A
Listening to Mozart does not actually make you cleverer, contradicting (反驳) a popular 1993 study that first coined the Mozart effect, Austrian researchers say.
A team at Vienna University's Faculty of Psychology collected studies that have sought to reproduce the Mozart effect and found no proof of the phenomenon's existence.
The original study showed that teenagers performed better in reasoning tests having listened to Mozart's 1781 Sonata for Two Pianos in D major than those who listened to something else or those who had been in a silent room.
But after analyzing about 3,000 individual cases compiled from 40 studies conducted around the world, the University of Vienna team found no proof that the Mozart effect actually exists.
“Those who listened to music—Mozart or something else, Bach, Pearl Jam—had better results than the silent group. But we already knew people perform better if they have a stimulus (刺激物)，” head researcher Jakob Pietschnig said.
Mr Pietschnig says the 1993 study at the University of California only involved 36 students.
He also says the original study was a typical case of “publication bias (发表性偏倚)” whereby scientific journals prefer positive results to negative or inconclusive results.
When the research was first published in Nature it had a considerable effect on public opinion, leading childcare centers in the United States to play classical music and the southern US state of Georgia to give newborns a free classical music CD.
Mr Pietschnig says the original study was carried out on adults in order to study their reasoning rather than intelligence.
“I advised everyone to listen to Mozart, but it's not going to improve cognitive abilities as some people hope，” he said.
篇章导读：本文是一篇说明文。最近的研究发现：听莫扎特的音乐并不能使人更聪明。所以专家虽然建议人们听莫扎特的音乐，不过别期望它真的可以改善认知能力。
1．Which of the following would be the best title for this passage?
A．Mozart Effect Actually Exists
B．Those Who Listen to Music Have Better Results
C．Teenagers Shouldn't Listen to Music
D．Mozart Doesn't Make You Clever
答案：D 标题判断题。本文首段揭示了文章的主旨，主要介绍了一项心理学研究的新发现，即听莫扎特的音乐并不能使人更聪明，而这一说法和1993年的一项研究结论是相矛盾的。
2．According to the passage, Bach and Pearl Jam in Paragraph 5 are probably ________.
A．names of two places B．names of two musicians
C．names of two filmsD．names of two kinds of music
答案：D 推理判断题。根据第五段中的“Those who listened to music—Mozart or something else, Bach，Pearl Jam ...”可知，Bach和Pearl Jam是something else的同位语，与前面的Mozart构成了并列的关系，这里用人名或乐队名称代表一种音乐风格。
3．What Mr Pietschnig said in the last Paragraph means that ________.
A．Mozart is unuseful
B．Mozart actually improves intelligence a lot
C．the result of Mozart is not as useful as people thought
D．we should resist Mozart
答案：C 细节理解题。最后一段的意思是：人们仍然可以听莫扎特音乐，但它对智力的影响并不像人们以前认为的那么大，因此C项正确。
