广东高考英语阅读理解专项训练

阅读理解

Most of us have experienced being introduced to someone new only to forget his name

within seconds. But why is it often easy to remember a person’s face but so difficult to remember

what he’s called?

A new video explains that is due to the way our brains process random data. The video,

called “why do you forget their name?” was produced by Mitchell Moffit and Greg Brown from

YouTube channel AsapSCIENCE. The pair explained our brains are born to recognize facial

details and that specific brain cells fire in response to seeing a face.

The University of Toronto, for example, found when looking for faces in a crowd the frontal

cortex (额叶皮层)sends signals to the posterior visual cortex(后视觉皮层)to enhance what the

person was looking at. But because names are random and hold no specific information in them,

the brain struggles to remember them.

The video continued to show when meeting people for the first time, many of us focus on

introducing ourselves and this is known as the “next-in-line effect”. Instead of watching and

listening to the other person, the brain starts focusing on its own routine — what I’ll say and how

I’ll say it. As a result, we’re not able to take in new information.

In an experiment by Texas Christian University, researchers asked people in a group to take

turns introducing themselves. They then tested them to see which information they remembered. A

participant’s memory was accurate for each fellow group member except for the person who spoke

before them. For these people, the participants failed to recall any or little information.

Also, brains have both short and long-term memory and the short-term memory is often

called “working memory”. This can only hold so much information and if the brain doesn’t focus,

or repeat it, the information fades.

1．Why are names hard to remember?

A．There is little detailed information in names.

B．Names are specific to each individual person.

C．The human brain responds to names too slowly.

D．Names are regarded as useless information.

2．What do we know about the “next-in-line effect”? A．It makes it hard to identify a person.

B．It causes a temporary loss of memory.

C．It worsens the ability to listen to others.

D．It blocks the reception of new information.

3．What does the author intend to do in Paragraph 5?

A．Add some background information.

B．Introduce a new topic for discussion.

C．Explain the previous paragraph further.

D．Provide another experiment for reference.

Michael Jackson had Bubbles, a chimpanzee(黑猩猩). Justin Bieber had Og Mally, a

capuchin(卷尾猴), until it was seized by German customs officials and put in a zoo. Rihanna has

been photographed bottle-feeding a baby monkey on holiday. The stars would find few fans in the

British government, which on December 12, 2020 placed new restrictions on keeping primates(灵长目动物)as pets. Somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 marmoserts, lemurs, tamarins and other

little species of primates are kept in private ownership in Britain, the government says, often bored

to misery.

One of the benefits of cutting loose from the European continent is that Britain can fully

express its passion for animals. Politicians are only too happy to work for it, for pet-friendly

policies are cheap and popular. In the previous election, the Tory Party promised to help reunite

missing pets with their owners by making it compulsory to put chips into the bodies of cats and

dogs, and to deal with animal smuggling(走私). The Labour Party promised to ban the live-boiling

of lobsters in restaurants.

Yet, Britain’s animal welfare laws are already among the most comprehensive in the world,

according to the Animal Protection Index.

Wild animals in traveling circuses were banned by law last year, but a decreasing public

appetite for parades of elephants and tigers balanced on chairs had already put an end to the

business. By the time the ban came into force, only two licensed animal circuses were left in

Britain. Members of Parliament are moved by the sad loss of pets because of motor accidents.

James Daly has proposed Gizmo’s Law, named after a cat, the victim of a hit-and-run accident,

which was burned without its owner’s knowledge. The law requires that dead animals be brought back from the roadside to scan them for microchips, so that they can be reunited with their

brokenhearted owners rather than being burned without their names being known. A draft bill in

2018 proposed criminalizing drivers who failed to stop after striking a cat. Hit-and-runs on dogs,

pigs, goats and humans are already illegal.

4．What does the author want to introduce by mentioning the three stars in Paragraph 1?