速配2015年7月25日雅思考试阅读真题

2021年1月14日发(作者：欧阳奋强)
2015年7月23日雅思考试阅读真题
Passage 2：
题目：Finding our way
内容：人类行为的研究
题型：配对题5道，选择题3道，判断题5道
题号：V100529
Finding Our Way
A “Drive 200 yards, and then turn right, “says the car’s computer voice. You relax in
the driver’s seat, follow the directions and reach your destination without error. It’s
certainly nice to have the Global Positioning System (GPS) to direct you to within a few
yards of your goal. Yet if the satellite service’s digital maps become even slightly outdated,
you can become lost. Then you have to rely on the ancient human skill of navigating 航行
in three-dimensional space. Luckily, your biological finder生物探测器/发现者 has an
important advantage over GPS: it does not go awry失败/出错 if only one part of the
guidance system goes wrong, because it works in various ways. You can ask questions of
people on the sidewalk. Or follow a street that looks familiar. Or rely on a navigational
rubric红色标志:
The human positioning system is flexible and capable of learning. Anyone who knows the
way from point A to point B—and from A to C—can probably figure out how to get from B
to C, too.
B But how does this complex cognitive认知 system really work? Researchers are
looking at several strategies people use to orient 向东themselves in space: guidance, path
integration and route following. We may use all three or combinations thereof在其中. And
as experts learn more about these navigational skills, they are making the case that our
abilities may underlie在什么基础下 our powers of memory and logical thinking. Grand
Central中央车站, Please Imagine that you have arrived in a place you have never
visited—New York City. You get off the train at Grand Central Terminal in midtown
Manhattan. You have a few hours to explore before you must return for your ride home.
You head uptown to see popular spots you have been told about: Rockefeller Center洛克
菲勒中心, Central Park, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art大都会博物馆. You meander
漫步 in and out of shops along the way. Suddenly, it is time to get back to the station. But
how?
C If you ask passersby for help, most likely you will receive information in many
different forms. A person who orients herself by a prominent landmark would gesture
southward: there. See the tall, broad MetLife Building? Head for that—the
station is right below it. “Neurologists call this navigational approach
that a landmark visible from a distance serves as the marker for one’s destination.
D Another city dweller居民 might say:
Okay. Go toward the end of Central Park, then walk down to St. Patrick’s Cathedral大教堂.
A few more blocks, and Grand Central will be off to your left. “In this case, you are pointed
toward the most recent place you recall, and you aim for it. Once there you head for the
next notable place and so on, retracing折回 your path. Your brain is adding together the
individual legs of your trek艰难跋涉 into a cumulative积累的 progress report.
Researchers call this strategy path integration.”路劲整合 Many animals rely primarily
on path integration to get around, including insects, spiders, crabs and rodents
啮齿动物
.
The desert ants of the genus类 Cataglyphis 沙蚁employ this method to return from
foraging觅食 as far as 100 yards away. They note the general direction they came from
and retrace their steps, using the polarization极化 of sunlight to orient themselves even
under overcast skies阴暗的天空. On their way back they are faithful to this inner homing
vector航线. Even when a scientist picks up an ant and puts it in a totally different spot, the
insect stubbornly proceeds in the originally determined direction until it has gone
of the distance it wandered from its nest. Only then does the ant realize it has not
succeeded, and it begins to walk in successively larger loops循环 to find its way home.
E Whether it is trying to get back to the anthill or the train station, any animal using
path integration must keep track of its own movements so it knows, while returning, which
segments it has already completed. As you move, your brain gathers data from your
environment—sights, sounds, smells, lighting, muscle contractions收缩, a sense of time
passing—to determine which way your body has gone. The church spire尖塔, the sizzling
极热的 sausages香肠 on that vendor’s grill小贩的架子, the open courtyard庭院, and the
train station—all represent snapshots快照 of memorable junctures 连接during your
journey.
F In addition to guidance and path integration, we use a third method for finding our
way. An office worker you approach for help on a Manhattan street comer might say:
straight down Fifth, turn left on 47th, turn right on Park, go through the walkway under the
Helmsley Building, then cross the street to the MetLife Building into Grand Central.” This
strategy, called route following, uses landmarks such as building sand street names,
plus directions—straight, turn, go through—for reaching intermediate中间点 points. Route
following is more precise than guidance or path integration, but if you forget the details
and take a wrong turn, the only way to recover is to backtrack until you reach a familiar
spot, because you do not know the general direction or have a reference landmark for your
goal. The route-following navigation strategy truly challenges the brain. We have to keep
all the landmarks and intermediate directions in our head. It is the most detailed and
therefore most reliable method, but it can be undone by routine memory lapses记忆差错.
With path integration, our cognitive memory is less burdened负担大; it has to deal with
only a few general instructions and the homing vector. Path integration works because it
relies most fundamentally on our knowledge of our body’s general direction of movement,
and we always have access to these inputs. Nevertheless, people often choose to give
route- following directions, in part because saying