Question+1+writing+pre-test

Question 1

Read the passage. On a piece of paper, take notes on the main points of the reading passage. Listen [|here] A truly amazing characteristic of human memory is that all people seem to experience a certain type of very specific amnesia, or the inability to remember events that have occurred in their lives. This particular kind of amnesia, which is apparently experienced quite universally, is the Inability to remember events that took place in the first few years of life; even though

the first few years of life are a time when learning is at its highest and tremendous amounts of information are learned, people seem to remember basically nothing from this period. When Freud first noted this interesting aspect of memory in 1805, he referred to it as childhood amnesia.

Since the time that Freud first noted this phenomenon, numerous studies have been conducted to learn about it, and the results of these studies are that people tend not to remember anything from the first three to five years of their lives. A possible difficulty in this type of study is that one cannot simply ask people if they remember events from the first five years of life because they may think that they remember things, but there is no way to check whether the remembered events actually occurred. Even when this difficulty is overcome in experiments, at least somewhat, by testing whether or not subjects can remember events that have been well documented from childhood, such as family celebrations or births of siblings, the results remain constant, that people tend not to remember anything from the first three to five years of life. Listen to the passage. On a piece of paper, take notes on the main points of the listening passage. n

Now answer the following question: How does the information in the listening passage add to the ideas presented in the reading passage?