2021年12月六级第3套长篇阅读匹配原文翻译及答案

A) A recent analysis found that most research mischaracterizes the relationship between music and skills enhancement.

最近的一项分析发现，大多数研究错误地描述了音乐与技能提升之间的关系。

B) In 2004, a paper appeared in the journal Psychological Science, titled "Music Lessons Enhance IQ." The author; composer and psychologist Glenn Schellenberg had conducted an experiment with 144 children randomly assigned to four groups: one learned the keyboard for a year, one took singing lessons, one joined an acting class, and a control group had no extracurricular training. The IQ of the children in the two musical groups rose by an average of seven points in the course of a year; those in the other two groups gained an average of 4.3 points.

2004年，一篇题为“音乐课增强智商”的论文发表在《心理科学》期刊上。作者、作曲家兼心理学家格伦·谢伦伯格进行了一项实验，将144名儿童随机分为四组：一组学习键盘乐器一年，一组上声乐课，一组参加表演课，还有一组控制组没有课外训练。两个音乐组的儿童智商在一年中平均提高了7分；其他两组的儿童平均提高了4.3分。

C) Schellenberg had 1ong been skeptical of the science supporting claims that music education enhances children's abstract reasoning, math, or language skills. If children who play the piano are smarter, he says, it doesn't necessarily mean they are smarter because they play the piano. It could be that the youngsters who play the piano also happen to be more ambitious or better at focusing on a task. Correlation, after all, does not prove causation.

谢伦伯格长期以来一直对支持音乐教育能增强儿童抽象推理、数学或语言技能的科学证据持怀疑态度。他说，如果弹钢琴的孩子更聪明，这并不一定意味着他们因为弹钢琴而更聪明。可能弹钢琴的年轻人也碰巧更有雄心或更擅长专注于任务。毕竟，相关性并不证明因果关系。

D) The 2004 paper was specifically designed to address those concerns. And as a passionate musician, Schellenberg was delighted when he turned up credible evidence that music has transfer effects on general intelligence. But nearly a decade later, in 2013, the Education Endowment Foundation funded a bigger study with more than 900 students. That study failed to confirm Schellenberg's findings, producing no evidence that music lessons improved math and literacy skills.

2004年的论文专门设计来解决这些关切。作为一名热情的音乐家，当发现音乐对一般智力有迁移效应的可靠证据时，谢伦伯格很高兴。但近十年后，在2013年，教育捐赠基金会资助了一项更大规模的研究，涉及900多名学生。该研究未能证实谢伦伯格的发现，没有提供证据表明音乐课提高了数学和读写技能。

E) Schellenberg took that news in stride while continuing to cast a skeptical eye on the research in his field, Recently, he decided to formally investigate just how often his fellow researchers in psychology and neuroscience make what he believes are erroneous—or at least premature—causal connections between music and intelligence. His results, published in May, suggest that many of his peers do just that.

谢伦伯格从容地接受了这一消息，同时继续以怀疑的眼光看待他所在领域的研究。最近，他决定正式调查心理学和神经科学领域的同行研究人员有多频繁地做出他认为是错误——或至少是过早的——音乐与智力之间的因果联系。他在五月发表的结果表明，许多同行确实如此。

F) For his recent study, Schellenberg asked two research assistants to look for correlational studies on the effects of music education. They found a total of 114 papers published since 2000. To assess whether the authors claimed any causation, researchers then looked for telltale verbs in each paper's title and abstract, verbs like "enhance", "promote", "facilitate", and "strengthen". The papers were categorized as neuroscience if the study employed a brain imaging method like magnetic resonance, or if the study appeared in a journal that had "brain", "neuroscience", or a related term in its title. Otherwise the papers were categorized as psychology. Schellenberg didn't tell his assistants what exactly he was trying to prove.

