想要大脑永远年轻? 那就学外语吧_BEC初级作文

想要大脑永远年轻? 那就学外语吧

All this means that we adults have to work our brains hard to learn a second language. But that may be all the more reason to try, for my failed French quest yielded an unexpected benefit. After a year of struggling with the language, I retook the cognitive assessment, and the results shocked me. My scores had skyrocketed, placing me above average in seven of 10 categories, and average in the other three. My verbal memory score leapt from the bottom half to the 88th — the 88th! — percentile and my visual memory test shot from the bottom 5th percentile to the 50th. Studying a language had been like drinking from a mental fountain of youth.

所有这些都意味着，成年人要想学习一门第二语言，就必须绞尽脑汁。但或许正因为如此，我们更有理由尝试，因为我学习法语的失败尝试，产生了一个意想不到的收益。与法语搏斗了一年之后，我又做了一遍那个认知测验，结果让我震惊。我的成绩大幅提高了，10个科目中有七个超过了平均水平，其他三个科目则与平均成绩持平。我的言语记忆力成绩从不到50分提高到了88分，视觉记忆测验则从5分提高到了50分。学习语言，仿佛是让头脑喝到了不老泉。

What might explain such an improvement?

那该怎么解释这种提高呢？

Last year researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Northwestern University in Illinois hypothesized that language study should prove beneficial for older adults, noting that the cognitive tasks involved — including working memory, inductive reasoning, sound discrimination and task switching — map closely to the areas of the brain that are most associated with declines due to aging. In other words, the things that make second-language acquisition so maddening for grown-ups are the very things that may make the effort so beneficial.