2015年6月大学英语四级阅读押题

A team of researchers in California has developed a way to predict what kinds of objects people are looking at by scanning what's happening in their brains.

When you look at something, your eyes send a signal about that object to your brain. Different regions of the brain process the information your eyes send. Cells in your brain called neurons (神经元) are responsible for this processing.

Like cells anywhere else in your body, active neurons use oxygen. Blood brings oxygen to the neurons, and the more active a neuron is, the more oxygen it will consume. The more active a region of the brain, the more active its neurons, and in turn, the more blood will travel to that region. And by using a technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging (功能性核磁共振成像), or fMRI, scientists can visualize (使显现) which parts of the brain receive more oxygen-rich blood—and therefore, which parts are working to process information.

An fMRI machine is a device that scans the brain and measures changes in blood flow to the brain. The technology shows researchers how brain activity changes when a person thinks, looks at something, or carries out an activity like speaking or reading. By highlighting the areas of the brain at work when a person looks at different images, fMRI may help scientists determine specific patterns of brain activity associated with different kinds of images.

The California researchers tested brain activity by having two volunteers view hundreds of pictures of everyday objects, like people, animals, and fruits. The scientists used an fMRI machine to record the volunteers' brain activity with each photograph they looked at. Different objects caused different regions of the volunteers' brains to light up on the scan, indicating activity. The scientists used this information to build a model to predict how the brain might respond to any image the eyes see.

In a second test, the scientists asked the volunteers to look at 120 new pictures. Like before, their brains were scanned every time they looked at a new image. This time, the scientists used their model to match the fMRI scans to the image. For example, if a scan in the second test showed the same pattern of brain activity that was strongly related to pictures of apples in the first test, their model would have predicted the volunteers were looking at apples.

6. What is responsible for processing a signal sent by people's eyes?
[A] Oxygen-rich blood.
[B] Neurons in the brain.
[C] A small region of the brain.
[D] The central part of the brain.

7. What do we learn from the third paragraph?
[A] Cells in your brain use more oxygen than cells elsewhere.
[B] It is impossible to discover which parts of the brain process information.
[C] The more oxygen a neuron consumes, the more blood it needs.
[D] fMRI helps scientists to discover how the brain develops intelligently.

8. What does the author mean "By highlighting the areas of the brain at work" (Line 3-4, Para. 4)?
[A] Scientists who are working give light to the parts of the brain.
[B] Scientists us fMRI to make the parts of the brain work.
[C] Scientists stop the parts of the brain from processing information.
[D] fMRI marks the parts of the brain that are processing information.

9. What did the researchers experiment on according to the passage?
[A] fMRI machines.
[B] Thousands of pictures.
[C] Animals, objects, and fruits.
[D] Two volunteers.

10. The best title for the passage would be _______.
[A] Your Thoughts Can Be Scanned
[B] A Technological Dream
[C] The Recent Development in Science and Technology
[D] A Device that Can Help You Calculate