Choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
NB There are more headings than paragraphs so you will not use all of them.
Music: Language We All Speak
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Section A: Music is one of the human species’ relatively few universal abilities. Without formal training, any individual, from Stone Age tribesman to suburban teenager, has the ability to recognise music and, in some fashion, to make it. Why this should be so is a mystery. After all, music isn’t necessary for getting through the day, and if it aids in reproduction, it does so only in highly indirect ways. Language, by contrast, is also everywhere- but for reasons that are more obvious. With language, you and the members of your tribe can organise a migration across Africa, build reed boats and cross the seas, and communicate at night even when you can’t see each other. Modem culture, in all its technological extravagance, springs directly from the human talent for manipulating symbols and syntax. Scientists have always been intrigued by the connection between music and language. Yet over the years, words and melody have acquired a vastly different status in the lab and the seminar room. While language has long been considered essential to unlocking the mechanisms of human intelligence, music is generally treated as an evolutionary frippery-mere “auditory cheesecake,” as the Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it.
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Section B: But thanks to a decade-long wave of neuroscience research, that tune is changing. A flurry of recent publications suggests that language and music may equally be able to tell us who we are and where we’re from – not just emotionally, but biologically. In July, the journal Nature Neuroscience devoted a special issue to the topic. And in an article in the August 6 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, David Schwartz, Catherine Howe, and Dale Purves of Duke University argued that the sounds of music and the sounds of language are intricately connected. To grasp the originality of this idea, it’s necessary to realise two things about how music has traditionally been understood. First, musicologists have long emphasised that while each culture stamps a special identity onto its music, the music itself has some universal qualities. For example, in virtually all cultures, the sound is divided into some or all of the 12 intervals that make up the chromatic scale – that is, the scale represented by the keys on a piano. For centuries, observers have attributed this preference for certain combinations of tones to the mathematical properties of sound itself. Some 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras was the first to note a direct relationship between the harmoniousness of a tone combination and the physical dimensions of the object that produced it. For example, a plucked string will always play an octave lower than a similar string half its size and a fifth lower than a similar string two-thirds its length. This link between simple ratios and harmony has influenced music theory ever since.
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Section C: This music-is-moth idea is often accompanied by the notion that music, formally speaking at least, exists apart from the world in which it was created. Writing recently in The New York Review of Books, pianist and critic Charles Rosen discussed the long-standing notion that while painting and sculpture reproduce at least some aspects of the natural world, and writing describes thoughts and feelings we are all familiar with, music is entirely abstracted from the world in which we live. Neither idea is right, according to David Schwartz and his colleagues. Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms or ratios but by the messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular -which in turn is shaped by our evolutionary heritage.” The explanation of music, like the explanation of any product of the mind, must be rooted in biology, not in numbers per se,” says Schwartz.
Schwartz, Howe, and Purves analysed a vast selection of speech sounds from a variety of languages to reveal the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus only on the raw sound, they discarded all theories about speech and meaning and sliced sentences into random bites. Using a database of over 100,000 brief segments of speech, they noted which frequency had the greatest emphasis in each sound. The resulting set of frequencies, they discovered, corresponded closely to the chromatic scale. In short, the building blocks of music are to be found in speech.
Far from being abstract, music presents a strange analogy to the patterns created by the sounds of speech. “Music, like the visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the natural world,” says Schwartz. “It emulates our sound environment in the way that visual arts emulate the visual environment.” In music, we hear the echo of our basic sound-making instrument- the vocal tract. The explanation for human music is simple, still than Pythagoras’s mathematical equations. We like the sounds that are familiar to us. Specifically, we like sounds that remind us of ourselves.
This brings up some chicken-or-egg evolutionary questions. It may be that music imitates speech directly, the researchers say, in which case it would seem that language evolve first. It’s also conceivable that music came first, and language is in effect an Imitation of song – that in everyday speech, we hit the musical notes we especially like. Alternately, it may be that music imitates the general products of the human sound-making system, which just happens to be mostly speech. “We can’t know this,” says Schwartz. “What we do know is that they both come from the same system, and it is this that shapes our preferences.”
