Reading Comprehension Test - 1

After reading the passage choose the best answer to the given question based on what is stated or implied in the passage and in any accompanying graphics (such as a table or graph).

In 2000, a neuroscientist at University College London named Eleanor Maguire wanted to find out what effect, if any, all that driving around the labyrinthine streets of London might have on 5 cabbies’ brains. When she brought sixteen taxi drivers into her lab and examined their brains in an MRI scanner, she found one surprising and important difference. The right posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be 10 involved in spatial navigation, was 7 percent larger than normal in the cabbies—a small but very significant difference. Maguire concluded that all of that way-finding around London had physically altered the gross structure of their brains. The more 15 years a cabbie had been on the road, the more pronounced the effect. The brain is a mutable organ, capable—within limits—of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory input, a phenomenon known as 20 neuroplasticity. It had long been thought that the adult brain was incapable of spawning new neurons—that while learning caused synapses to rearrange themselves and new links between brain cells to form, the brain’s basic anatomical  structure 25 was more or less static. Maguire’s study suggested the old inherited wisdom was simply not true. After her groundbreaking study of London cabbies, Maguire decided to turn her attention to mental athletes. She teamed up with Elizabeth 30 Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the academic monograph Superior Memory, to study ten individuals who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championship. They wanted to find out if the memorizers’ brains were—like the London 35 cabbies’—structurally different from the rest of ours, or if they were somehow just making better use of memory abilities that we all possess. The researchers put both the mental athletes and a group of matched control subjects into MRI scanners 40 and asked them to memorize three-digit numbers, black-and-white photographs of people’s faces, and magnified images of snowflakes, while their brains were being scanned. Maguire and her team thought it was possible that they might discover anatomical 45 differences in the brains of the memory champs, evidence that their brains had somehow reorganized themselves in the process of doing all that intensive remembering. But when the researchers reviewed the imaging data, not a single significant structural 50 difference turned up. The brains of the mental athletes appeared to be indistinguishable from those of the control subjects. What’s more, on every single test of general cognitive ability, the mental athletes’ scores came back well within the normal range. The 55 memory champs weren’t smarter, and they didn’t have special brains. But there was one telling difference between the brains of the mental athletes and the control subjects: When the researchers looked at which parts of the 60 brain were lighting up when the mental athletes were memorizing, they found that they were activating entirely different circuitry. According to the functional MRIs [fMRIs], regions of the brain that were less active in the control subjects seemed to be 65 working in overdrive for the mental athletes. Surprisingly, when the mental athletes were learning new information, they were engaging several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial 70 navigation, including the same right posterior hippocampal region that the London cabbies had enlarged with all their daily way-finding. At first glance, this wouldn’t seem to make any sense. Why would mental athletes be conjuring images in 75 their mind’s eye when they were trying to learn three-digit numbers? Why should they be navigating like London cabbies when they’re supposed to be remembering the shapes of snowflakes? Maguire and her team asked the mental athletes 80 to describe exactly what was going through their minds as they memorized. The mental athletes said they were consciously converting the information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial 85 journeys. They weren’t doing this automatically, or because it was an inborn talent they’d nurtured since childhood. Rather, the unexpected patterns of neural
activity that Maguire’s fMRIs turned up were the result of training and practice.

After reading the passage choose the best answer to the given question based on what is stated or implied in the passage and in any accompanying graphics (such as a table or graph).

