TEXT A A Frenchman, the
psychologist Alfred Binet, published the first standardized test of human
intelligence in 1905. But it was an American, Lewis Terman, a psychology
professor at Stanford, who thought to divide a test taker’s "mental age", as
revealed by that score, by his or her chronological age to derive a number that
he called the "intelligence quotient", or IQ. It would be hard to think of a
pop-scientific coinage that has had a greater impact of the way people think
about themselves and others. No country embraced the IQ--and the
application of IQ testing to restructure society--more thoroughly than the U.S..
Every year millions of Americans have their IQ measured, many with a direct
descendant of Binet’s original test, the Stanford-Binet, although not
necessarily for the purpose Binet intended. He developed his test as a way of
identifying public school students who needed extra help in learning, and that
is still one of its leading uses. But the broader and more
controversial use of IQ testing has its roots in a theory of intelligence--part
science, part sociology --that developed in the late 19th century, before
Binte’s work and entirely separate from it. Championed first by Charles Darwin’
s cousin Francis Galton, it held that intelligence was the most valuable human
attribute, and that if people who had a lot of it could be identified and put in
leadership positions, all of society would benefit. Terman
believed IQ tests should be used to conduct a great sorting out of the
population, so that young people would be assigned on the basis of their scores
to particular levels in the school system, which would lead to corresponding
socioeconomic destinations in adult life. The beginning of the IQ-testing
movement overlapped with the eugenics movement--hugely popular in America and
Europe among the "better sort" before Hitler gave it a bad name--which held that
intelligence was mostly inherited and that people-deficient in it should be
discouraged from reproducing. The state sterilization that Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes notoriously endorsed in a 1927 Supreme Court decision was done
with an IQ score as justification. The American IQ promoters
scored a great coup during World War I when they persuaded the Army to give IQ
tests to 1.7 million inductees. It was the world’s first mass administration of
an intelligence test, and many of the standardized tests in use today can be
traced back to it: the now ubiquitous and obsessed-over SAT(Study Ability Test);
the Wechsler, taken by several million people a year, according to its
publisher; and Terman’ s own National Intelligence Test, originally used in
tracking elementary school children. All these tests took from the Army the
basic technique of measuring intelligence mainly by asking vocabulary questions
(synonyms, antonyms, analogies, reading comprehension). The viewpoint that intelligence was mostly inherited and people deficient in intelligence should be discouraged from reproducing was held by ______.
A.IQ-testing movement B.Eugenic movement C.Hitler D.both IQ-testing and Eugenic movements