2021年12月英语六级真题 第2套

Section B
Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2.

Do music lessons really make children smarter?
A) A recent analysis found that most research mischaracterizes the relationship between music and skills enhancement.
B) In 2004, a paper appeared in the journal Psychological Science, titled “Music Lessons Enhance IQ.” The author, composer and psychologist Glenn Schellenberg, had conducted an experiment with 144 children randomly assigned to four groups: one learned the keyboard for a year, one took singing lessons, one joined an acting class, and a control group had no extracurricular training. The IQ of the children in the two musical groups rose by an average of seven points in the course of a year; those in the other two groups gained an average of 4.3 points.
C) Schellenberg had long been skeptical of the science supporting claims that music education enhances children's abstract reasoning, math, or language skills. If children who play the piano are smarter, he says, it doesn't necessarily mean they are smarter because they play the piano. It could be that the youngsters who play the piano also happen to be more ambitious or better at focusing on a task. Correlation, after all, does not prove causation.
D) The 2004 paper was specifically designed to address those concerns. And as a passionate musician, Schellenberg was delighted when he turned up credible evidence that music has transfer effects on general intelligence. But nearly a decade later, in 2013, the Education Endowment Foundation funded a bigger study with more than 900 students. That study failed to confirm Schellenberg's findings, producing no evidence that music lessons improved math and literacy skills.
E) Schellenberg took that news in stride while continuing to cast a skeptical eye on the research in his field. Recently, he decided to formally investigate just how often his fellow researchers in psychology and neuroscience make what he believes are erroneous—or at least premature—causal connections between music and intelligence. His results, published in May, suggest that many of his peers do just that.
F) For his recent study, Schellenberg asked two research assistants to look for correlational studies on the effects of music education. They found a total of 114 papers published since 2000. To assess whether the authors claimed any causation, researchers then looked for telltale verbs in each paper's title and abstract, verbs like “enhance,” “promote,” “facilitate,” and “strengthen.” The papers were categorized as neuroscience if the study employed a brain imaging method like magnetic resonance, or if the study appeared in a journal that had “brain,” “neuroscience,” or a related term in its title. Otherwise the papers were categorized as psychology. Schellenberg didn't tell his assistants what exactly he was trying to prove.
G) After computing their assessments, Schellenberg concluded that the majority of the articles erroneously claimed that music training had a causal effect. The overselling, he also found, was more prevalent among neuroscience studies, three quarters of which mischaracterized a mere association between music training and skills enhancement as a cause-and-effect relationship. This may come as a surprise to some. Psychologists have been battling charges that they don't do “real” science for some time—in large part because many findings from classic experiments have proved unreproducible. Neuroscientists, on the other hand, armed with brain scans and EEGs (脑电图), have not been subject to the same degree of critique.
H) To argue for a cause-and-effect relationship, scientists must attempt to explain why and how a connection could occur. When it comes to transfer effects of music, scientists frequently point to brain plasticity—the fact that the brain changes according to how we use it. When a child learns to play the violin, for example, several studies have shown that the brain region responsible for the fine motor skills of the left hand's fingers is likely to grow. And many experiments have shown that musical training improves certain hearing capabilities, like filtering voices from background noise or distinguishing the difference between the consonants (辅音) ‘b’ and ‘g’.
I) But Schellenberg remains highly critical of how the concept of plasticity has been applied in his field. “Plasticity has become an industry of its own,” he wrote in his May paper. Practice does change the brain, he allows, but what is questionable is the assertion that these changes affect other brain regions, such as those responsible for spatial reasoning or math problems.
J) Neuropsychologist Lutz Jäncke agrees. “Most of these studies don't allow for causal inferences,” he said. For over two decades, Jäncke has researched the effects of music lessons, and like Schellenberg, he believes that the only way to truly understand their effects is to run longitudinal studies. In such studies, researchers would need to follow groups of children with and without music lessons over a long period of time—even if the assignments are not completely random. Then they could compare outcomes for each group.
K) Some researchers are starting to do just that. The neuroscientist Peter Schneider from Heidelberg University in Germany, for example, has been following a group of children for ten years now. Some of them were handed musical instruments and given lessons through a school-based program in the Ruhr region of Germany called Jedem Kind ein Instrument, or “an instrument for every child,” which was carried out with government funding. Among these children, Schneider has found that those who were enthusiastic about music and who practiced voluntarily showed improvements in hearing ability, as well as in more general competencies, such as the ability to concentrate.
