单选题
Gordon Shaw the physicist, 66, and colleagues have discovered what's known as the "Mozart effect", the ability of a Mozart sonata, under the right circumstances, to improve the listener's mathematical and reasoning abilities. But the findings are controversial and have launched all kinds of crank notions about using music to make kids smarter. The hype, he warns, has gotten out of hand. But first, the essence: is there something abut the brain cells work to explain the effect? In 1978 the neuroscientist Vernon Mountacastle devised a model of the neural structure of the brain's gray matter. Looking like a thick band of colorful bead work, it represents the firing patterns of groups of neurons. Building on Mounteastle, Shaw and his team constructed a model of their own. On a lark, Xiaodan Leng, who was Shaw's colleague at the time, used a synthesizer to translate these patterns into music. What came out of the speakers wasn't exactly toe-tapping, but it was music. Shaw and Leng inferred that music and brain-wave activity are built on the same sort of pattern. "Gordon is a contrarian in his thinking, " says his longtime friend, Nobel Prize-Winning Standford Physicist Martin Perl. "That's important. In new areas of science, such as brain research, nobody knows how to do it. " What do neuroscientists and psychologists think of Shaw's findings? They haven't condemned it, but neither have they confirmed it. Maybe you have to take them with a grain of salt, but the experiments by Shaw and his colleagues are intriguing. In March a team led by Shaw announced that young children who had listened to the Mozart sonata and studied the piano over a period of months improved their scores by 27% on a test of ratios and proportions. The control group against which they were measured received compatible enrichment course — minus the music. The Mozart-trained kids are now doing math three grade levels ahead of their peers, Shaw claims. Proof of all this, of course, is necessarily elusive because it can be difficult to do a double blind experiment of educational techniques. In a double blind trial of an arthritis drug, neither the study subjects nor the experts evaluating them know which ones got the best treatment and which a dummy pill. How do you keep the participants from knowing it's Mozart on the CD?
单选题
In the first paragraph Gordon Shaw's concern is shown over______.
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】解析:推理题。Gordon Shaw发现了莫扎特效应会使孩子变聪明。但是第一段中写道:“But the findings are controversial and have launched all kinds of crank notions abut using music to make kids smarter.The hype,he warns,has gotten out of hand.”意思是:这些发现具有争议性并引起了对使用音乐让孩子更聪明的各种曲解。这说明对他的发现的大肆宣传已失控,所以答案是C。
单选题
Shaw and Leng's experiment on the model of their own seems to be based on the hypothesis that______.
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】解析:细节题。答案在第二段的下面的句子里:“Shaw and Leng inferred that music and brain-wave activity are built on the same sort of pattern.”意思是:Shaw和Leng推测音乐和脑波活动是建立在相同的模式上的。
单选题
The remarks made by Matin Perl in Para. 3 about Gordon Shaw could be taken as______.
单选题
In the sentence "Maybe you have to take them. . . " (Para. 4) the word "them" best refers to______.
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】解析:句义题。从这后半句可以找到答案:“Maybe you have to take them with a grain of salt,but the experiments by Shaw and his colleagues are intriguing.”意思是:也许你不得不对他们有所保留,但是Shaw和他的同事们所做的试验还是有趣的。
单选题
The important condition for the Mozart-trained kids to outsmart the control group is______.