In 2000, a neuroscientist at University College London named Eleanor Maguire wanted to find out what effect, if any, all that driving around the labyrinthine streets of London might have on 5 cabbies’ brains. When she brought sixteen taxi drivers into her lab and examined their brains in an MRI scanner, she found one surprising and important difference. The right posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be 10 involved in spatial navigation, was 7 percent larger than normal in the cabbies—a small but very significant difference. Maguire concluded that all of that way-finding around London had physically altered the gross structure of their brains. The more 15 years a cabbie had been on the road, the more pronounced the effect. The brain is a mutable organ, capable—within limits—of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory input, a phenomenon known as 20 neuroplasticity. It had long been thought that the adult brain was incapable of spawning new neurons—that while learning caused synapses to rearrange themselves and new links between brain cells to form, the brain’s basic anatomical structure 25 was more or less static. Maguire’s study suggested the old inherited wisdom was simply not true. After her groundbreaking study of London cabbies, Maguire decided to turn her attention to mental athletes. She teamed up with Elizabeth 30 Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the academic monograph Superior Memory, to study ten individuals who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championship. They wanted to find out if the memorizers’ brains were—like the London 35 cabbies’—structurally different from the rest of ours, or if they were somehow just making better use of memory abilities that we all possess. The researchers put both the mental athletes and a group of matched control subjects into MRI scanners 40 and asked them to memorize three-digit numbers, black-and-white photographs of people’s faces, and magnified images of snowflakes, while their brains were being scanned. Maguire and her team thought it was possible that they might discover anatomical 45 differences in the brains of the memory champs, evidence that their brains had somehow reorganized
themselves in the process of doing all that intensive remembering. But when the researchers reviewed the imaging data, not a single significant structural 50 difference turned up. The brains of the mental athletes appeared to be indistinguishable from those of the control subjects. What’s more, on every single test of general cognitive ability, the mental athletes’ scores came back well within the normal range. The 55 memory champs weren’t smarter, and they didn’t have special brains. But there was one telling difference between the brains of the mental athletes and the control subjects: When the researchers looked at which parts of the 60 brain were lighting up when the mental athletes were memorizing, they found that they were activating entirely different circuitry. According to the functional MRIs [fMRIs], regions of the brain that were less active in the control subjects seemed to be 65 working in overdrive for the mental athletes. Surprisingly, when the mental athletes were learning new information, they were engaging several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and  spatial 70 navigation, including the same right posterior hippocampal region that the London cabbies had enlarged with all their daily way-finding. At first glance, this wouldn’t seem to make any sense. Why would mental athletes be conjuring images in 75 their mind’s eye when they were trying to learn three-digit numbers? Why should they be navigating like London cabbies when they’re supposed to be remembering the shapes of snowflakes? Maguire and her team asked the mental athletes 80 to describe exactly what was going through their minds as they memorized. The mental athletes said they were consciously converting the information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial 85 journeys. They weren’t doing this automatically, or because it was an inborn talent they’d nurtured since childhood. Rather, the unexpected patterns of neural activity that Maguire’s fMRIs turned up were the result of training and practice.

After reading the passage choose the best answer to the given question based on what is stated or implied in the passage and in any accompanying graphics (such as a table or graph).

