为了帮助大家提升雅思阅读理解的能力和速度,我们今天给大家准备了一篇雅思阅读仿真模拟题“Lighting Up The Lies”(《谎言揭秘》,大家先自己尽量快速阅读,然后比照后面的译文,看看自己理解了多少。接下来请看雅思内容:雅思阅读仿真模拟题原文+译文
今天和大家分享一篇阅读仿真模拟题“Lighting Up The Lies”(《谎言揭秘》),这是一篇论说文,全文共8段。
Lighting Up The Lies
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage below.
Last year Sean A. Spence, a professor at the school of medicine at the University of Sheffield in England, performed brain scans that showed that a woman convicted of poisoning a child in her care appeared to be telling the truth when she denied committing the crime. This deception study, along with two others performed by the Sheffield group, was funded by Quickfire Media, a television production company working for the U.K.'s Channel 4, which broadcast videos of the researchers at work as part of a three-part series called "Lie Lab." The brain study of the woman later appeared in the journal European Psychiatry.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) purports to detect mendacity by seeing inside the brain instead of tracking peripheral measures of anxiety—such as changes in pulse, blood pressure or respiration —measured by a polygraph. Besides drawing hundreds of thousands of viewers, fMRI has pulled in entrepreneurs. Two companies—Cephos in Pepperell, Mass., and No Lie MRI in Tarzana, Calif.—claim to predict with 90 percent or greater certitude whether you are telling the truth. No Lie MRI, whose name evokes the casual familiarity of a walk-in dental clinic in a strip mall, suggests that the technique may even be used for “risk reduction in dating”.
Many neuroscientists and legal scholars doubt such claims—and some even question whether brain scans for lie detection will ever be ready for anything but more research on the nature of deception and the brain. An fMRI machine tracks blood flow to activated brain areas. The assumption in lie detection is that the brain must exert extra effort when telling a lie and that the regions that do more work get more blood. Such areas light up in scans; during the lie studies, the illuminated regions are primarily involved in decision making.
To assess how fMRI and other neuroscience findings affect the law, the Mac-Arthur Foundation put up $10 million last year to pilot for three years the Law and Neuroscience Project. Part of the funding will attempt to set criteria for accurate and reliable lie detection using fMRI and other brain-scanning technology. “I think it's not possible, given the current technology, to trust the results,” says Marcus Raichle, a neuroscientist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who heads the project's study group on lie detection. “But it’s not impossible to set up a research program to determine whether that’s possible.” A major review article last year in the American Journal of Law and Medicine by Henry T. Greely of Stanford University and Judy Illes, now at the University of British Columbia, explores the deficiencies of existing research and what may be needed to move the technology forward. The two scholars found that lie detection studies conducted so far (still less than 20 in all) failed to prove that fMRI is “effective as a lie detector in the real world at any accuracy level.”
Most studies examined groups, not individuals. Subjects in these studies were healthy young adults—making it unclear how the results would apply to someone who takes a drug that affects blood pressure or has a blockage in an artery. And the two researchers questioned the specificity of the lit-up areas; they noted that the regions also correlate with a wide range of cognitive behaviors, including memory, self- monitoring and conscious self-awareness.
The biggest challenge for which the Law and Neuroscience Project is already funding new research—is how to diminish the artificiality of the test protocol. Lying about whether a playing card is the seven of spades may not activate the same areas of the cortex as answering a question about whether you robbed the corner store. In fact, the most realistic studies to date may have come from the Lie Lab television programs. The two companies marketing the technology are not waiting for more data. Cephos is offering scans without charge to people who claim they were falsely accused if they meet certain criteria in an effort to get scans accepted by the courts. Allowing scans as legal evidence could open a potentially huge and lucrative market. “We may have to take many shots on goal before we actually see a courtroom.” says Cephos chief executive Steven Laken. He asserts that the technology has achieved 97 percent accuracy and that the more than 100 people scanned using the Cephos protocol have provided data that have resolved many of the issues that Greely and Illes cited.
But until formal clinical trials prove that the machines meet safety and effectiveness criteria, Greely and Illes have called for a ban on non-research uses. Trials envisaged for regulatory approval hint at the technical challenges. Actors, professional poker players and sociopaths would be compared against average Joes. The devout would go in the scanner after nonbelievers. Testing would take into account social setting. White lies—“no, dinner really was fantastic”—would have to be compared against untruths about sexual peccadilloes to ensure that the brain reacts identically.
There potential for abuse prompts caution. “The danger is that people’s lives can be changed in bad ways because of mistakes in the technology,” Greely says. “The danger for the science is that it gets a black eye because of this very high profile use of neuroimaging that goes wrong.” Considering the long and controversial history of the polygraph, gradualism may be the wisest course to follow for a new diagnostic that probes an essential quality governing social interaction.
