Directions: In this section, you will hear a passage three times. When the passage is read for the first time, you should listen carefully for its general idea. When the passage is read for the second time, you are required to fill in the blanks numbered from 36 to 43 with the exact words you have just heard. For blanks numbered from 44 to 46 you are required to fill in the missing information. For these blanks, you can either use the exact words you have just heard or write down the main points in your own words. Finally, when the passage is read for the third time, you should check what you have written.

The ancient Greeks developed basic memory systems called mnemonics. The name is 大36家 from their Goddess of memory “Mnemosyne”. In the ancient world, a trained memory was an 大37家 asset, particularly in public life. There were no 大38家 devices for taking notes, and early Greek orators(演说家) delivered long speeches with great 大39家 because they learned the speeches using mnemonic systems.

The Greeks discovered that human memory is 大40家 an associative process—that it works by linking things together. For example, think of an apple. The 大41家 your brain registers the word “apple”, it 大42家 the shape, color, taste, smell and 大43家 of that fruit. All these things are associated in your memory with the word “apple”.

大44家. An example could be when you think about a lecture you have had. This could trigger a memory about what you’re talking about through that lecture, which can then trigger another memory.

大45家. An example given on a website I was looking at follows: Do you remember the shape of Austria, Canada, Belgium, or Germany? Probably not. What about Italy, though? 大46家. You made an association with something already known, the shape of a boot, and Italy’s shape could not be forgotten once you had made the association.

PartⅣ Reading Comprehension(Reading in Depth)(25 minutes)

Section A

Directions: In this section, there is a short passage with 5 questions or incomplete statements. Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions or complete the statements in the fewest possible words. Please write your answers on Answer Sheet 2.

Questions 47 to 51 are based on the following passage.

Many countries have made it illegal to chat into a hand-held mobile phone while driving. But the latest research further confirms that the danger lies less in what a motorist’s hands do when he takes a call than in what the conversation does to his brain. Even using a “hands-free” device can divert a driver’s attention to an alarming extent.

Melina Kunar of the University of Warwick, and Todd Horowitz of the Harvard Medical School ran a series of experiments in which two groups of volunteers had to pay attention and respond to a series of moving tasks on a computer screen that were reckoned equivalent in difficulty to driving. One group was left undistracted while the other had to engage in a conversation using a speakerphone. As Kunar and Horowitz report, those who were making the equivalent of a hands-free call had an average reaction time 212 milliseconds slower than those who were not. That, they calculate, would add 5.7 metres to the braking distance of a car travelling at 100kph. They also found that the group using the hands-free kit made 83% more errors in their tasks than those who were not talking.

To try to understand more about why this was, they tried two further tests. In one, members of a group were asked simply to repeat words spoken by the caller. In the other, they had to think of a word that began with the last letter of the word they had just heard. Those only repeating words performed the same as those with no distraction, but those with the more complicated task showed even worse reaction times—an average of 480 milliseconds extra delay. This shows that when people have to consider the information they hear carefully, it can impair their driving ability significantly.