In 2000, a neuroscientist at University College London named Eleanor Maguire wanted to find out what effect, if any, all that driving around the labyrinthine streets of London might have on 5 cabbies’ brains. When she brought sixteen taxi drivers into her lab and examined their brains in an MRI scanner, she found one surprising and important difference. The right posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be 10 involved in spatial navigation, was 7 percent larger than normal in the cabbies—a small but very significant difference. Maguire concluded that all of that way-finding around London had physically altered the gross structure of their brains. The more 15 years a cabbie had been on the road, the more pronounced the effect. The brain is a mutable organ, capable—within limits—of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory input, a phenomenon known as 20 neuroplasticity. It had long been thought that the adult brain was incapable of spawning new neurons—that while learning caused synapses to rearrange themselves and new links between brain cells to form, the brain’s basic anatomical structure 25 was more or less static. Maguire’s study suggested the old inherited wisdom was simply not true. After her groundbreaking study of London cabbies, Maguire decided to turn her attention to mental athletes. She teamed up with Elizabeth 30 Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the academic monograph Superior Memory, to study ten individuals who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championship. They wanted to find out if the memorizers’ brains were—like the London 35 cabbies’—structurally different from the rest of ours, or if they were somehow just making better use of memory abilities that we all possess. The researchers put both the mental athletes and a group of matched control subjects into MRI scanners 40 and asked them to memorize three-digit numbers, black-and-white photographs of people’s faces, and magnified images of snowflakes, while their brains were being scanned. Maguire and her team thought it was possible that they might discover anatomical 45 differences in the brains of the memory champs, evidence that their brains had somehow reorganized
themselves in the process of doing all that intensive remembering. But when the researchers reviewed the imaging data, not a single significant structural 50 difference turned up. The brains of the mental athletes appeared to be indistinguishable from those of the control subjects. What’s more, on every single test of general cognitive ability, the mental athletes’ scores came back well within the normal range. The 55 memory champs weren’t smarter, and they didn’t have special brains. But there was one telling difference between the brains of the mental athletes and the control subjects: When the researchers looked at which parts of the 60 brain were lighting up when the mental athletes were memorizing, they found that they were activating entirely different circuitry. According to the functional MRIs [fMRIs], regions of the brain that were less active in the control subjects seemed to be 65 working in overdrive for the mental athletes. Surprisingly, when the mental athletes were learning new information, they were engaging several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial 70 navigation, including the same right posterior hippocampal region that the London cabbies had enlarged with all their daily way-finding. At first glance, this wouldn’t seem to make any sense. Why would mental athletes be conjuring images in 75 their mind’s eye when they were trying to learn three-digit numbers? Why should they be navigating like London cabbies when they’re supposed to be remembering the shapes of snowflakes? Maguire and her team asked the mental athletes 80 to describe exactly what was going through their minds as they memorized. The mental athletes said they were consciously converting the information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial 85 journeys. They weren’t doing this automatically, or because it was an inborn talent they’d nurtured since childhood. Rather, the unexpected patterns of neural activity that Maguire’s fMRIs turned up were the result of training and practice.

After reading the passage choose the best answer to the given question based on what is stated or implied in the passage and in any accompanying graphics (such as a table or graph).

In 2000, a neuroscientist at University College London named Eleanor Maguire wanted to find out what effect, if any, all that driving around the labyrinthine streets of London might have on 5 cabbies’ brains. When she brought sixteen taxi drivers into her lab and examined their brains in an MRI scanner, she found one surprising and important difference. The right posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be 10 involved in spatial navigation, was 7 percent larger than normal in the cabbies—a small but very significant difference. Maguire concluded that all of that way-finding around London had physically altered the gross structure of their brains. The more 15 years a cabbie had been on the road, the more pronounced the effect. The brain is a mutable organ, capable—within limits—of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory input, a phenomenon known as 20 neuroplasticity. It had long been thought that the adult brain was incapable of spawning new neurons—that while learning caused synapses to rearrange themselves and new links between brain cells to form, the brain’s basic anatomical structure 25 was more or less static. Maguire’s study suggested the old inherited wisdom was simply not true. After her groundbreaking study of London cabbies, Maguire decided to turn her attention to mental athletes. She teamed up with Elizabeth 30 Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the academic monograph Superior Memory, to study ten individuals who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championship. They wanted to find out if the memorizers’ brains were—like the London 35 cabbies’—structurally different from the rest of ours, or if they were somehow just making better use of memory abilities that we all possess. The researchers put both the mental athletes and a group of matched control subjects into MRI scanners 40 and asked them to memorize three-digit numbers, black-and-white photographs of people’s faces, and magnified images of snowflakes, while their brains were being scanned. Maguire and her team thought it was possible that they might discover anatomical 45 differences in the brains of the memory champs, evidence that their brains had somehow reorganized
themselves in the process of doing all that intensive remembering. But when the researchers reviewed the imaging data, not a single significant structural 50 difference turned up. The brains of the mental athletes appeared to be indistinguishable from those of the control subjects. What’s more, on every single test of general cognitive ability, the mental athletes’ scores came back well within the normal range. The 55 memory champs weren’t smarter, and they didn’t have special brains. But there was one telling difference between the brains of the mental athletes and the control subjects: When the researchers looked at which parts of the 60 brain were lighting up when the mental athletes were memorizing, they found that they were activating entirely different circuitry. According to the functional MRIs [fMRIs], regions of the brain that were less active in the control subjects seemed to be 65 working in overdrive for the mental athletes. Surprisingly, when the mental athletes were learning new information, they were engaging several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial 70 navigation, including the same right posterior hippocampal region that the London cabbies had enlarged with all their daily way-finding. At first glance, this wouldn’t seem to make any sense. Why would mental athletes be conjuring images in 75 their mind’s eye when they were trying to learn three-digit numbers? Why should they be navigating like London cabbies when they’re supposed to be remembering the shapes of snowflakes? Maguire and her team asked the mental athletes 80 to describe exactly what was going through their minds as they memorized. The mental athletes said they were consciously converting the information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial 85 journeys. They weren’t doing this automatically, or because it was an inborn talent they’d nurtured since childhood. Rather, the unexpected patterns of neural activity that Maguire’s fMRIs turned up were the result of training and practice.

