2023 年 12 月大学英语六级考试真题（第 3 套）

A)You may have heard that learning another language is one method for preventing or at least postponing the onset of dementia. Dementia refers to the loss of cognitive abilities, and one of its most common forms is Alzheimers disease (阿尔茨海默氏病). At this time, the causes of the disease are not well understood, and consequently, there are no proven steps that people can take to prevent it. Nonetheless, some researchers have suggested that learning a foreign language might help delay the onset of dementia.

B)To explore this possibility more deeply, let's look at some of the common misconceptions about dementia and the aging brain. First of all, dementia is not an inevitable part of the normal aging process. Most older adults do not develop Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia. It is also important to remember that dementia is not the same thing as normal forgetfulness. At any age, we might experience difficulty finding the exact word we want or have trouble remembering the name of the person we just met. People with dementia have more serious problems, like feeling confused or getting lost in a familiar place. Think of it this way: If you forget where you parked your car at the mall, that's normal; if you forget how to drive a car, that may be a signal that something more serious is going on.

C)The idea that dementia can be prevented is based on the comparison of the brain to a muscle. When people talk about the brain, they sometimes say things like "It is important to exercise your brain" or "To stay mentally fit, you have to give your brain a workout." Although these are colorful analogies, in reality the brain is not a muscle. Unlike muscles, the brain is always active and works even during periods of rest and sleep. In addition, although some muscle cells have a lifespan of only a few days, brain cells last a lifetime. Not only that, but it has been shown that new brain cells are being created throughout one's lifespan.

D)While it makes for a colorful analogy, comparing the brain to a muscle is inaccurate and misleading. So, if the brain is not a muscle, can it still be exercised? Once again, researchers don't know for sure. There are now many computer, online, and mobile device applications that claim to be able to "train your brain," and they typically tap into a variety of cognitive abilities. However, research suggests that although this type of training may improve one's abilities at the tasks themselves, they don't seem to improve other abilities. In other words, practicing a letter-detection task will, over time, improve your letter-detection skills, but it will not necessarily enhance your other perceptual abilities.

E)However, there is some reason to believe that learning languages might be different. The best evidence that foreign language learning confers cognitive benefits comes from research with those who are already bilingual (双语的). Bilingualism most commonly occurs when children are exposed to two languages, either in the home(mom speaks Dutch, dad speaks Spanish) or more formally in early schooling. But bilingualism certainly occurs in adulthood as well.

F)Bilingualism and multilingualism are actually more common than you might think. In fact, it has been estimated that there are fewer monolingual speakers in the world than bilinguals and multilinguals. Although in many countries most inhabitants share just one language, other countries have several official languages. Switzerland, for example, has four official languages: German, French, Italian, and Romansh. Throughout large parts of Africa, Arabic, Swahili, French, and English are often known and used by individuals who speak a different, native language in their home than they do in the marketplace. So bilingualism and multilingualism are to be found throughout the world. And with regard to cognitive abilities, the research on those who speak more than one language paints an encouraging picture.

G)For one thing, bilinguals are better at multitasking. One explanation of this superiority is that speakers of two languages are continually inhibiting one of their languages, and this process of inhibition confers general cognitive benefits to other activities. In fact, bilingual individuals outperform their monolingual counterparts on a variety of cognitive tasks, such as following complex instructions, and switching to new instructions. For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that the advantages of being bilingual are not universal across all cognitive domains. Bilingual individuals have been shown to have smaller vocabularies and to take longer in retrieving words from memory when compared to monolinguals. In the long run, however, the cognitive and linguistic advantages of being bilingual far outweigh these two drawbacks.

H)If the benefits of being bilingual spill over to other aspects of cognition, then we would expect to see a lower incidence of Alzheimer's disease in bilinguals than in monolinguals, or at least a later onset of Alzheimer's for bilinguals. In fact, there is evidence to support this claim. The psychologist Ellen Bialystok and her colleagues obtained the histories of 184 individuals who had made use of a memory clinic in Toronto. For those who showed signs of dementia, the monolinguals in the sample had an average age of 71.4 years at time of onset. The bilinguals, in contrast, received their diagnosis at 75.5 years, on average. In a study of this sort, a difference of four years is highly significant, and could not be explained by other systematic differences between the two groups. For example, the monolinguals reported, on average, a year and a half more schooling than their bilingual counterparts, so the effect was clearly not due to formal education.

I)A separate study, conducted in India, found strikingly similar results: bilingual patients developed symptoms of dementia 4.5 years later than monolinguals, even after other potential factors, such as gender and occupation, were controlled for. In addition, researchers have reported other positive effects of bilingualism for cognitive abilities in later life, even when the person acquired the language in adulthood. Crucially, Bialystok suggested that the positive benefits of being bilingual were only found in those who used both languages all the time.

