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Memory Decoding
A. Try this memory test: Study each face and compose a vivid image for the
person’s first and last name. Rose Leo, for example, could be a rosebud and a lion.
Fill in the blanks on the next page. The Examinations School at Oxford University is
an austere building of oak-paneled rooms, large Gothic windows, and looming
portraits of eminent dukes and earls. It is where generations of Oxford students have
tested their memory on final exams, and it is where, last August, 34 contestants
gathered at the World Memory Championships to be examined in an entirely different
manner. In timed trials, contestants were challenged to look at and then recite a two-
page poem, memorize rows of 40-digit numbers, recall the names of 110 people after
looking at their photographs, and perform seven other feats of extraordinary

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retention. Some tests took just a few minutes; others lasted hours. In the 14 years

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since the World Memory Championships was founded, no one has memorized the

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order of a shuffled deck of playing cards in less than 30 seconds. That nice round

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number has become the four-minute mile of competitive memory; a benchmark that
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the world’s best “mental athletes,” as some of them like to be called, are closing in
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on. Most contestants claim to have just average memories, and scientific testing
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confirms that they’re not just being modest. Their feats are based on tricks that
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capitalize on how the human brain encodes information. Anyone can learn them.
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B. Psychologists Elizabeth Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the

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monograph Superior Memory, recently teamed up with Eleanor Maguire, a

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neuroscientist at University College London to study eight people, including Karsten,

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who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championships. They wondered
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if the contestants’ brains were different in some way. The researchers put the
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competitors and a group of control subjects into an MRI machine and asked them to
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perform several different memory tests while their brains were being scanned. When
it came to memorizing sequences of three-digit numbers, the difference between the
memory contestants and the control subjects was, as expected, immense. However,
when they were shown photographs of magnified snowflakes, images that the
competitors had never tried to memorize before, the champions did no better than the
control group. When the researchers analyzed the brain scans, they found that the
memory champs were activating some brain regions that were different from those
the control subjects were using. These regions, which included the right posterior
hippocampus, are known to be involved in visual memory and spatial navigation.
C. It might seem odd that the memory contestants would use to visual
imagery and spatial navigation to remember numbers, but the activity makes sense

1
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when their techniques are revealed. Cooke, a 23-year-old cognitive-science graduate

student with a shoulder-length mop of curly hair, is a grand master of brain storage.
He can memorize the order of 10 decks of playing cards in less than an hour or one
deck of cards in less than a minute. He is closing in on the 30-second deck. In the
Lamb and Flag, Cooke pulled out a deck of cards and shuffled it. He held up three
cards –the 7 of spades, the queen of clubs, and the 10 of spades. He pointed at a
fireplace and said. “Destiny’s Child is whacking Franz Schubert with handbags.” The
next three cards were the king of hearts, the king of spades, and the jack of clubs. He
ran over to the bar and announced, “Admiral Lord Nelson is holding a guitar upside
down over there.” By now, everyone in the pub had begun to gawk. Forty-six cards
and a few minutes later, Cooke ended up outside the Lamb and Flag, where he
proceeded to reel off the deck’s order flawlessly.

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D. How did he do it? Cooke has already memorized a specific person, verb,

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and object that he associates with each card in the deck. For example, for the 7 of

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spades, the person (or, in this case, persons) is always the singing group Destiny’s

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Child, the action is surviving a storm, and the image is a dinghy. The queen of clubs
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is always his friend Henrietta, the action is thwacking with a handbag, and the image
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is of wardrobes filled with designer clothes. When Cooke commits a deck to memory,
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he does it three cards at a time. Every three-card group forms a single image of a
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person doing something to an object. The first card in the triplet becomes the person,
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the second the verb, the third the object. He then places those images along a specific
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familiar route, such as the one he took through the Lamb and Flag. In competitions,
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he uses an imaginary route that He has designed to be as smooth and downhill as

