赵南望四级深度阅读义赵南望四级深度阅读讲义.docVIP

2013海天教育英语四级深度阅读 （主讲：赵南望） 第一部分 外刊精读 Text 1 The greatest devastation of old age is the loss of mental faculties, and with the near doubling of life expectancy in the past century has come the mixed blessing of living longer and losing more. A few great thinkers and artists remained productive in their later years——Galileo, Monet, Shaw, Stravinsky, Tolstoy——but even they were not what they had been in their primes. In science, the boom falls sooner still: “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so,” said Einstein. Imagine if we could transplant old brains into younger bodies: would our minds stay young, or would we be senile teenagers, scaling mountains and skateboarding at 120, but forgetting where we put the car keys? Is the brain uniquely vulnerable to the ravages of time? Can anything be done? Incontrovertible evidence from many studies shows that a higher level of education and greater mental activity throughout life correlate with lower cognitive losses in old age. These benefits apply to all sorts of cognitive losses, including those associated with Alzheimer’s. Some researchers believe that mental application in early life produces complex neural connections that provide a reserve later on; others argue that education merely gives people the means to cope with and compensate for their losses. K. Warner Schaie, a professor of human development and psychology at Pennsylvania State University, has studied age-related change in more than 5,000 people, some for more than 40 years. Comparing earlier with later recruits, Mr. Schaie concludes that the rate of mental decline is slowing, a change he attributes to better education, healthier diet, lessened exposure to serious disease, and more mental activity. “You’ve got to practice,” Mr. Schaie says, “If you don’t solve problems, you no longer can solve problems.” Retirement can be particularly hard, he adds, because for many people, work is their most chall