2021 年 12 月大学英语六级考试真题（第 3 套）

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 1ong 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)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)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."

The trend toward rationality and enlightenment was endangered long before the advent of the World Wide Web. As Neil Postman noted in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the rise of television introduced not just a new medium but a new discourse: a gradual shift from a typographic culture to a photographic one, which in turn meant a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment. In an image-centered and pleasure-driven world, Postman noted, there is no place for rational thinking because you simply cannot think with images. It is text that enables us to "uncover lies, confusions and overgeneralizations, and to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another." The dominance of television was not confined to our living rooms. It overturned all of those habits of mind, fundamentally changing our experience of the world. Conduct of politics, religion, business, and culture was reduced to entertainment, sensationalism, and commerce. "Americans don't talk to each other; we entertain each other," Postman wrote. "They don't exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities, and commercials." At first, the web seemed to push against this trend. When it emerged towards the end of the 1980s as a purely text-based medium, it was seen as a tool to pursue knowledge, not pleasure. Reason and thought were most valued in this garden—all derived from the project of the Enlightenment. Universities around the world were among the first to connect to this new medium, which hosted discussion groups, informative personal or group blogs, electronic magazines, and academic mailing lists and forums. It was an intellectual project, not about commerce or control, created in a scientific research center in Switzerland. For more than a decade, the web created an alternative space that threatened television's grip on society.

A recent study reveals a small but growing proportion of the workforce is affected to some degree by a sense of entitlement. Work is less about what they can contribute and more about what they can take. This can lead to workplace dysfunction and diminish job satisfaction. I'm not referring to employees who are legitimately dissatisfied due to issues like unfair pay; I'm talking about those who believe they deserve special treatment regardless of their abilities or performance. As a result of the discrepancy between the privileges they feel entitled to and their inflated sense of self-worth, they tend to slack off instead of working hard for their employer. Many scholars believe this tendency begins in childhood, due to overindulgent parents, leading these individuals to expect the same kind of treatment throughout their adult lives. Despite their feelings, it's crucial for managers to find ways to keep them motivated. The research team from several American universities surveyed over 240 individuals, including managers and team members. Employee entitlement was measured through statements like "I honestly feel I'm just more deserving than others," while employee engagement was assessed with statements like "I really throw myself into my work." The findings revealed that ethical leadership alleviates the negative effects of employee entitlement. Ethical leaders communicate clear expectations, hold employees accountable, and are committed to doing the right thing. When confronted by an entitled team member, an ethical leader is disinclined to accommodate their demands. Instead, they point out the specific, objective criteria that must be met to receive rewards. This shift away from unrealistic expectations is successful because entitled employees feel more confident that ethical leaders will deliver on their promises, as they are perceived to be fair and trustworthy. However, researchers caution that there is no single perfect remedy. While ethical leadership is a critical step in the right direction, it is essential to recognize that individual beliefs and motivations can vary greatly.