Easy Learning

    Sudents should be jealous. Not only do babies get to doze their days away, but they’ve also mastered the fine art of learning in their sleep.

    By the time babies are a year old they can recognize a lot of sounds and even simple words. Marie Cheour at the UniversityofTurkuinFinlandsuspected that they might progress this fast because they learn language while they sleep as well as when they are awake.

    To test the theory, Cheour and her colleagues studied 45 newborn babies in the first few days of their lives. They exposed all the infants to an hour of Finnish vowel sounds—one that sounds like “oo”, another like “ee” and a third boundary vowel peculiar to Finnish and similar languages that sounds like something in between. EEG ¹recordings of the infant’s brains before and after the session showed that the newborns could not distinguish the sounds.

    Fifteen of the babies then went back with their mothers, while the rest were split into two sleep-study groups ². One group was exposed throughout their night-time sleeping hours to the same three vowels, while the others listened to other, easier-to-distinguish vowel sounds³.

    When tested in the morning, and again in the evening, the babies who’d heard the tricky boundary vowel all night showed brainwave activity indicating that they could now recognise this new sound. They could identify the sound even when its pitch was changed, while none of the other babies could pick up the boundary vowel at all.

    Cheour doesn’t know how babies accomplish this night-time learning, bunt she suspects that the special ability might indicate that unlike adults, babies don’t “turn off” their cerebral cortex while they sleep. The skill probably fades in the course of the first year of life, she adds—so forget the idea that you can pick up tricky French vowels as an adult just by slipping a language tape under your pillow. But while it may not help grown-ups, Cheour is hoping to use the sleeping hours to give remedial help to babies who are genetically at risk of language disorders.

词汇：

vowel /"vauəl/ n．元音

Finland /"finlənd/ n．芬兰

Finnish /"finiʃ/ adj．芬兰的；芬兰人的；芬兰语的

Newborn /"nju:bɔ:n/ n新生儿；adj新生儿的

cerebral /" seribrul/ adj．大脑的

remedial /ri"midiəl/adj．补救的

cortex /"kɔ: teksf n．皮层

注释：

1.    EEG = electroencephalogram /"i,lektrəuen"sefələgræm/：脑电图

2.    two sleep-study groups：两个睡觉时的学习小组

3.    easier-to-distinguish vowel sounds较容易区分的元音 

Finnish vowels are easy to distinguish.

A:Right B:Wrong C:Not mentioned

Advertising sells its products by offering seductive promises of youth, beauty, health, money, ease, romance, better lifestyle, even time. There’s no logical connection between a car and a cougar, but the image is powerful and presented with sophistication. We buy it and we may well buy the product.
When it comes to advertising, let the buyer beware. There are several less-than-candid techniques which advertisers use to get our attention. A product may be filmed or photographed in such a way to make it appear bigger, better, or more luscious. A product may be presented as being "unique", "one-of-a-kind", or "supreme", when in fact it’s identical to other products on the market. A product may claim to be "new" or "improved" when only an insignificant change has been made.
Finally, an advertiser may offer distorted truths or even tell outright lies. It takes a while for the government or the competition to catch up with false claims in advertising. Meanwhile, the public has been led to believe that a mouth wash can cure the common cold, or that bee pollen retards aging in human skin.
The consumer’s best defense is awareness. He can listen to, but not learn, the emotional message broadcast by the ad. He can distinguish between what the ad pretends to offer and what it is really selling. A face cream, for example, can only do so much. It can reduce dryness and provide temporary smoothness and moisture to the skin. But it is made in a factory, not in a magician’s study. It cannot turn back the clock.
According to the author, consumers’ best policy towards advertising is ______.

A:to doubt its truth B:to disbelieve it C:to distinguish between what is true and what is not true D:to know what products the advertiser is going to sell

Text 1

A:to doubt its truth B:to disbelieve it C:to distinguish between what is true and what is not true D:to know what products the advertiser is going to sell

Distinguish between phonetics and phonology.

Phonetics is defined as the study of the phonic medium of language; it is concerned with all the sounds that occur in the world’s languages. Phonetics looks at speech sounds from three distinct but related points of view. First, it studies the sounds from the speaker’s point of view, i.e., how a speaker uses his speech organs to articulate the sounds. Then it looks at the sounds from the hearer’s point of view, i.e., how the sounds are perceived by the hearer. Lastly, it studies the way sounds travel by looking at the sound waves, the physical means by which sounds are transmitted through the air from one person to another. These three branches of phonetics are labeled articulatory phonetics, auditory phonetics, and acoustic phonetics.
Phonology, however, is interested in the system of sounds of a particular language; it aims to discover how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication. Phone, phoneme, allophone, phonemic contrast, complementary distribution, minimal pair, phonological rules, suprasegmental features, etc. are all to be investigated by phonologists.

It is difficult to distinguish one twin （　） the other.

A:to B:by C:for D:from

It is difficult to distinguish one twin ______ the other.

A:to B:by C:for D:from

It is difficult to distinguish one twin ______ the other.

A:to B:by C:for D:from

? ?下面的短文有15处空白，请根据短文内容为每处空白确定1个最佳选项。

A:distinguish B:make C:gather D:develop