2017年6月大学英语四级真题试卷（二）

As if you needed another reason to hate the gym, it now turns out that exercise can exhaust not only your muscles, but also your eyes. Fear not, however, for coffee can stimulate them again. During【C1】______ exercise, our muscles tire as they run out of fuel and build up waste products. Muscle performance can also be affected by a【C2】______ called “ central fatigue” , in which an imbalance in the body’s chemical messengers prevents the central nervous system from directing muscle movements【C3】______ It was not known, however, whether central fatigue might also affect motor systems not directly【C4】______ in the exercise itself, such as those that move the eyes. To find out, researchers gave 11 volunteer cyclists a carbohydrate {碳水化合物)【C5】______ either with a moderate dose of caffeine (咖啡因) , which is known to stimulate the central nervous system, or as a placebo (安慰剂) without, during 3 hours of【C6】______ After exercising, the scientists tested the cyclists with eye-tracking cameras to see how well their brains could still【C7】______ their visual system. The team found that exercise reduced the speed of rapid eye movements by about 8% ,【C8】______ their ability to capture new visual information. The caffeine, the equivalent of two strong cups of coffee, was【C9】______ to reverse this effect, with some cyclists even displaying【C10】______ eye movement speeds. So it might be a good idea to get someone else to drive you home after that marathon.

A) cautiously I) phenomenon

B) commit J) preventing

C) control K) sensitive

D) cycling L) slowing

E) effectively M) solution

F) increased N) sufficient

G) involved O) vigorous H) limited

The Blessing and Curse of the People Who Never Forget

A handful of people can recall almost every day of their lives in enormous detail—and after years of research, neuroscientists are finally beginning to understand how they do it.

[A] For most of us, memory is a mess of blurred and faded pictures of our lives. As much as we would like to cling on to our past, even the saddest moments can be washed away with time.

[B] Ask Nima Veiseh what he was doing for any day in the past 15 years, however, and he will give you the details of the weather, what he was wearing, or even what side of the train he was sitting on his journey to work. “My memory is like a library of video tapes, walk-throughs of every day of my life from waking to sleeping,” he explains.

[C] Veiseh can even put a date on when those tapes started recording: 15 December 2000, when he met his first girlfriend at his best friend’s 16th birthday party. He had always had a good memory, but the thrill of young love seems to have shifted a gear in his mind: from now on, he would start recording his whole life in detail. “I could tell you everything about every day after that.”

[D] Needless to say, people like Veiseh are of great interest to neuroscientists (神经科学专家) hoping to understand the way the brain records our lives. A couple of recent papers have finally opened a window on these people’s extraordinary minds. And such research might even suggest ways for us all to relive our past with greater clarity.

[E] “Highly superior autobiographical memory” (or HSAM for short) , first came to light in the early 2000s, with a young woman named Jill Price. Emailing the neuroscientist and memory researcher Jim McGaugh one day, she claimed that she could recall every day of her life since the age of 12. Could he help explain her experiences?

[F] McGaugh invited her to his lab, and began to test her: he would give her a date and ask her to tell him about the world events on that day. True to her word, she was correct almost every time. [G] It didn’t take long for magazines and documentary film-makers to come to understand her “total recall”, and thanks to the subsequent media interest, a few dozen other subjects (including Veiseh) have since come forward and contacted the team at the University of California, Irvine.

[H] Interestingly, their memories are highly self-centred: although they can remember “autobiographical” life events in extraordinary detail, they seem to be no better than average at recalling impersonal information, such as random (任意选取的) lists of words. Nor are they necessarily better at remembering a round of drinks, say. And although their memories are vast, they are still likely to suffer from “false memories”. Clearly, there is no such thing as a “perfect” memory—their extraordinary minds are still using the same flawed tools that the rest of us rely on. The question is, how?

[I] Lawrence Patihis at the University of Southern Mississippi recently studied around 20 people with HSAM and found that they scored particularly high on two measures: fantasy proneness (取向) and absorption. Fantasy proneness could be considered a tendency to imagine and daydream, whereas absorption is the tendency to allow your mind to become fully absorbed in an activity—to pay complete attention to the sensations (感受) and the experiences. “I’m extremely sensitive to sounds, smells and visual detail,” explains Nicole Donohue, who has taken part in many of these studies. “I definitely feel things more strongly than the average person.”

[J] The absorption helps them to establish strong foundations for recollection, says Patihis, and the fantasy proneness means that they revisit those memories again and again in the coming weeks and months. Each time this initial memory trace is “replayed”, it becomes even stronger. In some ways, you probably go through that process after a big event like your wedding day—but the difference is that thanks to their other psychological tendencies, the HSAM subjects are doing it day in, day out, for the whole of their lives.

