Words and expressions
“...he usually got the eight-digit strings right, but nine digits was hit or miss, and he had never managed to remember a ten-digit string at all. ”
done in a way that is not planned or organized.
Eg. The campaign was rather a hit-and-miss(or hit-or-miss) affair.
Eg. After the extremely hard final examinations, I felt that all those efforts I made during the final seems to be hit or miss.
“For my dissertation, I had honed a psychological research tool called “the think-aloud protocol” that was designed specifically to study such mental processes. ”
to improve your skill at doing sth.
*Can be used in methodology writing for reports.
“This increase in the amount and sophistication of practice resulted in a steady improvement in the abilities of the performers in these various fields—an improvement that was not always obvious from year to year but that is dramatic when viewed over the course of several decades.”
very fashionable and expensive/ complexity
Eg. Given the sophistication of reading in a foreign language, I would like to set aside 2 hours a day for the reading homework.
“Why should the teaching techniques used to turn aspiring musicians into concert pianists have anything to do with the training that a dancer must go through to become a prima ballerina or the study that a chess player must undertake to become a grandmaster? ...for instance, or even something like teaching doctors to perform laparoscopic surgery—that method will need to take into account what works and what doesn’t in driving changes in the body and brain. Thus, all truly effective practice techniques work in essentially the same way.”
aspiring: wanting to be successful
Eg. He is an aspiring dancer that he aspires to perform in Tokyo Dome.
aspire to do sth.= be eager to do sth.
Eg. Currently, I aspire to learn Japanese well.
for instance=for example
“But before we delve into the details of deliberate practice, it will be best if we spend a little time understanding some more basic types of practice—the sorts of practice that most people have already experienced in one way or another.”
to try to find more information about sb or sth
delve into
Eg. research that delves deeply into this issue.
Eg. Last semester I delved into the current situation of cultural export in China.
Summary
This part of the chapter started with an experiment that shows how short-term memory can be improved through purposeful practice. And the next section, cases in other fields including the improvement of the world sports level, technical skills of music performance, as well as long-term memorization have been mentioned, in order to prove that extraordinary abilities are being improved as time goes by. (Albeit this chapter mainly focused on the potential of individuals, it also can be seen that the writer has optimistic thoughts towards the progress of all people as every generation is standing on the shoulder of the last generation.)
Impression
I always have inferiority feeling when I speak or write in English. Compared with my classmates that all have the experience of studying in international schools or abroad, my English is terrible. After reading this chapter I feel that although I did not have the chance to be bilingual or even trilingual in my childhood, through purposeful practice I still have the potential to learn other languages better.
Just one thing confused me that is the size of the sample too small in that experiment as the writer only chose one participant? Because of that, the writer used a whole sentence to describe how normal the participant is...
However, this book is hopefully gonna give me more confidence✌️
