考研英語(yǔ)閱讀材料匯編之健康類(1)

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閱讀是考研英語(yǔ)的重要題型之一，也是保障英語(yǔ)成績(jī)的關(guān)鍵題目。因此，考研學(xué)子們要充分重視英語(yǔ)閱讀，除了平時(shí)多多閱讀英語(yǔ)雜志、報(bào)紙外，還需要針對(duì)閱讀進(jìn)行專項(xiàng)訓(xùn)練。小編整理了關(guān)于考研英語(yǔ)閱讀題源的系列文章——考研英語(yǔ)閱讀材料匯編之健康類(1)，請(qǐng)參考!

Lest We Forget or Lest We Remember?

People remember emotionally charged events more easily than they recall the quotidian. A sexual encounter trumps doing the grocery shopping. A mugging trumps a journey to work. Witnessing a massacre trumps pretty well anything you can imagine.

That is hardly surprising. Rare events that might have an impact on an individual's survival or reproduction should have a special fast lane into the memory bank-and they do. It is called the a2b-adrenoceptor, and it is found in the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in processing strong emotions such as fear. The role of the α2b-adrenoceptor is to promote memory formation-but only if it is stimulated by adrenaline. Since emotionally charged events are often accompanied by adrenaline secretion, the α2b-adrenoceptor acts as a gatekeeper that decides what will be remembered and what discarded.

However, the gene that encodes this receptor comes in two varieties. That led Dominique de Quervain, of the University of Zurich, to wonder if people with one variant would have better emotional memories than those with the other. The short answer, just published in Nature Neuroscience, is that they do. Moreover, since the frequencies of the two variants are different in different groups of people, whole populations may have different mixtures of emotional memory.

The reason Dr de Quervain suspected the variants might work differently is that the rarer one looks like the commoner one when the latter has a memory-enhancing drug called yohimbine attached to it. His prediction, therefore, was that better emotional memory would be associated with the rarer version.

And that did, indeed, turn out to be the case in his first experiment. This involved showing students photographs of positive scenes such as families playing together, negative scenes such as car accidents, and neutral ones, such as people on the phone. Those students with at least one gene for the rarer version of the protein (everyone has two such genes, one from his father and one from his mother) were twice as good at remembering details of emotionally charged scenes than were those with only the common version. When phone- callers were the subject; there was no difference in the quality of recall.

That is an interesting result, but some of Dr de Quervain's colleagues at the University of Konstanz, in Germany, were able to take it further in a second experiment. In fact, they took it all the way along a dusty road in Uganda, to the Nakivale refugee camp. This camp is home to hundreds of refugees of the Rwandan civil war of 1994.

In this second experiment the researchers were not asking about photographs. With the help of specially trained interviewers, they recorded how often people in the camp suffered flashbacks and nightmares about their wartime experiences. They then compared those results with the α2b-adrenoceptor genes in their volunteers. As predicted, those with the rare version had significantly more flashbacks than those with only the common one.

Besides bolstering Dr de Quervain's original hypothesis, this result is interesting because only 12% of the refugees had the rarer gene. In Switzerland, by contrast, 30% of the population has the rare variety-and the Swiss are not normally regarded as an emotional people.

Whether that result has wider implications remains to be seen. Human genetics has a notorious history of jumping to extravagant conclusions from scant data, but that does not mean conclusions should be ducked if the data are good. In this case, the statistics suggest Rwanda may have been lucky: the long-term mental-health effects of the war may not be as widespread as they have been in people with a different genetic mix. On the other hand, are those who easily forget the horrors of history condemned to repeat them?

詞匯注解

witness /'witnis/

【文中釋義】v目擊

【大綱全義】n.目擊者，證人;證據(jù)，證明。v目擊，目睹;作證

impact /'impækt/

【文中釋義】 n.影響，作用

【大綱全義】n.沖擊，碰撞;影響v影響;擠入，壓緊

process / pr?'ses/

【文中釋義】v.加工，處理

【大綱全義】n.過(guò)程;工序;工藝;(法律)程序，(訴訟)手續(xù)v.加工，處理，辦理

promote /pr?'m?ut/

【文中釋義】v.促進(jìn)，增進(jìn)

【大綱全義】v.促進(jìn)，發(fā)揚(yáng);提升，提拔;增進(jìn)，助長(zhǎng);宣傳，推銷(商品)

charged/t?a:d?d/

【文中釋義 】adj.充滿感情的，(氣氛)緊張的

【大綱全義】adj.(顏色)過(guò)重的，(筆法)夸張的;充滿感情的，(氣氛)緊張的，(物)帶電的

accompany /?' k?mp?ni/

【文中釋義】v.與某事物同時(shí)存在或發(fā)生

【大綱全義】v.陪伴,陪同;伴隨，和…一起發(fā)生;伴奏

discard /dis'ka:d/

【文中釋義】v.丟棄，拋棄

【大綱全義】v.丟棄，拋棄，遺棄

variety/v?'rai?ti/

【文中釋義】n. 品種，種類

【大綱全義】n.種種，多種多樣;種類，品種

mixture /'mikst??/

【文中釋義】n.混合物

【大綱全義】n.混合;混合物，混合劑

suspect / s?s'pekt/

【文中釋義】v.推測(cè)，懷疑

【大綱全義】v.猜想;懷疑;察覺(jué) n.嫌疑犯 adj.可疑的

enhance / in'ha:ns/

【文中釋義】v.提高，增加，加強(qiáng)