参考译文:
去年,英国谢菲尔德大学医学院教授Sean A. Spence 在对一位将自己照顾的孩子毒死的妇女的大脑进行扫描时发现,这位被定罪的妇女在否认自己的犯罪事实时,看起来像是在说真话。这项关于欺骗的研究,连同其它两个由谢菲尔德小组领导的研究是由Quickfire Media赞助的,Quickfire Media是一家电视节目制作公司,播出频道为英国的第4频道,该频道播放这些研究人员在工作时的视频,构成一个由三部分组成的系列节目的一部分,该系列叫做“谎言实验室”。对该妇女大脑的研究之后出现在欧洲精神病学杂志上。
功能磁共振成像仪(fMRI)声称能通过看到大脑的内部来进行测谎,而不是通过追踪焦虑的外在表现:如通过测谎仪测出的脉搏,血压或呼吸的变化,功能磁共振成像技术除了吸引成百上千的观众外,还吸引着企业家的目光。两家公司——马萨诸塞州Pepperell市的 Cephos 公司和加利福尼亚州Tarzana市的No Lie MRI 公司声称对人们是否在说实话的预测的准确率可以达到90%甚至更高。No Lie MRI 这家公司的名字本身就会让人想起一个熟悉的情景——就像走进一家位于商业区的牙科诊所,表明该技术甚至可能被 用于“降低约会的风险。”
许多神经科学家和法律学者却怀疑此说法,有的甚至质疑对谎言的探测而进行大脑扫描测谎是否真的有用,还是只是一些对谎言的性质和大脑所做的更多的研究罢了。功能磁共振成像仪追踪到达大脑激活区的血流的行踪。测谎背后的假设是,当大脑在说谎时,它需要额外的运作并且负责这些额外运作的大脑区域需要更多的血液供给,而这些区域在被扫描时就会亮起,在对谎言进行研究时,这些被照亮的区域就是主要参与决策的区域。
为了评估功能磁共振成像仪和其他神经科学的发现如何影响法律,,000万元来资助一个将耗时三年的“法律和神经科学项目”。部分资金将会用来尝试设置使用功能磁共振成像仪和其它脑部扫描技术来进行测谎的准确性和可靠性的标准。华盛顿大学圣路易斯医学院负责该项目测谎研究小组的神经学家 Marcus Raichle 认为“在现有的技术前提下,很难完全相信测谎的结果,但是建立一个项目以确定测谎结果的可能性这项提议是可行的。”斯坦福大学的 Henry T. Greely 和英国哥伦比亚大学的 Judy Illes 在去年发表在美国《法律与医学杂志》上的一篇评论文章中探讨了现行研究的不足之处以及为了推进技术进步可能需要改进之处。两位学者发现,迄今为止进行的测谎研究(总数仍低于20)还不能证明磁共振成像仪作为测谎仪在现实世界中的任何的精度水平上都是有效的。
大多数的研究都是以团体而不是以个人为对象。这些研究的对象是健康的年轻成年人——所以不清楚如果对象变成因为服用了药物而影响了血压或是导致动脉堵塞的人时,这些研究结果是否还适用。两位研究人员质疑了这些发亮的区域,他们指出,该区域也和一系列认知行为具有相关性,包括记忆,自我检测和自我意识。
最大的挑战——同时也是“法律和神经枓学项目”为其资助了新的研究项目——是如何减少测试协议的人为干预程度。关于一张扑克牌是否是黑桃7的谎言可能无法激活与回答你是否抢劫了街角的一家商店时的大脑皮质的同一区域。事实上,迄今为止最现实的研究,有可能是来自“谎言实验室”这个电视节目。两家经营这样技术的公司不是再等待更多的数据。。允许对大脑的扫描作为法律证据可能会打开一个潜在的巨大和利润丰厚的市场。Cephos公司的首席执行官Steven Laken说道“在上法庭之前,可能需要进行若干的测试”。他声称该技术已达到97%的准确率,并且有超过100个使用Cephos公司扫描的人已经通过获得数据解决了许多Greely and Illes提到过的问题。
但是,Greely 和 Illes的呼吁在正式的临床试验证明该仪器能够满足安全性和有效性的标准前,该仪器不可用在非研究领域。要面对监管部门的批准的试验要面对技术上的挑战。演员,。虔诚的人会跟在怀疑论者的后面接受扫描。测试将需要考虑到社会环境。善意的谎言——“不,晚餐真是太棒了”——将会和有关性过失这样的谎言进行比对,以保证大脑对不同的谎言有相同的反应。
人们要小心这项技术被滥用的危险。Greely 认为“危险在于人们的生活可能会因为技术中的错误往不好的方向改变。科学的危险之处在于它有很多未知性,因为它很大程度上使用了错误的神经影像学。”鉴于漫长且有争议的测谎仪的历史,循序渐进可能是最明智的选择,来使用它作为一个新的诊断手段来检测社会治理的质量。
以上为雅思内容:雅思阅读仿真模拟题原文+译文