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  3. When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But m

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But m

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问题     When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But more and more studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong. Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit. The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, "Progress in Brain Research."
    Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful. "It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing," said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. "It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind."
    For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it. When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.
    "For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened," said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. "But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another."
    In the real world, such tendencies can yield big advantages, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.
The text intends to tell us that
选项 A、brains do deteriorate with age.
B、an older brain may be a wiser brain.
C、a brain with disease is a brain with wisdom.
D、how an older brain processes information.
答案B
解析 本题是一道文章主旨题，考查对文章主旨和框架的理解。这是一篇选摘的文章，基本上保留了原文的框架。B选项就是文章的原标题，是全文主题的提炼和概括。纵览全文，首段提出老年人记忆变差，并非是智能衰退，而是大脑在深度加工信息；第二段提出老年人记忆广度在加宽，虽然记忆下降，但这很有用；第三、四段为相关实验的过程，并点评道老人由于注意广度，更善于解决与干扰相关的问题；第五段评价老人这种特征的优势。总而言之，文章对老年人的智能进行了正面的评价。B选项“老人的大脑可能是一个更聪明的大脑”既包含了核心问题——老人的智能(an older brain)，又对其进行了正面的评价(wiser)，是正确选项。
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