第一篇：解密记忆Memory Decoding
原文：
A
Try this memory test: Study each face and compose a vivid image for the person’s first and last name. Rose Leo. for example, could be a rosehud ( 妙龄少女) and a lion. Fill in the blanks on the next page. The Examinations chool at Oxford University is an austere building of oak-paneled rooms, with large Gothic windows, and looming portraits of eminent dukes and earls. It is where generations of Oxford students have tested their memory on final exams, and it is where, last August, 34 contestants gathered at the World Memory Championships to be examined in an entirely different manner. In timed trials, contestants were challenged to look at and then recite a twopage poem, memorize rows of 40-digit numbers, recall the names of 110 people after looking at their photographs, and perform seven other feats of extraordinary retention. Some tests took just a few minutes; others lasted hours. In the 14 years since the World Memory Championships was founded, no one has memorized the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards in less than 30 seconds. That nice round number has become the four-minute mile of competitive memory; a benchmark that the world’s best “mental athletes”, as some of them like to be called are closing in on. Most contestants claim to have just average memories, and scientific testing confirms that they’re not just being modest. Their feats are based on tricks that capitalize on how the human brain encodes information. Anyone can learn them.
B
Psychologists Elizabeth Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the monograph Superior Memory, recently teamed up with Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London to study eight people, including Karsten, who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championships. They wondered if the contestants’ brains were different in some way. The researchers put the competitors and a group of control subjects into an MRI ( 磁共振）machine and asked them to perform several different memory tests while their brains were being scanned. When it came to memorizing sequences of three-digit numbers, the difference between the memory contestants and the control subjects was, as expected, immense. However, when they were shown photographs of magnified snowflakes, images that the competitors had never tried to memorize before the champions did no better than the control group. When the researchers analyzed the brain scans, they found that the memory champs were activating some brain regions that were different from those the control subjects were using. These regions, which included the right posterior hippocampus , which are known to be involved in visual memory and spatial navigation.
C
It might seem odd that the memory contestants would use to visual imagery and special numbers, but the activity makes sense when their techniques are revealed. Cooke, a 23-year-old cognitive-science graduate student with a shoulder-length mop of curly hair, is a grand master of brain storage. He can memorize the order of 10 decks of playing cards in less than than an hour or
one deck of cards in less than a minute. He is closing in on the 30-second deck. In the Lamb and Flag, Cooke pulled out a deck of cards and shuffled it. He held up three cards-the 7 0f spades( 黑桃), the queen of clubs, and the 10 0f spades. He pointed at a fireplace and said. “Destiny’s Child is whacking Franz Schubert with handbags.” The next three cards were the king of hearts, the
king of spades, and the jack of clubs. He ran over to the bar and announced, “Admiral Lord Nelson is holding a guitar upside down over there.” By now, everyone in the pub had begun to gawk. Forty-six cards and a few minutes later, Cooke ended up outside the Lamb and Flag, where he proceeded to reel off the deck’s order flawlessly.
D
How did he do it? Cooke has already memorized a specific person, verb, and object that he associates with each card in the deck. For example, for the 7 0f spades, the person (or, in this case, persons) is always the singing group Destiny’s Child, the action is surviving a storm, and the image is a dinghy. The queen of clubs is always his friend Henrietta, the action is thwacking with
a handbag, and the image is of wardrobes filled with designer clothes. When Cooke commits a deck to memory, he does it three cards at a time. Every threecard group forms a single image of a person doing something to an object. The first card in the triplet becomes the person, the second the verb, the third the object. He then places those images along a specific familiar route, such as the one he took through the Lamb and Flag. In competitions, he uses an imaginary route that He has designed to be as smooth and downhill as possible. When it comes time to recall, Cooke takes a mental walk along his route and translates the images into cards. That’s why the MRIs of the memory contestants showed activation in the brain areas associated with visual imagery and spatial navigation.
