Part B
Directions:
The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For questions 41~45, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent text by choosing from the list A~G and filling them into the numbered boxes. Paragraphs B and E have been correctly placed. Make your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (10 points)
[A] Macnamara concluded that practice is less of a driver. “Once you get to the highly skilled groups, practice stops accounting for the difference. Everyone has practiced a lot and other factors are at play in determining who goes on to that super-elite level,” she said, “The factors depend on the skill being learned: in chess it could be intelligence or working memory, in sport it may be how efficiently a person uses oxygen. To complicate matters further, one factor can drive another. A child who enjoys playing the violin, for example, may be happy to practice and be focused on the task because they do not see it as a chore.”
[B] The impact of this article—which shifted the narrative about the origins of expertise away from any important role for genes or stable abilities and towards the importance of practice and training—is difficult to overstate. Cited over 9000 times, it is one of the most referenced articles in the psychological literature. Moreover, the deliberate practice view gained substantial attention outside of the academic literature, inspiring numerous popular books including Geoff Colvin’s Talent Is Overrated and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, where Gladwell described the now famous ‘10,000 hours rule’, i.e. with 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, one becomes an expert. It seems fair to say that no single article has had a greater impact on scientific and popular views of expertise than Ericsson et al.
[C] The mystery of how people acquire expertise in complex domains such as music, sports and science has long been of interest to psychologists. In 1993, in their classic article, Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer introduced the highly influential deliberate practice view in an attempt to answer this question. They posited that individual differences, even among elite performers, are closely related to assessed amounts of deliberate practice—activities designed to improve performance.
[D] “There is no doubt that deliberate practice is important, from both a statistical and a theoretical perspective. It is just less important than has been argued,” says Macnamara. “For scientists, the important question now is, what else matters?”
[E] Macnamara and her colleagues repeated part of the 1993 study to see whether they reached the same conclusions. They interviewed three groups of 13 violinists rated as best, good, or less accomplished about their practice habits, before having them complete daily diaries of their activities over a week. While the less skillful violinists clocked up an average of about 6,000 hours of practice by the age of 20, there was little to separate the good from the best musicians, with each logging an average of about 11,000 hours. In all, the number of hours spent practicing accounted for about a quarter of the skills difference across the three groups.
[F] However, a new study, from psychological scientist Brooke Macnamara, with colleagues David Z. Hambrick of Michigan State University and Frederick Oswald of Rice University, offers a counterpoint to Ericsson’s view, suggesting that the amount of practice accumulated over time does not seem to play a huge role in accounting for individual differences in skill or performance. “Deliberate practice is unquestionably important, but not nearly as important as proponents of the view have claimed.” says Macnamara.
[G] To answer that question, the researchers are planning another meta-analysis focused specifically on practice and sports in order to better understand the role of these and other factors. And, Macnamara and her colleagues speculate that the age at which a person becomes involved in an activity may matter, and that certain cognitive abilities such as working memory may also play an influential role.