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Section D: Schwartz’s study also casts light on the long-running question of whether animals understand or appreciate music. Despite the apparent abundance of “music” in the natural world- birdsong, whalesong, wolf howls, synchronised chimpanzee hooting, previous studies have found that many laboratory animals don’t show a great affinity for the human variety of music-making. Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott of Harvard argued in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience that animals don’t create or perceive music the way we do. The act that laboratory monkeys can show recognition of human tunes is evidence, they say, of shared general features of the auditory system, not any specific chimpanzee musical ability. As for birds, those most musical beasts, they generally recognise their own tunes – a narrow repertoire – but don’t generate novel melodies as we do. There are no avian Mozarts.
But what’s been played to the animals, Schwartz notes, is human music. If animals evolve preferences for sound as we do – based upon the soundscape in which they live – then their “music” would be fundamentally different from ours. In the same way, our scales derive from human utterances; a cat’s idea of a good tune would derive from yowls and meows. To demonstrate that animals don’t appreciate sounds the way we do, we’d need evidence that they don’t respond to “music” constructed from their own sound environment.
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Section E: No matter how the connection between language and music is parsed, what is apparent is that our sense of music, even our love for it, is as deeply rooted in our biology and in our brains as language is. This is most obvious with babies, says Sandra Trehub at the University of Toronto, who also published a paper in the Nature Neuroscience special issue.
For babies, music and speech are on a continuum. Mothers use musical speech to “regulate infants’ emotional states.” Trehub says. Regardless of what language they speak, the voice all mothers use with babies is the same: “something between speech and song.” This kind of communication “puts the baby in a trance-like state, which may proceed to sleep or extended periods of rapture.” So, if the babies of the world could understand the latest research on language and music, they probably wouldn’t be very surprised. The upshot, says Trehub, is that music maybe even more of a necessity than we realise.
AI explanationShows the answer. Tap to open.
Question Focus: Main idea - how music and language are treated differently and why language seems more obviously useful
Why this is correct: This paragraph mainly compares music and language, showing that language has clear survival uses while music seems mysterious and less valued scientifically. The focus is not on research or culture, but on the difference in status and function between the two.
Passage Reference: Music is one of the human species' relatively few universal abilities. Without formal training, any individual, from Stone Age tribesman to suburban teenager, has the ability to recognise music and, in some fashion, to make it. Why this should be so is a mystery. After all, music isn't necessary for getting through the day, and if it aids in reproduction, it does so only in highly indirect ways. Language, by contrast, is also everywhere- but for reasons that are more obvious. With language, you and the members of your tribe can organise a migration across Africa, build reed boats and cross the seas, and communicate at night even when you can't see each other. Modem culture, in all its technological extravagance, springs directly from the human talent for manipulating symbols and syntax. Scientists have always been intrigued by the connection between music and language. Yet over the years, words and melody have acquired a vastly different status in the lab and the seminar room. While language has long been considered essential to unlocking the mechanisms of human intelligence, music is generally treated as an evolutionary frippery-mere 'auditory cheesecake,' as the Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it.
Tips: When a paragraph compares two things again and again, the heading is usually about contrast.
Why the other options are wrong:
- Recent research on music: This paragraph does not describe new studies or discoveries. That comes later, so this is a Wrong section trap.
- Culture embedded in music: Culture is mentioned only briefly. The paragraph is not mainly about culture, so this is an Example-as-main-idea trap.
Key Vocabulary:
- frippery = something unimportant
- by contrast = in comparison
Question Focus: Main idea - traditional explanations of music based on mathematics and history
Passage Reference: To grasp the originality of this idea, it's necessary to realise two things about how music has traditionally been understood. First, musicologists have long emphasised that while each culture stamps a special identity onto its music, the music itself has some universal qualities. For example, in virtually all cultures, the sound is divided into some or all of the 12 intervals that make up the chromatic scale - that is, the scale represented by the keys on a piano. For centuries, observers have attributed this preference for certain combinations of tones to the mathematical properties of sound itself. Some 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras was the first to note a direct relationship between the harmoniousness of a tone combination and the physical dimensions of the object that produced it. For example, a plucked string will always play an octave lower than a similar string half its size and a fifth lower than a similar string two-thirds its length. This link between simple ratios and harmony has influenced music theory ever since.
Why this is correct: Most of this paragraph looks back at old ideas about music, especially mathematical explanations from history. It explains what people believed for centuries, not what new research says.
Tips: Watch for time signals like "for centuries" or historical names. These often point to a history-based heading.
Why the other options are wrong:
- Recent research on music: Although research is mentioned at the start, the paragraph mainly explains older theories. Choosing research is a Partial truth trap.
