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1. 本次考试难度中等。
2. 整体分析：涉及社会类（P1）、科技类（P2）、神经科学类（P3）.
3. 主要题型：summary题和判断题比重上升； 近一年反复考到的配对题以段落信息+人名观点配对的组合形式出现；本月首次List of Headings题型出现。
4. P1 科萨族人研究
判断(7) + summary(6)
科萨族是南非种族之一。本文介绍了科萨族及其分支的发展历史，穿插介绍种族之间的关系，并谈及该种族的农业发展和河流的关系密切。 后讲这些种族和欧洲的关系，根据是否融入西方社会有不同分支。
部分参考答案
1) FALSE
2) FALSE
3) NOT GIVEN
4) FALSE
5) TRUE
Summary参考答案待补充
5. P2 竞技比赛中新科技的运用
List of Headings （7） + 多选 （1） + summary （4）
以一个运动员在墨西哥的长跑比赛中落败为引子，讲到如何运用新科技来提高运动员在竞技体育中的成绩，同时还要考虑道德方面的问题。
部分参考答案
14) – 20) 大致顺序7 3 4 1 2 5 6
21) – 22) BD
23) spirit
24) drag
25) nutrition
26) records
6. P3 通感
人名观点配对 + 段落信息配对 + 判断
对有些人来说，对某个感官或认知路径的刺激会导致和另一个感官或认知路径无意识的联通。前两段给出了通感的定义，后面通过实验证明这个现象不是mental illness，并且多见于孩子身上。
参考文章
Memory Decoding
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 rosebud and a lion. Fill in the blanks on the next page. The Examination school 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 two-page 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
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 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, 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 of 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 three-card 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.
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