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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

admin2013-07-11  41
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 examine carefully a lot of information, often to its long-term benefit.
    Some brains do deteriorate(衰退)with age. But for most aging adults, researchers say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to get hold of just one fact. 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. "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(结结巴巴地念)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 a researcher of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. "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. For instance, a seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes.
Why could older people give better replies than college students in the experiment?
选项 A、They were more experienced readers.
B、They absorbed more extra information.
C、College students couldn’t focus on the passage.
D、College students had no interest in the passage.
答案B
解析 由第4段最后一句中的taking it and processing it、第6段第2句中的retained all this extra data及该段最后一句的soaked up等可知，和学生不同，老年人在阅读时，能吸收那些额外的信息，并对这些信息进行处理和理解。这正是老年人回答问题比大学生好的原因，B与此相符，故为正确答案。
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