双语阅读英语文摘人一天最重要的40分钟.docVIP

人一天最重要的40分钟,你用好了吗? 英语生活贴士 The Forty Most Important Minutes Each Day: Are You Using Them Well?人一天最重要的40分钟，你用好了吗？ Recently I had a conversation in Beijing with an adult Chinese friend who was complaining how difficult it is to study English. No surprises there. It is a difficult language to master, just like Chinese.最近我在北京听一位中国朋友吐槽英语难学。这并不奇怪，英语跟中文一样，都不好学。 I made a few suggestions based on my own experience. One involved a very valuable fact which I learned from my high school Latin and Greek teacher. He was a Jesuit priest, a gifted linguist, and had an amazing ability to memorize things, like poetry, essays, speeches, etc.根据亲身经历，我有几点建议，其中也包括我高中拉丁语和希腊语老师的真传。这位老师是名耶稣会的牧师，很有语言天分，对诗歌、论文、演讲等记忆力超群。 His advice to us students was that for memorization purposes, there are forty minutes each day in which our memory is vastly more receptive than it is during the other 23 hours and 20 minutes. This 40-minute “super memory” period is divided into two parts: the 20 minutes before we sleep, and the 20 minutes after we first awake.他告诉我们这些学生，人在一天之中有40分钟记忆力最强，接收能力超过其余23小时20分。而这“记忆超强”的40分钟又可以分为两段：临睡前的20分钟和醒来后的20分钟。 The theory supporting this is pretty simple. First, the last information you input into your brain before a good night’s sleep has a better chance of taking root than information acquired during the hustle bustle of normal daily routine; and, second, your mind is free of distraction when you first awake in the morning — so more receptive to inputs, like a blank slate.要证明这一理论十分简单。首先，在进入梦乡前把信息植入脑海比在白天乱哄哄的情景下更容易扎根；其次，早晨醒来精力不容易分散，就像空白的页岩，吸收能力更强。 I took the advice to heart and it served me well in my school years. In my university days, our Chinese teacher would assign us 200 new vocabulary words each day, on which we would be quizzed the following day. Without the “magic” forty minute technique, there’s no way I would have passed those daily quizzes.我牢记他的教诲，上学期间身体力行，受益良多。大学期间，我的中文老师每天都会教200个新单词，次日还要搞小测验。幸亏有这“魔力40分钟”秘笈，否则我早就“挂科了”。 The technique really works, but like many t