Children who learn a musical instrument are more likely than non-players
to be verbally agile in later life, according to a recent scientific study.
Apparently, music improves intellectual ability and adults are significantly
more adept at memorising new words and extending their vocabulary if they
had music lessons as children. The study supports previous research which
found that the left hemisphere of musicians brains is more highly
developed than the left hemisphere of the brains of people who have never
learnt to play an instrument. Three years ago, for example, a team of
German scientists carried out experiments which proved this fact. They
used brain scanners to show that good musicians had a well developed left
hemisphere, especially the area of the brain which is involved in verbal
memory.
Professor Agnes Chan and her colleagues at the University of Hong Kong
compared 30 female students who had been taught to play music before the
age of 12 with 30 students who had never taken music lessons. They tested
the verbal memory of each subject by the number of words she could remember
from a 16-word list which was presented orally three times to each subject.
The study found that musically trained adults were able to learn, on average,
17 per cent more words than the others. But the two groups showed no difference
in their visual memory, which is controlled largely by the right hemisphere
of the brain. People who received music training before the age
of 12 have a better memory for spoken words than those who did not. It
seems clear that learning a musical instrument in childhood may, therefore,
have long-term positive effects on verbal memory, professor Chan
said.
Confronted with these results, some teachers working in the Foreign Languages
Department of the University of Hong Kong said that having had musical
education might help learning a foreign language but, they insisted, nothing
is more effective than real motivation, hard work, and a strong desire
to communicate with people from other parts of the world.
PART ONE: READING COMPREHENSION
1. Answer the following questions according to the information in
the text.
a) Why dont good musicians necessarily have good visual memory?
b) What did the German scientists mentioned in the text find out about
good musicians?
c) How would you describe the attitude of the Hong Kong foreign language
teachers in connection with the experiments reported in the text?
PART TWO: WRITING
Choose ONE. Write about either 1 or 2.
Option A: Describe your personal feelings about music and the
role music plays in your life.
Option B: You have a six-year-old younger brother. Your parents
want to know your opinion on what might be the best way for him to learn
a foreign language. Imagine the kind of conversation you would have and
write it down. Dont use real names or real data.
3. Vocabulary
Explain next words in English, write the phonetics and also an example:
to improve, research, to carry out, to seem.
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