precise significance of these findings remains contested. Nevertheless, they make it difficult to sustain the assumption that forgetting is invariably passive.

D The functional advantages of losing information are perhaps clearest in the formation of concepts. A child who encounters dozens of individual dogs does not retain an exhaustive file on each; instead, the idiosyncrasies of particular animals fade while the regularities they share are consolidated. What emerges is an abstraction flexible enough to accommodate a breed the child has never seen. The point is not trivial: a mind that registered every dog as an entirely separate case would be poorly equipped to cope with novelty, which is, after all, the condition under which most decisions have to be made. Some theorists go further and argue that the erosion of detail is not a by-product of generalisation but a precondition for it. Researchers in machine learning have arrived, by a quite different route, at a strikingly similar conclusion: a model that reproduces its training data too faithfully – a problem known as 'overfitting' – tends to perform poorly on cases it has not previously encountered.

E A rather different argument concerns the emotional colouring of memory. There is reasonable evidence that the affective intensity of unpleasant recollections tends to diminish more rapidly than that of pleasant ones, a pattern that may help to explain why most people are able to recover from humiliation or loss. It would be simplistic to attribute such recovery to forgetting alone; social support, reinterpretation and the mere passage of time all play their part, and the relative contribution of each is far from settled. Still, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the gradual softening of painful detail is, for the majority, more a mercy than a malfunction.

F None of this should be taken as a blanket endorsement of forgetting. Neurodegenerative conditions such as dementia inflict profound suffering, and it would be perverse to suggest that a student who cannot recall material on the day of an examination has been well served by her brain. Yet even in education, an appreciation of forgetting has practical consequences. Ebbinghaus himself noticed that material reviewed across several sessions was retained far better than material crammed into one, a phenomenon now known as the 'spacing effect'. Paradoxically, the benefit appears to be greatest when some forgetting has been allowed to occur between sessions: the effort of retrieving partially faded information seems to strengthen it more than effortless rereading does. Forgetting, in other words, is not only compatible with durable learning but may be one of its ingredients.

G What, then, follows? Certainly not that we should cease trying to remember, nor that the digital tools on which we increasingly depend are harmful; they are simply poor models of the faculty they supplement. The more modest conclusion is that the prevailing metaphor of memory as a storage device – a metaphor reinforced by every hard drive and cloud archive we use – obscures more than it illuminates. A file is either retained or deleted; biological memory, by contrast, appears to be engaged in a continuous process of evaluation, strengthening some traces and allowing others to recede in the light of what experience suggests will prove useful. To regard each lapse as evidence of deficiency is to misunderstand what memory is for.

Questions 27–30. Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

29. What is the writer's attitude to the animal research described in paragraph C?

  1. A. He believes it proves that human forgetting is an active process.
  2. B. He doubts whether the experiments were carried out in a scientifically sound way.
  3. C. He regards it as suggestive but is careful about its implications.
  4. D. He considers it largely irrelevant to the debate about how human memory works.
Ver respuesta y explicación

Respuesta correcta: C. He regards it as suggestive but is careful about its implications.

Explicación

C. The research 'lends some weight' to his view, but 'caution is warranted in extrapolating from rodents to humans' and its significance 'remains contested' – suggestive, treated with care. A is too strong: he says only that the findings make it 'difficult to sustain' the opposite assumption. B: he never questions how the experiments were done. D contradicts 'lends some weight to this interpretation'.

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