题目内容：

    You feel especially smart and funny when talking to a particular person, only to feel hopelessly unintelligent and tongue-tied in the presence of another.

Experiments show when people report feeling comfortable with a conversational partner, they are judged by those partners and by observers as actually being more witty (机智的）。

It's just one example of the powerful influence that social factors can have on intelligence. As parents, teachers and students settle into the school year, this work should encourage us to think about intelligence not as a “lump of something that's in our heads,” as the psychologist Joshua Aronson puts it, but as “a transaction among people.”

Mr. Aronson, an associate professor at New York University, has been a leader in investigating the effects of social forces on academic achievement. Along with the psychologist Claude Steele, he identified the phenomenon known as “stereotype (刻板印象） threat.” Members of groups believed not to be academically good score much lower on tests when reminded in advance of their race or gender.

The pair's experiments in the 1990s concluded that the performance of these students suffered because they were worried about confirming negative stereotypes about their group.

Minorities aren't the only ones easily hurt by stereotype threat. We all are. A group of people especially confident about their mathematical abilities did worse on a math test when told that the experiment was intended to investigate “why Asians appear to perform better than other students on tests of math ability.”

And in a study published earlier this year in the journal Learning and Individual Differences, high school students did worse on a test of spatial (空间的） skills when told that males are better at solving spatial problems because of genetic differences between males and females. The girls were anxious about confirming assumptions about their gender, while the boys were anxious about living up to them.

The evolving literature on stereotype threat shows that performance is always social in nature. Even alone in an exam room, we hear a chorus of voices assessing, evaluating, passing judgment. And as social creatures, humans are strongly affected by what these voices say.

1.What does the underlined word “transaction” in paragraph 3 refer to?

A.Spatial reasoning skills. B.The ability to remember information.

C.Interaction between us and the environment. D.Passing on knowledge from teachers to students.

2.After being told males typically perform better than females in math, males are most likely to perform      .

A.better than females B.the same as females

C.worse than usual D.worse than females

3.Which of the following “voices” in our head may influence performance on an exam?

A.“I am as prepared as I can be.”

B.“I am supposed to do well on this.”

C.“The testing room is different from my classroom.”

D.“I am solving the problems faster than the one sitting in front of me.”

4.How do stereotypes threaten our academic achievement?

A.Making us unintelligent. B.Reminding us of our weaknesses.

C.Limiting our spatial reasoning skills. D.Raising our anxiety level.