Section C

　　Recording 1

　　(16) Teachers and students alike have experienced the curious paradox that beginners, as a rule, tend to think too little about what they are doing because they think too much about what they are doing. Take for example people who are learning to play basketball or the piano. They have to give so much thought and attention to the low-level mechanics of handling the ball or fingering the keys or reading the music, that they are unable to give any thought to the thing that matters – the game, or the music, respectively. With experts, it’s just the other way around. They are open to the tactical possibilities and the musical challenges precisely because they are freed, through skill, from the need to pay attention to the low-level details of how to play. Indeed, when the expert pays attention to the mechanics, this is liable to disrupt performance.

　　This has led some to say that the expert operates in a zone ‘beyond thought’, in a state of flow. But this is misleading. Expert performance is not beyond thought. (17)Smart basketball players or skilled musicians need to pay close attention to the demands of high performance, to the challenges to be overcome. What they don’t need to do – what would be a distraction – is to have to think about where their fingers are, or how to control the ball while running. It’s not mechanics, but the play itself, that absorbs the experts’ intelligence. A nice video published online last month sheds light on (18) expertise and the conscious mind. The video reports a new study using an eye-tracking device. It turns out that the less-skilled pianist spends more time looking at her fingers than does the expert who, in contrast, is more likely to be looking at the sheet music, or looking ahead at keys he’s not yet playing. In general, the expert’s gaze was calmer and more stable.

　　This is not a surprising finding. It supports what we might almost think of as conventional wisdom. But it’s remarkable for all that, nonetheless. The eye tracker gives expert and learning performers a glimpse into what they do without thinking about it. The topic of the nature of skill – and the differences between beginners and experts – has been one of considerable discussion in cognitive science and philosophy.

　　16. What does the speaker say about beginners and expert pianists?

　　17. What do smart basketball players do according to the speaker?

　　18. What do we learn about the new study published in an online video?

　　Recording 2

　　Every summer when I top up my selection of summer outfits from the department stores, my eyes would nearly pop out of my head.(19)I’m overwhelmed with the wide range of different slimming products each year. And more shockingly, these products are often advocated by very slim models. Having lived in Asia for almost ten years now, I’ve seen various dieting tips come and go. I remember in Japan people heading directly to the food section in the supermarket when the banana diet was at its peak. Then, there was the black tea and oolong tea diet followed by the soybean diet and the tomato juice diet. The list goes on and on.

　　Apart from what people eat, I’ve also seen many interesting slimming products. In Hongkong, I’ve seen girls wrapping their whole body or both legs up with a special type of slimming tape which is supposed to help make them thinner.(20)But it just reminded me of the roasted ham my mother usually puts on the dinner table of Christmas. Then there were the face slimming rollers that were said to improve your blood circulation and make your face smaller. Personally,(20)I do not believe in any of these slimming gadgets. And I think I have a very different perspective when it comes to the definition of what is beautiful. Asian women prefer to avoid the sun because being pale or white is considered beautiful, whereas a tanned complexion is considered much more beautiful and sexy in the west.(21)It is most certainly shaped by a person’s culture as well as how they were raised in their childhood. As each summer season approaches, there’s no escape from it.

　　But it’s not only women who are affected by this pressure to look good. Men aspire to be able to show off their six packs or their V-shape backs and there’s a growing market of slimming pills aimed at men too. I think no matter what diets we follow or what slimming products we obsess ourselves with, at the end of the day there’s no magic trick to shape up for the summer. Eat in a balance way and incorporate the right level of physical activity. For me, this still seems to be the best plan.

　　Questions 19-21

　　19. What overwhelms the speaker when she buys her summer outfits each year?

　　20. What does the speaker think of girls wrapping their legs up with slimming tape?

　　21. What does the speaker think affects people’s interpretation of beauty?

　　Section C

　　Recording 3

　　Skin may seem like a superficial human attribute, but it is the first thing we notice about anyone we meet. As a zoologist focusing on the studies of apes and monkeys,(22) I’ve been studying why humans evolved to become the naked ape, and why skin comes in so many different shades around the world.

　　We can make a very good estimate from the fossil record that humans probably evolved naked skin around a million and a half years ago. And meanwhile, they mostly lost their coat of fur. Today, we have a few patches of hair remaining on various parts of our bodies. But compared with apes and monkeys, we have very little. Basically, we turned our skin darker to serve as a natural sun-protector in the place of the hair we lost. (23) We think we lost this hair because of the need to keep ourselves cool, when we were moving around vigorously in a hot environment. We can’t really lose heat by breathing quickly and loudly like dogs. We have to do it by sweating. So we evolved the ability to sweat plentifully, and lost most of our fur.

　　Most animals protect themselves from the sun with fur. (24) What we did in our ancestry was to produce more permanent natural coloring in our skin cells. This was really an important revolution in human history, because it allowed us to continue to evolve in equatorial environments. It really made it possible for us to continue along the path toward modern humans in Africa.

　　For most of the human history, we all had dark skin. What we see today is the product of evolutionary events, resulting from the dispersal of a few human populations out of Africa around 60,000 to 70,000 years ago. Our species originated around 200,000 years ago, and underwent tremendous diversification, culturally, technologically, linguistically, artistically, for 130,000 years. After that, a few small populations left Africa to populate the rest of the world. These early ancestors of modern Eurasians disperse into parts of the world that had more seasonal sunshine and much lower levels of sun radiation. (25) It’s in these populations that we begin to see real changes in the genetic makeup of natural coloring.

　　Today, skin color is evolving via new mixtures of people coming together and having children with new mixtures of skin color genes. We can see this in almost every large city worldwide. Not only the coloring genes, but lots of other genes are getting mixed up, too.

　　Questions 22 – 25:

　　22. What does the speaker mainly talk about?

　　23. What had probably caused humans to lose most of their hair one and a half million years ago?

　　24. What does the speaker say protected early humans from the sun?

　　25. What happened after humans migrated from Africa to other parts of the world?

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