填空题
Directions:
In the following article, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 41- 45, choose the most suitable one from the list A-G to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are two extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)
You don’t have to convince Steve Backley of the power of the mind over the body. When the British javelin thrower, who won bronze in Barcelona in 1992 and silver in Atlanta in 1996, was unable to walk (let alone train ) after spraining his ankle a few years ago, he worked out in a "mental gym". Sitting in a chair, he imagined himself throwing the javelin in every one of the world’s major track-and-field stadiums, until he had racked up about a thousand hurls.
41.______
Whether it is golfer Earl Woods teaching his son Tiger to form a mental image of the ball’s rolling into the hole, or Olympic weight-lifter Tara Nott’s training her brain to block out distractions, a strong mental game has always been part of elite sports. Michael Jordan, Nancy Kerrigan and Jack Nicklaus all practiced their moves mentally; Jean-Claude Killy used to ski a slalom course in his head many times before exploding out of the starting gate. "Everybody is pretty much at the same level physically," says American diver Michelle Davison, "[ The difference comes down to] who can hold it together mentally. "
42. ______
While coaches and trainers have long emphasized the importance of the mental game, exactly how the mind affects the body’s performance has always been a bit of a mystery, with buzzwords like "in the zone" and "mental imagery" carrying a vague whiff of quackery.
43. ______
"Mental practice can actually increase real-world strength and performance," says neuroscientist Ian Robertson of Trinity College Dublin, who describes the power of mental workouts in his engaging new book, Mind Sculpture. "Pumping virtual iron physically changes the brain—and the brain, after all, controls the body. "
44. ______
Imagine, in your mind’s eye, a harp in all its graceful detail; the same region of your visual cortex just turned on as if you actually looked at the instrument. But what matters to athletes is that, just as visual imagery activates the brain’s visual cortex, so imagining movement activates the motor cortex, notes Harvard University’s Stephen Kosslyn, who has done pioneering research on imagery.
Imagine tensing and relaxing the muscles of your right index finger, but without actually moving. Were you to do this for several minutes every day for four weeks, at the end of the period the strength of that finger would increase by 20% or so, as researchers found in 1992 when they had volunteers follow this mental regimen. Nothing changed in the finger muscles themselves as a result of the imagery.
45. ______
That’s probably why imaging is such a powerful, and popular, mental workout for athletes.
[A] The reason is that visualization activates many of the same neural circuits that actually seeing does.
[B] The same process likely occurred in Backley’s brain as he mentally hurled the javelin. "Through mental practice, [he] kept stimulating the networks of connected neurons where his skill was embroidered," Robertson writes.
[C] He returned to competition a few weeks later making his top distances; usually, losing weeks of throwing practice will set you back inches—and in sports of course, inches might as well be miles.
[D] Instead connections between nerves and the muscles they control, in a circuit starting in the motor cortex of the brain, got stronger. "The improvements in strength were caused by changes in the brain," says Robertson.
[E] But just as physicians are showing that something as inchoate as a positive outlook can affect something as real as the progress of breast cancer, so scientists are uncovering how mental imagery and other tricks of the athlete’s trade affect the real, physical brain and hence the body.
[F] That lesson has not been lost on the U. S. Olympic Committee. It had one full-time sports psychologist in 1988. Today it has five.
[G] A 1995 study in Boston compared the brain regions of people who physically practiced a five- finger piano exercise with people who mentally practiced it. In both groups the area of the brain devoted to moving the fingers got bigger and accuracy improved.