Passageone
One of the most important wayspeople have of communicating is done non-verbally, or without the use of words.Just as a bird watcher delights in watching birds, so the non-verbalistdelights in watching the non-verbal signals of human beings. But instead ofgoing into the countryside, the non-verbalist watches people at socialfunctions at beaches, on television, at the office or anywhere that peopleinteract. The person who studies such examples of human behavior wants to learnabout the actions of his fellow humans so that he may ultimately learn moreabout himself and find ways to improve his relationships with others.
One of the first and mostimportant works on this topic was Charles Darwin’s The Ex-pression of theEmotions in Man and Animal, published in 1872. In it Darwin believed thatexpressions of emotion are similar among humans, regardless of culture. Hebased his belief on man’s evolutionary origin. This work led to modern-daystudies of facial expressions and body language, when, in the 1950s, tworesearchers, Brunet and Taguiri, wrote, after thirty years of study, that thebest available research showed that there were no unchanging patternsaccompanying specific emotions.
Some fourteen years later,American researchers found that new research supported Darwin’s old belief.They had conducted studies in five widely different continents and concluded：”Observers in thesecultures recognize some of the same emotions when they are shown a set offacial photographs.” Researchers all over the world have noted and recordedalmost one million non-verbal signals. Albert Mehrabian found that the totaleffect of a human message is about 7% verbal (words only), 38% vocal (includingtone of voice, inflection, etc.) and 55% non-verbal (gestures and bodylanguage). One Professor Birdwhistle estimated that the average person actuallyspeaks words for a total of about ten or eleven minutes a day, and that theaverage sentence takes only about 2. 5 seconds. He also found that actualface-to-face conversation between people amounted to about 35 % while over 65%of communication is done non-verbally.
The main idea of this passage is____.()
A、people communicate mostly through body language
B、Charles Darwin was the first person to study human emotions
C、words are the most important part of communication
D、all emotions are expressed in the same way all over the world
【正确答案】：A
【题目解析】：本题是归纳题。根据对整篇文章的理解可知，人们平时交流时很多时候是通过非言语进行的，肢体语言在交流时起着非常重要的作用。答案为A。