E
The more resonant the images are, the more difficult they are to forget. But even meaningful information is hard to remember when there’s a lot of it. That’s why competitive memorizers place their images along an imaginary route. That technique, known as the Ioci method, reportedly originated in 477 B.C. with the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos. Simonides was the sole survivor
of a roof collapse that killed all the other guests at a royal banquet. The bodies were mangled beyond recognition, but Simonides was able to reconstruct the guest list by closing his eyes and recalling each individual around the dinner table. What he had discovered was that our brains are exceptionally good at remembering images and spatial information. Evolutionary psychologists
have offered an explanation: Presumably our ancestors found it important to recall where they found their last meal or the way back to the cave. After Simonides’ discovery, the loci method popular across ancient Greece as a trick for memorizing speeches and texts. Aristotle wrote about it, and later a number of treatises on the art memory were published in Rome. Before printed books, the art of memory was considered a staple or classical education on a par with grammar, logic and rhetoric.
F
The most famous of the naturals was the Russian journalist S. V. Shereshevski, who could recall long lists of numbers memorized decades earlier, as well as poems, strings of nonsense syllables, and just about anything else he was asked to remember. “The capacity of his memory had no distinct limits.” wrote Alexander Luria, the Russian psychologist who studied Shereshevski from the 1920s to the 1950s. Shereshevski also had synesthesia, a rare condition in which the senses become intertwined. For example, every number may be associated with a color or every word with a taste. Synesthetic reactions evoke a response in more areas of the brain, making memory easier. They also create problems. “lf I read when I am eating, I have a hard time understanding what I am reading-the taste of the food drowns out the sense.” Shereshevski told Luria.
G
K. Anders Ericsson, a Swedish-born psychologist at Florida State University, thinks anyone can acquire Shereshevski’s skills. He cites an experiment with S. F. an undergraduate who was paid to take a standard test of memory called the digit span for one hour a day, two or three days a week. When he started, he could hold, like most people, only about seven digits in his head at any given time (conveniently, the length of a phone number). Over two years, S. F. completed 250 hours of testing. By then. he had stretched his digit span from 7 to more than 80. He had developed his own strategy for remembering based on his own experience as a competitive runner: He associated strings of random numbers with track times. For example 3,492 was remembered as “3 minutes and 49 point 2 seconds, near world-record mile time.” The study of S. F. led Ericsson to believe that innately superior memory doesn’t exist at all. When he reviewed original case studies of naturals, he found that exceptional memorizers were using techniques-sometimes without realizing it-and lots of practice. Often, exceptional memory was only for a single type of material, like digits. “If we look at some of these memory tasks, they’re the kind of thing most people don’t even waste one hour practicing, but if they wasted 50 hours, they’d be exceptional at it,” Ericsson says. It would be remarkable, he adds, to find a person who is exceptional across a number of tasks. I don’t think that there’s any compelling evidence that there are such people.”
Questions 27-30
The reading Passage has seven paragrahhsA-G
Which paragraph contains the followinginformation?
参考答案：
27. E 28. D 29. B 30. F 31. 30 seconds 32. specificperson
33.loci method 34.synesthesia 35.practice 36.YES
37.YES 38.NO 39.NOT GIVEN 40.NO
第二篇：Nature works for Nature WorksTM PLA
A
A dozen years ago, scientists at Cargill got the idea of converting lactic acid made from corn into plastic while examining possible new uses for materials produced from corn wet milling processes. In the past, several efforts had been made to develop plastics from lactic acid, but with limited success. Achieving this technological breakthrough didn't come easily, but in time the efforts did succeed. A fermentation and distillation process using com was designed to create a polymer suitable for a broad variety of applications.
B
As an agricultural based firm, Cargill had taken this product as far as it could by 1997. The company needed a partner with access to plastics markets and polymerization capabilities, and began discussions with The Dow Chemical Company. The next step was the formation of the joint venture that created Cargill Dow LLC. Cargill Dows product the world's first commercially available plastic made from annually renewable resources such as corn:
Nature WorksTM PLA is a family of packaging polymers (carbon-based molecules) made from non-petroleum based resources.Ingeo is a family of polymers for fibers made in a similar manner.
C
By applying their unique technology to the processing of natural plant sugars, Cargill Dow has created a more environmentally friendly material that reaches the consumer in clothes, cups, packaging and other products. While Cargill Dow is a stand-alone business, it continues to leverage the agricultural processing, manufacturing and polymer expertise of the two parent companies in order to bring the best possible products to market.
