考研英语真题阅读理解解读.pdfVIP

07 07 0077年真题及解析 TEXT 1 TEXT 1 TTEEXXTT 11 If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in 2006’s World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have beenborn in the earlier months of the year thanin the later months.If 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. What might account for this strange phenomenon?Here 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 likelytoconceive children inspringtime, at the annual peakofsoccer mania; d)none of the above. Anders Ericsson, a 58  year  old psychology professor at Florida State University, says he believes strongly in “none of the above.”Ericsson 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.His first experiment, nearly 30years ago, involved memory: training aperson to hear and then repeat a random series of numbers.“With the first subject, after about 20 hours of training, his digit span had risen from 7 to 20,”Ericsson recalls.“He kept improving, and after about 200hours oftraining he had risen to over 80numbers.” This success, coupled with later research showing that memory itself is not genetically determined, led Ericsson to conclude that the actof memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise thanan intuitive one.In other words, whatever inborndifferences two people mayexhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped byhow well eachperson “encodes”the information.And the best wayto learnhow to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as