發(fā)布時間： 2017年05月18日

英語四級六級閱讀練習(xí)（60）：學(xué)習(xí)的密碼

小編寄語：熟悉四六級閱讀理解題型的同學(xué)應(yīng)該都了解，英語四六級考試閱讀理解材料大多選自《時代》《衛(wèi)報》《今日美國》等外刊。要想閱讀理解這部分拿到高分，必須在平常多閱讀，掌握新詞匯，鍛煉閱讀速度。但對于很多同學(xué)來說，如何每日在浩瀚的互聯(lián)網(wǎng)世界尋找合適的閱讀材料進(jìn)行分析解讀是一項很耗時間的事情。為此，　英語每日精選《衛(wèi)報》《時代》等外刊上的文章供大家進(jìn)行閱讀練習(xí)。

【今日閱讀推薦】本篇閱讀材料“學(xué)習(xí)的密碼”選自《時代》（原文標(biāo)題：The Secret Code Of Learning 2011.11.09）。如果大家覺得比較簡單，就當(dāng)作泛讀材料了解了解，認(rèn)識幾個新單詞或新表達(dá)方式也不錯。如果大家覺得這些材料理解上有難度，不妨當(dāng)做挑戰(zhàn)自己的拔高訓(xùn)練，希望大家都有進(jìn)步^^

Frederic Mishkin, who’s been a professor at Columbia Business School for almost 30 years, is good at solving problems and expressing ideas. Whether he’s standing in front of a lecture hall or engaged in a casual conversation, he’s a blur of motion, his hands waving, pointing, jabbing the air. “I talk with my hands,” he says. “I always have.” When he was in graduate school, in fact, one of his professors was so exasperated by this constant gesticulating that he made the young economist sit on his hands whenever he visited the professor’s office.

It turns out, however, that Mishkin’s mentor had it exactly wrong. Gesture doesn’t hinder clear thought and speech — it facilitates it. Research demonstrates that the movements we make with our hands when we talk constitute a kind of second language, adding information that’s absent from our words. It’s learning’s secret code: Gesture reveals what we know. It reveals what we don’t know. And it reveals (as Donald Rumsfeld might put it) what we know, but don’t yet know we know. What’s more, the congruence (or lack of congruence) between what our voices say and how our hands move offers a clue to our readiness to learn.

Many of the studies establishing the importance of gesture to learning have been conducted by Susan Goldin-Meadow, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. “We change our minds by moving our hands,” writes Goldin-Meadow in a review of this work published in the current issue of the journal Cognitive Science. Particularly significant are what she calls “mismatches” between verbal expression and physical gestures. A student might say that a heavier ball falls faster than a light one, for example, but make a gesture indicating that they fall at the same rate, which is correct. Such discrepancies indicate that we’re in a transitional state, moving from one level of understanding to another. The thoughts expressed by hand motions are often our newest and most advanced ideas about the problem we’re working on; we can’t yet assimilate these notions into language, but we can capture them in movement. When a child employs gesture, Goldin-Meadow notes, “the information about the child’s cognitive state is conveyed sub rosa — below the surface of ordinary conversation.” Such gesture-speech mismatches have been found in toddlers going through a vocabulary spurt, in elementary-school children describing why the seasons change, and in adults attempting to explain how a machine works.

Goldin-Meadow’s more recent work shows not only that gesture is an index to our readiness to learn, but that it actually helps to bring learning about. It does so in two ways. First, it elicits helpful behavior from others around us. Goldin-Meadow has found that adults spontaneously respond to children’s speech-gesture mismatches by adjusting their mode of instruction. Parents and teachers apparently receive the signal that children are ready to learn, and they act on it by offering a greater variety of problem-solving strategies.

The act of gesturing itself also seems to accelerate learning, bringing nascent knowledge into consciousness and aiding the understanding of new concepts. A 2007 study by Susan Wagner Cook, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Iowa, reported that third-graders who were asked to gesture while learning algebra were nearly three times more likely to remember what they’d learned than classmates who did not gesture. Another experiment conducted by Cook determined that college students who gestured as they retold short stories they’d seen recalled the details of the stories better, suggesting that gesturing as we’re remembering helps retrieve the information from memory.

So how can you crack learning’s secret code? First, pay attention to your own gestures. Research has found that watching a teacher gesture encourages young learners to produce gestures of their own. Learning improves even when children are given a specific gesture by someone else, rather than generating it themselves. In a 2009 experiment, Goldin-Meadow demonstrated that fourth-graders learning how to solve a math equation identified the correct answers more often when they imitated a helpful gesture shown to them by an adult than when they simply repeated the grown-up’s words.

Second, train yourself to attend to others’ gestures. Notice in particular the gestures that diverge from speech — when people say one thing and motion another, they are primed to take advantage of instruction and direction from others. And encourage your kids to move their hands when they talk. Studies show that children instructed to gesture make more speech-gesture mismatches — that is, they increase their readiness to learn. To those like Frederic Mishkin’s erstwhile professor, who think we should remain still while speaking, the science of learning has given us a cheeky retort: Tell it to the hand.

【重點單詞及短語】

exasperated adj. 激怒的；惱火的

sit on one's hands 袖手旁觀；不采取行動

gesticulate v. 做手勢；用手勢表達(dá)

mentor n. 指導(dǎo)者；良師益友

hinder v. 妨礙；阻礙

facilitate v. 幫助；促進(jìn)

congruence n. 適合；一致；相合性

discrepancy n. 矛盾；不符

sub rosa 秘密地；私下地

spontaneously adv. 自發(fā)地；不由自主地

retrieve v. 檢索；恢復(fù)；重新得到