Passage 1 新题
主题：传记类，讲述了女考古学家前往柬埔寨Cambodia探寻人类remains的事
题型： T/F/NG (7) 填空题(6)
参考答案(部分)：
T/F/NG： 1. F
2. NG
3. T
填空题： University
Funding
Map
Archeology
Passage 2 旧题
主题：认知心理类
文章标题：MultitaskingDebate— Can you do them at the same time?
题型：段落信息配对(5) 人名观点配对(5) 填空(3)
参考原文：
Talking on the phone while driving isn't the only situation where we'reworse at multitasking than we might like to think we are. New studies haveidentified a bottleneck in our brains that some say means we are fundamentallyincapable of true multitasking If experimental findings reflect real-worldperformance, people who think they are multitasking are probably justunderperforming in all — or at best, all but one - of their parallel pursuits.Practice might improve your performance, but you will never be as good as whenfocusing on one task at a time.
The problem, according to Rene Marois, a psychologist at VanderbiltUniversity in Nashville, Tennessee, is that there's a sticking point in thebrain. To demonstrate this, Marois devised an experiment to locate it.Volunteers watch a screen and when a particular image appears, a red circle,say, they have to press a key with their index finger. Different colouredcircles require presses from different fingers. Typical response time is abouthalf a second, and the volunteers quickly reach their peak performance. Thenthey learn to listen to different recordings and respond by making a specificsound. For instance, when they hear a bird chirp, they have to say “ba”; an electronicsound should elicit a “ko", and so on. Again, no problem. A normalperson can do that in about half a second, with almost no effort.
The trouble comes when Marois shows the volunteers an image, and thenalmost immediately plays them a sound. Now they’re flummoxed. “If you show animage and play a sound at the same time, one task is postponed,” he says. Infact, if the second task is introduced within the half-second or so it takes toprocess and react to the first, it will simply be delayed until the first oneis done. The largest dual-task delays occur when the two tasks are presentedsimultaneously; delays progressively shorten as the interval between presentingthe tasks lengthens.
There are at least three points where we seem to get stuck, says Marois.The first is in simply identifying what we're looking at. This can take a fewtenths of a second, during which time we are not able to see and recognise asecond item. This limitation is known as the "attentional blink”: experimentshave shown that if you're watching out for a particular event and a second oneshows up unexpectedly any time within this crucial window of concentration, itmay register in your visual cortex but you will be unable to act upon it.Interestingly, if you don’t expect the first event, you have no troubleresponding to the second. What exactly causes the attentional blink is still amatter for debate.
A second limitation is in our short-term visual memory. It’s estimatedthat we can keep track of about four items at a time, fewer if they arecomplex. This capacity shortage is thought to explain, in part, our astonishinginability to detect even huge changes in scenes that are otherwise identical,so-called “change blindness”. Show people pairs of near-identical photos - say,aircraft engines in one picture have disappeared in the other - and they willfail to spot the differences. Here again, though, there is disagreement aboutwhat the essential limiting factor really is. Does it come down to a dearth ofstorage capacity, or is it about how much attention a viewer is paying?
A third limitation is that choosing a response to a stimulus -- brakingwhen you see a child in the road, for instance, or replying when your mothertells you over the phone that she’s thinking of leaving your dad -- also takesbrainpower. Selecting a response to one of these things will delay by sometenths of a second your ability to respond to the other. This is called the“response selection bottleneck” theory, first proposed in 1952.
But David Meyer, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, AnnArbor, doesn't buy the bottleneck idea. He thinks dual-task interference is justevidence of a strategy used by the brain to prioritise multiple activities.Meyer is known as something of an optimist by his peers. He has written paperswith titles like "Virtually perfect time-sharing in dual-task performance:Uncorking the central cognitive bottleneck”. His experiments have shown thatwith enough practice - at least 2000 tries - some people can execute two taskssimultaneously as competently as if they were doing them one after the other.He suggests that there is a central cognitive processor that coordinates allthis and, what's more, he thinks it uses discretion: sometimes it chooses todelay one task while completing another.
Marois agrees that practice can sometimes erase interference effects. Hehas found that with just 1 hour of practice each day for two weeks, volunteersshow a huge improvement at managing both his tasks at once. Where he disagreeswith Meyer is in what the brain is doing to achieve this. Marois speculatesthat practice might give us the chance to find less congested circuits toexecute a task — rather like finding trusty back streets to avoidheavy traffic on main roads 一 effectively making our response to the tasksubconscious. After all, there are plenty of examples of subconsciousmultitasking that most of us routinely manage: walking and talking, eating andreading, watching TV and folding the laundry.
It probably comes as no surprise that, generally speaking, we get worseat multitasking as we age. According to Art Kramer at the University ofIllinois at Urbana- Champaign, who studies how ageing affects our cognitiveabilities, we peak in our 20s. Though the decline is slow through our 30s andon into our 50s, it is there; and after 55, it becomes more precipitous. In onestudy, he and his colleagues had both young and old participants do a simulateddriving task while carrying on a conversation. He found that while youngdrivers tended to miss background changes, older drivers failed to noticethings that were highly relevant. Likewise, older subjects had more troublepaying attention to the more important parts of a scene than young drivers.
It’s not all bad news for over-55s, though. Kramer also found that olderpeople can benefit from practice. Not only did they learn to perform better,brain scans showed that underlying that improvement was a change in the waytheir brains become active. While if s clear that practice can often make adifference, especially as we age, the basic facts remain sobering. "Wehave this impression of an almighty complex brain, says Marois,"and yet wehave very humbling and crippling limits.” For most of our history, we probablynever needed to do more than one thing at a time, he says, and so we haven'tevolved to be able to. Perhaps we will in future, though. We might yet lookback one day on people like Debbie and Alun as ancestors of a new breed of truemultitaskers.
Passage 3 新题
主题：商业类
文章大意：文章讲述了由香港机构举办的企业家培训课程
题型：带词库summary (6) Y/N/NG (4) 选择题 (4)
参考答案(部分)：
带词库summary： Venture
Workshops
session training
Y/N/NG： Y
N
NG
Y
备考建议：重要的事情说三遍，带词库的summary的答案不一定是按文章行文顺序的(duang);带词库的summary的答案不一定是按文章行文顺序的(duang);带词库的summary答案不一定是按文章行文顺序的(duang)。