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  3. It doesn’t take an Einstein to recognize that Albert Einstein’s brain was very different from yours and mine The gray matter hou

It doesn’t take an Einstein to recognize that Albert Einstein’s brain was very different from yours and mine The gray matter hou

admin2010-07-06  43
问题       It doesn’t take an Einstein to recognize that Albert Einstein’s brain was very different from yours and mine The gray matter housed inside that shaggy head managed to revolutionize our concepts of time, space, motion — the very foundations of physical reality — not just once but several times during his astonishing career. 61)Yet while there clearly had to be something remarkable about Einstein’s brain, the pathologist who removed it from the great physicist’s skull after his death reported that the organ was.to all appearances, well within the normal range — no bigger or heavier than anyone else’s.
     But a new analysis of Einstein’s brain by Canadian scientists, reported in the current Lancet, reveals that it has some distinctive physical characteristics after all. 62)<>A portion of the brain that governs mathematical ability and spatial reasoning—two key ingredients to the sort of thinking Einstein did best — was significantly larger than average and may also have had more interconnections among its ceils, which could have allowed them to work together more effectively.<>
     In 1996,Harvey gave much of his data and a significant fraction of the tissue itself to Dr Sandra Witel-son, a neuroscientist who maintains a "brain bank" at McMaster for comparative studies of brain structure and function. 63)These normal, undiseased brains, willed to science by people whose intelligence had been carefully measured before death, gave Witelson a solid set of benchmarks against which to measure the seat of Einstein’s brilliant thoughts.
     Not only was Einstein’s inferior parietal region unusually bulky, the scientists found, but a feature called the Sylvian fissure was much smaller than average, 64)Without this groove that normally slices through the tissue, the brain cells were pecked close together, permitting more interconnections—which in principle can  permit more cross-referencing of information and ideas, leading to great leaps of insight.
     That’s the idea, anyway. But while it’s quite plausible according to current neurological theory, that doesn’t necessarily make it true. We know Einstein was a genius, end we now know that his brain was physically different from the average. But none of this proves a cause-and-effect relationship. "What you really need, "says McLean’s Benes," is to look at the brains of a number of mathematical geniuses to see if the same abnormalities are present."
     Even if they are, it’s possible that the bulked-brains are a result of strenuous mental exercise, not an inherent feature that makes genius possible. 65)Bottom line: we still don’t know whether Einstein was born with an extraordinary mind or whether he earned it, one brilliant idea at a time.
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答案这些正常、健康的大脑由那些在生前曾被仔细评估过其智力的人们遗赠以供科学研究，给Witelson衡量爱因斯坦杰出的思维活动提供了一套可靠的标准。
解析 本句结构较为复杂。句子主干是：These brains gave Witelson a set of benchmarks。主语部分不仅有两个并列的前置修饰词(normal, undiseased)，还包括一个分词后置定语，相当于一个定语从句(which were willed by...)。在这个后置定语中又包含了一个定语从句(whose...)修饰people。而宾语部分也含有一个省略形式的定语从句(against which to...)，修饰benchmarks，只是将介词against移到了连接词前。词汇方面，考生应注意；undiseased原义为“未生病的，未受疾病侵扰的”，可译为“健康的”；will在此不是情态动词，而是用作实义动词，指“(立遗嘱)遗赠”；benchmark指“基准，规范”。
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