题目内容:
Passage OneQuestions are based on the following passage.
Mathematical ability and musical ability may not seem on the surface to be connected, but people who have researched the subject -- and studied the brain -- say that they are. Research for my book "Talking Children" drove home the point to me. Three quarters of the bright but speech delayed children in the group I studied had a close relative who was an engineer, mathematician or scientist, and four fifths had a close
relative who played a musical instrument. The children themselves usually took readily to math and other an alytical subject and to music.
Black, white and Asian children in this group show the same patterns. However, looking at the larger world around us, it is clear that blacks have been greatly over represented in the development of American popular music, especially in the history of jazz, and greatly underrepresented in such field as mathematics,
science and engineering.
If the abilities required in an alytical fields and in music are so closely related, how can there be this Ngreat discrepancy? One reason is that the development of mathematical and other such abilities require years of formal schooling, while certain musical talents can be developed with little or no formal training, as has
happened with a number of well-known black musicians. It is precisely in those kinds of music where one can acquire great skill without formal training thatblacks have excelled popular music rather than classical music, piano rather than violin, blues rather than opera. This is readily understandable, given that most blacks, for most of American history, have not had either the money or the leisure for long years of formal study in music. Blacks have not merely held their own in American popular music. They have played a disproportionately large role in the development of jazz, both traditional and modern. A long string of names comes to mind - Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin, W. C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker...and so on. None of this presupposes any special innate ability of blacks in music. On the contrary, it is perfectly consisted with blacks having no more such inborn ability than anyone else, but being limited to being able to express such ability in narrower channels than others who have had the money, the time and the formal education to spread out over a wider range of music, as well as into mathematics, science and engineering.
注意:此部分请在答题卡2上作答。
What is the main idea of the first paragraph? A.Mathematical ability and musical ability are connected.
B.Mathematical ability has more to do with the brain than musical ability.
C.More people are good at music than math.
D.More research should be done into the relationship between the mathematical ability and musical ability.
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