1 . A professor at the University of South Florida recently published a paper she knew barely anyone would read. At least, not outside her field. The paper had to do with the impact of algae (海藻) blooms and depletion (退化) of coral reefs on the region’s tourism industry.
The work of completing the paper was glum, says Heather O’Leary. It involved tracking visitors’ reactions to the environment on social media. “Part of the data for months was just reading posts: dead fish, dead fish, dead fish,” she recalled. “We were really thinking every day about the Gulf of Mexico and the waters that surround us, about those risks, and the risks to our coastal economy.”
O’Leary wanted people to pay attention to her paper and raise their environmental awareness. But she couldn’t come up with any solutions. However, attending concerts at USF’s School of Music inspired and gladdened her. She reached out to its director of bands, Matthew McCutchen. “I’m studying climate change and what’s going down at the coral reefs,” he remembered her saying. “And I’ve got all this data from my paper and I’d like to know if there’s any way that we can turn it into music. So people can know about my paper.”
Indeed there was. Composition professor Paul Reller worked with students to map pitch, rhythm and duration to the data. It came alive, O’Leary said, in ways it simply couldn’t be done on a spreadsheet.
“My students were really excited to start thinking about how students from other majors, such as the music students, heard patterns that they did not normally hear in some of the repetitions,” she said. In this case, she said, the patterns revealed the economic impact of pollution on coastal Florida communities.
With music, she added, “you can start to sense with different parts of your mind and your body that there are patterns happening and that they’re important.” “The world is going to see more and more of these ‘wicked problems’, the ones that take multiple people with different types of training and background to solve.”
Now,a group of professors and students are working to bring together music and the environment in related projects, such as an augmented (增强的) reality experience based on this composition. The group wants to spread awareness about the algae blooms, data literacy (数据认知) and environmental protection.
1. What does the underlined word “glum” in paragraph 2 mean?| A．Exciting. | B．Emotional. |
| C．Routine. | D．Miserable. |
| A．Turn her algae data into music. |
| B．Find some music about coral reefs. |
| C．Teach her some musical terms. |
| D．Compose songs regarding climate change. |
| A．The different types of training. |
| B．The repetition of pitch and rhythm. |
| C．The threat of pollution on the costal economy. |
| D．The complex challenges of wicked problems. |
| A．Providing solutions to the algae problem. |
| B．Exposing more wicked problems to the public. |
| C．Showing the economic growth in coastal cities. |
| D．Helping people experience the problems better. |
2 . What are two things that make humans different from animals? One is language and the other is music. It’s true that some animals can sing. However, the songs of animals like birds are very limited. It’s also true that humans, not animals, have developed musical instruments.
Music is a strange thing. It’s clearly different from language. However, people can use music to communicate things—especially their emotions. When music is used with speech in a song, it’s a very powerful form of communication.
If music is truly different from speech, then we should process music and language in different parts of the brain. The scientific study suggests this is true. For example, Vissarion Shebalin, a Russian composer, had a stroke (中风) in 1953. It injured the left side of his brain. He could no longer speak or understand speech. He could, however, still compose music until his death ten years later. On the other hand, sometimes strokes cause people to lose their musical ability, but they can still speak and understand speech.
Why does music have such a strong effect on us physically and emotionally? That’s a harder question to answer. Geoffrey Miller, a researcher at University College, London, thinks that music and love have a strong connection. Music requires special talent, practice and physical ability. That’s some-one’s mate. For example, playing a musical instrument requires fine muscular control. You also need a good memory to remember the notes. And playing those notes correctly suggests that your hearing is in excellent condition. Finally, when a man sings to the woman he loves, it may be a way of showing off.
However, Miller’s theory still doesn’t explain why certain combinations of sounds influence our emotions so deeply. For scientists, this is clearly an area that needs further research.
1. Music is considered powerful when it ________.| A．is translated into a language. | B．is combined with language in a song. |
| C．is sung by some famous musicians. | D．is mixed with the cry of an animal. |
| A．The left brain is responsible for musical ability. |
| B．Injury to brain has no influence on speaking. |
| C．Music and language involve different parts of the brain. |
| D．Suffering from stroke results in the loss of musical ability. |
| A．Music is closely linked with friendship. | B．Learning music requires an excellent sight. |
| C．Various abilities are trained in music learning. | D．Playing a musical instrument helps emotion control. |
| A．Culture. | B．Health. | C．Education. | D．History. |
Welcome to School Dance Club
Are you tired of sitting too long? Do you want to be healthier? Join the School Dance Club and move your body! Choice of dances: folk, modern, pop, etc. Level of difficulty: Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 Teachers: Helen White — 13 years of teaching experience — Graduated from International Master Dance School John Smith — First prize winner of “Dancers on Stage” for 4 years starting from 2016 Ken Power — Skilled in different kinds of dance, especially in “fusion (融合)” dance Who to join: Aged 12~15 If you would like to be one of us, please kindly fill in the form and send it to Maria Cooper’s office before 18th March. |
| A．1. | B．2. | C．3. | D．4. |
| A．Teachers with rich experience. | B．Teachers good at dancing. |
| C．Students aged 10. | D．Students aged 13. |
| A．poster | B．diary | C．poem | D．report |
4 . Festivals in 2023
Roskilde Festival
With some of the biggest names in music, the Roskilde Festival in Denmark is preparing to bring fans an experience of a lifetime. Besides rock, electronic, and pop music, fans will also be treated to comedy, poetry, a carnival, and much more at this week-long festival. You can even rent a bike to get around the festival quickly.