[K] Not everyone with a tendency to fantasise will develop HSAM, though, so Patihis suggests that something must have caused them to think so much about their past. “Maybe some experience in their childhood meant that they became obsessed (着迷) with calendars and what happened to them,” says Patihis.

[L] The people with HSAM I’ve interviewed would certainly agree that it can be a mixed blessing. On the plus side, it allows you to relive the most transformative and enriching experiences. Veiseh, for instance, travelled a lot in his youth. In his spare time, he visited the local art galleries, and the paintings are now lodged deep in his autobiographical memories.

[M] “ Imagine being able to remember every painting, on every wall, in every gallery space, between nearly 40 countries,” he says. “That’s a big education in art by itself.” With this comprehensive knowledge of the history of art, he has since become a professional painter.

[N] Donohue, now a history teacher, agrees that it helped during certain parts of her education: “I can definitely remember what I learned on certain days at school. I could imagine what the teacher was saying or what it looked like in the book.”

[O] Not everyone with HSAM has experienced these benefits, however. Viewing the past in high definition can also make it very difficult to get over pain and regret. “It can be very hard to forget embarrassing moments,” says Donohue. “You feel the same emotions—it is just as raw, just as fresh…You can’t turn off that stream of memories, no matter how hard you try.” Veiseh agrees: “It is like having these open wounds—they are just a part of you,” he says.

[P] This means they often have to make a special effort to lay the past to rest. Bill, for instance, often gets painful “flashbacks”, in which unwanted memories intrude into his consciousness, but overall he has chosen to see it as the best way of avoiding repeating the same mistakes. “Some people are absorbed in the past but not open to new memories, but that’s not the case for me. I look forward to each day and experiencing something new.”

The report says America’s urbanization will continue to be the most significant issue affecting the industry, as cities across the country imitate the walkability and transit-oriented development making cities like New York and San Francisco so successful.

As smaller cities copy the model of these “24-hour cities”, more affordable versions of these places will be created. The report refers to this as the coming of the “18-hour city”, and uses the term to refer to cities like Houston, Austin, Charlotte, and Nashville, which are “positioning themselves as highly competitive, in terms of livability, employment offerings, and recreational and cultural facilities”.

Another trend that looks significant in 2015 is that America’s largest population group, Millennials (千禧一代), will continue to put off buying a house. Apartments will retain their appeal for a while for Millennials, haunted by what happened to home-owning parents.

This trend will continue into the 2020s, the report projects. After that, survey respondents disagree over whether this generation will follow in their parents’ footsteps, moving to the suburbs to raise families, or will choose to remain in the city center.

Another issue affecting real estate in the coming year will be America’s failing infrastructure. Most roads, bridges, transit, water systems, the electric grid, and communications networks were installed 50 to 100 years ago, and they are largely taken for granted until they fail.

The report’s writers state that America’s failure to invest in infrastructure impacts not only the health of the real-estate market, but also our ability to remain globally competitive.

Apart from the specific trends highlighted above, which cause some investors to worry, the report portrays an overall optimism borne by the recent healthy real-estate “upcycle” and improving economy. Seventy-four percent of the respondents surveyed report a “good to excellent” expectation of real-estate profitability in 2015. While excessive optimism can promote bad investment patterns, resulting in a real-estate “bubble”, the report’s writers downplay that potential outcome in that it has not yet occurred.

The brain is a seemingly endless library, whose shelves house our most precious memories as well as our lifetime’s knowledge. But is there a point where it reaches capacity?

The answer is no, because brains are more sophisticated than that. Instead of just crowding in, old information is sometimes pushed out of the brain for new memories to form.

Previous behavioural studies have shown that learning new information can lead to forgetting. But in a new study, researchers demonstrated for the first time how this effect occurs in the brain.

In daily life, forgetting actually has clear advantages. Imagine, for instance, that you lost your bank card. The new card you receive will come with a new personal identification number (PIN). Each time you remember the new PIN, you gradually forget the old one. This process improves access to relevant information, without old memories interfering.

And most of us may sometimes feel the frustration of having old memories interfere with new, relevant memories. Consider trying to remember where you parked your car in the same car park you were at a week earlier. This type of memory (where you are trying to remember new, but similar information) is particularly vulnerable to interference.

When we acquire new information, the brain automatically tries to incorporate (合并) it within existing information by forming associations. And when we retrieve (检索) information, both the desired and associated but irrelevant information is recalled.

The majority of previous research has focused on how we learn and remember new information. But current studies are beginning to place greater emphasis on the conditions under which we forget, as its importance begins to be more appreciated.

A very small number of people are able to remember almost every detail of their life. While it may sound like an advantage to many, people with this rare condition often find their unusual ability burdensome.

In a sense, forgetting is our brain’s way of sorting memories, so the most relevant memories are ready for retrieval. Normal forgetting may even be a safety mechanism to ensure our brain doesn’t become too full.