Английский язык. Горчакова Е.П - 41 стр.

                                 41

relatively high IQs, but there is a wide range of scores within
any one occupation.

      There is no unanimity as to whether intelligence is one
capacity or many. For Spearman, intelligence consists of a
general factor, G, which controls every adaptive act, although
each task also involves a different specific ability, or S factor.
His theory can account for the moderately high positive
correlation usually found among tests of different abilities.
Thurstone thought that these correlations could be better
accounted for by assuming seven relatively independent group
factors, each responsible for a different cluster of abilities.
Guilford found forty such group factors and predicted that 120
would eventually be found. Thomson and others believe the
number to be nearly infinite, because each human ability is
specific and unrelated to any other, although each actual task
involves several abilities. It is because some abilities needed
for one task may also be involved in another task that, the
specificity theorists say, there are correlations among different
tests. The current tendency is to avoid characterizing a
person’s mental abilities by a single score; instead the many
different facets of the human mind are separately measured
and scored.

     A normal person increased his adaptive skills and
reasoning powers as he grows older, although the rat of growth
may decrease after adolescence. There is some decline in old
age, but there is enormous variation, with mental “old age”
arriving relatively early to some and never to others.

      One doesn’t “have” an IQ in the sense that one has blue
eyes. IQ scores change. They are stable only over shunt
periods and become less stable the longer the interval between
tests. Also, the younger the child, the less stable the IQ. For
those reasons it is inadvisable to categorize a child’s
intelligence on the basis of an IQ score taken in early
childhood.

     It is difficult to disentangle hereditary and environmental
influences on mental ability because, typically children as well
as their genes. Studies of naturally occurring events (which
result in children being reared apart from their parents,
identical twins being reared apart from each other, and so