You either have it, or you don’t—a sense of direction, that is. But why is it that some people could find their way across the Sahara without a map, while others can lose themselves in the next street?

Scientists say we’re all born with a sense of direction, but it is not properly understood how it works. One theory is that people with a good sense of direction have simply worked harder at developing it. Research being carried out at Liverpool University supports this idea and suggests that if we don’t use is, we lose it.

“Children as young as seven have the ability to find their way around,” says Jim Martland, Research Director of the project. “However, if they are not allowed out alone or are taken everywhere by car, they never develop the skills.”

Jim Martland also emphasizes that young people should be taught certain skills to improve their sense of direction. He makes the following suggestions:

●If you are using a map, turn it so it relates to the way you are facing.

●If you leave your bike in a strange place, put it near something like a big stone or a tree. Note landmarks on the route as you go away from your bike. When you return, go back along the same route.

●Simplify the way of finding your direction by using lines such as streets in a town, streams, or walls in the countryside to guide you. Count your steps so that you know how far you have gone and note any landmarks such as tower blocks or hills which can help to find out where you are.

Now you need never get lost again!

65. Scientists believe that_______.

A. some babies are born with a sense of direction.

B. people learn a sense of direction as they grow older

C. people never lose their sense of direction

D. everybody possesses a sense of direction from birth

66. What is true of seven-year-old children according to the passage?

A. They never have a sense of direction without maps

B. They should never be allowed out alone if they lack a sense of direction

C. They have a sense of direction and can find their way around

D. They can develop a good sense of direction if they are driven around in a car.

67. If you leave your bike in a strange place, you should ________.

A. tie it to a tree so as to prevent it from being stolen

B. draw a map of the route to help remember where it is

C. avoid taking the same route when you come back to it

D. remember something easily recognizable on the route

68. According to the passage, the best way to find your way around is to ________.

A. ask policemen for directions.

B. use walls, streams, and streets to guide yourself

C. remember your route by looking out for steps and stairs

D. count the number of landmarks that you see

What’s your earliest memory Do you remember learning to walk The birth of a sibling Nursery school Adults rarely remember events from much before kindergarten, just as children younger than 3 or 4 seldom recall any specific experiences (as distinct from general knowledge). Psychologists have floated all sorts of explanations for this “childhood amnesia”. The reductionists appealed to the neurological, arguing that the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for forming memories, doesn’t mature until about the age of 2. But the reigning theory holds that since adults do not think like children, they cannot access childhood memories. Adults are struck with grown-up “schema”, the bare bones of narratives. (46)When they riffle through the mental filing cabinet in search of fragments of childhood memories to hang on this narrative skeleton, according to this theory, they don’t find any that fit. It’s like trying to find the French word in an English index.
Now psychologist Katherine Nelson of the City University of New York offers a new explanation for childhood amnesia. (47)She argues that children don’t even form lasting, long-term memories of personal experiences until they learn to use someone else’s description of those experiences to turn their own short-term, fleeting recollections into permanent memories. In other words, children have to talk about their experiences and hear others talk about them — hear Mom recount that days’ trip to the dinosaur museum, hear Dad re- member aloud their trip to the amusement park.
Why should memory depend so heavily on narrative Nelson marshals evidence that the mind structures remembrances that way. (48)Children whose mothers talk about the day’s activities as they wind down toward bedtime, for instance, remember more of the day’s special events than do children whose mothers don’t offer this novelistic framework. Talking about an event in a narrative way helps a child remember it. (49)And learning to structure memories as a long-running narrative, Nelson suggests, is the key to a permanent “autobiographical memory”, the specific remembrances that form one’s life story. (What you had for lunch yesterday isn’t part of it; what you ate on your first date with your future spouse may be.)
Language, of course, is the key to such a narrative. Children learn to engage in talk about the past. The establishment of these memories is related to the experience of talking to other people about them. (50)In particular, a child must recognize that a retelling — of that museum trip, say — is just the trip itself in another medium, that of speech rather than experience. That doesn’t happen until the child is perhaps four or five. By the time she’s ready for kindergarten she’ll remember all sorts of things. And she may even, by then, have learned’ not to blurt them out in public.