It is well known that teenage boys tend to do better at math than girls that male high sc

It is well known that teenage boys tend to do better at math than girls, that male high school students are more likely 【26】______ their female counterparts to tackle advanced math courses like calculus, that 【27】______ all the great mathematicians have been men. Are women born with 【28】______ mathematical ability？ Or does society"s sexism 【29】______ their progress？ In 1980, two Johns Hopkins University researchers tried to 【30】______ the eternal nature/nurture debate. Julian Stanley and Camilla Benbow have 【31】______ 10,000 talented seventh and eighth 【32】______ between 1972 and 1979. Using the Scholastic Aptitude Test, 【33】______ math questions are meant to measure ability rather than knowledge, they discovered 【34】______ sex differences. 【35】______ the verbal abilities of the males and females 【36】______ differed, twice as 【37】______ boys as girls scored over 500 (on a scale of 200 to 800) on mathematical ability; at the 700 level, the ratio was 14 【38】______ l. The conclusion: males have 【39】______ superior mathematical reasoning ability. Benbow and Stanley"s findings, 【40】______ were published in "Science", 【41】______ some men and women. Now there is comfort for those people in a new study from the University of Chicago that suggests math is not, after all, a natural male 【42】______ Prof. Zalman Usiskin studied 1,366 high school students. They were selected from geometry classes and tested 【43】______ their ability to solve geometry proofs, a subject requiring 【44】______ abstract reasoning and spatial ability. The conclusion 【45】______ by Usiskin: there are no sex differences in math ability.

【26】

A．and

B．than

C．with

D．on