Passage One The words you use betray who you are. Linguists and psychologists have long been studying this phenomenon. A few decades ago they had the hunch that the number of active verbs in your sentences or which adjectives you use (lovely, sweet, angry) reflect personality traits. They have pointed out various insights. For example,uicidal poets, in their published works, use more first-person singular words (like "me" or "my") and death-related words than poets who aren't suicidal. Peoplen positions of powerre more likely to make statements that involve others ("we," "us"), while lower-status people often use language that's more self-focused and ask more questions. Comparing genders, women end to use ore words related to psychological and social processes, while men referred more to impersonal topics and objects' properties. This research suggests that Internet companies such as Facebook and Google, with their collection of written expressions, are sitting on powerful insights about us as people. But if you ask them, "Hey, can you give me the take on me that you've got in-house or that you've built for advertisers, with my anonymized(匿名的) data?" -- they won't give it to you. I actually did ask, and they don't have that kind of offering. But I've found someone who does: IBM's Watson division. Researchers there have taken the personality dictionaries already created by scientists, dropped them into Watson, and sent it off to apply it to people on Twitter, Facebook, blogs. That forms a digital population of people and personality types. Over time, more text from more people will help Watson get smarter. In its own studies, IBM found that characteristics derived from people's writings can reliably predict some of their real-world behaviors. For instance, people who are less neurotic(神经质的) and more open to experiences are more likely to click on an ad, while people who score high on self-enhancement (meaning, seek personal success) like to read articles about work. For IBM, these kinds of interpretations can become a business opportunity.