阅读理解。
Do you remember the game "Telephone"? A message gets passed from person to person, and everyone
laughs at how distorted (曲解) it becomes. As a game, telephone can be fun. In real life, sending messages
through third parties fouls things up. It is important for family members who have "business" with other
family members to take it up directly.
When tension arises in a relationship between two people, a frequent way of dealing with this is to send
messages through a third person. Family doctors refer to the process as triangulation. Following a quarrel,
a mother may say to her son, "Tell your father to pass the salt," which may be answered by, "Tell your
mother to get her own salt." In many long cases of triangulation, the middleman becomes severely disturbed.
Two years ago, Ruth and Ralph Gordon brought their 17-year-old daughter for treatment. Lucille was
not doing well in school, using drugs heavily. When I began to work with her, she was uncommunicative
and aggressive. After some time, however, she opened up and told me her parents rarely talked to each other,
but both used her as a middleman. Mrs. Cordon was sexually unsatisfied and suggested to Lucille that she
ask her father to go for marriage advice. Mr. Cordon told Lucille that he was seeing another woman, and he
urged Lucille to speak to her mother about improving her behaviour. Caught in this confusing situation, Lucille
became more and more troubled. It wasn't until she refused to play middleman that she began to improve.
When either parent began to send a message through her, she learned to say, "Tell him/her yourself!"
You'll find that when family members learn to dial each other directly, there's rarely a busy signal or wrong
number. With direct dialing, a sense of freshness is created.
1. The underlined words "fouls things up" in the 1st paragraph means, ____.
A. create things
B. improve things
C. remove things
D. ruins things
2. "triangulation" in the second sentence of the 2nd paragraph refers to ____.
A. the process of sending messages through a 3rd person
B. the middleman who becomes severely disturbed
C. the tension in a relationship between two people
D. the argument between a mother and a father
3. Through the example of Lucille and her parents, the writer hopes to tell the readers that ____.
A. family members should learn to get their messages across directly
B. parents should send their children taking drugs for treatment
C. children can hardly get used to their parents' troubles
D. children should refuse the requests of their parents
