Week Sixteen 科普小品
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 infant's cries pull at the heartstrings in a way that other cries don't, researchers found. 教师是
园丁 拟步甲科 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 baby's 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 bl
ink—two regions of the brain that respond to emotion lit up. Their response to a baby's 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 it's 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.
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Fellow researcher Katie Young said it may take a bit longer for someone to recognize their own child's 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 baby's crying difficult to ignore?
A. Because it cries louder than others.
B. Because it cries in a different manner.
历史
唯心主义 C. Because its cry is moving.
D. Because its cry is absorbing.
2. What does the underlined word "trigger" in Paragraph 2 mean?
A. Cause. B. Avoid. C. Remove. D. Cure.日本
气象厅 3. According to the passage, responses to a baby's cry are strong 校花们 .
A. in people with children B. in people with no children
C. in neither men nor women D. in both men and women
4. People's response to baby's cry can be understood .
A. from human's fundamental emotion
B. from a view of parents
C. from a view of people who are not parents
D. from an evolutionary view
5. When do grown-ups play computer games much better?
A. When hearing recordings of adults crying.
B. When hearing recordings of high-pitched birdsong.
C. When hearing recordings of old people crying.
D. When hearing recordings of babies crying.
B
At last, good news to report about the "greenest government ever". A package of railway spending across England and Wales worth £9.4bn—of which £4.2bn will be spent on previously unannounced projects. The projects include a high capacity "electric spine" running between Yorkshire and the East Midlands down to south coast ports, and the electrification of the line between Sheffield and Bedford. Further electrification is also planned in Wales meaning two-thirds of the Welsh population will have access to electric trains.
Speaking on Radio 4's Today program this morning, she said, we all know that diesel(柴油机) is massively expensive so if we can move over to electric trains, not only are they greener, they're also cheaper and also they are lighter too, so what that means is that when they are on the track they don't damage it so much, so maintenance costs go down too.