A new study, conducted by British company Mind lab International, has found that listening to music at work increases accuracy and speed, The Telegraph reported. Perhaps, some parents disagree with this idea, saying, “Switch off the music and concentrate!” Well, if that’s the case with your parents, you might now be able to convince them that you have science on your side.
The company gave 26 participants a series of different tasks for five days in a row, including spell checking, mathematical word problems, data entry, and abstract reasoning. The participants completed these tasks while listening to music or no music at all.
The results showed that while music was playing, 88% of participants produced their most accurate test results and 81% completed their fastest work. David Lewis, chairman of Mind lab International, told The Telegraph, “Music is a very powerful management tool if you want to increase not only the efficiency of your workforce but also their emotional state...they are going to become more positive about the work.”
However, you may have a list of your favourite songs, but not all kinds of music match all homework. For maths or other subjects involving numbers or attention to detail, you should listen to classical music, the study found. In the study, pop music enabled participants to complete their tasks 58% faster than when listening to no music at all. If you are reviewing your English writing, pop music is the best choice, as it is the best kind for spell checking. It cut mistakes by 14%, compared to listening to no music. After finishing your homework, do you often take time to check your answers? Maybe, some dance music is suitable for you.
1. What does the underlined word “they” refer to in Para.3?| A．Participants. | B．Results. |
| C．Tests. | D．Tools. |
| A．Classical music. | B．Pop music. |
| C．Dance music. | D．Rock music. |
| A．We Cannot Live without Music |
| B．Music Helps Us to Learn |
| C．Different Music, Different Lives |
| D．Music in the Classroom |
| A．Persuade their parents to listen to music. |
| B．Listen to the same music together. |
| C．Finish tasks with music or without music at all. |
| D．Try their best to choose the most suitable music. |
相似题推荐
Many people go to school for an education.Some learn languages，history，math and other subjects.Others go to school to learn a skill.School education is very important and useful.Yet no one can learn everything from school.A teacher cannot teach his students everything they want to know.So，much more is learned outside school by the students themselves.
Great people before us didn't get everything from school.Their teachers only showed them the way.Edison didn't even finish school.But they were all so successful because they knew how to study.They read books that were not taught at school.They would ask many questions as they read.They worked hard all their lives.Above all，they knew how to use their heads.
1. People go to school only for an education，they don't go there to learn a skill.| A．T | B．F |
| A．T | B．F |
| A．T | B．F |
| A．T | B．F |
| A．T | B．F |
But the SAT folks have added a single question, to be answered in an essay, handwritten on the spot. That’s an interesting way to test writing ability, but content aside, have you ever seen young people’s handwriting lately? Or anyone’s for that matter, in this age of computer keyboards? Students write numbers and sign their names on bank checks. They scribble class notes in what can generously be described as the written word.
Yet today’s kids are asked to write, thoughtfully and clearly, for several minutes on this SAT Test. Good luck to the text scorers who must work out difficultly the scrawl (潦草的笔迹)of young people who’ve been typing on computers since the age of three! Teachers insist that good handwriting can not only help one’s score on the SAT, but also, later on in life, impress potential employers. And don’t forget, we all have to turn to handwriting from time to time, as computers go down when power goes out.
Then how to improve the handwriting? Well, with a few simple steps you can improve your handwriting.
Position the pen. You should hold the pen between the forefinger and the thumb. You should then rest it near the first knuckle（指节）of the middle finger. The rest of your fingers should be curled （卷曲) under your hand and your hand should remain relaxed.
Evaluate your handwriting. What do you like and what you don’t like about the way you write? Make changes to your letters till you like how they look.
Take your time. Make sure that, while you are writing, you take your time. Speed is bound to make your writing messy- looking. If it is worth writing well, then take your time.
Practice. Practice it a lot; it’s not enough to do it once and hope for the best. It has to be something you work at to make great improvements.
1. The SAT tests students on __________.
| A．math, English, reading and handwriting |
| B．math, grammar, reading and handwriting |
| C．math, foreign language and writing |
| D．math, foreign language and handwriting |
| A．Practice writing a lot. |
| B．Writing as fast as you can. |
| C．Relaxing your hand when holding the pen. |
| D．Changing your letters till you like how they look. |
| A．writing seems to be very important in the SAT |
| B．those who will go to college have to take the SAT |
| C．students should practice handwriting more often |
| D．kids don’t know how to write in the computer age |
【推荐3】The pleasures of learning
Learning is a natural pleasure, inborn and instinctive (本能的), one of the essential pleasures of the human race. When Archimedes discovered the principle of specific gravity by observing his own displacement of water in a bathtub (浴缸), he jumped out with delight, shouting, “Eureka, Eureka!” (I have found it).
