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2024年6月英语六级考试辅导阅读理解材料
大学英语六级考试是由国家统一出题的，统一收费，统一组织考试，用来评定应试人英语能力的全国性的考试，每年各举行两次。下面是小编收集整理的2024年6月英语六级考试辅导阅读理解材料，欢迎大家借鉴与参考，希望对大家有所帮助。
材料1：
1.Move It
Quick — what’s the No.1 thing you can do for your brain’s health? Differential calculus, you say? Chess? Chaos theory? Nope, the best brain sharpener may be … sneakers? Yup.Once they’re on your feet, you can pump up your heart rate.“The best advice I can give to keep your brain healthy and young is aerobic exercise,” says Donald Stuss, PhD, a neuropsychologist and director of the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto.
differential calculus [数]微积分;微分学 chaos theory 混沌理论
pump up 给……打气;加速
aerobic exercise 有氧运动
Mark McDaniel, PhD, professor of psychology at Washington University in St.Louis, agrees, but adds, “I would suggest a combined program of aerobics and weight training.Studies show the best outcomes for those engaged in both types of exercise.”
As we age, our brain cells, called neurons, lose the tree-branch-like connections between them.These connections, or synapses, are essential to thought.Quite literally, over time, our brains lose their heft.Perhaps the most striking brain research today is the strong evidence we now have that “exercise may forestall some kinds of mental decline,” notes McDaniel.It may even restore memory.Myriad animal studies have shown that, among other brain benefits, aerobic exercise increases capillary development in the brain, meaning more blood supply, more nutrients and — a big requirement for brain health — more oxygen.
forestall v.垄断;预先阻止
mental decline 智力下降
The preeminent exercise and brain-health researcher in humans is Arthur Kramer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.In a dozen studies over the past few years, with titles such as “Aerobic Fitness Reduces Brain Tissue Loss in Aging Humans,” Kramer and his colleagues have proved two critical findings: Fit people have sharper brains, and people who are out of shape, but then get into shape, sharpen up their brains.This second finding is vital.There’s no question that working out makes you smarter, and it does so, Kramer notes, at all stages of life.Just as important, exercise staves off heart disease, obesity, diabetes and other maladies that increase the risk of brain problems as we age.
preeminent adj.卓越的
a dozen 一打;十二个
out of shape (身体)走形;变样
sharpen up 使……更敏锐;认真思考
stave off 避开;延缓
2.Feed It
Another path to a better brain is through your stomach.We’ve all heard about antioxidants as cancer fighters.Eating foods that contain these molecules, which neutralize harmful free radicals, may be especially good for your brain too.Free radicals have nothing to do with Berkeley politics and everything to do with breaking down the neurons in our brains.Many colorful fruits and vegetables are packed with antioxidants, as are some beans, whole grains, nuts and spices.
neutralize v.抵消;中和;使……中立
have nothing to do with 与……无关
be packed with 挤满;塞满;充满
More important, though, is overall nutrition.In concert with a good workout routine, you should eat right to avoid the diseases that modern flesh is heir to.High blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and high cholesterol all make life tough on your brain, says Carol Greenwood, PhD, a geriatric research scientist at the University of Toronto.
in concert with 和…相呼应;与…合作;和…一致
flesh is heir to 人所难免[共有]的
If your diet is heavy, then you’re probably also heavy.The same weight that burdens your legs on the stairs also burdens your brain for the witty reply or quick problem solving.The best things you can eat for your body, Greenwood notes, are also the best things you can eat for your brain.Your brain is in your body, after all.Greenwood’s recommendation is to follow the dietary guidelines from the American Diabetes Association (available at diabetes.org).
3.Speed It Up
Sorry to say, our brains naturally start slowing down at the cruelly young age of 30 (yes, 30).It used to be thought that this couldn’t be helped, but a barrage of new studies show that people of any age can train their brains to be faster and, in effect, younger.“Your brain is a learning machine,” says Michael Merzenich, PhD, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco.Given the right tools, we can train our brains to act like they did when we were younger.All that’s required is dedicated practice: exercises for the mind.
a barrage of 大量的
in effect 实际上
Merzenich has developed a computer-based training regimen to speed up how the brain processes information (positscience.com).Since much of the data we receive comes through speech, the Brain Fitness Program works with language and hearing to improve both speed and accuracy.Over the course of your training, the program starts asking you to distinguish sounds (between “dog” and “bog,” for instance) at an increasingly faster rate.It’s a bit like a tennis instructor, says Merzenich, shooting balls at you faster and faster over the course of the summer to keep you challenged.Though you may have started out slow, by Labor Day you’re pretty nimble.
nimble adj.敏捷的;聪明的
Similarly, Nintendo was inspired by the research of a Japanese doctor to develop a handheld game called Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day, which has sold more than two million copies in Japan.No software out there has yet been approved by the FDA as a treatment for cognitive impairment, but an increasing number of reputable scientific studies suggest that programs like Merzenich’s could help slow down typical brain aging, or even treat dementia.The biggest finding in brain research in the last ten years is that the brain at any age is highly adaptable, or “plastic,” as neurologists put it.If you ask your brain to learn, it will learn.And it may speed up in the process.