After reading the passage choose the best answer to the given question based on what is stated or implied in the passage and in any accompanying graphics (such as a table or graph).

In 2000, a neuroscientist at University College London named Eleanor Maguire wanted to find out what effect, if any, all that driving around the labyrinthine streets of London might have on 5 cabbies’ brains. When she brought sixteen taxi drivers into her lab and examined their brains in an MRI scanner, she found one surprising and important difference. The right posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be 10 involved in spatial navigation, was 7 percent larger than normal in the cabbies—a small but very significant difference. Maguire concluded that all of that way-finding around London had physically altered the gross structure of their brains. The more 15 years a cabbie had been on the road, the more pronounced the effect. The brain is a mutable organ, capable—within limits—of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory input, a phenomenon known as 20 neuroplasticity. It had long been thought that the adult brain was incapable of spawning new neurons—that while learning caused synapses to rearrange themselves and new links between brain cells to form, the brain’s basic anatomical structure 25 was more or less static. Maguire’s study suggested the old inherited wisdom was simply not true. After her groundbreaking study of London cabbies, Maguire decided to turn her attention to mental athletes. She teamed up with Elizabeth 30 Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the academic monograph Superior Memory, to study ten individuals who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championship. They wanted to find out if the memorizers’ brains were—like the London 35 cabbies’—structurally different from the rest of ours, or if they were somehow just making better use of memory abilities that we all possess. The researchers put both the mental athletes and a group of matched control subjects into MRI scanners 40 and asked them to memorize three-digit numbers, black-and-white photographs of people’s faces, and magnified images of snowflakes, while their brains were being scanned. Maguire and her team thought it was possible that they might discover anatomical 45 differences in the brains of the memory champs, evidence that their brains had somehow reorganized
themselves in the process of doing all that intensive remembering. But when the researchers reviewed the imaging data, not a single significant structural 50 difference turned up. The brains of the mental athletes appeared to be indistinguishable from those of the control subjects. What’s more, on every single test of general cognitive ability, the mental athletes’ scores came back well within the normal range. The 55 memory champs weren’t smarter, and they didn’t have special brains. But there was one telling difference between the brains of the mental athletes and the control subjects: When the researchers looked at which parts of the 60 brain were lighting up when the mental athletes were memorizing, they found that they were activating entirely different circuitry. According to the functional MRIs [fMRIs], regions of the brain that were less active in the control subjects seemed to be 65 working in overdrive for the mental athletes. Surprisingly, when the mental athletes were learning new information, they were engaging several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial 70 navigation, including the same right posterior hippocampal region that the London cabbies had enlarged with all their daily way-finding. At first glance, this wouldn’t seem to make any sense. Why would mental athletes be conjuring images in 75 their mind’s eye when they were trying to learn three-digit numbers? Why should they be navigating like London cabbies when they’re supposed to be remembering the shapes of snowflakes? Maguire and her team asked the mental athletes 80 to describe exactly what was going through their minds as they memorized. The mental athletes said they were consciously converting the information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial 85 journeys. They weren’t doing this automatically, or because it was an inborn talent they’d nurtured since childhood. Rather, the unexpected patterns of neural activity that Maguire’s fMRIs turned up were the result of training and practice.

After reading the passage choose the best answer to the given question based on what is stated or implied in the passage and in any accompanying graphics (such as a table or graph).