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possible. When it comes time to recall, Cooke takes a mental walk along his route
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and translates the images into cards. That’s why the MRIs of the memory contestants
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showed activation in the brain areas associated with visual imagery and spatial
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navigation.
E. The more resonant the images are, the more difficult they are to forget.
But even meaningful information is hard to remember when there’s a lot of it. That’s
why competitive memorizers place their images along an imaginary route. That
technique, known as the loci method, reportedly originated in 477 B.C. with the
Greek poet Simonides of Ceos. Simonides was the sole survivor of a roof collapse
that killed all the other guests at a royal banquet. The bodies were mangled beyond
recognition, but Simonides was able to reconstruct the guest list by closing his eyes
and recalling each individual around the dinner table. What he had discovered was
that our brains are exceptionally good at remembering images and spatial
information. Evolutionary psychologists have offered an explanation: Presumably our

2
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ancestors found it important to recall where they found their last meal or the way
back to the cave. After Simonides’ discovery, the loci method popular across ancient
Greece as a trick for memorizing speeches and texts. Aristotle wrote about it, and
later a number of treatises on the art memory were published in Rome. Before printed
books, the art of memory was considered a staple or classical education on a par with
grammar, logic and rhetoric.
F. The most famous of the naturals was the Russian journalist S. V.
Shereshevski, who could recall long lists of numbers memorized decades earlier, as
well as poems, strings of nonsense syllables, and just about anything else he was
asked to remember. “The capacity of his memory had no distinct limits.” wrote
Alexander Luria, the Russian psychologist who studied Shereshevski from the 1920s
to the 1950s. Shereshevski also had synesthesia, a rare condition in which the senses

p/
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become intertwined. For example, every number may be associated with a color or

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every word with a taste. Synesthetic reactions evoke a response in more areas of the

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brain, making memory easier. They also create problems. “If I read when I eat, I have

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a hard time understanding what I’m reading –the taste of the food drowns out the
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sense.” Shereshevski told Luria.
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G. K. Anders Ericsson, a Swedish-born psychologist at Florida State

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University, thinks anyone can acquire Shereshevski’s skills. He cites an experiment

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with S. F., an undergraduate who was paid to take a standard test of memory called
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the digit span for one hour a day, two or three days a week. When he started, he could
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hold, like most people, only about seven digits in his head at any given time
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(conveniently, the length of a phone number). Over two years, S.F. completed 250
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hours of testing. By then, he had stretched his digit span from 7 to more than 80. He
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had developed his own strategy for remembering based on his own experience as a
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competitive runner: He associated strings of random numbers with track times. For
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example 3,492 was remembered as “3 minutes and 49 point 2 seconds, near world-
record mile time.” The study of S. F. led Ericsson to believe that innately superior
memory doesn’t exist at all. When he reviewed original case studies of naturals, he
found that exceptional memorizers were using techniques –sometimes without
realizing it –and lots of practice. Often, exceptional memory was only for a single
type of material, like digits. “If we look at some of these memory tasks, they’re the
kind of thing most people don’t even waste one hour practicing, but if they wasted 50
hours, they’d be exceptional at it,” Ericsson says. It would be remarkable, he adds, to
find a person who is exceptional across a number of tasks. I don’t think that there’s
any compelling evidence that there are such people.”

3
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Questions 27-30
The reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-G.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-G in boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
27 The reason why competence of super memory is significant in academic
settings
28 An example of extraordinary recalling by applying designed images
orders.

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29 Scientific experiment into Biological explanation for good memory

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30 A depiction of natural ability of memory

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Questions 31-35
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Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using
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NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.
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Write your answers in boxes 31-35 on your answer sheet.

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In World Memory Championships, 31 ___________ was a limitation time for

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participants to remember a deck of cards. A man called Ed Cooke in a pub, spoke a

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string of odd words when he held 7 of the spades (one of the three cards) was
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remembered as he encoded it to a 32 ___________. The superior memory skill can be

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traced back to Ancient Greece, the strategy was called 33 ___________. Russian
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journalist had a similar mental condition named 34 ___________ which combined

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number with other senses, but Ericsson suggested that fantastic memory could be
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achieved by numerous 35 ___________.

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4
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Questions 36-40
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading
Passage 1?
In boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet, write
YES if the statement is true
NO if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage
36 Two psychologists in Britain carried out an experiment which was open
to question

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37 Cooke used a technique of connection with a real object and a number in

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the card.

