Some people never forget a face - PAU inglés Madrid 2012 resuelto

>Exámenes selectividad inglés resueltos C. Madrid

A new study finds some people can remember faces of people they met years ago and only in passing. Others of us, of course, aren't blessed with that ability. In fact about 2 percent of the population has prosopagnosia, a condition characterized by great difficulty in recognizing faces.

The "super-recognizers", as they are called, excel at recalling faces. The study suggests that there is — as with many things — a broad spectrum of ability in this realm. The research involved standardized face recognition tests, and the superrecognizers scored far above average on these tests. Often super-recognizers are able to recognize another person despite significant changes in appearance, such as aging or a different hair color. They also recognize other people far more often than they are recognized. In these cases, they often compensate by pretending not to recognize someone they met in passing, so as to avoid appearing to attribute too much importance to a brief encounter.

Super-recognizers, then, really stand out in terms of their ability to remember people. They have extreme stories of recognizing people; it doesn't have to be a significant interaction. They can recognize someone who was shopping in the same store with them two months ago, for example, even if they didn't speak to the person. One woman in the new study said she had identified another woman on the street who served her as a waitress five years earlier in a different city. This outstanding ability could be important in courts, where one person's eyewitness testimony might thus be more credible than another based on their varying abilities to recognize a face.

RESPUESTAS

I. READING COMPREHENSION

1.- Are the following statements TRUE or FALSE? Copy the evidence from the text. No marks are given for only TRUE or FALSE.

a) A small minority of people cannot identify other people’s faces easily.

• TRUE: "Others of US, of course, aren't blessed with that ability. In fact, about 2 percent of the population has prosopagnosia, a condition characterized by great difficulty in recognizing faces." (Paragraph 1)

b) Super-recognizers are only able to recognize people who have the same appearance as when they met.

• FALSE: "Often super-recognizers are able to recognize another person despite significant changes in appearance, such as aging or a different hair colour.  (Paragraph 2)

2.- In your own words and based on the ideas in the text, answer the following questions. Do not copy from the text.

a) Why do some super-recognizers pretend not to recognize people?

• Because they don’t want to make others believe that they attribute too much importance to short interactions.  

b) Why might the results of the study be important in courts?

• Because super-recognizers’ testimonies are much more reliable than others due to their extraordinary ability.  

II. USE OF ENGLISH

 

3.-Find the words in the text that mean:

• a) remembering (paragraph 2): recalling
• b) wide (paragraph 2): broad
• c) meeting (paragraph 2): encounter
• d) believable (paragraph 3): credible

4.- Complete the following sentences. Use the appropriate form of the word in brackets when given.

• a) According to the results of a recent study, some people have been found (find) to be super recognizers.
• b) People who suffer from prosopagnosia find it difficult to identify faces.
• c) Hi, Jane! I remember meeting (meet) you at a party last year.
• d) If the witness hadn't been (not be) in that city five years earlier, she wouldn't have met (not meet) the waitress.

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