J)But encouraging as these kinds of studies are, they still have not established exactly how or why differences between bilinguals and monolinguals exist. Because these studies looked back at the histories of people who were already bilingual, the results can only say that a difference between the two groups was found, but not why that difference occurred. Further research is needed to determine what caused the differences in age of onset between the two groups.

K)Other studies of successful aging suggest that being connected to one's community and having plenty of social interaction is also important in delaying or even preventing the onset of dementia. Once again, however, the results are far less clear than the popular media might lead you to believe. Older individuals who lead active social lives are, almost by definition, healthier than their counterparts who rarely leave their homes or interact with others. So we can't really say whether being socially active prevents the onset of dementia, or if people who don't have dementia are more likely to be socially active.

L)But even if studying a foreign language is not a magical cure-all, there is one thing it will do: It will make you a better speaker of a foreign language. Doing that confers a whole host of advantages we do know about.

Research is meant to benefit society by raising public awareness and creating products and innovations that enhance development. For research to serve its full purpose, the results must leave the confines of research laboratories and academic journals. Findings effectively communicated can go a long way to serve the interests of the public. They can help address social injustices or improve treatments offered to patients. Many researchers seem to be content with sharing the results of their studies in academic journals or at conferences. But few journals allow everybody to read the findings. Even articles freely available are usually written in academic language incomprehensible to the average reader. For researchers in the tenure-track system, their main goal is winning tenure, which in part can be achieved by getting a number of papers published in prominent journals. Pressures like this mean community-level outreach is not prioritised. Many researchers lack the writing skills to describe their results to a general audience. They may also worry about whether the public will understand their findings, or about findings being used to influence controversial policies. These concerns cause some researchers to shy away from communicating their findings outside the academic community. Propagating research findings beyond academic publications is particularly crucial for addressing certain social discrepancies. It can help families, communities, healthcare providers, policymakers, government agencies and other stakeholders to understand and respond to crises that plague society. The benefits of sharing findings flow both ways. Engaging with other researchers and the public can lead to unexpected new connections and new ideas that could suggest fruitful new directions for research. To benefit both researchers and the communities, the need to find innovative, accessible ways to share the work cannot be overstated. Institutions and funding organisations should support more researchers to publish in open access journals so that the public doesn't have to pay to read them. Institutions and researchers should invest in partnerships that expand capacity for sharing results more broadly. Furthermore, ethics committees should make it mandatory for researchers to share their results with the public. Every research participant should opt in or out of receiving results, as part of the process of giving informed consent. There could be misunderstanding of the findings presented by the researcher because of technical terms. But this can be resolved by researchers engaging the services of professional writers or communication officers to help with translating their study into more accessible language and share it widely with media outlets and the public. Sharing results with the people who are most affected by them makes us better researchers and ensures that our work can be used to improve people's lives. Institutions and collaborators must recognise the value of doing so.

Spiders make their presence felt in late August and through early autumn. This is the mating season of some of the most common varieties, when male house spiders come out of hidden corners to look for females, and garden spiders reach adult size and spin their most dazzling webs. Yet while the spider is a familiar fixture of nursery poems or songs and Halloween decorations, its relationship with humans is complicated. Fear of spiders is common and has serious impacts on the lives of sufferers. Its prevalence appears unrelated to any rational assessment of risk. Spiders in the UK are almost all harmless. Farmland species perform valuable ecosystem services, by preying on insects that are our competitors for crops. But they are a constant source of human anxieties—with a cultural association with witches and wickedness dating back to the middle ages. Does this perhaps explain, in part, the lack of data about how spiders are faring in our age of ecological crisis? British butterflies are the most studied group of insects in the world, due to the long tradition of collecting and observing them. But spider conservationists point out that it was only in the 1980s that the classification of house spiders was properly sorted out. And while information about insect populations is gathered by experiments that measure the numbers hitting windscreens or traps, there have been few attempts to count spiders. The huge reductions in the numbers of flying insects can only mean a reduction in spiders' food supply. A recent landmark study identified a 75% fall in insect populations between 1989 and 2016, with pesticide use thought to be to blame along with the destruction of wild areas for development. This means the overall picture for spiders is worrying, as it is for most creatures. But conservationists are most concerned about those varieties that are threatened due to habitat loss and fragmentation, which makes it impossible for them to migrate. Of around 650 spider species regularly recorded in the UK, the majority thrive in marshes and wasteland. Conservation efforts, often led by determined individuals, have helped some species to recover by reintroducing them to new areas. With rewilding now firmly on the environmental policy agenda, the hope is that in future, spiders will be enabled to migrate by themselves, adapting to climate change by moving along wildlife corridors. It seems unlikely that spiders will ever attract the same level of human enthusiasm as bees, birds or butterflies, in spite of their unique status as nature's spinners. But as they reveal themselves in all their splendour this autumn, it would be a good thing if more animal lovers recognised the ways in which spiders are simply terrific.