If you dream in color, you’re not alone: the majority of people today claim to have colorful dreams. But it wasn’t always thus. Research conducted in the early part of the last century consistently found that people reported dreaming most often in black and white.
According to Eva Murzyn at the University of Dundee, there are at least two possible explanations for this strange situation.
The first is the methods used in the researches. The early studies tended to use questionnaires（问卷）, while more modern studies use dream diaries (filled in upon rising in the morning) or so-called “REM-awakening”, which involves interrupting people’s dream-filled periods of sleep to find out what they were dreaming about. People’s memories of their dreams are likely to be less accurate by using the questionnaire approach and they are more likely to reflect their beliefs about the form dreams generally take in an unclear way.
The second explanation has to do with black and white television and film. It's possible that the sudden increase in black and white film and television during the first half of the last century either affected the form of people’s dreams at that time, or affected their beliefs about the form dreams generally take.
According to Murzyn’s findings, it’s the explanation based on media exposure that carries more weight. She used both questionnaire and diary methods to study the dreams of 30 older (average age 64) and 30 younger people (average age 21).
The methodological technique made no difference to the type of dreams people reported. However, the extremely important thing was that, across both questionnaires and diaries, the older participants (who had had significant early life exposure to black and white media) reported experiencing significantly more black and white dreams over the last ten days than the younger participants (22 per cent vs. 4 per cent).
Another finding was that older participants reported black and white dreams and colorful dreams to be of equal clearness. By contrast, the younger participants reported that the quality of black and white dreams was poorer. This raises the possibility that the younger participants didn’t really have any black and white dreams at all, but were simply regarding poorly remembered dreams as black and white.
小题1:We learn from the text that ______.
A．people in the first half of the last century never had colorful dreams
B．older people are more likely to have black and white dreams
C．the dreams of younger people are always colorful
D．people today don’t have white and black dreams any more小题2:What did Murxyn do to find out the explanations for the colors in people’s dreams?
A．She applied both questionnaire and diary methods to study people’s dreams.
B．She used diary methods to record people’s dreams.
C．She chose 60 people to answer her questions about their dreams.
D．She woke people up to record the colors of their dreams.小题3:What does the underlined expression “carry more weight” in paragraph 5 mean?
A．be heavier
B．be more powerful
C．be more important
D．be more useful小题4:From Murxyn’s findings we can infer that ______.
A．both older people and younger people could report colorful dreams clearly
B．young people don’t have any black and white dreams in fact
C．the color of a person’s dream is decided by one’s age
D．it is probably the color of media that affects the color of one’s dream
