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Рубрика:
2. Read the following statements and cross out the details
that are not included in the article.
1. There are more cars then people in the world today
2. Two and a half million cars pass through New York City
each day.
3. Travel is sometimes slow because of traffic.
4. Cars were first produced in large numbers by Ford Motors.
5. The first electric cars were faster then gasoline-powered
cars.
6. The General Motors Company produced an electric car.
Text 12
THE MIND MACHINE?
I. Before reading.
1. Read the headline of the article and say what it will be
about using the choice below:
a. The work of the brain
b. The experiments on the brain
c. The problems with the brain
d. Brain and computer
2. Read the article and say if your predictions were correct.
Although intelligence has been studied, and the brain has
been studied, there is little understanding of how the brain works
to produce intelligence. This has something to do with the fact
that the brain contains around 100 billion cells (about the
number of stars in the Milky Way).
One of the continuing myths about the relationship between
intelligence and the brain is that the brains of very clever
people are somehow physically different from those of
ordinary people. At the beginning of the century an American
scientist called E.A. Spitzka produced a list of the weights of
the brains of important, well-known men. The heaviest brain
on the list was that of Turgenev, the Russian novelist, at
2000g. However, the brain of another great genius, Walt
Whitman, weighed only 1282g.
There are no significant differences between the intelli-
gence levels of males and females. However, girls under seven
score a little higher than boys in IQ tests and the highest IQ
recorded is that of Marylin vos Savant at 230. However, men
and women do differ in the way they think. Generally, women
are more skilled verbally and men do better on visual-spatial
tasks.
Interestingly, the fibres which join the two halves of the
brain have been found to be larger in women than in men. This
supports the theory that women can change from 'practical' to
'emotional' thinking-more quickly than men.
People with mental problems have often been treated
extremely badly. Two hundred years ago, the mentally ill were
swung around in revoking chairs, or holes were drilled in their
skulls to release evil spirits. From the 1930s, the mentally ill
were subjected to electric shock therapy and lobotomy - the
removal of part of their brain. In the 1960s and 70s, thousands
of people were given drugs to cope with anxiety and then
became addicted to them.
The brain needs ten times as much blood as other organs of
the body, as it can't store glucose for later use. This is different
to muscles and other organs and although the adult brain
makes up only two per cent of the body weight, its oxygen
consumption is twenty per cent of the body’s total.
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