年高二英语话题阅读训练-Week-Sixteen科普小品.docVIP

Week Sixteen 科普小品 一、阅读理解（共20小题；共40.0分） A As any plane passenger will confirm, a crying baby is almost impossible to ignore, no matter how hard you try. Now scientists believe they may have worked out why. An infants cries pull at the heartstrings in a way that other cries dont, researchers found. Researchers found that the sound of a baby crying can trigger unique emotional responses in the brain, making it impossible for us to ignore them—whether we are parents or not. Other types of cry, including calls of animals in sadness, fail to cause the same response—suggesting the brain is programmed to respond specifically to a babys cry. A team of Oxford University scientists scanned the brains of 28 men and women as they listened to a variety of calls and cries. After 100 milliseconds—roughly the time it takes to blink—two regions of the brain that respond to emotion lit up. Their response to a babys cry was particularly strong. The response was seen in both men and women—even if they had no children. You might read that men should barely notice a baby and step over it and not see any of them but its not true. There is a specialized processing in men and women which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that both genders would be responding to these cues. The study was in people who were not parents, yet they are all responding at 100ms to these particular sounds, so this might be a fundamental response present in all of us regardless of parental status. Fellow researcher Katie Young said it may take a bit longer for someone to recognize their own childs cries because they need to do more fine-grained analysis. The team had previously found that our reactions speed up when we hear a baby crying. Adults performed better on computer games when they played the sound of a baby crying than after they heard recordings of adults crying or high-pitched birdsong. 1. Why is a babys crying difficult to ignore? A. Bec