雅思阅读全真 Passage 2 · The Science of Forgetting（中等难度）
中等难度，约 800 词，三种题型：段落标题匹配 / 摘要填空 / True-False-Not Given。建议限时 20 分钟。
Reading Passage
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–13.
The Useful Art of Forgetting
A. When people speak of memory, they almost always do so in tones of admiration. The ability to remember — to recall names, faces, facts and routes — is treated as a sign of intelligence, and its loss is treated as a tragedy. Yet this almost exclusive focus on remembering obscures a truth that cognitive scientists have begun to take seriously: that forgetting is not a failure of memory, but one of its central functions. Far from being a defect, the controlled loss of information is essential to the operation of a healthy mind.
B. The modern study of forgetting begins with Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist who in the 1880s memorised thousands of nonsense syllables and measured how many he retained after varying intervals. His famous "forgetting curve" showed that we lose the vast majority of newly learned material within hours, and that what survives declines slowly thereafter. For over a century, Ebbinghaus's curve was read as evidence of memory's frailty — a warning that, without constant revision, knowledge evaporates. Only recently have researchers reinterpreted the same data as evidence of memory's efficiency. A system that retained every impression would be as useless as one that retained nothing.
C. The case for adaptive forgetting rests on the logic of prediction. The brain evolved not to record the past but to anticipate the future, and an overloaded memory actively impairs this function. If every detail of last summer's holiday remained equally vivid, it would be impossible to extract the general principles that make future decisions easier. Forgetting, in this view, is the process by which the brain discards the incidental in order to retain the structural. A forgotten phone number, in other words, is not a malfunction; it is the brain deliberately clearing space.
D. This logic has been confirmed at the biological level. A growing body of research points to the active role played by a class of brain mechanisms that weaken or eliminate neural connections over time — the mirror image of the processes that strengthen them during learning. Far from passive decay, this "synaptic pruning" appears to be a regulated process: the brain systematically removes connections that are seldom used, on the assumption that unused information is unlikely to be relevant. The energy savings are considerable. If all synapses were maintained indefinitely, the brain would require several times the energy budget it actually consumes.
E. The practical implications extend to education, where the virtues of forgetting are still poorly understood. Teachers commonly treat memory as a container to be filled, and students are praised for their ability to reproduce material verbatim. Yet research on the "spacing effect" — the finding that information learned in short, spaced sessions is retained far better than the same information crammed into one long session — suggests that the interval between study sessions is itself a form of controlled forgetting. Each retrieval, however incomplete, strengthens the trace for the next. The cramming student, by contrast, builds a fragile memory that collapses as soon as the exam ends.
F. None of this is to romanticise the loss of memory. The patient with severe amnesia, or the elderly person losing their grip on recent events, offers no useful insight into the wisdom of forgetting. The argument is narrower: within the ordinary range of human memory, a degree of forgetting is not an error but a design feature. The challenge for education, and for the technologies that increasingly aim to remember on our behalf, is not to eliminate forgetting but to work out which kinds of memory deserve to be preserved, and which are better released.
Questions 1–4
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.
List of Headings i. The brain's limited energy budget ii. A century of misreading a classic experiment iii. Why prediction demands an imperfect memory iv. How spacing defeats cramming v. The chemistry of a forgotten name vi. When forgetting becomes a tragedy
1. Paragraph B 2. Paragraph C 3. Paragraph D 4. Paragraph E
Questions 5–9
Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Adaptive Forgetting and the Brain
The brain did not evolve in order to record the past, but to make (5) ______ about what will happen next. Forgetting allows the mind to discard (6) ______ details and keep the underlying principles. At the biological level, the brain actively weakens connections that are rarely used — a process known as (7) ______ pruning. This process saves a great deal of (8) ______, since maintaining every connection would require several times the current energy budget. In education, short and (9) ______ study sessions are more effective than long cramming, because each retrieval strengthens the memory trace.
Questions 10–13
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?
Write: TRUE / FALSE / NOT GIVEN
10. Ebbinghaus's results were originally interpreted as showing the weakness of memory.
11. The energy used by the brain is roughly the same as that used by the heart.
12. The "spacing effect" suggests that long study sessions are superior to short ones.
13. The writer believes the new research justifies a relaxed attitude to amnesia.
答案与解析
Headings
- ii（B 段：Ebbinghaus 曲线一百年来被误读，"Only recently have researchers reinterpreted" → A century of misreading）
- iii（C 段：大脑进化为预测未来，"an overloaded memory actively impairs this function" → Why prediction demands an imperfect memory）
- i（D 段末尾："The energy savings are considerable" → The brain's limited energy budget；注意 v "chemistry" 文中未提）
- iv（E 段：spacing effect vs cramming → How spacing defeats cramming）
Summary
- predictions（"anticipate the future" → make predictions about the future）
- incidental（"discards the incidental in order to retain the structural"）
- synaptic（"synaptic pruning"）
- energy（"The energy savings are considerable"）
- spaced（"short, spaced sessions"——题干 spaced sessions）
True / False / Not Given
- TRUE（B 段："Ebbinghaus's curve was read as evidence of memory's frailty"）
- NOT GIVEN（文中只说大脑能量预算，未与心脏比较）
- FALSE（E 段明确 spaced sessions 优于 cramming——与题干相反）
- FALSE（F 段开头："None of this is to romanticise the loss of memory. The patient with severe amnesia... offers no useful insight"）
备考要点
- Heading 干扰：第 3 题 vi "When forgetting becomes a tragedy" 看似对应 F 段，但 F 不在题目范围内；v "chemistry" 文中无据
- Summary 同义替换：predictions = anticipate；incidental = details not kept
- NOT GIVEN 识别：第 11 题是典型的"文中提过 A（大脑能耗），但没说和 B（心脏）比较"
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