【大問３ 読解問題】
Read this article and answer the questions below.
“This is an eighteenth-, nineteenth-century problem. We really shouldn't be talking in these terms. I don't know why we're still doing it," complains Gina Rippon, professor of cognitive neuroimaging-using machines to produce images of brain activity-at Aston University, in Birmingham. She is one of a small but growing number of scientists, psychologists, and gender experts scattered across the globe who are challenging claims that brains show significant sex differences.
Rippon became interested in sex and gender when she was teaching courses on women and mental health at the University of Warwick, where she spent twenty-five years. More women than men tend to suffer from depression or have eating disorders, and she found that, time and again, their illnesses were being explained in course readings in terms of something innate, rather than something that developed through social relations. She was convinced that there were social reasons for such mental problems. This sparked an interest in how biological explanations are used and misused, particularly when it comes to women.
When she arrived at Aston University in ２０００ and started working in neuroimaging, she decided to take a look at how the latest powerful imaging techniques were being used in research on women. Technologies like electroencephalography had already been used for almost a century to study electrical signals from the brain. But during the １９９０s, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) -a technique that allows changes in brain activity to be tracked by measuring which areas see more blood flow-utterly transformed the field. There was an explosion of new studies, many of which came with eye-catchingly colorful pictures of the brain.
Despite the promise of this new technology, the pictures it painted weren't always pretty. Especially for women. “I did a review in ２００８ of where we were going with the emerging brain-imaging story and gender differences, and I was shocked,” says Rippon. Studies saw sex differences in the brain when it came to almost everything. Examples included mental tasks, listening to someone read, responding to psychological stress, experiencing emotion, eating chocolate, looking at erotic photos, and even smelling. One claimed that the brains of homosexual men ( A ) the brains of straight women than with those of straight men. “I just got drawn into it because I thought this is shocking, that it is being used in exactly the same way as people in the past saying women shouldn't go to university because it will mess up their reproductive systems," she tells me.
Rippon wasn't the only one raising her eyebrows at some of these brain studies. MRI produces pictures that are problematic. They can easily be affected by noise and false positives. In terms of image quality, the best resolution it can reach is a cubic millimeter or so, and with many machines it's considerably less. This may sound like a tiny volume, but is in fact vast when it comes to an organ as dense as the brain. Just one cubic millimeter can contain around a hundred thousand nerve cells, and a billion connections. Given these limitations, some in the scientific community ( B ) that they might be reading too much into brain scans.
All over the world, what started as quiet criticism increased in volume. In ２００５, Craig Bennett, then a first-year graduate student at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, carried out an equipment test that happened to reveal how it might be possible to read just about anything into a brain scan. As a joke, he and a colleague tried to find the most unusual objects they could fit inside an MRI machine, to help prepare it before their serious scientific work began. ( C ) The dead fish's brain.
Amusing though the salmon experiment was, it highlighted what some saw as a far more serious problem in neuroscience. Eight years after Bennett's fish trick, the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience published an analysis of neuroscience studies and reached the damaging conclusion that questionable research practices were leading to unreliable results. “It has been claimed and demonstrated that many (and possibly most) of the conclusions drawn from biomedical research are probably false," the article began.
The authors explained that one of the big complications is that scientists are under enormous pressure to publish their work, and journals tend to publish results that appear statistically significant. If there's no big effect, a journal is less likely to be interested. "As a consequence, researchers have strong incentives to engage in research practices that make their findings publishable quickly, even if those practices reduce the likelihood that the findings reflect a true effect,” they continued. In other words, scientists were being pressured to do bad research, including using small samples of people or exaggerating real effects, so they could seem to have interesting results.
Paul Matthews, the head of brain sciences at Imperial College London, admits that in the early days of MRI, many researchers-himself included - were caught out by unintentionally bad interpretations of data. “The errors that have been made have been fundamental statistical errors. We've all made them," he says. “I'm more careful about it now, but I've made them, too. It's a very embarrassing thing. It's born of this strong drive to get results from whatever work one's completed because one can't do any more. Most people, if not the overwhelming majority, don't intend to cheat. What they tend to do is get excited because of exploration and they misstate the degree to which they're exploring the data or the meaningfulness of the outcomes."
The problem has at least been recognized. Even so, Rippon believes that sex-difference research continues to suffer from bad research because it remains such a hot topic. For scientists and journals, an interesting study on sex difference can equal instant global publicity.
The vast majority of experiments and studies show no sex difference, she says. But they're not the ones that get published. “I describe this as an iceberg. You get the bit above the water, which is the smallest but most visible part, because it's easy to get studies published in this area. But then there's this huge amount under the water where people haven't found any differences.” People end up seeing only the tip of the iceberg - the studies that seem to confirm sex differences.
Angela Saini. Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story Inferior
１ Choose the most suitable answer from those below to complete the following sentence. Rippon was first attracted to research on sex and gender because she
(a) found conflicting views on sex differences among the students at her university.
(b) had many students who asked her if depression and eating disorders were common among men.
(c) no longer found that her beliefs about sex differences explained ongoing problems.
(d) realized that what she found in teaching materials did not agree with what she believed.
(e) was asked by her university to create new courses on women and mental health.
２ Use six of the seven words below to fill in blank space (A) in the best way. Indicate your choices for the second, fourth, and sixth positions.
(a) common
(b) had
(c) in
(d) more
(e) much
(f) were
(g) with
３ Choose the most suitable answer from those below to fill in blank space (B).
(a) asked to be informed
(b) began to be concerned
(c) failed to be persuaded
(d) tried to be optimistic
(e) wanted to be sure
４ Choose the most suitable order of sentences from those below to fill in blank space (C).
(a) A few years later, when Bennett was looking for evidence of false positives in brain imaging, he dug out this old scan of the salmon.
(b) Proving the critics right and showing how even the best technologies can mislead, it showed three small red areas of activity close together in the middle of the fish's brain.
(c) They started with a pumpkin and ended with a dead, eighteen-inch-long, mature Atlantic salmon wrapped in plastic.
５ Choose the most suitable answer from those below to complete the following sentence. According to the analysis published by Nature Reviews Neuroscience, neuroscientists have difficulty getting the results of their research published because
(a) journals tend to reject papers that do not have significant findings.
(b) neuroscience is more complicated than most other areas of research.
(c) the pressures scientists are under are too big to be ignored.
(d) their conclusions are often seen as being too dramatic.
(e) too many experiments have been conducted using small samples of people.
６ Choose the most suitable answer from those below to complete the following sentence. According to Matthews, errors in the interpretation of data
(a) are more often than not intentional in his field of research.
(b) cannot be detected if statistical methods are employed.
(c) may occur when researchers are desperate for results.
(d) need not result in embarrassment if they are accidental.
(e) tend to decrease in number when scientists are highly motivated.
７ Choose the most suitable answer from those below to complete the following sentence. Rippon uses the image of an iceberg to argue that
(a) large samples have to be used to make experiments reliable.
(b) many journals are eager to publish research in neuroscience.
(c) the best research is based on the most solid foundation.
(d) the more careful the research, the more likely it is to be published.
(e) very few research results actually show sex differences.
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