2020年9月六级 第1套 Section A 选词填空

Overall, men are more likely than women to make excuses. Several studies suggest that men feel the need to appear competent in all __26__, while women worry only about the skills in which they've invested __27__. Ask a man and a woman to go diving for the first time, and the woman is likely to jump in, while the man is likely to say he's not feeling too well.

Ironically, it is often success that leads people to flirt with failure. Praise won for __28__ a skill suddenly puts one in the position of having everything to lose. Rather than putting their reputation on the line again, many successful people develop a handicap-drinking, __29__, depression--that allows them to keep their status no matter what the future brings. An advertising executive __30__ for depression shortly after winning an award put it this way: "Without my depression, I'd be a failure now; with it, I'm a success 'on hold.'"

In fact, the people most likely to become chronic excuse makers are those __31__ with success. Such people are so afraid of being __32__ a failure at anything that they constantly develop one handicap or another in order to explain away failure.

Though self-handicapping can be an effective way of coping with performance anxiety now and then, in the end, researchers say, it will lead to __33__. In the long run, excuse makers fail to live up to their true __34__ and lose the status they care so much about. And despite their protests to the __35__, they have only themselves to blame.