Advancing age means losing your hair, your waistline and your memory, right？ Dana Denis is

just 40 years old, but (21)______ she's worried about what she calls "my rolling mental blackouts." "I try to remember something and I just blank out," she says.

You may (22)______ about these lapses, calling them "senior moments" or blaming "early Alzheimer's(老年痴呆症)." Is it an inescapable fact that the older you get, the (23)______ you remember？ Well, sort of. But as time goes by, we tend to blame age (24)______ problems that are not necessarily age-related.

"When a teenager can't find her keys, she thinks it's because she's distracted or disorganized," says Paul Gold "A 70-year-old blames her (25)______ ." In fact, the 70-year-old may have been (26)______ things for decades.

In healthy people, memory doesn't worsen as (27)______ as many of us think. "As we (28)______ , the memory mechanism isn't (29)______ ," says psychologist Fergus Craik. "It's just inefficient."

The brain's processing (30)______ slows down over the years, though no one knows exactly (31)______ Recent research suggests that nerve cells lose efficiency and (32)______ there's less activity in the brain. But, cautions Barry Gordon, "It's not clear that less activity is (33)______ . A beginning athlete is winded(气喘吁吁)more easily than a (34)______ athlete. In the same way, (35)______ the brain gets more skilled at a task, it expends less energy on it.

There are (36)______ you can take to compensate for normal slippage in your memory gears, though it (37)______ effort. Margaret Sewell says: "We're a quick-fix culture, but you have to (38)______ to keep your brain (39)______ shape. It's like having a good body. You can't go to the gym once a year (40)______ expect to stay in top form."

(21)

A．almost

B．seldom

C．already

D．never