新理念大学英语听力

Level 4 Unit 11、12

II.
Emotional intelligence, or EI is the ability to understand your own emotions and those of people around you. The concept of emotional intelligence, developed by Daniel Goleman, means you have a self-awareness that enables you to recognize feelings and helps you manage your emotions.
On a personal level, it involves motivation and being able to focus on a goal rather than demanding instant gratification. A person with a high emotional intelligence is also capable of understanding the feelings of others. Culturally, they are better at handling relationships of every kind.
Just because someone is deemed “intellectually” intelligent, it does not necessarily follow that they are emotionally intelligent. Having a good memory, or good problem solving abilities, does not mean you are capable of dealing with emotions or motivating yourself.
Highly intelligent people may lack the social skills that are associated with high emotional intelligence. Scholars, who show incredible intellectual abilities in narrow fields, are an extreme example of this: a mathematical genius may be unable to relate to people socially. However, it is relatively rare for a person to have high intellectual intelligence with low emotional intelligence. In other words, a person can be both intellectually and emotionally intelligent.

III.
When we talk about intelligence, we do not mean the ability to get good scores on certain kinds of tests or even the ability to do well in school. By intelligence we mean a way of living and behaving, especially in a new or upsetting situation. If we want to test intelligence, we need to find out how a person acts instead of how much he knows what to do.
For instance, when an intelligent person is in a new situation, he thinks about the situation, not about himself or what might happen to him. He tries to find out all he can, and then he acts immediately and tries to do something about it. He probably isn't sure how it will work out, but at least he tries. And, if he can't make things work out right, he doesn't feel ashamed that he failed; he just tries to learn from his mistakes. An intelligent person, even if he is very young, has a special outlook on life, a special feeling about life, and knows how he fits into it.
If you look at children, you'll see great difference between what we call “bright” children and “not-bright” children. They are actually two different kinds of people, not just the same kind with different amount of intelligence. For example, the “bright” child really wants to find out about life — he tries to get in touch with everything around him. But, the “unintelligent” child keeps more to himself and his own dream-world; he seems to have a wall between him and life in general.

IV.
Are some people born clever and others born stupid? Or is intelligence developed by our environment and our experience? Strangely enough, the answer to both these q

uestions is yes. Our intelligence is partly given us at birth, and no amount of special education can make a genius out of a child born with low intelligence. On the other hand, a child who lives in an uninteresting environment will develop his intelligence less than one who lives in rich and changing surroundings. Thus the limits of a person's intelligence are fixed at birth, but whether or not he reaches those limits will depend on his environment. This view, now held by most experts, can be supported in a number of ways.
It is easy to show that intelligence is to some degree something we are born with. The closer the blood relationship between two people, the closer they are likely to be in intelligence. Thus if we take two unrelated people at random from the population, it is likely that their degrees of intelligence will be completely different. If on the other hand we take two identical twins, they will very likely be as intelligent as each other. Relations like brothers and sisters, parents and children, usually have similar intelligence, and this clearly suggests that intelligence depends on birth.
Imagine now that we take two identical twins and put them in different environments. We might send one, for example, to a university and the other to a factory where the work is tiring and uninteresting. We would soon find differences in intelligence developing, and this shows that environment as well as birth plays a part. This conclusion is also suggested by the fact that people who live in close connection with each other, but who are not related at all, are likely to have similar degrees of intelligence.