In 2000, a neuroscientist at University College London named Eleanor Maguire wanted to find out what effect, if any, all that driving around the labyrinthine streets of London might have on 5 cabbies’ brains. When she brought sixteen taxi drivers into her lab and examined their brains in an MRI scanner, she found one surprising and important difference. The right posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be 10 involved in spatial navigation, was 7 percent larger than normal in the cabbies—a small but very significant difference. Maguire concluded that all of that way-finding around London had physically altered the gross structure of their brains. The more 15 years a cabbie had been on the road, the more pronounced the effect. The brain is a mutable organ, capable—within limits—of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory input, a phenomenon known as 20 neuroplasticity. It had long been thought that the adult brain was incapable of spawning new neurons—that while learning caused synapses to rearrange themselves and new links between brain cells to form, the brain’s basic anatomical structure 25 was more or less static. Maguire’s study suggested the old inherited wisdom was simply not true. After her groundbreaking study of London cabbies, Maguire decided to turn her attention to mental athletes. She teamed up with Elizabeth 30 Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the academic monograph Superior Memory, to study ten individuals who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championship. They wanted to find out if the memorizers’ brains were—like the London 35 cabbies’—structurally different from the rest of ours, or if they were somehow just making better use of memory abilities that we all possess. The researchers put both the mental athletes and a group of matched control subjects into MRI scanners 40 and asked them to memorize three-digit numbers, black-and-white photographs of people’s faces, and magnified images of snowflakes, while their brains were being scanned. Maguire and her team thought it was possible that they might discover anatomical 45 differences in the brains of the memory champs, evidence that their brains had somehow reorganized
themselves in the process of doing all that intensive remembering. But when the researchers reviewed the imaging data, not a single significant structural 50 difference turned up. The brains of the mental athletes appeared to be indistinguishable from those of the control subjects. What’s more, on every single test of general cognitive ability, the mental athletes’ scores came back well within the normal range. The 55 memory champs weren’t smarter, and they didn’t have special brains. But there was one telling difference between the brains of the mental athletes and the control subjects: When the researchers looked at which parts of the 60 brain were lighting up when the mental athletes were memorizing, they found that they were activating entirely different circuitry. According to the functional MRIs [fMRIs], regions of the brain that were less active in the control subjects seemed to be 65 working in overdrive for the mental athletes. Surprisingly, when the mental athletes were learning new information, they were engaging several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial 70 navigation, including the same right posterior hippocampal region that the London cabbies had enlarged with all their daily way-finding. At first glance, this wouldn’t seem to make any sense. Why would mental athletes be conjuring images in 75 their mind’s eye when they were trying to learn three-digit numbers? Why should they be navigating like London cabbies when they’re supposed to be remembering the shapes of snowflakes? Maguire and her team asked the mental athletes 80 to describe exactly what was going through their minds as they memorized. The mental athletes said they were consciously converting the information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial 85 journeys. They weren’t doing this automatically, or because it was an inborn talent they’d nurtured since childhood. Rather, the unexpected patterns of neural activity that Maguire’s fMRIs turned up were the result of training and practice.

After reading the passage choose the best answer to the given question based on what is stated or implied in the passage and in any accompanying graphics (such as a table or graph).

