Section B: Information Matching
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 Jancke agrees. “Most of these studies don’t allow for causal inferences,” he said. For over two decades, Jancke 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 as 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.”
36. Glenn Schellenberg’s latest research suggests many psychologists and neuroscientists wrongly believe in the causal relationship between music and IQ.
37. The belief in the positive effects of music training appeals to many researchers who are musicians themselves.
38. Glenn Schellenberg was doubtful about the claim that music education helps enhance children’s intelligence.
39. Glenn Schellenberg came to the conclusion that most of the papers assessed made the wrong claim regarding music’s effect on intelligence.
40. You must abandon your unverified beliefs before you become a scientist.
41. Lots of experiments have demonstrated that people with music training can better differentiate certain sounds.
42. Glenn Schellenberg’s findings at the beginning of this century were not supported by a larger study carried out some ten years later.
43. One researcher shares Glenn Schellenberg’ view that it is necessary to conduct long-term developmental studies to understand the effects of music training.
44. Glenn Schellenberg’s research assistants had no idea what he was trying to prove in his new study.
45. Glenn Schellenberg admits that practice can change certain areas of the brain but doubts that the change can affect other areas.
Answers & Explanations (答案与解析)
36. E。解析：题干意为“Glenn Schellenberg的最新研究表明，许多心理学家和神经科学家错误地认为音乐和智商之间存在因果关系。” 对应 [E] 段 "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."（最近，他决定正式调查心理学和神经科学领域的同行们有多频繁地在音乐和智力之间做出他认为是错误的——或至少是不成熟的——因果联系。他5月份发表的结果表明，他的许多同行正是这么做的。）wrongly believe 对应 erroneous... causal connections。
37. N。解析：题干意为“对音乐训练积极作用的信念，吸引了许多本身就是音乐家的研究人员。” 对应 [N] 段 "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... is inherently appealing.'"（音乐研究人员往往像Schellenberg一样，本身就是音乐家，正如他在最近的论文中指出的那样，“音乐训练带来的积极的认知和神经副作用的想法……本质上是有吸引力的。”）appeals to many researchers 对应 inherently appealing。
38. C。解析：题干意为“Glenn Schellenberg对音乐教育有助于提高儿童智力的说法表示怀疑。” 对应 [C] 段首句 "Schellenberg had long been skeptical of the science supporting claims that music education enhances children’s abstract reasoning, math, or language skills."（Schellenberg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”这一主张的科学性持怀疑态度。）doubtful 对应 skeptical。
39. G。解析：题干意为“Glenn Schellenberg得出结论：在评估的大多数论文中，关于音乐对智力影响的声明是错误的。” 对应 [G] 段首句 "After computing their assessments, Schellenberg concluded that the majority of the articles erroneously claimed that music training had a causal effect."（在计算了他们的评估结果后，Schellenberg得出结论：大多数文章错误地声称音乐训练具有因果效应。）most of the papers 对应 the majority of the articles，wrong claim 对应 erroneously claimed。
40. O。解析：题干意为“在成为科学家之前，你必须放弃未经证实的信念。” 对应 [O] 段 "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.'"（但他补充说，这些信念应该被留在实验室的门口。否则，这项工作就会变成宗教或信仰。“如果你想成为一名科学家，你必须放下你的信仰。”）abandon your unverified beliefs 对应 let go of your faith。
41. H。解析：题干意为“大量实验表明，受过音乐训练的人能更好地辨别某些声音。” 对应 [H] 段最后一句 "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 'b' and 'g'."（许多实验表明，音乐训练能提高某些听力，比如从背景噪音中过滤出声音，或者区分辅音“b”和“g”的区别。）better differentiate 对应 distinguishing the difference。
42. D。解析：题干意为“Glenn Schellenberg在本世纪初的发现并没有得到大约十年后开展的一项更大规模研究的支持。” 对应 [D] 段 "The 2004 paper... But nearly a decade later, in 2013... funded a bigger study... That study failed to confirm Schellenberg’s findings..."（2004年的论文……但近十年后的2013年……资助了一项更大规模的研究……这项研究未能证实Schellenberg的发现……）beginning of this century 对应 2004，some ten years later 对应 nearly a decade later，not supported by a larger study 对应 failed to confirm / bigger study。
43. J。解析：题干意为“一位研究人员赞同Glenn Schellenberg的观点，即有必要进行长期的纵向/发展性研究，以了解音乐训练的影响。” 对应 [J] 段 "Neuropsychologist Lutz Jancke agrees. ... like Schellenberg, he believes that the only way to truly understand their effects is to run longitudinal studies."（神经心理学家Lutz Jancke表示赞同。……像Schellenberg一样，他认为真正了解其影响的唯一方法是进行纵向研究。）long-term developmental studies 对应 longitudinal studies。
44. F。解析：题干意为“Glenn Schellenberg的研究助手不知道他在新研究中试图证明什么。” 对应 [F] 段最后一句 "Schellenberg didn’t tell his assistants what exactly he was trying to prove."（Schellenberg没有告诉他的助手他到底想证明什么。）had no idea 对应 didn't tell。
45. I。解析：题干意为“Glenn Schellenberg承认练习可以改变大脑的某些区域，但怀疑这种改变能否影响其他区域。” 对应 [I] 段最后一句 "Practice does change the brain, he allows, but what is questionable is the assertion that these changes affect other brain regions..."（他承认，练习确实会改变大脑，但值得怀疑的是这些改变会影响大脑其他区域的论断……）admits 对应 allows，doubts 对应 questionable。
核心搭配与高分句型
【核心搭配与高频短语】
take... in stride：从容应对，泰然处之（Schellenberg took that news in stride）
cast a skeptical eye on：对...投以怀疑的目光（cast a skeptical eye on the research）
when it comes to：当谈到，涉及到（When it comes to transfer effects of music）
allow for：顾及，考虑到，允许（don’t allow for causal inferences）
fall into：分成，归入（The youngsters fall into three groups）
let go of：放开，放弃（let go of your faith）
【亮点句型解析】
The fact that 引导同位语从句：
"...scientists frequently point to brain plasticity—the fact that the brain changes according to how we use it."
（……科学家经常指出大脑的可塑性——即大脑会根据我们使用它的方式发生改变这一事实。）破折号后跟 `the fact that` 从句，非常严谨地对前文的专业术语 `brain plasticity` 进行了确切的定义解释。
"...scientists frequently point to brain plasticity—the fact that the brain changes according to how we use it."
（……科学家经常指出大脑的可塑性——即大脑会根据我们使用它的方式发生改变这一事实。）破折号后跟 `the fact that` 从句，非常严谨地对前文的专业术语 `brain plasticity` 进行了确切的定义解释。