This pleasure is not limited to learning from textbooks, which are too often boring.
Far beyond books, learning means keeping the mind open and active to receive all kinds of experiences. Among the pleasures of learning, we should include travel, travel with an open mind, an alert eye and a wish to understand other peoples, other places, rather than looking in them for a mirror image of oneself.
| A．But it does include learning from books. |
| B．Learning extends our lives into new dimensions (维度). |
| C．This shout means Archimedes enjoyed playing with water. |
| D．The other pleasure is of deepening one’s knowledge of a special field. |
| E．Learning also means learning to practice, or at least to appreciate an art. |
| F．Man has the ability to attain happiness, and learning is the best way to achieve it. |
| G．The outburst from instinct and the joy of its satisfaction are possessed by all people. |
【推荐1】The baby monkey is much more developed at birth than the human baby. Almost from the moment it is born, the baby monkey can move around and hold tightly to its mother. During the first few days of its life the baby will approach and hold onto almost any large, warm, and soft object in its environment, particularly if that object also gives it milk. After a week or so, however, the baby monkey begins to avoid newcomers and focuses its attentions on “mother” — the real mother or the mother-substitute.
During the first two weeks of its warmth is perhaps the most important psychological thing that a monkey mother has to give to its baby. The Harlows, a couple who are both psychologists, discovered this fact by offering baby monkeys a choice of two types of mother-substitutes — one covered with cloth and one made of bare wire. If the two artificial mothers were both the same temperature, the little monkeys always preferred the cloth mother. However, if the wire model was heated, while the cloth model was cool, for the first two weeks after birth the baby monkeys picked the warm wire mother-substitutes as their favorites. Thereafter they switched and spent most of their time on the more comfortable cloth mother.
Why is cloth preferable to bare wire? Something that the Harlows called contact comfort seems to be the answer, and a most powerful influence it is. Baby monkeys spend much of their time rubbing against their mothers’ skins, putting themselves in as close contact with the parent as they can. Whenever the young animal is frightened, disturbed, or annoyed, it typically rushes to its mother and rubs itself against her body. Wire doesn’t “rub” as well as does soft cloth. Prolonged “contact comfort” with a cloth mother appears to give the babies confidence and is much more rewarding to them than is either warmth or milk.
According to the Harlows, the basic quality of a baby’s love for its mother is trust. If the baby is put into an unfamiliar playroom without its mother, the baby ignores the toys no matter how interesting they might be. It screams in terror and curls up into a fury little ball. If its cloth mother is now introduced into the playroom, the baby rushes to it and holds onto it for dear life. After a few minutes of contact comfort, it obviously begins to feel more secure. It then climbs down from the mother-substitute and begins to explore the toys, but often rushes back for a deep embrace as if to make sure that its mother is still there and that all is well. Bit by bit its fears of the new environment are gone and it spends more and more time playing with the toys and less and less time holding on to its “mother.”
1. After the first two weeks of their life, baby monkeys prefer the cloth mother to the wire mother because the former is ________.| A．larger in size | B．closer to them |
| C．less frightening and less disturbing | D．more comfortable to rub against |
| A．Attention. | B．Softness. |
| C．Confidence. | D．Interest. |
| A．it frequently rushes back for a deep embrace when exploring the toys |
| B．it spends more time screaming to get rewards |
| C．it is less attracted to the toys though they are interesting |
| D．it cares less about whether its mother is still around |
| A．give the reasons of the experiment |
| B．present the findings of the experiment |
| C．introduce the method of the experiment |
| D．describe the process of the experiment |
【推荐2】In today’s constantly connected world, finding solitude (独处) has become a lost art.
Alone time can promote creativity.