In 2000, a neuroscientist at University College London named Eleanor Maguire wanted to find out what effect, if any, all that driving around the labyrinthine streets of London might have on 5 cabbies’ brains. When she brought sixteen taxi drivers into her lab and examined their brains in an MRI scanner, she found one surprising and important difference. The right posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be 10 involved in spatial navigation, was 7 percent larger than normal in the cabbies—a small but very significant difference. Maguire concluded that all of that way-finding around London had physically altered the gross structure of their brains. The more 15 years a cabbie had been on the road, the more pronounced the effect. The brain is a mutable organ, capable—within limits—of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory input, a phenomenon known as 20 neuroplasticity. It had long been thought that the adult brain was incapable of spawning new neurons—that while learning caused synapses to rearrange themselves and new links between brain cells to form, the brain’s basic anatomical structure 25 was more or less static. Maguire’s study suggested the old inherited wisdom was simply not true. After her groundbreaking study of London cabbies, Maguire decided to turn her attention to mental athletes. She teamed up with Elizabeth 30 Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the academic monograph Superior Memory, to study ten individuals who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championship. They wanted to find out if the memorizers’ brains were—like the London 35 cabbies’—structurally different from the rest of ours, or if they were somehow just making better use of memory abilities that we all possess. The researchers put both the mental athletes and a group of matched control subjects into MRI scanners 40 and asked them to memorize three-digit numbers, black-and-white photographs of people’s faces, and magnified images of snowflakes, while their brains were being scanned. Maguire and her team thought it was possible that they might discover anatomical 45 differences in the brains of the memory champs, evidence that their brains had somehow reorganized
themselves in the process of doing all that intensive remembering. But when the researchers reviewed the imaging data, not a single significant structural 50 difference turned up. The brains of the mental athletes appeared to be indistinguishable from those of the control subjects. What’s more, on every single test of general cognitive ability, the mental athletes’ scores came back well within the normal range. The 55 memory champs weren’t smarter, and they didn’t have special brains. But there was one telling difference between the brains of the mental athletes and the control subjects: When the researchers looked at which parts of the 60 brain were lighting up when the mental athletes were memorizing, they found that they were activating entirely different circuitry. According to the functional MRIs [fMRIs], regions of the brain that were less active in the control subjects seemed to be 65 working in overdrive for the mental athletes. Surprisingly, when the mental athletes were learning new information, they were engaging several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial 70 navigation, including the same right posterior hippocampal region that the London cabbies had enlarged with all their daily way-finding. At first glance, this wouldn’t seem to make any sense. Why would mental athletes be conjuring images in 75 their mind’s eye when they were trying to learn three-digit numbers? Why should they be navigating like London cabbies when they’re supposed to be remembering the shapes of snowflakes? Maguire and her team asked the mental athletes 80 to describe exactly what was going through their minds as they memorized. The mental athletes said they were consciously converting the information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial 85 journeys. They weren’t doing this automatically, or because it was an inborn talent they’d nurtured since childhood. Rather, the unexpected patterns of neural activity that Maguire’s fMRIs turned up were the result of training and practice.

After reading the passage choose the best answer to the given question based on what is stated or implied in the passage and in any accompanying graphics (such as a table or graph).

In 2000, a neuroscientist at University College London named Eleanor Maguire wanted to find out what effect, if any, all that driving around the labyrinthine streets of London might have on 5 cabbies’ brains. When she brought sixteen taxi drivers into her lab and examined their brains in an MRI scanner, she found one surprising and important difference. The right posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be 10 involved in spatial navigation, was 7 percent larger than normal in the cabbies—a small but very significant difference. Maguire concluded that all of that way-finding around London had physically altered the gross structure of their brains. The more 15 years a cabbie had been on the road, the more pronounced the effect. The brain is a mutable organ, capable—within limits—of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory input, a phenomenon known as 20 neuroplasticity. It had long been thought that the adult brain was incapable of spawning new neurons—that while learning caused synapses to rearrange themselves and new links between brain cells to form, the brain’s basic anatomical structure 25 was more or less static. Maguire’s study suggested the old inherited wisdom was simply not true. After her groundbreaking study of London cabbies, Maguire decided to turn her attention to mental athletes. She teamed up with Elizabeth 30 Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the academic monograph Superior Memory, to study ten individuals who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championship. They wanted to find out if the memorizers’ brains were—like the London 35 cabbies’—structurally different from the rest of ours, or if they were somehow just making better use of memory abilities that we all possess. The researchers put both the mental athletes and a group of matched control subjects into MRI scanners 40 and asked them to memorize three-digit numbers, black-and-white photographs of people’s faces, and magnified images of snowflakes, while their brains were being scanned. Maguire and her team thought it was possible that they might discover anatomical 45 differences in the brains of the memory champs, evidence that their brains had somehow reorganized
themselves in the process of doing all that intensive remembering. But when the researchers reviewed the imaging data, not a single significant structural 50 difference turned up. The brains of the mental athletes appeared to be indistinguishable from those of the control subjects. What’s more, on every single test of general cognitive ability, the mental athletes’ scores came back well within the normal range. The 55 memory champs weren’t smarter, and they didn’t have special brains. But there was one telling difference between the brains of the mental athletes and the control subjects: When the researchers looked at which parts of the 60 brain were lighting up when the mental athletes were memorizing, they found that they were activating entirely different circuitry. According to the functional MRIs [fMRIs], regions of the brain that were less active in the control subjects seemed to be 65 working in overdrive for the mental athletes. Surprisingly, when the mental athletes were learning new information, they were engaging several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial 70 navigation, including the same right posterior hippocampal region that the London cabbies had enlarged with all their daily way-finding. At first glance, this wouldn’t seem to make any sense. Why would mental athletes be conjuring images in 75 their mind’s eye when they were trying to learn three-digit numbers? Why should they be navigating like London cabbies when they’re supposed to be remembering the shapes of snowflakes? Maguire and her team asked the mental athletes 80 to describe exactly what was going through their minds as they memorized. The mental athletes said they were consciously converting the information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial 85 journeys. They weren’t doing this automatically, or because it was an inborn talent they’d nurtured since childhood. Rather, the unexpected patterns of neural activity that Maguire’s fMRIs turned up were the result of training and practice.

