Reading and Memory: Understanding and Improvement

Dreaming and Sleep Habits

Reading Question 1:
Based on the reading that you have done so far in this course, read each paragraph and answer according to the instructions given

                  
i.Identify one sentence that does not belong in the paragraph below:

Dreams are stories and images that our minds create while we sleep. To sleep well, one must do a number of things to get up feeling refreshed the next day. They can be entertaining, fun, romantic, disturbing, frightening, and sometimes bizarre. We may not remember dreaming, but everyone is thought to dream between 3 and 6 times per night. It is thought that each dream lasts between 5 to 20 minutes. Around 95 percent of dreams are forgotten by the time a person gets out of bed. Dreaming can help you learn and develop long-term memories. Blind people dream more with other sensory components compared with sighted people.

ii.What is the main idea in the paragraph below?

Whether you need to study for an exam, want to learn a new language, hope to avoid embarrassing memory lapses, or simply want to stay mentally sharp, improving your memory is easier than it sounds. All it takes is trying out new memorization techniques or making key adjustments in your lifestyle. Research suggests we remember things better and retain them longer when we associate meaning to them using semantic encoding. If you attach meaning or factual knowledge to any of this sensory input, that's called semantic encoding.

iii.Write a topic sentence for the paragraph below:

If you are experiencing a tough time, having a friend or a family member to help you through can make a ton of difference and can make the progress easier. Having family and friends you can depend on will generally boost your confidence level. Through a long-term study, it has been found that human beings cannot live solitarily all the time.  If you have at least one friend or an active family member, you will be more likely to get out and start trying new things. If you have children, your friends and family can help you bring up your children. 

iv.Identify the topic sentence in the paragraph below:

It is important to completely wash all cutlery before using them. Even if they look clean, it is important to wash them with the right detergent. No one likes to eat with a dirty knife, fork, or spoon.  Clean cutlery won’t transmit germs and bacteria and therefore help prevent diseases and infections. Itis one of the simplest ways to keep safe and healthy. It is always wonderful to see gleaming cutlery in a restaurant.

Memory Improvement Techniques

v.Read the paragraph and answer the questions that follow:

Today, it dominates many aspects of our life. We are so used to it that we do not even think about all the areas it touches. It helps us communicate with our friends and family. It is an invaluable tool in the kitchen as we look up recipes and ingredients. If we are attempting repairs on our car, we might look up a tutorial on YouTube. We access our entertainment online. Whenever we have any question, from the most mundane to the most complicated, we immediately browse to find the answer. It is almost unbelievable that people in the past lived without it.

What is the paragraph describing? How do you know?

Reading Question 2:
 Read the text below and identify at least five statements that are opinions or suggestions.     
A newborn baby can see, hear and feel. By the age of five, a child can talk, ride a bike and invent imaginary friends. How does this development happen? We don’t understand the way language, thinking and planning develop very well. Now scientists are using new technology to ‘see’ into children’s brains. And they seem to be discovering new information about the way a baby’s brain develops.

A study in 2010 showed that the experiences a child has in their first few years affects the development of the brain. It showed that children who received more attention seemed to have higher IQs. The brain of a newborn baby has nearly a hundred billion neurons. This is the same number as an adult’s brain. As they grow, a baby receives information through the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. This information creates connections between different parts of the brain. At the age of three, there are a hundred trillion connections.

One experiment looked at images of babies’ brains while they were listening to different sounds. The sounds were in different sequences. For example, one sequence was mu-ba-ba. This is the pattern ‘A-B-B’. Another sequence was mu-ba-ge. This is the pattern ‘A-B-C’. The images showed that the part of the brain responsible for speech seemed more active during ‘A-B-B’ patterns. This probably shows that babies can tell the difference between different patterns. This experiment is interesting because sequences of words are important to grammar and meaning. Compare two sentences with the same words in a different order: ‘John killed the bear’ is very different from ‘The bear killed John.’ So, it looks like that babies learn grammatical rules from the beginning of life.

Researchers also know that babies need to hear a lot of language in order to understand grammar rules. But there is a big difference between listening to television, audio books or the internet, and interacting with people. One study compared two groups of nine-month-old American babies. One group watched videos of Mandarin Chinese sounds. In the other group, people spoke the same sounds to the babies. The test results showed that it is possible that the second group could recognize different sounds, however the first group learned nothing. The scientist, Patricia Kuhl, said this result was very surprising. It suggests that social experience is essential to successful brain development in babies.