I The experiment was carried out in all parts of Britain.
MUSIC TO HELP YOUR BRAIN
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Listening to pop music may make you cleverer, according to a Megalab experiment in which 11,000 children in 250 schools across Britain took part.
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The idea was put forward as a scientific study by Dr Sue Hallam of the lnstitute of Education, London, to follow up work in California which suggested that listening to music by Mozart for ten minutes had a direct effect on people's ability to work out problems.
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The Megalab experiment took place at eleven o'clock one Thursday morning. School children were split at random into three separate groups: one listening to Mozart, one to a pop group and one to a conversation in which Dr Hallam discussed Megalab.
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The children were then given problem-solving tasks. The group which had listened to the discussion scored 52 per cent, those who had listened to Mozart also scored 52 per cent, but those who had listened to the pop group scored 56 per cent. Dr Hallam said the result is interesting and ‘approaching significance'.
She thought that the reason was not due to the 'Mozart effect' but because the mood of the children had changed, so they were more aroused and tried harder. 'They were probably enjoying it and so they were well motivated,' she said. 'The others were probably uninterested or not particularly inspired by Mozart or by the discussion.'
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Dr Frances Rauscher, of the Centre for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory in Berkeley, California, had suggested that students would do better after listening to Mozart because his music is complex and stimulates particular activity in the brain.
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However, Dr Hallam did not dismiss Californian idea, because the experiments were performed on adults, who may process music differently.
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The Minister for Science said, 'lf the results are conclusive, we could see a whole new approach in the future to the way pupils are taught in school.'
For questions 56 – 65, read the text below. Decide whether the statements about the text below are true (T), false (F) or there is no information in the text (N/S). The first one is done as an example. Transfer your answers to the Answer Sheet.
MOST DIFFICULT TO LEARN
People often ask which is the most difficult language to learn, and it is not easy to answer because there are many factors to take into consideration. Firstly, in a first language the differences are unimportant as people learn their mother tongue naturally, so the question of how hard a language is to learn is only relevant when learning a second language.
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A native speaker of Spanish, for example, will find Portuguese much easier to learn than a native speaker of Chinese – because Portuguese is very similar to Spanish, while Chinese is very different – so the native language can affect learning a second language. The greater the differences between the second language and our first are, the harder it will be for most people to learn. Many people answer that Chinese is the hardest language to learn, possibly influenced by the thought of learning the Chinese writing system, and the pronunciation of Chinese does appear to be very difficult for many foreign learners. However, for Japanese speakers, who already use Chinese characters in their own language, learning writing will be less difficult than for speakers of languages using the Roman alphabet.
Some people seem to learn languages readily, while others find it very difficult. Teachers and the circumstances in which the language is learned also play an important role, as well as each learner's motivation for learning. If people learn a language because they need to use it professionally, they often learn it faster than people studying a language that has no direct use in their day-to-day life.
Apparently, British diplomats and other embassy staff have found that the second hardest language is Japanese, which will probably come as no surprise to many, but the language that they have found to be the most problematic is Hungarian, which has 35 cases (forms of a noun according to whether it is subject, object, genitive, etc). This does not mean that Hungarian is the hardest language to learn for everyone, but it causes British diplomatic personnel, who are generally used to learning languages, the most difficulty. However, Tabassaran, a Caucasian language has 48 cases, so it might cause more difficulty if British diplomats had to learn it.
Different cultures and individuals from those cultures will find different languages more difficult. In the case of Hungarian for British learners, it is not a question of the writing system, which uses a similar alphabet, but the grammatical complexity, though native speakers of related languages may find it easier, while struggling with languages that the British find relatively easy.
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No language is easy to learn well, though languages which are related to our first language are easier.
Learning a completely different writing system is a huge challenge, but that does not necessarily make a language more difficult than another. In the end, it is impossible to say that there is one language that is the most difficult language in the world.
| T | F | N/S | |
| 0. The question of how hard a language is to learn is relevant to both first and second language acquisition. | ü | ||
| 56. A mother-tongue language has a great impact on personal utterances. | |||
| 57. Portuguese is definitely easier than Chinese. | |||
| 58. A Japanese speaker may well find the Chinese writing system easier than a speaker of a European language. | |||
| 59. A teacher plays a greater role in the learning process. | |||
| 60. The Hungarian alphabet causes problems for British speakers. | |||
| 61. Hungarian is not the hardest language in the world. | |||
| 62. Hungarian has as many cases as Tabassaran. | |||
| 63. Many British diplomats learn Tabassaran. | |||
| 64. Writing substantially improves the ability of studying the second language. | |||
| 65. The writer thinks that learning new writing systems is easy. |
Writing 60 minutes
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