雅思阅读练习题：The inevitable and beneficial daydreaming？

　　新东方在线雅思网为大家带来了雅思阅读练习题： The inevitable and beneficial daydreaming?。正文都做了贴心的注解，文章包含雅思词汇、例句讲解。希望以下内容能够为同学们的雅思备考提供帮助。新东方在线雅思网将第一时间为大家发布最新、最全、最专业的雅思报名官网消息和雅思考试真题及解析，供大家参考。

　　Daydreaming has a bad reputation, but neuroscientists(神经科学家)are beginning to realise that a wandering mind is not only typical – it might be beneficial.

　　Sit down, relax and think of nothing. Struggling? There might be a good reason why your mind seems to wander even when you try very hard to switch off: your brain never really rests. And contrary to popular belief(与普遍观点相反), those idle daydreams might even be beneficial.

　　For years, neuroscientists worked on the assumption(假设;理论)that our brains work hard when given a specific job to do, and switch off when we’re not mentally stimulated(刺激). This is why you’ll read about experiments in which volunteers perform a task – tapping a finger, performing some mental arithmetic, looking at evocative(唤起记忆的)pictures – while their brain is scanned. The scan reveals which parts of the brain become more active during the task and which become less active. In this way it is possible to work out how our brain controls our behaviour.

　　Often the neuroscientists want to explore brain activity for a number of different tasks, so they need a way of getting the brain back to a neutral state(中性状态) between tests. This is typically done by asking the person to stare at a simple white cross(十字架)in the middle of a black screen. By thinking about nothing in particular, the theory goes, the brain should basically switch off.

　　There is just one problem: it doesn’t.

　　The first sign that a resting brain is surprisingly active came two decades ago. A student called Bharat Biswal was studying for a PhD at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. He was investigating(研究)ways to get a purer signal from a brain scanner, when he noticed that the resting brain isn’t doing nothing.(他正在研究如何从脑部扫描仪中提取一种更纯的信号，却发现休息的大脑并不是没有工作。) Even when people were told to clear their minds or to stare at a cross, activity in the brain continued. Not only that, the brain scans seemed to reveal this activity was actually coordinated(协调的).

　　Then in 1997 an analysis incorporating(包含，整合)the results of nine brain scan studies revealed another surprise. Gordon Shulman hoped his analysis would help identify the network that comes to life when people pay attention. But he discovered the opposite – the network which is activated when we do nothing.

　　It would make sense for the brain to become more active when volunteers shifted from resting to performing a task. Instead, Schulman noticed that some areas of the brain consistently(总是，一贯地)became less active when the resting period ended and the activity began. This suggested that while people were lying quietly in the scanner supposedly doing nothing, parts of their brains were in fact more active than when the volunteers were actively performing a task.(这表明，当志愿者静静地躺在扫描仪中，似乎什么都没做，其大脑的某些部分反而更活跃，甚至比他们积极完成一项工作时更活跃。)

　　It took a while for the idea that the brain never rests to catch on(变得流行，被人理解). For years neuroscientists had thought that brain circuits(线路)switched off when they weren’t needed. In 1998 the neuroscientist Marcus Raichle, now one of the leaders in the field, even had a paper rejected by a referee who said “the apparent activity must surely be down to an error in the data”.(神经科学家Marcus Raichle现在已经是该领域的领头人之一，但在1998年，他的一篇论文甚至被审稿人给拒绝了，理由是“大脑看起来很明显的活动状态一定是由于数据出现错误”。)

　　Today things are very different. Almost 3000 scientific papers have been published on the topic of the brain’s surprisingly busy “resting state”. Some object to(反对) this term for the very reason that the brain isn’t resting at all. They prefer instead to talk about the “default mode network”(默认状态网络) – the areas of the brain which remain active while we are apparently idle.

　　The big question is: why is the idling brain so active? There are plenty of theories, but no agreement yet. Maybe different brain areas are simply practising working together. Perhaps the brain is staying active like an idling car, just in case it needs to act suddenly. But it’s possible that those mind wanderings and replays of our day play a vital role in helping us to consolidate(加强) our memories. We know that our dreams seem to play a part in sorting out our memories – now there is evidence that it happens during the day too (in rats, at least).

　　We also know that when the mind is left to wander, it often focuses on the future. We start thinking about what we’re going to eat in the evening or where we’re going to go next week. All three of the chief areas of the brain involved in imagining the future are part of the default mode network. It is almost as though our brain is programmed to contemplate(思考)the future whenever it finds itself unoccupied(空闲的).

　　Moshe Bar from Harvard Medical School thinks there might be a very good reason for that. He believes daydreaming essentially creates memories of events that haven’t happened. This gives us a strange set of “prior experiences” we can draw on to help us decide how to act if the daydreams ever do come to pass. (这就给我们一套奇怪的“前经验”，如果白日梦真的发生了，我们可以利用这些经验来决定自己采取的行动。)For instance, many air travelers have wondered what it might be like to crash. Bar’s idea is that if the plane did actually crash, the memories of all those daydreams from previous flights would come into play and help the passenger decide how to behave.

