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

hool 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