Nintendo 任天堂(日本电子游戏公司及其开发的电脑游戏名称)
FDA (美)食品及药物管理局(Food and Drug Administration)
cognitive impairment 认知障碍;认知损害
brain aging 脑老化
To keep your brain young and supple, you can purchase software like Merzenich’s, or you can do one of a million new activities that challenge and excite you: playing Ping-Pong or contract bridge, doing jigsaw puzzles, learning a new language or the tango, taking accordion lessons, building a kit airplane, mastering bonsai technique, discovering the subtleties of beer-brewing and, sure, relearning differential calculus.
supple adj.灵活的;柔软的
jigsaw puzzles 拼图游戏;拼图玩具
“Anything that closely engages your focus and is strongly rewarding,” says Merzenich, will kick your brain into learning mode and necessarily notch it up.For his part, Merzenich, 64, has “4,000 hobbies,” including a wood shop and a vineyard.
notch up 完成
4.Stay Calm
So you may be saying to yourself, I have to sign up right now for Swahili and calculus and accordion lessons before my brain withers away! Stop! Breathe.Relax.Good.
wither away 枯萎;幻灭
While challenging your brain is very important, remaining calm is equally so.In a paper on the brain and stress, Jeansok Kim of the University of Washington asserts, in no uncertain terms, that traumatic stress is bad for your brain cells.Stress can “disturb cognitive processes such as learning and memory, and consequently limit the quality of human life,” writes Kim.
in no uncertain terms 明确地
One example is a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is a primary locus of memory formation, but which can be seriously debilitated by chronic stress.Of course, physical exercise is always a great destressor, as are calmer activities like yoga and meditation.And when you line up your mental calisthenics (your Swahili and swing lessons), make sure you can stay loose and have fun.
5.Give It a Rest
Perhaps the most extreme example of the mental power of staying calm is the creative benefit of sleep.Next time you’re working on a complex problem, whether it be a calculus proof or choosing the right car for your family, it really pays to “sleep on it.”
Researchers at Harvard Medical School have looked at the conditions under which people come up with creative solutions.In a study involving math problems, they found that a good night’s rest doubled participants’ chances of finding a creative solution to the problems the next day.The sleeping brain, they theorize, is vastly capable of synthesizing complex information.
6.Laugh a Little
Humor stimulates the parts of our brain that use the “feel good” chemical messenger dopamine.That puts laughter in the category of activities you want to do over and over again, such as eating chocolate or having sex.Laughter is pleasurable, perhaps even “addictive,” to the brain.
But can humor make us smarter? The jury is still out and more studies are needed, but the initial results are encouraging.Look for a feature on exciting new research about humor and intelligence in the September issue of Reader’s Digest.
7.Get Better With Age
In our youth-obsessed culture, no one’s suggesting a revision to the Constitution allowing 20-year-olds to run for President.The age requirement remains at 35.You’ve heard about the wisdom and judgment of older people? Scientists are starting to understand how wisdom works on a neurological level.
run for 竞选
When you are older, explains Merzenich, “you have recorded in your brain millions and millions of little social scenarios and facts” that you can call upon at any time.Furthermore, he notes, “you are a much better synthesizer and integrator of that information.”
Older people are better at solving problems, because they have more mental information to draw upon than younger people do.That’s why those in their 50s and 60s are sage.They’re the ones we turn to for the best advice, the ones we want to run our companies and our country.
As Barry Gordon, a neurologist at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and author of Intelligent Memory: Improve the Memory That Makes You Smarter, puts it, “It’s nice to know some things get better with age.”
Question time:
1.Why "exercise may forestall some kinds of mental decline"?
2.How to train our brains to be faster according to Dr.Michael Merzenich?
3.Why older people are better at solving problems?
【参考答案】
1.Because studies have shown that among other brain benefits, aerobic exercise increases capillary development in the brain, meaning more blood supply, more nutrients and — a big requirement for brain health — more oxygen.
2.Anything that closely engages your focus and is strongly rewarding will kick our brain into learning mode and necessarily notch it up.
3.Because they have more mental information to draw upon than younger people do.