Knowing these benefits, you may wonder how to find alone time in a world that seems to never sleep. One practical way is to mark off time in your calendar for spending alone with yourself. It doesn’t have to be long. Any time that you can spend alone with yourself to focus, relax, create, or think deeply is better than no time.
| A．Alone time is beneficial not only mentally but also physically. |
| B．During that time, make good use of the social relationships you have. |
| C．When the time comes, unplug (拔掉，断开) from all the ways you connect with others. |
| D．We tend to link a desire for alone time with people who are lonely or antisocial. |
| E．Being alone means the chance to explore your interests without being disturbed. |
| F．Therefore, you’re more likely to make better choices about who you want to be around. |
| G．When you’re alone, you can think freely, letting your imagination fly and producing new ideas. |
【推荐3】Personality is the pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviors unique to a person. People tend to think of personality as fixed. But according to psychologists, that’s not how it works. “Personality is a developmental phenomenon,” said Brent Roberts, a psychologist at the University of Illinois.
That’s not to say that you’re a different person each day you wake up. “In the short term, change can be barely detectable,” Roberts said Individuals’ levels of each personality trait tended to stay consistent within each decade of life. But those decades add up. “Throughout all those years, our personality is still changing, but slowly,”Roberts said. “It’s something that’s subtle,” he added. “You don’t notice it on that five-to-10-year time scale, but in the long term, it becomes pronounced.”
In 1960, psychologists surveyed over 440,000 high school students, 1952 of whom were tracked down and given the same survey fifty years later. The results, published in 2018 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that in their 60s, participants scored much higher than they had as teenagers on questions measuring calmness, self-confidence, leadership and social sensitivity. There’s good evidence that the average self-control of a30-year-old is higher than a 20-year-old. At the same time, people who are relatively self-controlled at 18 also tend to be relatively self-controlled at age 30.
So why do we change so much? Evidence suggests it’s not dramatic life events, such as marriage, the birth of a child or loss of a loved one. Some psychologists actually suggest these events strengthen your personality as you bring your characteristics with you to that particular situation.
`“Instead, changing expectations placed on us—as we adjust to university, starting a family—slowly wears us in, almost like a pair of shoes,” Roberts said. “Over time you are asked in many contexts across life to do things a bit differently,” he added. “There’s not a user handbook for how to act, but we unconsciously follow the way we are supposed to behave in these situations. So we adapt.”
1. What do we know about personality from paragraph 1 and paragraph 2?| A．Individual personality has a lot in common. |
| B．Personality develops slowly in the long run. |
| C．Every day personality is a new phenomenon. |
| D．Short-term change in personality can be detected. |
| A．Obvious. | B．Skeptical. | C．Steady. | D．Rewarding. |
| A．Clearly a 30-year-old tends to lose temper more easily than a 20-year-old. |
| B．440,000 high school students surveyed in 1960 were traced fifty years later. |
| C．Participants behave more calmly and confidently in their 60s than as teenagers. |
| D．People who are relatively self-controlled at 18 are surely not self-controlled at 30. |
| A．Dramatic life events. |
| B．Changing expectations on others. |
| C．Different contexts across life. |
| D．Constant adaptation to situations. |
【推荐1】13-year-old Abraham Olagbegi was born with a rare blood disease in Jackson, Mississippi and needed a bonemarrow transplant（骨髓移植）. His transplant was successful, and he qualified for Make-A-Wish, an organization that realizes wishes for children with serious illnesses. Abraham decided he wanted a long lasting wish.
“I remember we were coming home from one of his doctor appointments and he said, ‘Mom, I thought about it, and I really want to feed the homeless’.” Abraham’s mom Miriam Olagbegl, said. So, that’s what he did.
In September, Make-A-Wish helped Abraham organize a day to hand out free food in Jackson, Mississippi. “When the homeless people get the plate, some of them would come back and sing to us and thank us,” he said. “And it just really feels good, it warms our hearts. And my parents always taught us that it’s a blessing to be a blessing”.
But Abraham’s wish is still not realized. Make-A-Wish will help Abraham feed the homeless once a month for one year. After Make-A-Wish finishes his wish in August 2022, Abraham plans to continue helping the homeless. He wants to turn this into a nonprofit（非营利组织）—one he’s already named “Abraham’s Table.”
1. What can we know about Make-A-Wish?| A．It is an organization of developing medicine. |
| B．It supported Abraham in his transplant. |
| C．It is the place where Abraham did his surgery. |
| D．It helps seriously sick children realize their wishes. |
| A．Make-A-Wish’s helping Abraham with his wish. |
| B．Abraham’s day of handing out free food. |
| C．The homeless people’s act of giving thanks. |
| D．Abraham’s mother’s teaching Abraham a lesson. |
| A．At their home. | B．At his school. | C．In the doctor’s. | D．On the way home. |
| A．Abraham has realized his wish till now. |
| B．Make-A-Wish will keep helping Abraham. |
| C．Abraham has decided to set up Abraham’s Table. |
| D．Make-A-Wish named a nonprofit after Abraham. |
【推荐2】School gardening has become very popular during the coronavirus health crisis, with families and teachers saying its hands-on lessons can be used to teach many subjects. Finding the money to keep a school garden going can be tough. Some experts and teachers, however, are finding creative ways to make it work.
