IELTS Reading 練習 我們為什麼做夢（含題目+詳解）

Why We Dream

A. Few questions about the human mind have proven as durable, or as resistant to clear answers, as why we dream. Every night, the typical adult enters four or five episodes of rapid-eye-movement sleep, during which the brain becomes highly active and produces vivid, often bizarre narratives. The phenomenon is universal across cultures, but its purpose remains the subject of competing theories.

B. The first widely influential modern account came from Sigmund Freud, who argued in 1900 that dreams were the disguised expression of unconscious wishes, especially those that the waking mind found unacceptable. For much of the twentieth century this view was taken seriously even by clinicians who were sceptical of Freud's broader system. Today, however, mainstream sleep researchers regard the wish-fulfilment account as poorly supported by evidence: the imagery in most dreams is not obviously hidden, and many dreams concern recent everyday events rather than buried desires.

C. A more biological explanation emerged in the 1970s with the activation-synthesis hypothesis of Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley. They proposed that during REM sleep the brainstem fires randomly, and the higher cortex weaves these signals into a story simply because narrative is what cortex does. On this view, dreams have no intrinsic meaning; they are a side effect of the brain's tendency to make sense of noise. Critics replied that even if the underlying signals are random, the choice of imagery is far from arbitrary — emotionally charged content appears more often than chance would predict.

D. The most influential recent theories link dreams to memory consolidation. During slow-wave and REM sleep, the brain appears to replay and reorganise the day's experiences, strengthening useful associations and weakening trivial ones. Studies of rats show that the same neuronal patterns active while learning a maze re-fire during sleep, sometimes in reverse order. The resulting reorganisation may be experienced, in humans, as the loose narratives we call dreams.

E. None of these explanations is universally accepted. What is clear is that dreaming is not the unfiltered window into the soul that Freud imagined, nor the empty noise that the activation-synthesis hypothesis first suggested. It sits, like much of the brain's behaviour, somewhere between meaningful and mechanical.

The passage has five paragraphs, A-E. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, and D from the list below.

• i. A persistent question
• ii. Random firing turned into stories
• iii. Hidden wishes pushed back into the open
• iv. Dreams as a tool for memory
• v. A measured conclusion
• vi. Cultural variation in dream content

1. Paragraph B
2. Paragraph C
3. Paragraph D

1. Most current sleep researchers reject Freud's wish-fulfilment theory of dreams.
2. The activation-synthesis hypothesis claims that dream imagery is completely random.
3. Hobson and McCarley's theory was the first to use brain-imaging technology.

Complete the sentences below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

1. The typical adult enters several episodes of ______ sleep each night.
2. Recent theories connect dreaming with the process of memory ______.
3. In rat experiments, neurons that fired during learning re-fire during sleep, sometimes in ______.

1. iii — Hidden wishes pushed back into the open Paragraph B is entirely about Freud's view that dreams are "the disguised expression of unconscious wishes". "Hidden wishes" paraphrases "disguised ... unconscious wishes". Heading i fits A, not B.

2. ii — Random firing turned into stories Paragraph C: "during REM sleep the brainstem fires randomly, and the higher cortex weaves these signals into a story". Direct paraphrase.

3. iv — Dreams as a tool for memory Paragraph D opens: "The most influential recent theories link dreams to memory consolidation". Heading iv fits exactly.

4. TRUE Supporting sentence: "mainstream sleep researchers regard the wish-fulfilment account as poorly supported by evidence". "Mainstream researchers" = "most current researchers"; "poorly supported" leads to "reject".

5. FALSE Supporting sentence: "Critics replied that even if the underlying signals are random, the choice of imagery is far from arbitrary". The hypothesis says the signals are random; the imagery is shaped by the cortex. The statement overstates the claim.

6. NOT GIVEN The passage says nothing about brain-imaging technology in connection with Hobson and McCarley. Don't infer — choose NOT GIVEN.

7. rapid-eye-movement / REM Supporting sentence: "the typical adult enters four or five episodes of rapid-eye-movement sleep". Either form is acceptable; "REM" is two characters but counts as one word in IELTS.

8. consolidation Supporting sentence: "theories link dreams to memory consolidation". Single-word answer; the question supplies "memory".

9. reverse order Supporting sentence: "the same neuronal patterns active while learning a maze re-fire during sleep, sometimes in reverse order". Two-word phrase from the text.