原文朗读＋词汇复习【刻意练习 04B】

Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals. Our hypothetical music student would have been much more successful with a practice goal something like this: “Play the piece all the way through at the proper speed without a mistake three times in a row.” Without such a goal, there was no way to judge whether the practice session had been a success.

In Steve’s case there was no long-range goal because none of us knew how many digits one could possibly memorize, but he had a very specific short-term goal: to remember more digits than he had the previous session. As a distance runner, Steve was very competitive, even if he was only competing with himself, and he brought that attitude to the experiment. From the very beginning Steve was pushing each day to increase the number of digits he could remember.

Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal. If you’re a weekend golfer and you want to decrease your handicap by five strokes, that’s fine for an overall purpose, but it is not a well-defined, specific goal that can be used effectively for your practice. Break it down and make a plan: What exactly do you need to do to slice five strokes off your handicap? One goal might be to increase the number of drives landing in the fairway. That’s a reasonably specific goal, but you need to break it down even more: What exactly will you do to increase the number of successful drives? You will need to figure out why so many of your drives are not landing in the fairway and address that by, for instance, working to reduce your tendency to hook the ball. How do you do that?An instructor can give you advice on how to change your swing motion in specific ways. And so on. The key thing is to take that general goal—get better—and turn it into something specific that you can work on with a realistic expectation of improvement.

Keywords & phrases

1)      well-defined   定义明确的

2)      hypothetical   adj. 假象的，假设的

3)      all the way through   从头到尾，完整地

4)      in a row   连续地

5)      long-range   长期的，远程的

6)      digit   n. 数字，数码

7)      distance runner   长跑选手

8)      a bunch of   一些，一群，一束（花）

9)      handicap   n. 缺陷残疾，高尔夫运动中称为“差点”

10)   slice   v. 切成片，切下；n. 薄片

11)    stroke   n. 击球

12)   fairway   n. （高尔夫球场上的）平坦球道

13)   tendency   n. 倾向

14)   hook   v. 勾

15)   swing   摆动，挥动