2015 年英语专业四级阅读理解passage 1(翻译)

2015年专业四级英语真题（翻译）

Passage 1（翻译）

Inundated by more information than we can possibly hold in our heads, we're increasingly handing off the job of remembering to search engines and smart phones. Google is even reportedly working on eyeglasses that could one day recognize faces and supply details about whoever you're looking at. But new research shows that outsourcing our memory —and expecting that information will be continually and instantaneously available —is changing our cognitive habits.

Research conducted by Betsy Sparrow, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia University，has identified three new realities about how we process information in the Internet age. First, her experiments showed that when we don't know the answer to a question, we now think about where we can find the nearest Web connection instead of the subject of the question itself. A second revelation is that when we expect to be able to find information again later on, we don't remember it as well as when we think it might become unavailable. And then there is the researchers' final observation: the expectation that we'll be able to locate information down the line leads us to form a memory not of the fact itself but of where we'll be able to find it.

But this handoff comes with a downside. Skills like critical thinking and analysis must develop in the context of facts: we need something to think and reason about, after all. And these facts can't be Googled as we go; they need to be stored in the original hard

drive, our long-term memory. Especially in the case of children, “factual knowledge must precede skill”，says Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology，at the University of Virginia — meaning that the days of drilling the multiplication table and memorizing the names of the Presidents aren't over quite yet Adults, too, need to recruit a supply of stored knowledge in order to situate and evaluate new information they encounter. You can't Google context.

Last, there's the possibility, increasingly terrifying to contemplate, that our machines fail us. As Sparrow puts it, "The experience of losing our Internet connection becomes more and more like losing a friend." If you' re going to keep your memory on your smart phone, better make sure it's fully charged.

我们头脑中充斥着太多的信息，我们越来越多地把记忆的工作交给搜索引擎和智能手机。据报道，谷歌甚至还在研制一种眼镜，这种眼镜有朝一日可以识别人脸，并提供你所看到的人的详细信息。但新的研究表明，将我们的记忆外包——并期待信息将持续、即时可用——正在改变我们的认知习惯。

哥伦比亚大学心理学助理教授贝茜·斯派罗进行的研究发现了三个关于网络时代我们如何处理信息的新现实。首先，她的实验表明，当我们不知道一个问题的答案时，我们现在考虑的是在哪里可以找到最近的网络连接，而不是问题本身。第二个启示是，当我们期望以后能够再次找到这个信息时和当我们认为它可能变得无用时一样，我们不记得它了。然后是研究人员最后的观察结果: 对于我们将能够沿着这条线找寻信息的期望，引导我们形成记忆的不是事实本身，而是我们将能够在哪里找到它。

但这种交接也有不利的一面。批判性思维和分析等技能必须在事实的背景下培养:毕竟，我们需要思考和推理。这些事实不能在谷歌上搜索;它们需要存储在原始的硬盘驱动器上，也就是我们的长期记忆。弗吉尼亚大学的心理学教授丹尼尔·威灵厄姆说，尤其对于儿童,“事实性知识必须先于技巧”——这意味着训练乘法表和记住总统姓名的日子还没有结束，成年人，同样，为了定位和评估他们遇到的新信息，需要利用存储知识的供应。你无法谷歌知识的宝库。

最后，还有一种可能性，这种设想越来越可怕，那就是我们的机器让我们失望了。正如斯派洛所说，“失去网络连接的体验越来越像失去朋友。”如果你想把你的记忆保存在你的智能手机上，最好确保它充满电。