"Math anxiety is not simply a proxy for low math ability - meaning that when people have poor math skills they feel anxious about them. Rather, when math-anxious individuals are faced with a math task, they experience worries-often about performing poorly on the math task-and these worries tie up valuable thinking and reasoning resources needed for the task at hand. Specifically, these worries tie up working memory resources, our mental scratchpad that allows us to work with whatever information is held in consciousness. Working memory is a limited capacity system that integrates, computes, stores, and manipulates the information to which a person is attending. Because higher-math-anxious people are essentially doing two things at once when they do math (i.e., attending to their worries and doing the math), their math performance suffers. In this respect, math anxiety itself actually causes people to perform worse in mathematics than their abilities warrant." Which of the following most accurately summarizes the passage above? A) Math anxiety is not simply a proxy for low math ability. B) When faced with a math task, people who have math anxiety worry about their performance, and this anxiety uses up lots of cognitive energy. They end up juggling the math task and their worries, which causes their task performance to decrease. C) The text cannot be summarized. It should be quoted exactly as is.
"Math anxiety is not simply a proxy for low math ability - meaning that when people have poor math skills they feel anxious about them. Rather, when math-anxious individuals are faced with a math task, they experience worries-often about performing poorly on the math task-and these worries tie up valuable thinking and reasoning resources needed for the task at hand. Specifically, these worries tie up working memory resources, our mental scratchpad that allows us to work with whatever information is held in consciousness. Working memory is a limited capacity system that integrates, computes, stores, and manipulates the information to which a person is attending. Because higher-math-anxious people are essentially doing two things at once when they do math (i.e., attending to their worries and doing the math), their math performance suffers. In this respect, math anxiety itself actually causes people to perform worse in mathematics than their abilities warrant."
Which of the following most accurately summarizes the passage above?
A) Math anxiety is not simply a proxy for low math ability.
B) When faced with a math task, people who have math anxiety worry about their performance, and this anxiety uses up lots of cognitive energy. They end up juggling the math task and their worries, which causes their task performance to decrease.
C) The text cannot be summarized. It should be quoted exactly as is.
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