文章大意:这是一篇说明文。最新的研究表明人们可以像听到其他声音一样,听到沉默。文章解释了研究开展的经过以及发现表明,人类体验沉默和声音的方式大致相同:它们会扭曲我们对时间的感知。
From the roar of a crowd to the quiet of a library, sound and silence might seem like polar opposites. However, according to a new research, our brains perceive them in the same way. Silence may not be a sound, but scientists say we can truly hear it.
In this new study, researchers examined how people experience silence using well-known auditory illusions (错觉). The illusions are meant to test the perception of noise, but for the study, the team adapted them to measure people’s response to silence, instead.
“If you can get the same illusions with silences as you get with sounds, then that may be obvious that we literally hear silence after all.” Chaz Firestone, a co-author of the study and cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University, says in a statement.
In the study, participants were tricked by these “silence illusions” in a similar way to how people are typically fooled by the sound versions of the experiments.
The researchers prepared seven experiments and tested them on 1,000 study participants. In one experiment, researchers played a recording that sounded like background noise in a crowded place. In the first half of the recording, the background noise was interrupted by two separate periods of silence. In the second half, one continuous period of silence was inserted (嵌入). Researchers asked participants which silence felt longer- the combination of the first two periods of silence, or the second uninterrupted one. Most participants thought the continuous silence was longer, but it was actually the same length as the two shorter silences combined.
These results were consistent with previous research that examined auditory illusions, which used two separate sounds and one continuous sound. With that illusion, people also perceived the continuous sound as longer than the two separate ones together.
Similar findings across the seven experiments suggested that humans experience silence and sound in much the same way: They can distort (扭曲) our perception of time.
8. Why did researchers use auditory illusions in the new study?
A.To help people perceive sounds. | B.To test people’s adaptability to noise. |
C.To measure how people respond to silence. | D.To remind people to be quiet in the library. |
9. What can we infer from paragraph 5?
A.Illusions of silence fool people’s brains. |
B.The three periods of silence are of the same length. |
C.Sound is usually difficult for people to perceive. |
D.Participants chose a recording and played it. |
10. Where is this text most likely from?
A.A diary. | B.A journal. | C.A novel. | D.A guidebook. |
11. What is the best title for the text?
A.We can truly hear silence like a sound. |
B.Sound and silence are actually the same. |
C.Auditory illusions affect our perception ability. |
D.Our brain has the ability to perceive sound and silence. |