WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING DOES THE PASSAGE INFER

55. Which of the following does the passage infer?

A. We now fully understand how risk factors trigger heart attacks.

B. We do not fully understand how risk factors trigger heart attacks.

C. We have not identified many risk factors associated with heart attacks.

D. We recently began to study how risk factors trigger heart attacks.

Reading passage:

You can usually tell when your friends are happy or angry by the looks on their faces or by their actions.

This is useful because reading their emotional expressions helps you to know how to respond to them.

Emotions have evolved to help us respond to important situations and to convey our intentions to others.

But does raising the eyebrows and rounding the mouth say the same thing in Minneapolis as it does in

Madagascar? Much research on emotional expressions has centered on such questions.

According to Paul Ekman, the leading researcher in this area, people speak and understand substantially

the same “facial language”. Studies by Ekman’s group have demonstrated that humans share a set of

universal emotional expressions that testify to the common biological heritage of the human species.

Smiles, for example, signal happiness and frowns indicate sadness on the faces of people in such far- flung

places as Argentina, Japan, Spain, Hungary, Poland , Sumatra ,the United States, Vietnam, the jungles of

New Guinea , and the Eskimo villages north of Artic Circle. Ekman and his colleagues claim that people

everywhere can recognize at least seven basic emotions: sadness, fear, anger, disgust, contempt, happiness,

and surprise. There are, however, huge differences across cultures in both the context and intensity of

emotional displays – the so called display rules. In many Asian cultures, for example, children are taught to

control emotional responses – especially negative ones- while many American children are encouraged to

express their feelings more openly. Regardless of culture, however, emotions usually show themselves, to

some degree , in people’s behavior. From their first days of life, babies produce facial expressions that

communicate their feelings.

The ability to read facial expressions develops early, too. Very young children pay close attention to

facial expressions, and by age five, they nearly equal adults in their skill at reading emotions on people’s

faces. This evidence all points to a biological underpinning for our abilities to express and interpret a basic

set of human emotions. Moreover, as Charles Darwin pointed out over a century ago, some emotional

expressions seem to appear across species boundaries. Cross - cultural psychologists tell us that certain

emotional responses carry different meanings in different cultures. For example, what emotion do you

suppose might be conveyed by sticking out your tongue? For Americans, this might indicate disgust, while

in China it can signify surprise. Likewise, a grin on an American face may indicate joy, while on a Japanese

face it may just as easily mean embarrassment. Clearly, culture influences emotional expressions.