Вариант 4

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.

Neuroscience explains how our brain works and can be a source of information on treating our brain properly during revision time and memorizing information in general.

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 stimulus, 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.

Breaks are important to minimise interference. When your hippocampus is forced to store many new (and often similar) patterns in a short space of time, it can get them jumbled up. The best example of this is when you get a new telephone number. Your old number is still so well-entrenched in your memory that remembering the new one is a nightmare. It’s even worse if the new one has a few similarities to the old. Plan your revision so you can take breaks and revise what you’ve just learned before moving on to anything new.

Attention is the key to memorising. By choosing to focus on something, you give it a personal meaning that makes it easier to remember. In fact, most of our problems when it comes to revision have very little to do with the brain’s capacity for remembering things; we just struggle to devote our full attention to the task in hand.

Playing music while revising will make your task harder, because any speech-like sounds, even at low volume, will automatically use up part of the brain’s attention capacity.

We spend approximately a third of our lives sleeping and it’s never as important as during revision time. Sleep plays a critical role in memory consolidation – this is when the brain backs up short-term patterns and creates long-term memories. The process is believed to occur during deep sleep, when the hippocampal neurons pass the patterns of activity to another part of the brain called the neocortex, which is responsible for language and the generation of motor commands.

Past research in Nature Neuroscience shows how memories are decluttered and irrelevant information is deleted during this process. This results in the important memories (the pathways that have been strengthened through repetition) becoming easier to access.

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.