L) To establish whether effects such as improved concentration are caused by music participation itself, and not by investing time in an extracurricular activity of any kind, Assal Habibi, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, is conducting a five-year longitudinal study with children from low-income communities in Los Angeles. The youngsters fall into three groups: those who take after-school music, those who do after-school sports, and those with no structured after-school program at all. After two years, Habibi and her colleagues reported seeing structural changes in the brains of the musically trained children, both locally and in the pathways connecting different parts of the brain.
M) That may seem compelling, but Habibi's children were not selected randomly. Did the children who were drawn to music perhaps have something in them from the start that made them different but eluded the brain scanners? “As somebody who started taking piano lessons at the age of five and got up every morning at seven to practice, that experience changed me and made me part of who I am today,” Schellenberg said. “The question is whether those kinds of experiences do so systematically across individuals and create exactly the same changes. And I think that is that huge leap of faith.”
N) Did he have a hidden talent that others didn't have? Or more endurance than his peers? Music researchers tend, like Schellenberg, to be musicians themselves, and as he noted in his recent paper, “the idea of positive cognitive and neural side effects from music training (and other pleasurable activities) is inherently appealing.” He also admits that if he had children of his own, he would encourage them to take music lessons and go to university. “I would think that it makes them better people, more critical, just wiser in general,” he said.
O) But those convictions should be checked at the entrance to the lab, he added. Otherwise, the work becomes religion or faith. “You have to let go of your faith if you want to be a scientist.”

音乐课真能让孩子更聪明吗？
A）最近的一项分析发现，对于音乐和技能提升之间的关系，大多数研究的描述都是错误的。
B）2004年，《心理科学》杂志上刊登了一篇题为《音乐课提高智商》的论文。该论文的作者——作曲家、心理学家格伦·舍伦贝格进行了一项实验。该实验将144名儿童随机分为四组：一组学习一年键盘，一组学习一年声乐，一组学习一年表演，还有一个对照组，这组不接受课外训练。两组学习音乐的儿童，其智商在一年内平均提高了7分；而另外两组儿童的智商平均提高了4.3分。
