Part One Words, Phrases and Sentences
baffle (vt.) hinder or prevent (the efforts, plans, or desires) of; be a mystery or bewildering to 使困难；使为难
e.g. Few cities in the world can baffle a GPS system like London can.
Imitation: His indifference just baffled her when she was to express her love.
unfathomable (adj.) impossible to come to understand 深不可测的；难以理解的；高深莫测的
e.g. Half or more of the prospective drivers end up dropping out, but those who stay with it and earn their licenses have internalized London to a degree that Google Maps, with its satellite images, camera cars, and unfathomable memory and processing power, can only vaguely approximate.
Imitation: The human brain is unfathomably complex.
nothing short of downright; truly 简直就是；无异于…；简直不比…差
e.g. The resulting memory and navigational skills are nothing short of astonishing, and so London taxi drivers have proved irresistible to psychologists interested in learning and, particularly, in the learning of navigational skills.
Imitation: Sheldon, a guy who is nothing short of nerdy, is an outstanding physicist.
loose end a detail that is left unsettled, unexplained, or incomplete 未了结的零星问题；不用的部分
e.g. That still left one loose end, however: perhaps the taxi drivers in the studies had started out with larger posterior hippocampi that gave them an advantage in finding their way around London, and the extensive testing they went through was nothing more than a weeding-out process that zeroed in on those prospective drivers who were naturally better equipped to be able to learn their way around the maze that is London.
Imitation: You still have a loose end in your essay.
flat out (informal) with the maximum speed or effort; totally exhausted 竭尽全力；用全速；疲惫
e.g. Until the first decade of the twenty-first century, most scientists would have flat out denied that something like what Maguire has seen in the brains of London cabbies was even possible.
Imitation: There's no need to feel sorry since you have just flatted out.
Part Two Summary
In the first half of Chapter Two, still, the author showed us some conclusion about Harnessing Adaptability.
Firstly, he made a contrast between the physical challenge ( visible) and the mental challenge ( invisible), and also told us the similarity between them. We can know from the first part that "both the structure and the function of the brain change in response to various sorts of mental training".
Next, when it comes to the brains of London cabbies, they were compared with the brains of birds that store food in different places and then with bus drivers' brains in a technical way. The same method was applied to three groups of prospective taxi drivers( passed; gave up and did something else; never accepted training ). The results showed us that " the human brain grows and changes in response to intense training ".
At last, we are shown by the experiments made on blind and deaf people and those who were engaged in presbyobia that "the brain’s structure and function are not fixed. They change in response to use. It is possible to shape the brain in the ways that we desire through conscious, deliberate training."
Part Three What I Have Learned
第二章讲到了合理利用大脑的适应性。我对这一部分提到的针对老花眼人群的实验觉得非常惊奇：在眼部状况没有改变的情况下，接受实验的人群视力竟然提高了。大脑的适应性简直强到惊人。就我自己而言，因为迷恋手写，多年以来一直坚持手写笔记，最近开始尝试在电脑上写笔记是非常不适应的，最经常的状况就是面对着电脑写不出东西来，可能慢慢摸索，向优秀的笔记借鉴一下经验，大脑也会慢慢适应这种写笔记的方法，情况会有改善吧。
今天的阅读过程中有一个小小的疑问：“One of the most striking results to date could have implications for anyone who suffers from agerelated farsightedness—which is just about everyone over the age of fifty.” 这句话中的date怎么解释比较合理呢？
谢谢各位的指教！