在他最近的研究中，谢伦伯格让两名研究助理寻找关于音乐教育影响的相关性研究。他们找到了自2000年以来发表的共114篇论文。为了评估作者是否声称了因果关系，研究人员随后在每篇论文的标题和摘要中寻找明显的动词，如“增强”、“促进”、“便利”和“加强”。如果研究采用了脑成像方法如磁共振，或研究出现在标题中包含“大脑”、“神经科学”或相关术语的期刊中，则将论文归类为神经科学。否则，论文被归类为心理学。谢伦伯格没有告诉他的助理他具体想证明什么。

G) After computing their assessments, Schellenberg concluded that the majority of the articles erroneously claimed that music training had a causal effect. The overselling, he also found, was more prevalent among neuroscience studies, three quarters of which mischaracterized a mere association between music training and skills enhancement as a cause-and-effect relationship. This may come as a surprise to some. Psychologists have been battling charges that they don't do "real" science for some time— in large part because many findings from classic experiments have proved unreproducible. Neuroscientists, on the other hand, armed with brain scans and EEGs(脑电图), have not been subject to the same degree of critique.

在计算评估后，谢伦伯格得出结论，大多数文章错误地声称音乐训练有因果效应。他还发现，过度宣传在神经科学研究中更为普遍，其中四分之三错误地将音乐训练与技能提升之间的单纯关联描述为因果关系。这可能对某些人来说是个惊讶。心理学家一直在应对他们没有进行“真正”科学的指控——很大程度上因为经典实验的许多发现已被证明不可重复。另一方面，神经科学家凭借脑扫描和脑电图（EEG），没有受到同等程度的批评。

H) To argue for a cause-and-effect relationship, scientists must attempt to explain why and how a connection could occur. When it comes to transfer effects of music, scientists frequently point to brain plasticity — the fact that the brain changes according to how we use it. When a child learns to play the violin, for example, several studies have shown that the brain region responsible for the fine motor skills of the left hand's fingers is likely to grow. And many experiments have shown that musical training improves certain hearing capabilities, like filtering voices from background noise or distinguishing the difference between the consonants (辅音) 'b' and 'g'.

为了论证因果关系，科学家必须试图解释为什么以及如何可能发生联系。当谈到音乐的迁移效应时，科学家经常提到大脑可塑性——大脑根据我们如何使用它而变化的事实。例如，当一个孩子学习拉小提琴时，几项研究表明，负责左手手指精细运动技能的大脑区域可能会增长。许多实验表明，音乐训练改善了某些听力能力，如从背景噪音中过滤声音或区分辅音“b”和“g”的差异。

I) But Schellenberg remains highly critical of how the concept of plasticity has been applied in his field. "Plasticity has become an industry of its own," he wrote in his May paper. Practice does change the brain, he allows, but what is questionable is the assertion that these changes affect other brain regions, such as those responsible for spatial reasoning or math problems.

但谢伦伯格对可塑性概念在他所在领域的应用方式仍然高度批评。“可塑性已经成为一个独立的行业，”他在五月的论文中写道。他承认练习确实改变大脑，但有问题的是，这些变化会影响其他大脑区域的断言，例如那些负责空间推理或数学问题的区域。

J) Neuropsychologist Lutz Jäncke agrees. "Most of these studies don't allow for causal inferences," he said. For over two decades, Jäncke has researched the effects of music lessons, and like Schellenberg, he believes that the only way to truly understand their effects is to run longitudinal studies. In such studies, researchers would need to follow groups of children with and without music lessons over a long period of time—even if the assignments are not completely random. Then they could compare outcomes for each group.

神经心理学家卢茨·延克同意。“这些研究大多不允许因果推断，”他说。二十多年来，延克一直在研究音乐课的影响，与谢伦伯格一样，他认为真正理解其效果的唯一方法是进行纵向研究。在这样的研究中，研究人员需要跟踪有音乐课和无音乐课的儿童组很长时间——即使分配不是完全随机的。然后他们可以比较每组的结果。

K) Some researchers are starting to do just that. The neuroscientist Peter Schneider from Heidelberg University in Germany, for example, has been following a group of children for ten years now. Some of them were handed musical instruments and given lessons through a school-based program in the Ruhr region of Germany called Jedem Kind ein Instrument, or "an instrument for every child," which was carried out with government funding. Among these children, Schneider has found that those who were enthusiastic about music and who practiced voluntarily showed improvements in hearing ability, as well as in more general competencies, such as the ability to concentrate.