Boomtown Fair
Boomtown is considered to be one of the wildest independent festivals in the world. Set up in 2009, in Winchester, United Kingdom, the fair takes place every summer in the city, offering entertainment for visitors of all ages. Additionally, it specially conducts arts and crafts workshops for kids. Tracing its origin (起源) to its “underground” roots, Boomtown offers every type of music, from folk and jazz to disco and punk.
Impact Festival
The festival stays true to its name and truly affect you through the experience you have while you attend the festival. You will spend your day meeting beautiful people, listening to some fantastic live music, seeing an combination (结合) of fashionable costumes and clothing, freeing your mind and spirit refreshed and dancing the night away with a bunch of other people. You will be staying in Lodz, the third largest city in Poland, a beautiful city.
Wilderness Festival
The combination of some kinds of attractive music, amazing food, and a lovely atmosphere come together to give you the Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire, UK. Other than live music performances, the Oxfordshire Wilderness Festival also offers an environment for camping and enjoying the quiet backdrop of countryside.
1. Where should people go if they want their children to attend workshops?| A．Lodz. | B．Oxfordshire. | C．Roskilde. | D．Winchester. |
| A．Impact Festival. | B．Boomtown Fair. | C．Roskilde Festival. | D．Wilderness Festival. |
| A．Appreciate comedy and poetry. | B．Watch fashion shows. |
| C．Taste free foods. | D．Learn some crafts. |
5 . From Mozart to Metallica, tons of people enjoy listening to various types of music while they paint, write, or draw. Most believe that music helps increase creativity, but an international study conducted by English and Swedish researchers is challenging that view. The study results were echoed by scientists from Lancaster University, and the University of Gavle, saying their findings show music actually weakens creativity.
To reach their conclusions, researchers had volunteers complete verbal problems designed to inspire creativity while sitting in a quiet room, and then again while music played in the background. They found that background music significantly weakened the volunteers’ ability to complete tasks connected with verbal creativity. The team also tested background noises like those commonly heard in a library, but found that such noises had no influence on subjects’ creativity.
The tasks were simple word games. For example, volunteers were given three words, such as dress, rise, and flower. Then, they were asked to find a single word connected with all three that could be combined to form a common phrase or word. The single word, in this case, would be “sun” (sundress, sunrise, sunflower). Volunteers completed the tasks in either a quiet room, or while listening to two different types of music: rock music or light music
“We found strong evidence of weakened performance when playing background music in comparison to quiet background conditions,” says co-author D. Neil McLatchie of Lancaster University. He and his colleagues find that music negatively influences the verbal working memory processes of the brain, preventing creativity. Also, as far as the library background noises having seemingly no effect, the study’s authors believe that was the case because library noises create a “regular state” environment that doesn’t affect concentration.
“To conclude, the findings here challenge the popular view that music increases creativity, and instead show that music, whatever type it is, is always a disadvantage for creative performance in problem solving,” the study reads.
1. The underlined word in Paragraph 1 can be replaced by ________.| A．challenged | B．accepted | C．doubted | D．heard |
| A．To play music. | B．To combine given words. |
| C．To create new words. | D．To connect words with music. |
| A．Quiet background inspires creativity best. | B．Library noise does no harm to creativity. |
| C．Music has a bad effect on language ability. | D．Music types matter in creative performance. |
| A．Quiet Environments Prevent Concentration. | B．Background NoiseAffects Concentration. |
| C．Composing Music Weakens Creativity. | D．Listening to Music Reduces Creativity. |
6 . Claire King says she would never have started going to the Glastonbury Festival if her friend who runs a food stand hadn't needed a hand a few years ago. “I thought it would just be all noise, and I never liked rock music.” Now she says she would pay her friend to allow her to work at her stand! “The tickets sell like hot cakes, so it's the best way of making sure I can get to the five-day festival in June,” she points out.
Nick Hendon likes going to the Cambridge Folk Festival, which takes place over a long weekend in summer at Cherry Hinton Hall. His favourite festival area is the Club Tent where members of the audience, as well as the invited artists, can get up and perform. “My wife usually takes part. She has a beautiful voice,” he says proudly.
Joan Mitchell does her best to get to the International Eisteddfod, a dance and music festival which takes place every year during the second week of July in Wales. The festival is also famous for the final Sunday Evening Gala Concert which usually has some of the biggest names in opera as guest performers. “I've seen Dame Kiri Te Kanawa9 James Galway and Montserrat Caballe, but no one could ever match Luciano Pavarotti. He was truly breathtaking!”
Graham Crosby tries to get to as many concerts as possible during the eight-week summer season of the Proms festival every year. The Proms is the largest classical music festival in the world. “The atmosphere is much more relaxing than that at other classical concerts. In fact, the audience sometimes behave more like rock fans, jumping up and down to the music, which is really exciting.”
1. What can we know about Claire King from the text?| A．She doesn't like working for her friend. |
| B．She runs a food stand during the festival. |
| C．She gets the ticket for the festival from her friend. |
| D．She doesn't need to buy a ticket to get to the festival. |
| A．Graham Crosby. | B．Claire King. |
| C．Nick Hendon. | D．Joan Mitchell. |
| A．The Proms. |
| B．The Glastonbury Festival. |
| C．The International Eisteddfod. |
| D．The Cambridge Folk Festival. |
