阅读理解。
Frederic Mishkin, who's been a professor at Columbia Business School for almost 30 years, is good
at solving problems and expressing ideas. Whether he's standing in front of a lecture hall or engaged in a
casual conversation, his hands are always waving and pointing. When he was in graduate school, one of
his professors was so annoyed by this constant gesturing that he made the young economist sit on his
hands whenever he visited the professor's office.
It turns out, however, that Mishkin's professor had it exactly wrong. Gesture doesn't prevent but
promotes clear thought and speech. Research demonstrates that the movements we make with our hands when we talk form a kind of second language, adding information that's absent from our words. It's
learning's secret code: Gesture reveals what we know. It reveals what we don't know. What's more, the
agreement (or lack of agreement) between what our voices say and how our hands move offers a clue to
our readiness to learn.
Many of the studies establishing the importance of gesture to learning have been conducted by Susan
Goldin-Meadow, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. "We change our minds by
moving our hands," writes Goldin-Meadow in a review of this work. Particularly significant are what she
calls "mismatches" between oral expression and physical gestures. A student might say that a heavier ball
falls faster than a light one, for example, but make a gesture indicating that they fall at the same rate, which
is correct. Such differences indicate that we're moving from one level of understanding to another. The
thoughts expressed by hand motions are often our newest and most advanced ideas about the problem
we're working on; we can't yet absorb these concepts into language, but we can capture them in
movement.
Goldin-Meadow's more recent work strews not only that gesture shows our readiness to learn, but
that it actually helps to bring learning about. It does so in two ways. First, it elicits (引出) helpful behavior
from others around us. Goldin-Meadow has found that adults respond to children's speech-gesture
mismatches by adjusting their way of instruction. Parents and teachers apparently receive the signal that
children are ready to learn, and they act on it by offering a greater variety of problem-solving techniques.
The act of gesturing itself also seems to quicken learning, bringing new knowledge into consciousness and
aiding the understanding of new concepts. A 2007 study by Susan Wagner Cook, an assistant professor
of psychology at the University of Iowa, reported that third-graders who were asked to gesture while
learning algebra (代数) were nearly three times more likely to remember what they'd learned than
classmates who did not gesture.
1. According to Paragraph 1, Frederic Mishkin was asked to sit on his hands because ____.
A. he could litter express his ideas that way
B. he always pointed his finger at his professor
C. his professor did not like his gesturing
D. his gestures prevented his professor from thinking
2. How is gesturing important in acquiring knowledge?
A. It draws tasteful responses from others and increases learning speed.
B. It promotes second language learning and quickens thinking.
C. It provides significant clues for solving academic problems.
D. It reduces students' reliance on teachers' instruction.
3. What can be inferred from the passage about gesture-speech mismatches?
A. They can stimulate our creativity.
B. Instructors should make full use of them.
C. Teachers can hardly explain new concepts without them.
D. They serve as a stepping stone to solving real life problems.
4. What could be the best title of the passage?
A. Hand Motions, a Second Language
B. Gesturing: Signal of Understanding
C. New Uses of Gesturing
D. The Secret Code of Learning
