大学英语自学教程(上册) 课文及翻译六篇(3)

大学英语自学教程(上册) unit 04 改善你的记忆力

04-A. Improving Your Memory

　　Psychological research has focused on a number of basic principles that help memory: meaningfulness, organization, association, and visualization. It is useful to know how these principles work.

　　Meaningfulness affects memory at all levels. Information that does not make any sense to you is difficult to remember. There are several ways in which we can make material more meaningful. Many people, for instance, learn a rhyme to help them remember. Do you know the rhyme “Thirty days has September, April, June, and November…? ” It helps many people remember which months of the year have 30 days.

　　Organization also makes a difference in our ability to remember. How useful would a library be if the books were kept in random order? Material that is organized is better remembered than jumbled information. One example of organization is chunking. Chunking consists of grouping separate bits of information. For example, the number 4671363 is more easily remembered if it is chunked as 467,13,63. Categorizing is another means of organization. Suppose you are asked to remember the following list of words: man, bench, dog, desk, woman, horse, child, cat, chair. Many people will group the words into similar categories and remember them as follows: man, woman, child; cat, dog, horse; bench, chair, desk. Needless to say, the second list can be remembered more easily than the first one.

　　Association refers to taking the material we want to remember and relating it to something we remember accurately. In memorizing a number, you might try to associate it with familiar numbers or events. For example, the height of Mount Fuji in Japan - 12, 389 feet - might be remembered using the following associations: 12 is the number of months in the year, and 389 is the number of days in a year (365) added to the number of months twice (24).

　　The last principle is visualization. Research has shown striking improvements in many types of memory tasks when people are asked to visualize the items to be remembered. In one study, subjects in one group were asked to learn some words using imagery, while the second group used repetition to learn the words. Those using imagery remembered 80 to 90 percent of the words, compared with 30 to 40 percent of the words for those who memorized by repetition. Thus forming an integrated image with all the information placed in a single mental picture can help us to preserve a memory.

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改善你的记忆力

　　心理研究集中在有助于记忆力的几个基本原则，即富有意义、组织、联想和想像。知道这些原则如何发挥作用是非常有益的。

　　富有意义从各个方面影响记记力。你很难记住对你毫无意义的信息，我们可以用几种办法使材料变得更有意义。例如，很多人学会用韵音来帮助他们记忆。你知道“九、四、六、十一有30天……”这首押韵诗吗?它帮助人们记住一年中哪些月份有30天。

　　信息的组织也对我们的记忆能力造成差异。图书馆的书如果陈列得杂乱无章对我们还会有什么帮助吗?组织过的材料比混杂的信息更容易记住。组织信息的一个例子就是组块。组块是将一个个单独的信息组织成信息块。例如，4671363这组数字如果被组块成467 13 63就更容易记住。分类是另一种组织方法。假定要求你记住一组词：男人、凳子、狗、书桌、女人、马、孩子、猫、椅子。很多人会将这些词分成相似种类的几组，即男人、女人、孩子；猫、狗、马；凳子、椅子、书桌。不用说第二种排列比第一种排列更容易记忆。

　　联想指将我们要记忆的材料和我们已准确记住的信息联系起来。在记忆数字时，可以将这一数字与我们所熟悉的数字或事件联系起来，例如，日本富士山的高度为12，389英尺，这一数字可以用下面的联想法记住：12是一年中的月份数，389是一年的天数(365)加月数的两倍(24)。

　　最后一个基本原则是想像。研究表明，如果人们把需要记忆的东西进行想像，各种记忆能力都会有显著的提高。在一项研究中，一组受试者被要求使用想像法学习一些生词，而另外一组用重复法学习生词。用想像法记忆单词的一组记住了80%～90%的生词，相比之下，用重复法记忆单词的一组只记住了30%～40%的生词。因此，将所有的信息放在一幅内心的图画里，从而形成一个整体形象，可以帮助我们保存记忆。

　　大学英语自学教程(上册) unit 05 对食物的错误看法

05-A. Fallacies about Food

　　Many primitive peoples believed that by eating an animal they could get some of the good qualities of that animal for themselves. They thought, for example, that eating deer would make them run as fast as the deer. Some savage tribes believed that eating enemies that had shown bravery in battle would make them brave. Man-eating may have started because people were eager to become as strong and brave as their enemies.

　　Among civilized people it was once thought that ginger root by some magical power could improve the memory. Eggs were thought to make the voice pretty. Tomatoes also were believed to have magical powers. They were called love apples and were supposed to make people who ate them fall in love.

　　Later another wrong idea about tomatoes grew up - the idea that they were poisonous. How surprised the people who thought tomatoes poisonous would be if they could know that millions of pounds of tomatoes were supplied to soldiers overseas during World War II.

　　Even today there are a great many wrong ideas about food. Some of them are very widespread.

　　One such idea is that fish is the best brain food. Fish is good brain food just as it is good muscle food and skin food and bone food. But no one has been able to prove that fish is any better for the brain than many other kinds of food.

　　Another such idea is that you should not drink water with meals. Washing food down with water as a substitute for chewing is not a good idea, but some water with meals has been found to be helpful. It makes the digestive juices flow more freely and helps to digest the food.

　　Many of the ideas which scientists tell us have no foundation have to do with mixtures of foods. A few years ago the belief became general that orange juice and milk should never be drunk at the same meal. The reason given was that the acid in the orange juice would make the milk curdle and become indigestible. As a matter of fact, milk always meets in the stomach a digestive juice which curdles it; the curdling of the milk is the first step in its digestion. A similar wrong idea is that fish and ice cream when eaten at the same meal form a poisonous combination.

　　Still another wrong idea about mixing foods is that proteins and carbohydrates should never be eaten at the same meal. Many people think of bread, for example, as a carbohydrate food. It is chiefly a carbohydrate food, but it also contains proteins. In the same way, milk, probably the best single food, contains both proteins and carbohydrates. It is just as foolish to say that one should never eat meat and potatoes together as it is to say that one should never eat bread or drink milk.

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