Passage 58
学霸导读 研究发现，人的性格会随着年龄的增长而改变，甚至一个人年老时和年少时的性格鲜有关联。看看爱丁堡大学的研究者们是如何得出这一结果的呢？
Good news for awkward teenagers around the world. As time goes by, you could end up like a c 1 different person.
This comes from the longest running personality study ever carried out by scientists. According to researchers from the University of Edinburgh in the U.K.， our personality changes so much from youth to old age that most people’s personalities in older age are barely recognizable （ 易认出的 ） compared to their younger s 2 .
The researchers analyzed results from a study in 1947, which gathered 1,208 teenagers in Scotland aged 14 and asked their teachers to assess their personalities based on six traits.
Now, more than six decades later, the team from the University of Edinburgh has m 3 to contact 635 of the original students, and 174 agreed to have their personalities tested once more.
At an a 4 age of 76.7 years old, the group were asked to rate themselves on the same six personality traits, then pick a close friend or a family member to do the same.
By c 5 the then-and-now test results, the researchers found that there was hardly any relationship between traits people had as teenagers and t 6 in their older years.
It was “as if the second tests had been given to different people”, the study’s researchers wrote in their report, which was p 7 in the journal Psychology and Aging.
The results were a surprise because research in the past found personality stability in people tested from c 8 to middle-age, and from middle-age to older age.
As the team explained， our personality appears stable over short intervals （ 间隔 ）—increasingly so throughout adulthood. However， the l 9 the interval between two tests of personality， the weaker the relationship between the two tends to be.
It’s clear that more studies are needed to f ind out what’s going on here. But it could be the f irst s 10 that it’s not just our cells that are being replaced throughout life—the way we think， feel and behave might not be as set in stone （ 一成不变 ） as we once thought.
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6.__________7.__________8.__________9.__________10.__________
高频词汇
awkward /'ɔːkwəd/ adj. 尴尬的，使人难堪的
barely /'beəli/ adv. 几乎不
assess /ə'ses/ v. 评估，评定
trait /treɪt/ n. 特征，特点