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38 Simonides recalled each dead guest by each unique sound which

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belonged to every guest. Ss
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39 Modern people’s memory largely dropped because of relying too much
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on logic thinking.
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40 Ericsson gave his consent to the opinion of John Wilding and Eleanor
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Maguire who did earlier experiment.

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5
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KEY
27. E
28. D
29. B
30. F
31. 30 seconds
32. specific person
33. loci method
34. synesthesia

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35. practice

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36. YES

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37. YES Ss
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38. NO
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39. NOT GIVEN

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40. NO
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Mungo Man
A. Fifty thousand years ago, a lush landscape greeted the first Australians
making their way towards the south-east of the continent. Temperatures were cooler
than now. Megafauna - giant prehistoric animals such as marsupial lions, goannas and
the rhinoceros-sized diprotodon -were abundant. The Lake Mungo remains are three
prominent sets of fossils which tell the archeologists the story: Mungo Man lived
around the shores of Lake Mungo with his family. When he was young Mungo Man
lost his two lower canine teeth, possibly knocked out in a ritual. He grew into a man
nearly 1.7m in height. Over the years his molar teeth became worn and scratched,
possibly from eating a gritty diet or stripping the long leaves of water reeds with his
teeth to make twine. As Mungo Man grew older his bones ached with arthritis,

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especially his right elbow, which was so damaged that bits of bone were completely

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worn out or broken away. Such wear and tear is typical of people who have used a

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woomera to throw spears over many years. Mungo Man reached a good age for the

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hard life of a hunter-gatherer, and died when he was about 50. His family mourned
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for him, and carefully buried him in the lunette, on his back with his hands crossed in
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his lap, and sprinkled with red ochre. Mungo Man is the oldest known example in the
m

world of such a ritual.

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B. This treasure-trove of history was found by the University of Melbourne

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geologist Professor Jim Bowler in 1969. He was searching for ancient lakes and came
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across the charred remains of Mungo Lady, who had been cremated. And in 1974, he
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found a second complete skeleton, Mungo Man, buried 300 meters away. Using
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carbon-dating, a technique only reliable to around 40,000 years old, the skeleton was
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first estimated at 28,000 to 32,000 years old. The comprehensive study of 25 different
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sediment layers at Mungo concludes that both graves are 40,000 years old.
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C. This is much younger than the 62,000 years Mungo Man was attributed
with in 1999 by a team led by Professor Alan Thorne, of the Australian National
University. The modern day story of the science of Mungo also has its fair share of
rivalry. Because Thorne is the country’s leading opponent of the Out of Africa theory
-that Homo sapiens had a single place of origin. “Dr. Alan Thorne supports the multi-
regional explanation (that modern humans arose simultaneously in Africa, Europe
and Asia from one of our predecessors, Homo erectus, who left Africa more than 1.5
million years ago.) if Mungo Man was descended from a person who had left Africa
in the past 200,000 years, Thorne argues, then his mitochondrial DNA should have
looked like that of the other samples.”
D. However, Out of Africa supporters are not about to let go of their beliefs

7
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because of the Australian research, Professor Chris Stringer, from the Natural History
Museum in London, UK, said that the research community would want to see the
work repeated in other labs before major conclusions were drawn from the Australian
research. But even assuming the DNA sequences were correct, Professor Stringer said
it could just mean that there was much more genetic diversity in the past than was
previously realized. There is no evidence here that the ancestry of these Australian
fossils goes back a million or two million years. It’s much more likely that modern
humans came out of Africa.” For Bowler, these debates are irritating speculative
distractions from the study’s main findings. At 40,000 years old, Mungo Man and
Mungo Lady remain Australia’s oldest human burials and the earliest evidence on
Earth of cultural sophistication, he says. Modern humans had not even reached North
America by this time. In 1997, Pddbo’s research group recovered a mtDNA

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fingerprint from the Feldholer Neanderthal skeleton uncovered in Germany in 1865-

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the first Neanderthal remains ever found.

