In the not-too-distant future, fully autonomous vehicles will drive our streets. These cars will need to make quick decisions to avoid endangering human lives—both inside and outside of the vehicles.

To determine attitudes toward these decisions, a group of researchers created a variation on the classic philosophical exercise known as “the Trolley problem”. They posed a series of moral dilemmas involving a self-driving car with brakes (刹车) that suddenly give out: Should the car change direction to avoid a group of passers-by, killing the driver? Or should it kill the people on foot, but spare the driver? Does it matter if the passers-by are men or women? Children or older people? Doctors or murderers?

To pose these questions to a large range of people, the researchers built a website called Moral Machine, where anyone could click through the situations and say what the car should do. “Help us learn how to make machines moral,” a video asks on the site.

What the researchers found was a series of near-universal preferences, regardless of where someone was from. People everywhere believed the moral thing for the car to do was to spare the young over the old, spare humans over animals, and spare the lives of many over the few. Their findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Researchers found that the 130 countries with more than 100 respondents could be grouped into three groups that showed similar moral preferences. And these preferences seemed to correlate with social differences. Respondents from collectivistic cultures, which “emphasize the respect that is due to older members of the community,” showed a weaker preference for sparing younger people.

The researchers emphasized that the study’s results should be used with extreme caution (谨慎), and they shouldn’t be considered the final word on societal preferences—especially since respondents were not a representative sample.

【小题1】What give(s) rise to the questions in paragraph 2?

A．The researchers’ attitudes.	B．The people’s moral dilemmas.
C．The self-driving car’s power cut.	D．The autonomous vehicle’s brake failure.

【小题2】What might contribute to respondents’ moral preferences?

A．Their living habits.	B．Their family members.
C．Their cultural context.	D．Their educational background.

【小题3】What is the major limitation of the research?

A．The complex procedure.	B．The limited questions.
C．The insufficient participants.	D．The careless respondents.

【小题4】Which of the following is a suitable title for the text?

A．The New Self-driving Cars	B．The New “Trolley Problem”
C．Should Car Drivers Be Moral?	D．Does moral preference matter?