2018年英语专四真题答案解析（含听力原文）

PART I DICTATION

Emotional Reaction to Music

No matter who you are, where you live, / or what your cultural background is, / people get some pleasure from listening to their favorite music. / However, some people are simply not capable of enjoying music. / This is not because they can’t experience pleasure at all. / They don’t have trouble hearing music properly, either. / Instead, they’re just indifferent to music. / Researchers have conducted studies to find out / why some people have no emotional reaction to music. / However, despite their efforts, the mystery remains.

PART II LISTENING COMPREHENSION

SECTION A TALK

1. seven

2. sounds

3. cognitive

4. a sound changes

5. six-month-old

6. discriminate the

7. their first birthda

8. totally equivalen

9. incredible differe

10. taking statistics

SECTION B CONVERSATIONS

Conversation One

1. According to the man, what is a British characteristic?

答案：C. The British are unable to speak a foreign language.

2. What is the second most-spoken language in the UK?

答案：B. Polish.

3. Why was the 1,000 Words Campaign launched?

答案：A. To help improve international trade.

4.According to the man, which is not considered an advantage of learning a foreign language?

答案：D. It makes you work hard.

5. What’s the most probable relationship between the man and the woman?

答案：B. Schoolmates.

Conversation Two

6. According to Alice, what is a phobia?

答案：A. An unreasonable fear.

7. What are the chances of getting knocked off one’s bicycle and killed in a one-mile journey?

答案：C. One in fourteen million.

8. What kind of event do people tend to worry about?

答案：B. Catastrophic events.

9. Which may involve a chronic risk?

答案：D. Smoking cigarettes.

10. Why do some people enjoy risks?

答案：A. They get pleasure from risks.

婴儿的语言天赋

The Linguistic Gift of Babies

大家早上好。在今天的课上，我要讲一些你们看不到的东西。也就是：婴儿的大脑里是如何运转的。

Good morning, everyone. In today's lecture, I'm going to talk about something you can't see. That is, what's going on in the little brain of a baby.

例如，婴儿如何学习一门语言。

For example, how babies learn a language.

这是一个大家很感兴趣的问题。

It is always a question people show great interest in.

婴儿和七岁之前的儿童都是天才，七岁后就会出现系统性的衰退。

Babies and children are geniuses until they turn seven, and then there's a systematic decline.

我的实验室里工作的重点就是发育的第一个关键时期，在这个关键时期，婴儿试图掌握在他们的语言中用到的音。

Work in my lab is focused on the first critical period in development, and that is the period in which babies try to master which sounds are used in their language.

我们认为，通过研究声音是如何习得的，我们将建立一个适用于语言其他方面的模型，也可能适用于儿童时期可能存在的社交、情感和认知发展关键时期的模型。

We think, by studying how the sounds are learned, we'll have a model for the rest of language, and perhaps for critical periods that may exist in childhood for social, emotional and cognitive development.

所以我们一直在通过实验来研究这些婴儿。

So we've been studying the babies by conducting an experiment.

在我们的实验中，婴儿，通常是6个月大的婴儿，坐在父母的膝盖上，我们训练他们当音变化的时候转过头去，比如从“啊”变成“咿”的时候。

During our experiment, the baby, usually a six-monther, sits on a parent's lap, and we train them to turn their heads when a sound changes—like from "ah" to "ee".

如果他们在正确的时候这样做，黑盒子就会亮起来，熊猫就会敲鼓。我们学到了什么?

If they do so at the appropriate time, the black box lights up and a panda bear pounds a drum. What have we learned?

全世界的婴儿就是我所说的“世界公民”。

Well, babies all over the world are what I like to describe as "citizens of the world".

他们可以区分所有语言的所有音，不管我们测试的是哪个国家，用的是什么语言，这很了不起，因为你知道，我做不到。

They can discriminate all the sounds of all languages, no matter what country we're testing and what language we're using, and that's remarkable because you know, I can't do that.

我们的听力受到了文化限制。

We're culture-bound listeners.

我们能分辨出自己语言的音，却分辨不出外语的音。

We can discriminate the sounds of our own language, but not those of foreign languages.

所以问题就来了：这些世界公民什么时候会变成我们这样只能听懂某一种语言的人?

So the question arises: When do those citizens of the world turn into the language-bound listeners that we are?

答案是：在他们一周岁之前。

And the answer: before their first birthdays.

这里是东京和美国西雅图参加测试的婴儿在转头实验中的表现，此时他们听到了“ra”和“la”，这是英语中很重要的发音，日语中却不重要。

What you see here is performance on that head-turn task for babies tested in Tokyo and the United States, here in Seattle, as they listened to the "ra" and "la" — sounds important to English, but not to Japanese.

所以在6到8个月大的时候，婴儿们的表现是完全一样的。

So at six to eight months, the babies are totally equivalent.

两个月后，一些不可思议的事情发生了。

Two months later, something, something incredible occurs.

美国的婴儿表现越来越好，而日本的婴儿表现越来越差。

The babies in the United States are getting a lot better while babies in Japan are getting a lot worse.

问题是，在这两个月的关键时期发生了什么?

So the question is: What's happening during this critical two-month period?

我们知道这是辩声能力发展的关键时期，但是究竟发生了什么?

We know this is the critical period for sound development, but what's going on up there?

也许发生了两件事。

Maybe there are two things going on.

首先，婴儿们全神贯注地听我们说话，他们一边听我们说话一边做统计——他们在做统计。

The first is that the babies are listening intently to us, and they're taking statistics as they listen to us talk—they're taking statistics.

也就是说，两个婴儿听他们自己的母亲说妈妈语——我们和孩子说话时使用的通用语。

That is to say, the two babies listen to their own mother speaking motherese—the universal language we use when we talk to kids.

在产生语言的过程中，当婴儿听的时候，他们所做的就是做统计，也就是说，他们听到的语言的声音分布。

During the production of speech, when babies listen, what they're doing is taking statistics, that is, sound distribution on the language that they hear.

这些声音分布不断完善，婴儿就吸收