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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 a

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

admin2011-10-20  79
问题     When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of 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. "
    Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, 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.
Older adults tend to be forgetful because of______.
选项 A、their broader range of attention
B、the harm of Alzheimer’s disease
C、their wide information
D、their frustration from limited attention
答案A
解析 此题考查对文章中相关细节的理解。问题问的是老年人往往健忘的原因，根据题干信息“be forgetful”，我们可以定位至第二段转折后的句子“much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact，...”，句中的difficult to latch onto just one fact对应题干中的be forgetful；句中that所指代的内容就是健忘的原因，而that所指代的是先行词(widening focus of)attention，是A选项their broader range of attention的同义转述，因此A选项正确。
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