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Biking Makes Teens Smarter (But Just the Girls)

by A.K. Streeter, Portland, Oregon on 12.20.10
TreeHugger - Cars & Transportation

 

Photo courtesy Sabine Bungert via Beauty and the Bike project.

Girls who walked or biked to school in a recent Spanish study performed better at school in verbal and math skills then their cohorts who rode the bus or rode a car, according to this story from Reuters News.

And the longer the girls in the study commuted, the better they performed - regardless of how much other exercise and sports activity they reported.

What is interesting is that improved test results didn't hold true for the boys studied, leading researchers to question whether it is just the increased exercise levels (girls have been found to exercise less than boys) or other factors that made girl cyclists and walkers do better on cognitive tests girls that were driven or bussed to school.

David Martínez-Gómez of the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid and his colleagues looked at test scores from 1,700 urban Spanish teens.

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