　　But the resting state is not easy to investigate. As some cognitive psychologists have pointed out, just because a person is lying in a scanner we can’t be sure that they are alone in their thoughts, introspecting(内省). They could be thinking about the sounds of the scanner and what’s happening around them. For this reason there are still plenty of unanswered questions about mind wandering. For instance, are the daydreams we experience when we’re trying – and failing – to focus on our work different from the ones we have when we’re deliberately(有意地) trying to switch off?(比如，当我们试图—或者没做到—专心工作时体验到的白日梦，与我们刻意要关闭大脑时体验的白日梦有什么不同?)

　　Progress is being made, though. A study published earlier this year hinted that we might all experience the resting state in a slightly different same way. Researchers conducted a detailed brain scan study of five people who had been trained to recount their mind wanderings in detail every time they heard a computer beep. The researchers found considerable(相当大的) differences between each person’s daydreaming thoughts and experiences.

　　In September researchers at the University of Oxford used scans from the Human Connectome Project of 460 people’s brains in a resting state to explore which parts of the brain communicate with each other when we are at rest. Again, the results hinted at personal differences in the resting state – this time linked to life skills and experiences. The strength of the connections between different parts of the brain varies with the strength of a person’s memory, their years of education and their physical endurance.(大脑不同部分之间联系的强度取决于个人记忆力的强度、受教育长短及其身体耐力。) It is as though parts of the brain remain connected when our mind wanders just in case we need them to do something.

　　Scientifically, the discovery that the brain is never truly at rest could help make sense of a longstanding mystery: why does the brain uses 20% of body’s energy when the activities we know it performs should need only about 5%?Marcus Raichle has labelled the missing 15% the brain’s “dark energy” – resting state activity might account for some of this discrepancy(差异，缺口).(为什么大脑使用了身体能量的20%，而大脑完成我们所知的活动仅需要5%?Marcus Raichle将那消失的15%称为大脑的“黑能量”—休息状态下的活动也许能部分解释这15%的缺口。)

　　The discovery of the resting state also has the potential to change the way we each feel about our brains. We know how hard it is to empty our minds. We know how our minds have a frustrating tendency to wander even when we don’t want them to. But the emerging picture suggests these quirks(怪癖)might actually be beneficial – even if they do prevent us from finishing a task in time to meet a deadline. In other words, perhaps it’s time to celebrate the virtues of an idle mind. (换句话说，我们也许该歌颂一下胡思乱想的美德了。)

　　Vocabulary

　　Neuroscientist 神经科学家

　　Popular belief 通行的观点

　　Assumption 假设，前提

　　Stimulate 刺激

　　Evocative 召唤的;引起回忆的

　　Neutral 中性的

　　Cross 十字架

　　Investigate 研究;探究

　　Coordinate 协调

　　Incorporate 整合;纳入

　　Consistently 总是;一贯

　　Catch on 被人接受，变得流行

　　Object to 反对

　　Consolidate 加强;巩固

　　Contemplate 思考

　　Unoccupied 空闲的

　　Introspect 内省

　　Deliberately 刻意地

　　Considerable 相当大的

　　Discrepancy 差异;缺口

　　Quirk 怪癖

　　本文对雅思写作的启示

　　这篇文章可以分为三个部分：第一部分提出我们休息时，大脑其实在活动;第二部分尝试对这种现象予以解释;第三部分认为这种白日梦可能有好处(你能划出这三部分的位置吗?)。请看第一部分作者如何引用论据来论证与常规观点相悖的看法;第二部分如何提出解释;第三部分如何阐述未经证实的好处。以下句式可以模仿：

　　1. Contrary to popular belief, those idle daydreams might even be beneficial.

　　与普遍观点不同的是，这些无所事事的白日梦甚至可能是有好处的。

　　2. The first sign that a resting brain is surprisingly active came two decades ago.

　　休息的大脑出奇地活跃，这个说法首次出现在20年前。

　　Then in 1997 an analysis incorporating(包含，整合) the results of nine brain scan studies revealed another surprise.

　　1997年，一份整合了9项大脑扫描研究结果的分析揭示出另一些让人意想不到的结论。

　　Today things are very different. Almost 3000 scientific papers have been published on the topic of the brain’s surprisingly busy “resting state”.

　　今天情况大不相同了，已经发表了大约3000篇科学论文，讨论大脑的这种令人惊奇的繁忙“休息状态”。

　　3. The big question is: why is the idling brain so active? There are plenty of theories, but no agreement yet.

　　重要的问题是：为什么空闲的大脑如此活跃?有很多理论，但还没有定论。

　　4.The discovery of the resting state also has the potential to change the way we each feel about our brains.

　　关于空闲状态的发现还有可能改变我们对大脑的感觉方式。