2007考英语真题英语一阅读部分.doc

Text 1 ①If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in 2006s World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months. ②If you then examined the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this strange phenomenon to be even more pronounced. ①What might account for this strange phenomenon? ②Here are a few guesses: a) certain astrological signs confer superior soccer skills; b) winter-born babies tend to have higher oxygen capacity, which increases soccer stamina; c) soccer-mad parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime, at the annual peak of soccer mania; d) none of the above. ①Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University, says he believes strongly in“none of the above.”②Ericsson grew up in Sweden, and studied nuclear engineering until he realized he would have more opportunity to conduct his own research if he switched to psychology. ③His first experiment, nearly 30 years ago, involved memory: training a person to hear and then repeat a random series of numbers. ④“With the first subject, after about 20 hours of training, his digit span had risen from 7 to 20,”Ericsson recalls. ⑤“He kept improving, and after about 200 hours of training he had risen to over 80 numbers.” ①This success, coupled with later research showing that memory itself is not genetically determined, led Ericsson to conclude that the act of memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise than an intuitive one. ②In other words, whatever inborn differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person“encodes”the information.③And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice. ④Deliberate practice entails more than simpl