Susan Hobart is a retired teacher at Lake View Elementary School in Madison, Wiscon. She manages the school’s large garden with 12 raised beds. “School gardens are a great way to get students outside with a purpose. Gardening helps calm the students and gives them a whole different perspective (思维方式) they wouldn’t have just sitting at desks,” she says.
Each spring, the school’s program gets plant seedlings (秧苗) grown through a training program at a nearby prison. A church group comes during spring break to prepare the garden for the children’s return. Over the summer, a volunteer takes care of the garden. “If we had to buy the seedlings, they’d cost $ 3 each and we could never afford that,” Hobart says. “If you take a look at your relationships and the community around you and then all the wider networks out there, there are plenty of creative ways to find help.”
Toby Adams directs the New York Botanical Garden’s Edible Academy, where schoolchildren learn about growing food. He says that there has been another increase in interest in school gardens since the start of this year. School gardens can teach lessons in health, science, social studies, and even arts classes.
For schools without space for even a small garden, turning to local botanical gardens and parks can sometimes be the answer. “We are located in the Bronx, where there are basically wall-to-wall six-story apartments. There’s limited space, and it’s hard to find a good place to gather 30 kids,” says Adams. He thinks that gardens do not have to take up a large area outdoors. “It could be a container garden and there are all kinds of gardens,” he says.
1. What does the underlined word “it” in paragraph 1 refer to?| A．Raising money. | B．A health guideline. | C．Teaching lessons. | D．School gardening. |
| A．School gardening is beneficial to students. |
| B．Gardens are commonly seen in most schools. |
| C．Students should think twice before gardening. |
| D．Managing school gardens costs much money. |
| A．By expanding its campus. | B．By getting social support. |
| C．By relying on students only. | D．By collecting more money. |
| A．Lack of space. | B．Little experience. | C．Poor management. | D．Students’ indifference. |
【推荐3】First lady Melania Trump posted a shameless selfie (自拍照) on Twitter this morning, sharing a picture of herself using a Santa hat filter (圣诞帽滤光器) and shining reindeer (驯鹿) with the words “#MerryChristmas.”
— Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) December 25, 2017
The first family is spending the holiday at their Florida home in Mar-a-Lago, referred to as the “Winter White House.” Last night, the president and his wife attended a Christmas Eve service at the Palm Beach church where they were married and were greeted by applause.
Guests at Mar-a-Lago had a lot of food choices for their Christmas Eve dinner, including turkey, beef tenderloin, cornbread, creamy kale, popovers, mashed potatoes, turkey gravy, various local vegetable dishes and a seafood display including local fish and shellfish (甲壳类) as well as a variety of desserts.
On Christmas Eve, the first lady wrote that she was “looking forward to helping kids track Santa today with @NoradSanta! Wishing everyone a very Merry #Christmas Eve!”
Looking forward to helping kids track Santa today with @NoradSanta! Wishing everyone a very
Merry #Christmas Eve!
— Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) December 24, 2017
She also shared a picture that showed her making Christmas calls with the president, writing that they “had fun” participating in the annual tradition.
As did her husband, who shared three photos on his Instagram (图片软件) account in the library of the so-called Winter White House.
The first lady wasn’t the only member of the Trump family sharing photos from their Christmas celebrations. Donald Trump Jr. posted a picture on his public Instagram account showing two of his children, daughter Kai and son Spencer, “having a great Christmas Eve dinner with grandpa” at Mar-a-Lago.
Merry Christmas everyone. Kai and Spencer are having a great Christmas Eve dinner with grandpa…
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) December 25, 2017
1. Which can be used to express the author to show no respect to Melania Trump?| A．Shameless. | B．Merry. | C．Annual. | D．Public. |
| A．In Mar-a-Lago. | B．At their Florida home. |
| C．At the Palm Beach church. | D．In Winter White House. |
| A．10. | B．11. | C．12. | D．9. |
| A．Sharing their ideas. | B．Surfing on the Internet. |
| C．Spending winter at Mar-a-Lago. | D．Showing themselves off on the Internet. |
