You are going to read a newspaper article on education. Read the text and answer the questions that follow. Decide whether each statement is True or False and provide your arguments drawn from the text to justify your choice. The proof should be given in your own words.
If you’re a student, you rely on one brain function above all others: memory.
These days, we understand more about the structure of memory than we ever have before, so we can find the best techniques for training your brain to hang on to as much information as possible. The process depends on the brain’s neuroplasticity, its ability to reorganise itself throughout your life by breaking and forming new connections between its billions of cells.
How does it work? Information is transmitted by brain cells called neurons. When you learn something new, a group of neurons activate in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. It’s like a pattern of light bulbs turning on.
Your hippocampus is forced to store many new patterns every day. This increases hugely when you are revising. Provided with the right trigger – an event or thing that causes you remember something – the hippocampus should be able to retrieve any pattern. But if it keeps getting new information, the overworked brain might go wrong. That’s what happens when you think you’ve committed a new fact to memory, only to find 15 minutes later that it’s disappeared again.
So what’s the best way to revise? Here are the top tips to get information into your brain and keep it there.
Teachers often urge students to make up mnemonics – sentences based on the initial letters of items you’re trying to remember. Trouble is, they help you remember the order, but not the names. The mnemonic Kings Prefer Cheese Over Fried Green Spinach can help you recall the order of taxonomy in biology (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) but that’s only helpful if you’re given the names of the ranks.
The mnemonic is providing you with a cue, or a signal, but, if you haven’t memorised the names, the information you want to recall is not there. You’re just giving your overflowing hippocampus yet another pattern of activity to store and retrieve.
Pathways between neurons can be strengthened over time. Simple repetition – practising retrieving a memory over and over again – is the best form of consolidating the pattern.
Science tells us the ideal time to revise what you’ve learned is just before you’re about to forget it. And because memories get stronger the more you retrieve them, you should wait increasingly longer each time – after a few minutes, then a few hours, then a day, then a few days. This technique is known as spaced repetition.
This also explains why you forget things so quickly after a week of cramming for an exam. Because the growing curve of memory retrieval does not continue, the process reverses and within a few weeks, you have forgotten everything.
1-5. Choose whether the statements are True (T) or False (F) and, to justify your choice, provide your proof from the text in your own words.
Example : (0) The statement is true because the narrator has never read a single book in the original and has not demonstrated any interest in the subject.
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1. Our brain stops pulling facts and details out of our memory when it is exposed to too much information.
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2. Mnemonics are a perfect memorising tool, especially if you don’t have time to memorise particular words.
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3. To increase your memory power, it is advisable to memorise something just once, 15 minutes before you need to use this information.
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4. If you want to have a reliable memory of anything, you should revise it at equal intervals of time.
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5. Even if you worked hard for your exam, you can forget the information you learnt if you stop revising it.
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