2016年全国硕士研究生入学统一考试英语（二）试题

Advancing age means losing your hair, your waistline and your memory, right? Dana Denis is just 40 years old, but_____（1）she’s worried about what she calls “my rolling mental blackouts.” “I try to remember something and I just blank out,” she says.

You may_____（2）about these lapses, calling them “senior moments” or blaming “early Alzheimer’s (老年疾呆症).” Is it an inescapable fact that the older you get, the_____（3）you remember? Well, sort of. But as time goes by, we tend to blame age_____（4）problems that are not necessarily age-related.

“When a teenager can’t find her keys, she thinks it’s because she’s distracted or disorganized,” says Paul Gold. “A 70-year-old blames her_____（5）.” In fact, the 70-year-old may have been_____（6）things for decades.

In healthy people, memory doesn’t worsen as_____（7）as many of us think. “As we_____（8）, the memory mechanism isn’t_____（9）,” says psychologist Fergus Craik. “It’s just inefficient.”

The brain’s processing_____（10）slows down over the years, though no one knows exactly_____（11）. Recent research suggests that nerve cells lose efficiency and_____（12）there’s less activity in the brain. But, cautions Barry Gordon, “It’s not clear that less activity is_____（13）. A beginning athlete is winded (气喘吁吁)more easily than a_____(14)athlete. In the same way,_____（15）the brain gets more skilled at a task, it expends less energy on it.”

There are_____（16）you can take to compensate for normal slippage in your memory gears, though it_____（17）effort Margaret Sewell says: “We’re a quick-fix culture, but you have to_____（18）to keep your brain_____（19）shape. It’s like having a good body. You can’t go to the gym once a year_____（20）expect to stay in top form.”