Lack of interest can also lead to absent-mindedness. “A man who can recite sports statistics from 30 years ago,” says Zelinski, “may not remember to drop a letter in the mailbox.” Women have slightly better memories than men, possibly because they pay more attention to their environment, and memory relies on just that.

　　Visual cues can help prevent absent-mindedness, says Schacter. “But be sure the cue is clear and available,” he cautions. If you want to remember to take a medication (藥物) with lunch, put the pill bottle on the kitchen table—don’t leave it in the medicine chest and write yourself a note that you keep in a pocket.

　　Another common episode of absent-mindedness: walking into a room and wondering why you’re there. Most likely, you were thinking about something else. “Everyone does this from time to time,” says Zelinski. The best thing to do is to return to where you were before entering the room, and you’ll likely remember.

　　1. Why does the author think that encoding properly is very important?

　　A) It helps us understand our memory system better.

　　B) It enables us to recall something form our memory.

　　C) It expands our memory capacity considerably.

　　D) It slows down the process of losing our memory.

　　2. One possible reason why women have better memories than men is that ________.

　　A) they have a wider range of interests

　　B) they are more reliant on the environment

　　C) they have an unusual power of focusing their attention

　　D) they are more interested in what’s happening around them

　　3. A note in the pocket can hardly serve as a reminder because ________.

　　A) it will easily get lost

　　B) it’s not clear enough for you to read

　　C) it’s out of your sight

　　D) it might get mixed up with other things

　　4. What do we learn from the last paragraph?

　　A) If we focus our attention on one thing, we might forget another.

　　B) Memory depends to a certain extent on the environment.

　　C) Repetition helps improve our memory.

　　D) If we keep forgetting things, we’d better return to where we were.

　　5. What is the passage mainly about?

　　A) The process of gradual memory loss.

　　B) The causes of absent-mindedness.

　　C) The impact of the environment on memory.

　　D) A way if encoding and recalling.

　　參考答案

　　1. B 2. D 3. C 4.A 5. B

　　It is hard to track the blue whale, the ocean’s largest creature, which has almost been killed off by commercial whaling and is now listed as an endangered species. Attaching radio devices to it is difficult, and visual sightings are too unreliable to give real insight into its behavior.

　　So biologists were delighted early this year when, with the help of the Navy, they were able to track a particular blue whale for 43 days, monitoring its sounds. This was possible because of the Navy’s formerly top-secret system of underwater listening devices spanning the oceans.

　　Tracking whales is but one example of an exciting new world just opening to civilian scientists after the cold war as the Navy starts to share and partly uncover its global network of underwater listening system built over the decades to track the ships of potential enemies.

　　Earth scientists announced at a news conference recently that they had used the system for closely monitoring a deep-sea volcanic eruption (爆發) for the first time and that they plan similar studies.

　　Other scientists have proposed to use the network for tracking ocean currents and measuring changes in ocean and global temperatures.

　　The speed of sound in water is roughly one mile a second—slower than through land but faster than through air. What is most important, different layers of ocean water can act as channels for sounds, focusing them in the same way a stethoscope (聽診器) does when it carries faint noises from a patient’s chest to a doctor’s ear. This focusing is the main reason that even relatively weak sounds in the ocean, especially low-frequency ones, can often travel thousands of miles.

　　1. The passage is chiefly about ________.

　　A) an effort to protect an endangered marine species

　　B) the civilian use of a military detection system

　　C) the exposure of a U.S. Navy top-secret weapon

　　D) a new way to look into the behavior of blue whales

　　2. The underwater listening system was originally designed ________.

　　A) to trace and locate enemy vessels

　　B) to monitor deep-sea volcanic eruptions

　　C) to study the movement of ocean currents

　　D) to replace the global radio communications network

　　3. The deep-sea listening system makes use of ________.

　　A) the sophisticated technology of focusing sounds under water

　　B) the capability of sound to travel at high speed

　　C) the unique property of layers of ocean water in transmitting sound

　　D) low-frequency sounds traveling across different layers of water

　　4. It can be inferred from the passage that ________.

　　A) new radio devices should be developed for tracking the endangered blue whales

　　B) blue whales are no longer endangered with the use of the new listening system

　　C) opinions differ as to whether civilian scientists should be allowed to use military technology

　　D) military technology has great potential in civilian use

　　5. Which of the following is true about the U.S. Navy underwater listening network?

　　A) It is now partly accessible to civilian scientists.

　　B) It has been replaced by a more advanced system.

　　C) It became useless to the military after the cold war.

　　D) It is indispensable in protecting endangered species

　　參考答案

　　1. B 2. A 3. C 4.D 5. A