ELF– Engelsk läsförståelse (HPMAJ2021P4)

In the following text there are gaps which indicate that something has been left out. Look at the four alternatives that correspond to each gap and decide which one best fits the gap. Then mark your choice on your answer sheet.

An American President

In August 2004, Glen Jeansonne wrote a nuanced appreciation of the recently deceased Ronald Reagan. At the time, non-scholarly hagiographies and hatchet jobs competed to shape popular understanding of the 40th president’s __1__ .

Jeansonne assessed Reagan as neither a great president nor a mediocre one, a rather broad judgment but one that defied the prevailing scholarly tendency to underrate him. Today, many historians, whether favourable to Reagan or not, regard him as the most consequential president of the second half of the 20th century. He demonstrated that remarkable individuals can influence the __2__ of history.

Reagan was instrumental in bringing near to conclusion the 40-year Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union. While many 21st-century conservatives think he engineered a Reagan Revolution, this catchy alliteration claims too much. He moved America rightward without making it a conservative nation, but this was __3__ a significant transformation following the prolonged liberal ascendancy of the mid-20th century.

Reagan’s unstinting optimism helped restore widespread confidence in America’s future after the turmoil of the 1960s and the misery of the 1970s. Yet this outlook inhibited acknowledgement that there were many Americans who still needed the government’s help. He was slow to support AIDS sufferers and never used his bully pulpit to inspire popular understanding of their __4__ . He failed to appreciate that African-Americans needed a benevolent state to protect them from racial discrimination. Though not himself a bigot, he misunderstood how deeply embedded racial problems were in the United States.

Whatever his __5__ , Reagan demonstrated the capacity of the American presidency for effective leadership at home and abroad. Whether the changes he promoted made the US a better country or not is an ongoing debate. But his capacity to combine conviction with pragmatism offers lessons for politicians of all hues.

Iwan Morgan, History Today

How Babies Think

If you look cursorily at children who are four years old and younger, you might conclude that not much is going on. Babies, after all, cannot talk. However, the new science that began in the late 1970s depends on techniques that look at what babies and young children do instead of what they say. Babies look longer at novel or unexpected events than at more predictable ones, and experimenters can use this behavior to figure out what babies expect to happen. The strongest results, however, come from studies that observe actions as well: Which objects do babies reach for or crawl to? How do babies and young children imitate the actions of people around them?

By the end of the 20th century, experiments had thus charted impressively abstract and sophisticated knowledge in babies and the equally impressive growth of that knowledge as children get older. Some scientists have argued that babies must be born knowing much of what adults know about how objects and people behave. Undoubtedly, newborns are far from being blank slates, but the changes in children’s knowledge also suggest that they are learning about the world from their experiences.

One of the great mysteries of psychology and philosophy is how human beings learn about the world from a confusing mess of sensory data. Over the past decade, researchers have begun to understand much more about how babies and young children can learn so much so quickly and accurately. In particular, we have discovered that babies and young children have an extraordinary ability to learn from statistical patterns.

For example, in a 2008 study, researcher Fei Xu at the University of California, Berkeley, showed 8-month-old babies a box full of mixed-up ping-pong balls: say, 80 percent white and 20 percent red. The experimenter would then take out five balls, seemingly at random. The babies were more surprised (that is, they looked longer and more intently at the scene) when the experimenter pulled four red balls and one white one out of the box – an improbable outcome – than when she pulled out four white balls and one red one.

Detecting statistical patterns is just the first step in scientific discovery. Even more impressively, children (like scientists) use those statistics to draw conclusions about the world. In a version of the ping-pong ball study with 20-month-old babies using toy green frogs and yellow ducks, the experimenter would take five toys from a box and then ask the child to give her a toy from some that were on the table. The children showed no preference between the colors if the experimenter had taken mostly green frogs from the box of mostly green toys. Yet they specifically gave her a duck if she had taken mostly ducks from the box – apparently the children thought her statistically unlikely selection meant that she was not acting randomly and that she must prefer ducks.

Obviously, children are not doing experiments or analyzing statistics in the self-conscious way that adult scientists do. The children’s brains, however, must be unconsciously processing information in a way that parallels the methods of scientific discovery. The central idea of cognitive science is that the brain is a kind of computer designed by evolution and programmed by experience.

Neuroscientists have started to understand some of the brain mechanisms that allow all this learning to occur. Baby brains are more flexible than adult brains. They have far more connections between neurons, none of them particularly efficient, but over time they prune out unused connections and strengthen useful ones. Baby brains also have a high level of the chemicals that make brains change connections easily.

The brain region called the prefrontal cortex is distinctive to humans and takes an especially long time to mature. The adult capacities for focus, planning and efficient action that are governed by this brain area depend on the long learning that occurs in childhood. This area’s wiring may not be complete until the mid-20s.

The lack of prefrontal control in young children naturally seems like a huge handicap, but it may actually be tremendously helpful for learning. The prefrontal area inhibits irrelevant thoughts or actions. But being uninhibited may help babies and young children to explore freely. There is a trade-off between the ability to explore creatively and learn flexibly, like a child, and the ability to plan and act effectively, like an adult. The very qualities needed to act efficiently – such as swift automatic processing and a highly pruned brain network – may be intrinsically antithetical to the qualities that are useful for learning, such as flexibility.

Alison Gopnik,Scientific American