ich.
33. A country shows its progress with GNP by
A. selling more products.
B. spending more money.
C. spending less money.
D. providing more jobs.
34. According to GNH, people are happier if they
A. have new technology.
B. have a good, stable government.
C. can change their religion.
D. have more money.
35. Today many countries are
A. using the principles of GNH to measure their progress.
B. working together to develop a common scale to measure GNH.
C. taking both Bhutan and Brazil as symbols for social progress.
D. trying to find their own ways to measure happiness.
第二篇 Download Knowledge Directly to Your Brain
For the first time, researchers have been able to hack into the process of learning in the brain, using induced brain patterns to create a learned behavior. It’s not quite as advanced as an instant kung-fu download, and it’s not as sleek as cognitive inception, but it’s still an important finding that could lead to new teaching and rehabilitation techniques.
Future therapies could decode the brain activity patterns of an athlete or a musician, and use them as a benchmark for teaching another person a new activity, according to the researchers.
Scientists from Boston University and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study the learning process. They were examining the adult brain’s aptitude for visual perceptual learning, or VPL, in which repetitive training improves a person’s performance on a particular task. Whether adults can do this as well as young people has been an ongoing debate in neuroscience.
Led by BU neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe, researchers used a method called decoded fMRI neurofeedback to stimulate the visual cortex. First they showed participants circles at different orientations. Then they used fMRI to watch the participants’ brain activity. The researchers were then able to train the participants to recreate this visual cortex activity.
The volunteers were again placed in MRI machines and asked to visualize shapes of certain colors. The participants were asked to “somehow regulate activity in the posterior part of the brain” to make a solid green disc as large as they could. They were told they would get a paid bonus proportional to the size of this disc, but they weren’t told anything about what the disc meant. The researchers watched the participants’ brain activity and monitored the activation patterns in their visual cortices.
“Participants can be trained to control the overall mean activation of an entire brain region,” the study authors write, “or the activation in one region relative to that in another region.”
This worked even when test subjects were not aware of what they were learning, the researchers said.
“The most surprising thing in this study is that mere inductions of neural activation patterns corresponding to a specific visual feature led to visual performance improvement on the visual feature, without presenting the feature or subjects' awareness of what was to be learned,” Watanabe said in a statement.
Watanabe and colleagues said this method can be a powerful tool.
“It can ‘incept’ a person to acquire new learning, skills, or memory, or possibly to restore skills or knowledge that has been damaged through accident, disease, or aging, without a person’s awareness of what is learned or memorized,” they write.
36. what have researchers been able to do with the help of the study?
A. Discover a person’s learning process in the brain.
B. Make a person know how to do something without learning.
C. Set up different learning patterns for different people.
D. Enable people to learn kung fu instantly.
37. what helps a person to do a particular task better in visual perceptual learning?
A. Testing
B. Encouragement
C. Self- assessment
D. Repetition
38. which of the following statements is true of the experiment participants?
A. They learned how to control MRL machines in the experiment
B. They were not told what to be learned in the experiment
C. They were paid to take part in the experiment
D. They were not cooperative in the experiment
39. the finding of the study is most significant in that learning
A. is full of fun
B. is visualized
C. happens unconsciously
D. becomes unnecessary
40. who are most likely to benefit from the study?
A. Teenagers
B. Musicians
C. Senior people
D. Athletes
第三篇 Small But Wise
On December 14, NASA1 blasted a small but mighty telescope into space. The telescope is called WISE and is about as wide around as a trashcan. Don't let its small size fool you: WISE has a powerful digital camera, and it will be taking pictures of some the wildest objects2 in the known universe, including asteroids, faint stars, blazing galaxies3 and giant clouds of dust where planets and stars are born.
“I'm very excited because we're going to be seeing parts of the universe that we haven't seen before, ” said Ned Wright, a scientist who directs the WISE project.
Since arriving in space, the WISE telescope has been circling the Earth, held by gravity in a polar orbit4( this means it crosses close to the north and south poles with each lap5). Its camera is pointed outward, away from the Earth, and WISE will snap a picture of a different part of the sky every 11 minutes. After six months it will have taken pictures across the entire sky.
The pictures taken by WISE won't be like everyday digital photographs, however. WISE stands for “Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. ” As its name suggests, the WISE camera takes pictures of features that give off infrared radiation6.
Radiation is energy that travels as a wave. Visible light, including the familiar spectrum of light7 that becomes visible in a rainbow, is an example of radiation. When an ordinary digital camera takes a picture of a tree, for example, it receives the waves of visib
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