【大綱全義】v.提高，增強(qiáng)

attached /?'tæt?t/

【文中釋義】adj.附加的

【大綱全義】adj.依戀的，充滿愛(ài)心的;附上......的

neutral /'nju:tr?l/

【文中釋義】adj.中性的

【大綱全義】adj.中立的，不偏不倚的;中性的，中和的

recall /ri'k?:l/

【文中釋義】n.記憶力，記性

【大綱全義】n.回憶，召回，取消v回憶，記得，回想;撤消，收回

dusty /'d?sti/

【文中釋義】adj.滿是灰塵的

【大綱全義】adj.多灰塵的，灰塵厚積的;灰色的;(酒)濁的;灰塵一般的;粉末狀的;無(wú)聊的，干巴巴的;含糊的，不明朗的，無(wú)價(jià)值的

refugee /¸refju(︰) ˊd?i: /

【文中釋義】n.難民

【大綱全義】n.(政治上的)避難者，難民

超綱單詞

quotidian n.每天發(fā)生的事 amygdala n.扁桃體

adrenaline n.腎上腺素 commoner n.平民

flashback n.例敘，閃回 yohimbine n.育亨賓

重點(diǎn)段落譯文

和日常發(fā)生的事情比起來(lái)，人們往往會(huì)記住引起強(qiáng)烈情緒反應(yīng)的事件。而路遇行兇搶劫的記憶也比平常去上班的記憶更深刻。目擊一場(chǎng)大殺戮在你心中留下的烙印可能也是其他任何事情所不可比擬的。

這不足為奇。對(duì)于那些可能影響個(gè)體生存和繁衍的不尋常事件，它們理應(yīng)有一個(gè)能夠優(yōu)先進(jìn)入人的記憶庫(kù)的快速通道，而事實(shí)也是如此—這個(gè)快速通道叫做α 2b腎上腺素受體，是在人的扁桃體中發(fā)現(xiàn)的。扁桃體是人大腦中處理強(qiáng)烈情緒(如恐懼)的部分。α 2b腎上腺素受體所扮演的角色是促進(jìn)記憶的形成，但必須是在它受到腎上腺素的刺激之后。由于引起情緒很大波動(dòng)的事件通常伴隨著腎上腺素的分泌，α 2b腎上腺素受體就像看門人一樣要決定記住哪些事而舍棄哪些事。

然而，對(duì)這些受體進(jìn)行編碼的基因有兩種變體。那么，攜帶其中一種變體的人是否比攜帶另一種變體的人對(duì)引起情緒反應(yīng)的事情記憶得更深刻呢?蘇黎世大學(xué)的多米尼克·德凱爾萬(wàn)教授對(duì)此提出質(zhì)疑。答案是肯定的—這一結(jié)論剛剛發(fā)表在《自然—神經(jīng)科學(xué)》雜志上。此外，由于在不同的人群體內(nèi)，這兩種變體的分布頻率不同，因此從總體來(lái)看，人們的情緒記憶存在著各種不同的狀況。

德凱爾萬(wàn)博士之所以懷疑不同的變體有不同的作用是有一定的依據(jù)的。這兩種變體中，一種是較少見(jiàn)的變體，另一種是較常見(jiàn)的變體;而后者與一種叫做育亨賓的可增強(qiáng)記憶的藥物相結(jié)合時(shí)，其作用與較少見(jiàn)的變體表現(xiàn)得一樣。因此，他推測(cè):較少見(jiàn)的那種變體會(huì)促成較好的情緒記憶。

這種情況也確實(shí)在他第一次的實(shí)驗(yàn)中得到了驗(yàn)證。在該實(shí)驗(yàn)中，他給學(xué)生們展示了各種積極情緒的圖片(如一家人在一起戲耍的情景)、消極情緒的圖片(如車禍)，以及中性的圖片(如正在打電話的人)。那些學(xué)生中有的人至少攜帶有一個(gè)少見(jiàn)的變體基因(每個(gè)人都有一對(duì)這樣的基因，一個(gè)來(lái)自來(lái)父親，另一個(gè)來(lái)自于母親)，他們對(duì)于情緒事件的記憶力是那些只有常見(jiàn)變體基因的學(xué)生的兩倍。而當(dāng)記憶的對(duì)象是打電話的人時(shí)，學(xué)生們的記憶力水平?jīng)]有出現(xiàn)差異。

這是一個(gè)有趣的結(jié)果，但德凱爾萬(wàn)博士在德國(guó)康斯坦茨大學(xué)的一些同事又進(jìn)一步地做了第二個(gè)實(shí)驗(yàn)。事實(shí)上，他們帶著這個(gè)實(shí)驗(yàn)穿過(guò)了烏干達(dá)灰蒙蒙的公路，來(lái)到了納基瓦萊難民營(yíng)。那里居住著1994年盧旺達(dá)內(nèi)戰(zhàn)后成百上千的難民。

在這第二個(gè)實(shí)驗(yàn)中，研究者們沒(méi)有使用圖片。在經(jīng)過(guò)專門訓(xùn)練的調(diào)查人員的幫助下，他們記錄了難民們腦海中戰(zhàn)時(shí)情景閃回的次數(shù)，以及關(guān)于戰(zhàn)時(shí)經(jīng)歷的噩夢(mèng)的次數(shù)。然后，他們將記錄結(jié)果與研究對(duì)象中所攜帶的α 2b腎上腺索受體基因進(jìn)行了比較。正如之前所預(yù)計(jì)的一樣，那些帶有少見(jiàn)變體基因的難民所經(jīng)歷的記憶閃回次數(shù)，比起只有常見(jiàn)變休基因的難民要多得多。

希望各位考生能夠每天堅(jiān)持閱讀，提高詞匯量和語(yǔ)感能力，為以后的系統(tǒng)復(fù)習(xí)打下堅(jiān)實(shí)的基礎(chǔ)。最后提醒大家，夏季來(lái)臨，復(fù)習(xí)備考需注意防暑降溫。預(yù)祝考研成功!

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