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as we age. According to Art Kramer at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign,
who studies how ageing affects our cognitive abilities, we peak in our 20s. Though the
decline is slow through our 30s and on into our 50s, it is there; and after 55, it becomes
more precipitous. In one study, he and his colleagues had both young and old participants
do a simulated driving task while carrying on a conversation. He found that while young
drivers tended to miss background changes, older drivers failed to notice things that were
highly relevant. Likewise, older subjects had more trouble paying attention to the more
important parts of a scene than young drivers.
J
It’s not all bad news for over-55s, though. Kramer also found that older people can benefit
from practice. Not only did they learn to perform better, brain scans showed that
underlying that improvement was a change in the way their brains become active. While
it’s clear that ractice can often make a difference, especially as we age, the basic facts
remain sobering. "We have this impression of an almighty complex brain," says Marois,
"and yet we have very humbling and crippling limits." For most of our history, we probably
never needed to do more than one thing at a time, he says, and so we haven’t evolved to
be able to. Perhaps we will in future, though. We might yet look back one day on people
like Debbie and Alun as ancestors of a new breed of true multitasker.
Questions 28-32 The reading Passage has ten paragraphs A-J.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter in boxes 28-32 on your answer sheet.
28 A theory explained delay happens when selecting one reaction
29 Different age group responds to important things differently
30 Conflicts happened when visual and audio element emerge simultaneously