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E. In its 1999 study, Thorne’s team used three techniques to date Mungo

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Man at 62,000 years old, and it stands by its figures. It dated bone, teeth enamel and
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some sand. Bowler has strongly challenged the results ever since. Dating human
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bones is “notoriously unreliable”, he says. As well, the sand sample Thorne’s group
m

dated was taken hundreds of meters from the burial site. “You don’t have to be a
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gravedigger ... to realize the age of the sand is not the same as the age of the grave,”
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says Bowler.
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F. Thorne counters that Bowler’s team used one dating technique, while his
.fa

used three. Best practice is to have at least two methods produce the same result. A
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Thorne team member, Professor Rainer Grun, says the fact that the latest results were
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consistent between laboratories doesn’t mean they are absolutely correct. We now
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have two data sets that are contradictory. I do not have a plausible explanation.”
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Now, however, Thorne says the age of Mungo Man is irrelevant to this origins debate.
Recent fossils finds show modern humans were in China 110,000 years ago. “So he
has got a long time to turn up in Australia. It doesn’t matter if he is 40,000 or 60,000
years old.
G. Dr. Tim Flannery, a proponent of the controversial theory that Australia’s
megafauna was wiped out 46,000 years ago in a “blitzkrieg” of hunting by the
arriving people, also claims the new Mungo dates support this view. In 2001 a
member of Bowler’s team, Dr. Richard Roberts of Wollongong University, along with
Flannery, director of the South Australian Museum, published research on their
blitzkrieg theory. They dated 28 sites across the continent, arguing their analysis
showed the megafauna died out suddenly 46,000 years ago. Flannery praises the

8
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Bowler team’s research on Mungo Man as “the most thorough and rigorous dating”
of ancient human remains. He says the finding that humans arrived at Lake Mungo
between 46,000 and 50,000 years ago was a critical time in Australia’s history. There
is no evidence of a dramatic climatic change then, he says. “It’s my view that humans
arrived and extinction took place in almost the same geological instant.”
H. Bowler, however, is skeptical of Flannery’s theory and says the Mungo
study provides no definitive new evidence to support it. He argues that climate
change at 40,000 years ago was more intense than had been previously realized and
could have played a role in the megafauna’s demise. “To blame the earliest
Australians for their complete extinction is drawing along bow.”

p/
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k
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//
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9
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Questions 1-8
Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-F) with
opinions or deeds below. Write the appropriate letters A-F in boxes 1-8 on your
answer sheet.
NB you may use any letter more than once.
A Jim Bowler
B Alan Thorne
C Pddbo
D Tim Flannery

/
E Chris Stringer

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F Rainer Grun

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1 He was searching for ancient lakes and came across the charred remains

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of Mungo Lady, who had been cremated. Ss
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2 Professor who hold a skeptical attitude towards reliability for DNA

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analysis on some fossils.

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3 Professor whose determination of the age of Mungo Man to be much

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younger than the former result which is older than the 62,000 years .
b
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4 determining the age of Mungo Man has little to do with controversy for
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the origins of Australians.

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5 research group who recovered a biological proof of first Neanderthal

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found in Europe.
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6 a supporter of the idea that Australia’s megafauna was extinct due to the
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hunting by the ancient human beings.

7 Instead of keep arguing a single source origin, multi-regional
explanation has been raised.
8 Climate change rather than prehistoric human activities resulted in
megafauna’s extinction.

10
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Questions 9-14
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading
Passage 1?
In boxes 9-14 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement is true
FALSE if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage
9 The Lake Mungo remains offer the archeologists the evidence of graphic
illustration of human activities around

/
10 In Lake Mungo remains, weapons were found used by the Mungo.

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11 Mungo Man is one of the oldest known archeological evidence in the

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world of cultural sophistication such as a burying ritual.

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12 Ss
Mungo man and woman’s skeletons were uncovered in the same year.
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13 There is controversy among Scientists about the origin of the oldest

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Homo sapiens.
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14 Out of Africa supporters have criticizes Australian professors for using

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outmoded research method

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//
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11
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KEY
1. A
2. E
3. A
4. B
5. C
6. D
7. B
8. A

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9. TRUE

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10. NOT GIVEN

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11. TRUE Ss
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12. FALSE
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13. TRUE
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14. NOT GIVEN

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//
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12
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