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 about the brain cells work to explain the effect? In 1978 the neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle 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 patterns.
"Gordon is a contrarian in his thinking," says his longtime friend, Nobel Prize-winning Stanford physicist Martin Peri. "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 courses--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 test treatment and which a dummy pill. How do you keep the participants from knowing it's Mozart on the CD?

单选题 The remarks made by Martin Perk in Paragraph 3 about Gordon Shaw could be taken as ______.
A. a compliment B. an outspoken criticism
C. an expression of jealousy D. something a little sarcastic

单选题 In the sentence "Maybe you have to take them..." (Para. 4) the word "them" best refers to ______.
A. neuroscientists and psychologists
B. Shaw and his colleagues
C. the experiments by Shaw and his team
D. Shaw's findings

单选题 The most important condition for the Mozart-trained kids to outsmart the control group is ______.
A. being particularly trained to tackle math problems
B. listening to a specific Mozart and playing the piano
C. having extra courses designed exclusively for them
D. studying the piano for its breathtaking complexity

单选题 According to the author, proof of what Shaw claims is difficult because ______.
A. the control group will also enjoy the same kind of Mozart
B. some educational techniques need re-evaluation
C. the double-blind experiment is not reliable and thus rejected by Shaw
D. participants cannot be kept from knowing what is used in the test

单选题 In the first paragraph Gordon Shaw's concern is shown over ______.
A. the open hostility by the media towards his findings
B. his strength to keep trying out the "Mozart effect"
C. a widespread misunderstanding of his findings
D. the sharp disagreement about his discovery

单选题 Shaw and Leng's experiment on the model of their own seems to be based on the hypothesis that ______.
A. listening to Mozart could change the brain's hardware
B. brain-waves could be invariably translated into music
C. listening to music could stimulate brain development
D. toe-tapping could be very close to something musical