After reading the passage choose the best answer to the given question based on what is stated or implied in the passage and in any accompanying graphics (such as a table or graph).

Nearly a half-century ago, Peter Higgs and a handful of other physicists were trying to understand the origin of a basic physical feature: mass. You can think of mass as an object’s heft or, a little more 5 precisely, as the resistance it offers to having its motion changed. Push on a freight train (or a feather) to increase its speed, and the resistance you feel reflects its mass. At a microscopic level, the freight train’s mass comes from its constituent 10 molecules and atoms, which are themselves built from fundamental particles, electrons and quarks. But where do the masses of these and other fundamental particles come from? When physicists in the 1960s modeled the 15 behavior of these particles using equations rooted in quantum physics, they encountered a puzzle. If they imagined that the particles were all massless, then each term in the equations clicked into a perfectly symmetric pattern, like the tips of a perfect 20 snowflake. And this symmetry was not just mathematically elegant. It explained patterns evident in the experimental data. But—and here’s the puzzle—physicists knew that the particles did have mass, and when they modified the equations to 25 account for this fact, the mathematical harmony was spoiled. The equations became complex and unwieldy and, worse still, inconsistent. What to do? Here’s the idea put forward by Higgs. Don’t shove the particles’ masses down the throat of 30 the beautiful equations. Instead, keep the equations pristine and symmetric, but consider them operating within a peculiar environment. Imagine that all of space is uniformly filled with an invisible substance—now called the Higgs field—that exerts a 35 drag force on particles when they accelerate through it. Push on a fundamental particle in an effort to increase its speed and, according to Higgs, you would feel this drag force as a resistance. Justifiably, you would interpret the resistance as the particle’s mass. 40 For a mental toehold, think of a ping-pong ball submerged in water. When you push on the ping-pong ball, it will feel much more massive than it does outside of water. Its interaction with the watery environment has the effect of endowing it with mass. 45 So with particles submerged in the Higgs field. In 1964, Higgs submitted a paper to a prominent physics journal in which he formulated this idea mathematically. The paper was rejected. Not because it contained a technical error, but because the 50 premise of an invisible something permeating space, interacting with particles to provide their mass, well, it all just seemed like heaps of overwrought speculation. The editors of the journal deemed it “of no obvious relevance to physics.” 55 But Higgs persevered (and his revised paper appeared later that year in another journal), and physicists who took the time to study the proposal gradually realized that his idea was a stroke of genius, one that allowed them to have their cake and eat it 60 too. In Higgs’s scheme, the fundamental equations can retain their pristine form because the dirty work of providing the particles’ masses is relegated to the environment. While I wasn’t around to witness the initial 65 rejection of Higgs’s proposal in 1964 (well, I was around, but only barely), I can attest that by the mid-1980s, the assessment had changed. The physics community had, for the most part, fully bought into the idea that there was a Higgs field permeating 70 space. In fact, in a graduate course I took that covered what’s known as the Standard Model of Particle Physics (the quantum equations physicists have assembled to describe the particles of matter and the dominant forces by which they influence 75 each other), the professor presented the Higgs field with such certainty that for a long while I had no idea it had yet to be established experimentally. On occasion, that happens in physics. Mathematical equations can sometimes tell such a convincing tale, 80 they can seemingly radiate reality so strongly, that they become entrenched in the vernacular of working physicists, even before there’s data to confirm them.