材料2：
Our visual perception depends on the reception of energy reflecting or radiating from that which we wish to perceive.If our eyes could receive and measure infinitely delicate sense-data, we could perceive the world with infinite precision.The natural limits of our eyes have, of course, been extended by mechanical instruments; telescopes and microscopes, for example, expand our capabilities greatly.There is, however, an ultimate limit beyond which no instrument can take us; this limit is imposed by our inability to receive sense-data smaller than those conveyed by an individual quantum of energy.Since these quanta are believed to be indivisible packages of energy and so cannot be further refined, we reach a point beyond which further resolution of the world is not possible.It is like a drawing a child might make by sticking indivisible discs of color onto a canvas.
We might think that we could avoid this limitation by using quanta with extremely long wavelengths; such quanta would be sufficiently sensitive to convey extremely delicate sense-data.And these quanta would be useful, as long as we only wanted to measure energy, but a completely accurate perception of the world will depend also on the exact measurement of the lengths and positions of what we wish to perceive.For this, quanta of extremely long wavelengths are useless.To measure a length accurately to within a millionth of an inch, we must have a measure graduated in millionths of an inch; a yardstick graduated in inches in useless.Quanta with a wavelength of one inch would be, in a sense, measures that are graduated in inches.Quanta of extremely long wavelength are useless in measuring anything except extremely large dimensions.
Despite these difficulties, quanta have important theoretical implications for physics.It used to be supposed that, in the observation of nature, the universe could be divided into two distinct parts, a perceiving subject and a perceived object.In physics, subject and object were supposed to be entirely distinct, so that a description of any part of the universe would be independent of the observer.The quantum theory, however, suggests otherwise, for every observation involves the passage of a complete quantum from the object to the subject, and it now appears that this passage constitutes an important coupling between observer and observed.We can no longer make a sharp division between the two in an effort to observe nature objectively.Such an attempt at objectivity would distort the crucial interrelatioship of observer and observed as parts of a single whole.But, even for scientists, it is only in the world of atoms that this new development makes any appreciable difference in the explanation of observations.
1.The primary purpose of the passage is to
(A) discuss a problem that hinders precise perception of the world
(B) point out the inadequacies of accepted units of measurement
(C) criticize attempts to distinguish between perceiving subjects and perceived objects
(D) compare and contrast rival scientific hypotheses about how the world should be measured and observed
(E) suggest the limited function of sensory observation
2.According to the passage, quanta with an extremely long wavelength cannot be used to give complete information about the physical world because they
(A) exist independently of sense-data
(B) are graduated only in inches
(C) have an insignificant amount of energy
(D) cannot, with present-day instruments, be isolated from quanta of shorter wavelength
(E) provide an insufficiently precise means of measuring length and position
3 Which of the following describes a situation most analogous to the situation discussed in lines 9-13?
(A) A mathematician can only solve problems the solution of which can be deduced from known axiom.
(B) An animal can respond to no command that is more complicated syntactically than any it has previously received.
(C) A viewer who has not learned, at least intuitively, the conventions of painting, cannot understand perspective in a drawing.
(D) A sensitized film will record no detail on a scale that is smaller than the grain of the film.
(E) A shadow cast on a screen by an opaque object will have sharp edge only if the light source is small or very distant.
4.The author uses the analogy of the child’s drawing (lines 17-19) primarily in order to
(A) illustrate the ultimate limitation in the precision of sense-data conveyed by quanta
(B) show the sense of helplessness scientists feel in the face of significant observational problems
(C) anticipate the objections of the those scientists who believe that no instrumental aid to observation is entirely reliable
(D) exemplify the similarities between packages of energy and varieties of color
(E) disparage those scientists who believe that measurement by means of quanta offers an accurate picture of the world
5.The author implies that making a sharp division between subject and object in physics is
(A) possible in a measurement o object’s length and position, but not in a measurement of its energy
(B) still theoretically possible in the small-scale world of atoms and electrons
(C) possible in the case of observations involving the passage of a complete quantum
(D) no longer an entirely accurate way to describe observation of the universe
(E) a goal at which scientists still aim
6.The author’s use of the phrase “in a sense” (line 34) implies which of the following?
(A) Quanta of extremely long wavelength are essentially graduated in inches.
(B) quanta of one-inch wavelength are not precisely analogous to yardsticks graduated in inches.
(C) Quanta of extremely long wavelength, in at least on e respect, resemble quanta of shorter wavelength.
(D) quanta of on-inch wavelength and quanta of extremely long wavelength do not differ only in their wavelengths.
(E) quanta of one-inch wavelength must be measured by different standards than quanta of extremely long wavelength.
7.According to the passage, the quantum theory can be distinguished from previous theories of physics by its
(A) insistence on scrupulously precise mathematical formulations
(B) understanding of the inherent interrelationship of perceiver and perceived
(C) recognition of the need for sophisticated instruments of measurement
(D) emphasis on small-scale rather than on large-scale phenomena
(E) regard for philosophical issues as well as for strictly scientific ones
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