4.  Intricately intertwined with(与……错综交织) self-esteem and inhibition and risk-taking, the construct of anxiety, as it has been studied in the psychological domain(领域), plays an important affective role in second language acquisition. Anxiety is almost impossible to define in a simple sentence. It is associated with feelings of uneasiness, frustration, self-doubt, apprehension(恐惧), or worry. Scovel defined anxiety as “state of apprehension, or vague fear…” We all know what anxiety is and we all have experienced feelings of anxiousness. How does this construct relate to second language learning? Any complex task we undertake can have elements of anxiety in it, aspects in which we doubt our own abilities and wonder if we will indeed succeed. Second language learning is no exception to a long list of complex tasks that are susceptible(易受感染的) to our human anxieties.
The research on anxiety suggests that, like self-esteem, anxiety can be experienced at various levels. At the deepest, or global level, trait anxiety is a more permanent predisposition(倾向) to be anxious. Some people are predictably and generally anxious about many things. At a more momentary, or situational level, state anxiety is experienced in relation to some particular event or act. As we learned in the case of self-esteem, then, it is important in a classroom for a teacher to try to determine whether a student’s anxiety stems from a more global trait or whether it comes from a particular situation at the moment.
Trait anxiety, because of its global and somewhat ambiguously defined nature, has not proved to be useful in predicting second language achievement. However, recent research on foreign language anxiety, as it has come to be known, focuses more specifically on the situational nature of state anxiety.(5分)
4.1  The passage mainly talks about ______.(1分)
A. anxiety
B. inhibition
C. risk-taking
D. self-esteem