After reading the passage choose the best answer to the given question based on what is stated or implied in the passage and in any accompanying graphics (such as a table or graph).

Nearly a half-century ago, Peter Higgs and a handful of other physicists were trying to understand the origin of a basic physical feature: mass. You can think of mass as an object’s heft or, a little more 5 precisely, as the resistance it offers to having its motion changed. Push on a freight train (or a feather) to increase its speed, and the resistance you feel reflects its mass. At a microscopic level, the freight train’s mass comes from its constituent 10 molecules and atoms, which are themselves built from fundamental particles, electrons and quarks. But where do the masses of these and other fundamental particles come from? When physicists in the 1960s modeled the 15 behavior of these particles using equations rooted in quantum physics, they encountered a puzzle. If they imagined that the particles were all massless, then each term in the equations clicked into a perfectly symmetric pattern, like the tips of a perfect 20 snowflake. And this symmetry was not just mathematically elegant. It explained patterns evident in the experimental data. But—and here’s the puzzle—physicists knew that the particles did have mass, and when they modified the equations to 25 account for this fact, the mathematical harmony was spoiled. The equations became complex and unwieldy and, worse still, inconsistent. What to do? Here’s the idea put forward by Higgs. Don’t shove the particles’ masses down the throat of 30 the beautiful equations. Instead, keep the equations pristine and symmetric, but consider them operating within a peculiar environment. Imagine that all of space is uniformly filled with an invisible substance—now called the Higgs field—that exerts a 35 drag force on particles when they accelerate through it. Push on a fundamental particle in an effort to increase its speed and, according to Higgs, you would feel this drag force as a resistance. Justifiably, you would interpret the resistance as the particle’s mass. 40 For a mental toehold, think of a ping-pong ball submerged in water. When you push on the ping-pong ball, it will feel much more massive than it does outside of water. Its interaction with the watery environment has the effect of endowing it with mass. 45 So with particles submerged in the Higgs field. In 1964, Higgs submitted a paper to a prominent physics journal in which he formulated this idea mathematically. The paper was rejected. Not because it contained a technical error, but because the 50 premise of an invisible something permeating space, interacting with particles to provide their mass, well, it all just seemed like heaps of overwrought speculation. The editors of the journal deemed it “of no obvious relevance to physics.” 55 But Higgs persevered (and his revised paper appeared later that year in another journal), and physicists who took the time to study the proposal gradually realized that his idea was a stroke of genius, one that allowed them to have their cake and eat it 60 too. In Higgs’s scheme, the fundamental equations can retain their pristine form because the dirty work of providing the particles’ masses is relegated to the environment. While I wasn’t around to witness the initial 65 rejection of Higgs’s proposal in 1964 (well, I was around, but only barely), I can attest that by the mid-1980s, the assessment had changed. The physics community had, for the most part, fully bought into the idea that there was a Higgs field permeating 70 space. In fact, in a graduate course I took that covered what’s known as the Standard Model of Particle Physics (the quantum equations physicists have assembled to describe the particles of matter and the dominant forces by which they influence 75 each other), the professor presented the Higgs field with such certainty that for a long while I had no idea it had yet to be established experimentally. On occasion, that happens in physics. Mathematical equations can sometimes tell such a convincing tale, 80 they can seemingly radiate reality so strongly, that they become entrenched in the vernacular of working physicists, even before there’s data to confirm them.