C）［38］舍伦贝格长期以来一直对支持音乐教育能提高儿童抽象推理、数学或语言技能等主张的科学持怀疑态度。他认为，如果弹钢琴的孩子更聪明，并不一定说明他们是因为弹钢琴才更聪明的。也可能是弹钢琴的孩子恰好更有雄心或对一项任务的专注力更强。毕竟，相关性不等于因果关系。
D）2004年的这篇论文就是专门来解决这些问题的。作为一名充满激情的音乐家，当舍伦贝格找到了可信的证据，证明音乐对一般智力有迁移效应时，他感到很高兴。但在近10年后的2013年，教育捐赠基金会资助了一项规模更大的研究，这次研究对象覆盖了900多名学生。［42］这项研究未能证实舍伦贝格的发现，没有为音乐课提高数学和读写能力提供任何证据。
E）舍伦贝格从容地接受了这个消息，同时继续对他所在领域的研究持怀疑态度。［36］最近，他决定正式研究一下，在他的心理学和神经科学领域的同仁中，有多少人得出了音乐和智力之间存在因果关系这一结论——在他看来，这种结论是错误的，或者至少是不成熟的。他的研究结果于五月份发表，表明许多同行都得出了这一结论。
F）在他最近的研究中，舍伦贝格请了两位研究助理，让他们寻找关于音乐教育影响的相关研究。他们发现，自2000年以来，共有114篇论文发表。为评估这些论文的作者是否声称二者有因果关系，研究人员随后在每篇论文的标题和摘要中查找标志性动词，比如“增强”“促进”“促使”和“加强”。如果某研究采用像磁共振这样的大脑成像方法，或者某研究出现在标题含有“大脑”“神经科学”或相关术语的期刊中，这些论文就被归为神经科学类。否则，这些论文就被归为心理学类。［44］舍伦贝格没有告诉他的助理们，他到底想证明什么。
G）［39］在计算了他们的评估之后，舍伦贝格得出这样的结论：大多数文章都错误地声称音乐训练（对智力）有因果效应。他还发现，过度夸大（这种因果关系）在神经科学研究中更为普遍，其中四分之三的神经科学研究将音乐训练和技能提高之间的单纯的联系误解为因果关系。这可能会让一些人感到惊讶。心理学家面临指责已经有一些时间了，说他们不做“真正的”科学——这在很大程度上是因为许多经典实验的发现已经被证明是不可复制的。另一方面，在脑部扫描和脑电图的帮助下，神经科学家们并没有受到同等程度的批评。
H）为了论证因果关系，科学家们必须努力解释这种联系是因何以及如何发生的。当涉及音乐的迁移效应时，科学家们经常指向大脑的可塑性——而事实上，大脑会随着我们的使用方式而变化。比如说，当一个孩子学习拉小提琴时，有几项研究表明，负责左手手指精细动作技能的大脑区域很可能会发育。［41］还有许多实验表明，音乐训练可以提高某些听觉功能，比如从背景噪音中过滤出人声，或辨别辅音b和g之间的区别。
I）但是对于可塑性的概念如何应用于他的领域，舍伦贝格仍然持高度批判态度。“可塑性已经成为一个独立的研究领域，”他在五月份发表的文章中写道。［45］他承认，练习确实会使大脑发生改变，但值得怀疑的是这些变化会影响大脑其他区域的断言，比如会影响那些负责空间推理或数学问题的区域。
J）神经心理学家卢茨·詹克对此表示赞同。他说：“这些研究大多不考虑因果推论。”［43］20多年来，詹克一直在研究音乐课的影响，和舍伦贝格一样，他也认为，要真正理解音乐课的影响，唯一的方法就是进行纵向研究。在纵向研究中，研究人员需要对上音乐课和没上音乐课的儿童群体进行长时间的跟踪研究——即便（研究）任务不是完全随机的。然后他们才能比较每一组的结果。
K）有些研究人员已经开始这样做了。例如，来自德国海德堡大学的神经科学家彼得·施耐德现在已经跟踪一群孩子10年了。德国鲁尔地区有一项由政府资助、名为Jedem Kind ein Instrument，即“每个孩子都有一件乐器”的校本项目，这些孩子中的一部分通过该项目得到乐器并接受课程。施耐德发现，在这些孩子中，对音乐充满热情并自愿练习的人在听力和更多一般能力方面都有所提高，比如集中注意力的能力。
L）为了确定诸如提高注意力这类的影响是否是由参加音乐课本身，而不是花时间参与其他任何形式的课外活动带来的，南加州大学心理学教授阿萨尔·哈比比正在进行一项为期五年的纵向研究，研究对象是洛杉矶低收入社区的孩子。这些孩子们分为三组：课后学习音乐的孩子，参加课外体育活动的孩子，以及没有参加任何有组织的课外活动的孩子。两年后，哈比比和她的同事们报告说，他们发现接受音乐训练的孩子的大脑在局部和连接大脑不同部位的通路上发生了结构性变化。
M）这看起来可能很有说服力，但哈比比所研究的孩子们并不是随机选择的。那些被音乐吸引的孩子，会不会从一开始就有某种特质让他们与众不同，但却骗过了大脑扫描仪呢？舍伦贝格说：“我从五岁开始上钢琴课，每天早上七点起床练习，这种经历改变了我，一定程度上使我成为今天的我。问题是，这类经历是否对每个人都有这样系统的影响，并产生完全相同的变化。我认为这要看人们选择相信的程度。”
N）他有没有别人没有的隐藏天赋？还是他比同龄人更有耐力？［37］像舍伦贝格一样，从事音乐研究的人往往自己就是音乐家，正如他在最近的论文中指出的：“音乐训练（以及其他令人愉快的活动）对认知和神经具有积极作用的想法在本质上是诱人的。”他还承认，如果他有自己的孩子，他会鼓励他们上音乐课、上大学。他说：“我认为这会让他们成为更好的人，更具有批判性思维，总的来说就是更聪明。”
O）但他补充说，这些信念应该在（研究人员）进入实验室之前受到检验。否则，科研工作就变成了宗教或信仰。［40］“如果你想成为一名科学家，你就必须放弃你的信仰。”