阅读理解。
Music lessons may improve memory and learning ability in your children by promoting different
patterns of brain development, a study shows.
After a year of musical training, children aged between 4 and 6 performed better at a standard
memory test than did children who were not taught music. The findings suggest that music could be
useful for building the learning capacity of your minds.
Earlier studies have shown that older children given music lessons become better at IQ tests than
those who are musically untrained, but this is the first to show such a benefit in children so young.
Professor Laurek Trainor, of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, also found clear differences
in the ways in which children's brains responded to sound after a year of musical training.' This is the
first study to show that brain responses in young, musically trained and untrained children change
differently over the course of a year," she said. "These changes are likely to be related to the cognitive
( 认知的 )benefit that is seen with musical training."
Professor Trainer's team looked at 12 children, 6 of whom had just started extra-curricular (课程
外) music lessons and 6 of whom were not being taught any music except that included as a standard
part of their school curriculum (课程标准) .
During the year all 12 children had their brains examined four times using magneto-encephalography
(MEG), and each child was played two types of sound -white noise and a violin tone. The MEG
measurements showed that all children responded more to violin sounds than to white noise, reflecting
a preferable for meaningful tones, and their response times fell over the course of the year as their brains
matured.
1. This passage is mainly about ____.
A. why music lessons are good for the memory
B. the benefit from extra-curricular training for younger children
C. a study on twelve young children's brains
D. new technology to examine children's brains
2. It can be concluded from the text that ____.
A. the study is the first one on the effect of musical training on children's brains
B. scientists got no valuable results from the earlier studies on the topic
C. children musically trained remember things better than those untrained
D. older children get more benefit from musical training than younger ones
3. What do we know about the twelve children tested in the study?
A. None of them had been musically trained before.
B. Only 6 of them had a knowledge of music before.
C. Not all of them had been taught some music in school.
D. All of them were required to learn some music in school.
4. We know from the MEG measurements that ____.
A. the older a child is, the more quickly he/she responds to sounds
B. human brains prefer musical sounds to white noise
C. children of different ages respond to sounds at the same speed
D. all the twelve children like to learn to play the violin very much