一些研究人员正开始这样做。例如，德国海德堡大学的神经科学家彼得·施耐德现在已经跟踪一组儿童十年。其中一些人通过德国鲁尔地区的一个学校项目获得了乐器和课程，该项目名为Jedem Kind ein Instrument，即“每个孩子一件乐器”，由政府资助进行。在这些儿童中，施耐德发现那些对音乐热情并自愿练习的人显示了听力能力的提高，以及更一般的能力，如集中注意力的能力。

L) To establish whether effects such as improved concentration are caused by music participation itself, and not by investing time in an extracurricular activity of any kind, Assal Habibi, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, is conducting a five-year longitudinal study with children from low-income communities in Los Angeles. The youngsters fall into three groups: those who take after-school music, those who do after-school sports, and those with no structured after-school program at all. After two years, Habibi and her colleagues reported seeing structural changes in the brains of the musically trained children, both locally and in the pathways connecting different parts of the brain.

为了确定如注意力集中等改善是否由音乐参与本身引起，而不是由投入任何课外活动的时间引起，南加州大学心理学教授阿萨尔·哈比比正在对洛杉矶低收入社区的儿童进行一项为期五年的纵向研究。这些年轻人分为三组：参加课外音乐组、参加课外体育组，以及完全没有结构化课外项目组。两年后，哈比比和她的同事报告说，在受过音乐训练的儿童的大脑中观察到了结构变化，无论是在局部还是连接大脑不同部分的通路上。

M) That may seem compelling, but Habibi's children were not selected randomly. Did the children who were drawn to music perhaps have something in them from the start that made them different but eluded the brain scanners? "As somebody who started taking piano lessons at the age of five and got up every morning at seven to practice, that experience changed me and made me part of who I am today," Schellenberg said. "The question is whether those kinds of experiences do so systematically across individuals and create exactly the same changes. And I think that is that huge leap of faith."

这似乎令人信服，但哈比比的儿童不是随机选择的。那些被音乐吸引的儿童是否可能从一开始就有什么特质使他们与众不同，但却逃过了脑扫描仪？“作为一个五岁开始上钢琴课、每天早上七点起床练习的人，那种经历改变了我，使我成为今天的一部分，”谢伦伯格说。“问题是这类经历是否在个体之间系统地产生，并造成完全相同的变化。我认为那是巨大的信仰飞跃。”

N) Did he have a hidden talent that others didn't have? Or more endurance than his peers? Music researchers tend, like Schellenberg, to be musicians themselves, and as he noted in his recent paper, "the idea of positive cognitive and neural side effects from music training (and other pleasurable activities) is inherently appealing." He also admits that if he had children of his own, he would encourage them to take music lessons and go to university. "I would think that it makes them better people, more critical, just wiser in general," he said.

他是否有别人没有的隐藏天赋？或者比同龄人更有耐力？音乐研究人员往往像谢伦伯格一样自己也是音乐家，正如他在最近论文中指出的，“音乐训练（和其他愉快活动）带来积极认知和神经副作用的想法本质上是吸引人的。”他还承认，如果他有孩子，他会鼓励他们上音乐课和上大学。“我会认为这使他们成为更好的人，更批判性，总体上更聪明，”他说。

O) But those convictions should be checked at the entrance to the lab, he added. Otherwise, the work becomes religion or faith. "You have to let go of your faith if you want to be a scientist."

但他补充说，这些信念应该在进入实验室时被检查。否则，工作就变成了宗教或信仰。“如果你想成为科学家，就必须放下你的信仰。”