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

Dear editor,
     I am writing to ask what has happened to our young people. They are not as polite or hard-working as
my generation (一代人). I will give you two examples.
     Last Friday, I got on the underground at 9:15 a.m. It was very crowded so there was no free seat. There
were some boys sitting on the seats near me. I didn't know why they were not at school. They were talking
and laughing loudly. It was difficult for me to read my newspaper with all the noise. At the next stop, a
pregnant (怀孕的) woman and her daughter got on with lots of shopping bags. I expected the boys to let them
sit down. They saw the woman but they did nothing. I had to ask them to give the woman and her daughter
seats. They did so but gave me a rude look.
     Last Saturday, I had dinner with my friend's family. I was glad to see his children, who I hadn't seen for
ten years. During the dinner, I started talking about world politics with the children. It soon became clear that
they didn't know much about it. They couldn't tell me the name of the King of Spain or President of Italy. All
they knew about was the Internet or which singers were the most beautiful. In my days, students knew the
kings, the queens and the presidents of every country in Europe.
    I worry about the future of Germany. How could these young people become good workers and parents?
They sit around Mcdonald's after school instead of going to the library as I did at their age. Maybe they have
too much money. Perhaps some readers can give us some ideas about what to do with this "lost generation".
                                                                                                                                  Yours sincerely,
                                                                                                                                   Frantz Vogts