D
The basic raw materials for PLA are carbon dioxide and water. Growing plants, like com take these building blocks from the atmosphere and the soil. They are combined in the plant to make carbohydrates (sucrose and starch) through a process driven by photosynthesis. The process for making Nature Works PLA begins when a renewable resource such as corn is milled, separating starch from the raw material. Unrefined dextrose, in turn, is processed from the starch.
E
Cargill Dow turns the unrefined dextrose into lactic acid using a fermentation process similar to that used by beer and wine producers. This is the same lactic acid that is used as a food additive and is found in muscle tissue in the human body Through a special condensation process, a lactide is formed. This lactide is purified through vacuum distillation and becomes a polymer (the base for Natureworks PLA) that is ready for use through a solvent-free melt process development of this new technology allows the company to "harvest"the carbon that living plants remove from the air through photosynthesis. Carbon is stored in plant starches, which can be broken down into natural plant sugars. The carbon and other elements in these natural sugars are then used to make Nature Works PLA
F
Nature Works PLA fits all disposal systems and is fully compostable in commercial composting facilities. With the proper infrastructure, products made from this polymer can be recycled back to a monomer and re-used as a polymer Thus, at the end of its life cycle, a product made from Nature Works PLA can be broken down into its simplest parts so that no sign of it remains
G
PLA is now actively competing with traditional materials in packaging and fiber applications throughout the world based on the technology's success and promise, Cargill Dow is quickly becoming a premier player in the polymers market. This new polymer now competes head-on with petroleum-based materials like polyester. A wide range of products that vary in molecular weight and crystallinity can be produced, and the blend of physical properties of PLA makes it suited for a broad range of fiber and packaging applications. Fiber and non-woven applications include clothing, fiberfill, blankets and wipes Packaging applications include packaging films and food and beverage containers
H
As Nature Works PLA polymers are more oil- and grease-resistant and provide a better flavor and aroma barrier than existing petroleum-based polymers, grocery retailers are increasingly using this packaging for their fresh foods. As companies begin to explore this family of polymers, more potential applications are being identified. For example, PLA possess two properties that are particularly useful for drape fabrics and window furnishings. Their resistance to ultraviolet light is particularly appealing as this reduces the amount of fading in such fabrics, and their refractive index is low, which means fabrics constructed from these polymers can be made with deep colors without requiring large amounts of dye. In addition, sportswear makers have been drawn to the product as it has an inherent ability to take moisture away from the skin and when blended with cotton and wool, the result is garments that are lighter and better sorbing moisture
I
PLA combines inexpensive large-scale fermentation with chemical processing to produce a value-added polymer product that improves the environment as well. The source material for PLA is a natural sugar found in plants such as com and using such renewable feedstock presents several environmental benefits. As an alternative to traditional petroleum-based polymers, the production of PLA uses 20%-50% less fossil fuel and releases a lower amount of greenhouse gasses than comparable petroleum based plastic; carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is removed when the feedstock is grown and is returned to the earth when the polymer is degraded. Because the company is using raw materials that can be regenerated year after year, it is both cost competitive and environmentally responsible
Questions 27-30
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F, below.
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet
27. Scientists manage to
28. Cargill need to have contacts with
29. Nature work is used for
30. Ingeo is used to
A. make things like clothes.
B. produce plastic from plant.
C. selling plastic in market.
D. fermentation process.
E. drape fabrics.
F. wrapping products
Choose the correct letter, A,B,C or D.
Write your answers in boxes 35-40 on your answer sheet.
35. Why did choose the PLA as material for food packaging?
A It smells good.
B It can save food freshness.
C It can be used on other material.
D Some other things need to be revised about it.
36. What is PLA packaging is used for?
A absorbing moisture
B composting facilities
C packaging fresh food
D manufacturing
37-38. Which two features of PLA is correct?
A It takes in moisture of skin
B It is water proof
C comfortable sportswear
D It’s not fading under the sun
E It is only made in deep color
39-40. Which two features of PLA is correct?
A It is made of renewable raw materials.
B It involves the removal of carbon dioxide
C It is no use of fossil fuel product
D It uses renewable raw resources
E It is sustenance which can absorb the CO2 in the atmosphere
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