2008年6月大学英语六级简答综合辅导(4)
hat experiences influence subsequent behaviour is evidence of an obvious but nevertheless remarkable activity called remembering. Learning could not occur without the function popularly named memory. Constant practice has such an effect on memory as to lead to skillful performance on the piano, to recitation of a poem, and even to reading and understanding these words. Socalled intelligent behaviour demands memory, remembering being a primary requirement for reasoning. The ability to solve any problem or even to recognize that a problem exists depends on memory. Typically, the decision to cross a street is based on remembering many earlier experiences.
Practice (or review) tends to build and maintain memory for a task or for any learned material. Over a period of no practice what has been learned tends to be forgotten; and the adaptive consequences may not seem obvious. Yet, dramatic instances of sudden forgetting can be seen to be adaptive. In this sense, the ability to forget can be interpreted to have survived through a process of natural selection in animals. Indeed, when one’s memory of an emotionally painful experience leads to serious anxiety, forgetting may produce relief. Nevertheless, an evolutionary interpretation might make it difficult to understand how the commonly gradual process of forgetting survived natural selection.
In thinking about the evolution of memory together with all its possible aspects, it is helpful to consider what would happen if memories failed to fade. Forgetting clearly aids orientation in time, since old memories weaken and the new tend to stand out, providing clues for inferring duration. Without forgetting, adaptive ability would suffer; for example, learned behaviour that might have been correct a decade ago may no longer be. Cases are recorded of people who (by ordinary standards) forgot so little that their everyday activities were full of confusion. Thus forgetting seems to serve the survival of the individual and the species.
Another line of thought assumes a memory storage system of limited capacity that provides adaptive flexibility specifically through forgetting. In this view, continual adjustments are made between learning or memory storage (imput) and forgetting (output). Indeed, there is evidence that the rate at which individuals forget is directly related to how much they have learned. Such data offer gross support of contemporary models of memory that assume an inputouput balance. Questions:
1. According to Para. 1, memory plays an important role in ____.
2. We can obviously notice that over a period of no practice what has bee
n learned tends to be forgotten from ______.
3. It seems that the author disagree to explain _____.
4. If memories failed to fade, _______.
5. According to the assumption given in!last para., we don’t exactly know ______
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短文大意
本文对于人的记忆和遗忘功能一
责任编辑:joyyy
