How to practice this piece
1. Listen without reading
Press play and do not look at the text. You can repeat the audio as many times as you want or slow it down.
2. Do the exercises
Comprehension, true or false, ordering, real speech and a dictation. Each one is checked at the end.
3. Read and listen again
When you finish every exercise the text unlocks, with each word highlighted while it plays.
Comprehension
Choose your answers. They are not graded automatically: when you have answered them all, press “Check answers” at the bottom to see which ones you got right.
Question 1
What is the main idea of the talk?
Question 2
How has the speaker's opinion of forgetting changed over the years?
Question 3
How did Ebbinghaus study memory?
Question 4
When does most of the forgetting happen?
Question 5
What did Ebbinghaus notice about material he had reviewed before?
Question 6
What is the result of the example with the two students?
Question 7
What does the speaker admit about her explanation of why spacing works?
Question 8
How does the speaker feel about the advice she gives at the end?
0 of 8 answered
About this piece
A university lecturer explains why forgetting is not only a failure and how timing helps memories last. Practice following a long explanation with a clear argument, caveats and a concrete example.
What you will practice
- Comprehension: the main idea and the details you hear (numbers, prices, times, names).
- True, false or not given: precise attention to what was really said.
- Ordering: following the sequence of what happened.
- Real speech: forms and expressions that do not sound the way they are written.
- Dictation: writing the missing words in a sentence from the audio.
Vocabulary from this piece
caveats noun
warnings or conditions that limit what you are saying
replicated verb
repeated in the same way, to see if you get the same result
flattens verb
becomes level, with less change
cramming noun
studying a lot in a very short time before a test
fragile adjective
easy to break or lose
durable adjective
able to last a long time
retrieval noun
the act of getting information back from memory
plausible adjective
likely to be true; reasonable
revision noun
studying again what you have learned, before an exam
Dr. Helen Marsh: Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to begin with a confession: I used to think of forgetting as a kind of failure, something to be avoided at all costs.
Dr. Helen Marsh: Over the years, however, I've come to see it very differently.
Dr. Helen Marsh: The story starts in the late nineteenth century, with the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus.
Dr. Helen Marsh: Rather than study other people, he used himself as his only subject, memorising long lists of meaningless syllables and then testing how much he could recall after different intervals.
Dr. Helen Marsh: What he found has been replicated, with some caveats, many times since.
Dr. Helen Marsh: Forgetting, it turns out, isn't steady. Most of the loss occurs early, within hours of learning, and then the decline gradually flattens out.
Dr. Helen Marsh: This is what we now call the forgetting curve.
Dr. Helen Marsh: Now, it would be easy to draw a gloomy conclusion from this, namely that anything we learn is doomed to vanish. But that's not the whole picture.
Dr. Helen Marsh: Ebbinghaus also noticed that material he had reviewed before was relearned far more quickly than material that was entirely new.
Dr. Helen Marsh: Which brings me to the point I really want to make. It isn't merely that we forget; it's that the timing of our review matters.
Dr. Helen Marsh: Studying the same material in a single, intense session, what we commonly call cramming, tends to produce a quick but fragile result.
Dr. Helen Marsh: Spreading the same effort over several days, by contrast, seems to make memories considerably more durable.
Dr. Helen Marsh: To make this concrete, imagine two students learning the same fifty words. One studies for five hours on Sunday night. The other studies for an hour a day over five days.
Dr. Helen Marsh: A week later, the second student will, on average, remember noticeably more, even though both spent exactly the same time.
Dr. Helen Marsh: I should stress that nobody fully understands why this is so. One plausible explanation is that a little forgetting makes retrieval harder, and it's precisely that difficulty that strengthens the memory.
Dr. Helen Marsh: Not until we struggle to remember something do we give the brain a reason to hold on to it.
Dr. Helen Marsh: So, what should we take away from all this? Hardly anything I'm saying is revolutionary.
Dr. Helen Marsh: Yet most of us still leave our revision until the night before.
Dr. Helen Marsh: If I could persuade you to do just one thing, it would be this: study a little, forget a little, and then come back to it.
Dr. Helen Marsh: Thank you. I'm happy to take questions.