- Culture embedded in music: Culture is only one small point here. The main focus is history and theory, so this is an Example-as-main-idea trap.
Key Vocabulary:
- chromatic scale = twelve musical notes
- ratios = mathematical relationships
Question Focus: Main idea - modern scientific studies linking music to speech and biology
Passage Reference: Neither idea is right, according to David Schwartz and his colleagues. Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms or ratios but by the messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular -which in turn is shaped by our evolutionary heritage.' The explanation of music, like the explanation of any product of the mind, must be rooted in biology, not in numbers per se,' says Schwartz. Schwartz, Howe, and Purves analysed a vast selection of speech sounds from a variety of languages to reveal the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus only on the raw sound, they discarded all theories about speech and meaning and sliced sentences into random bites. Using a database of over 100,000 brief segments of speech, they noted which frequency had the greatest emphasis in each sound. The resulting set of frequencies, they discovered, corresponded closely to the chromatic scale. In short, the building blocks of music are to be found in speech.
Why this is correct: This long section explains new scientific research by Schwartz and colleagues. It shows how studies of speech sounds reveal where music really comes from.
Tips: When you see experiments, data, and researchers, the heading is usually about research.
Why the other options are wrong:
- Historical theories review: Old theories are mentioned only to be rejected. The focus is new findings, so this is a Reverse meaning trap.
- Questions on a biological link with human and music: Biology is discussed, but this paragraph mainly explains research results, not open questions. This is a Partial truth trap.
Key Vocabulary:
- utterances = spoken sounds
- frequencies = sound waves
Question Focus: Main idea - whether animals understand or respond to music
Passage Reference: Schwartz's study also casts light on the long-running question of whether animals understand or appreciate music. Despite the apparent abundance of 'music' in the natural world- birdsong, whalesong, wolf howls, synchronised chimpanzee hooting, previous studies have found that many laboratory animals don't show a great affinity for the human variety of music-making. Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott of Harvard argued in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience that animals don't create or perceive music the way we do. The act that laboratory monkeys can show recognition of human tunes is evidence, they say, of shared general features of the auditory system, not any specific chimpanzee musical ability. As for birds, those most musical beasts, they generally recognise their own tunes - a narrow repertoire - but don't generate novel melodies as we do. There are no avian Mozarts. But what's been played to the animals, Schwartz notes, is human music. If animals evolve preferences for sound as we do - based upon the soundscape in which they live - then their 'music' would be fundamentally different from ours. In the same way, our scales derive from human utterances; a cat's idea of a good tune would derive from yowls and meows. To demonstrate that animals don't appreciate sounds the way we do, we'd need evidence that they don't respond to 'music' constructed from their own sound environment.
Why this is correct: The whole paragraph discusses animals and music, especially whether animals respond to human music or their own sounds. This clearly matches communication and understanding with animals.
Tips: If a paragraph keeps repeating one group like animals, the heading should mention that group.
Why the other options are wrong:
- Animals sometimes make music: The paragraph is not just saying animals make sounds. It questions understanding and response, so this is a Paraphrase trap.
- Recent research on music: Research is mentioned, but only about animals. The topic is animal response, so this is a Context shift trap.
Key Vocabulary:
- affinity = liking
- soundscape = sound environment
Question Focus: Main idea - biological connection between music, language, and the human brain
Passage Reference: No matter how the connection between language and music is parsed, what is apparent is that our sense of music, even our love for it, is as deeply rooted in our biology and in our brains as language is. This is most obvious with babies, says Sandra Trehub at the University of Toronto, who also published a paper in the Nature Neuroscience special issue. For babies, music and speech are on a continuum. Mothers use musical speech to 'regulate infants' emotional states.' Trehub says. Regardless of what language they speak, the voice all mothers use with babies is the same: 'something between speech and song.' This kind of communication 'puts the baby in a trance-like state, which may proceed to sleep or extended periods of rapture.' So, if the babies of the world could understand the latest research on language and music, they probably wouldn't be very surprised. The upshot, says Trehub, is that music maybe even more of a necessity than we realise.
Why this is correct: This paragraph focuses on biology and the brain, especially in babies. It shows music and language are closely connected at a biological level.
Tips: Do not choose a heading just because one example matches. Always ask what the paragraph is mostly about.
Why the other options are wrong:
- Music is good For babies: Babies are an example, but the main idea is biology, not benefits. This is an Example-as-main-idea trap.
- Recent research on music: Research is mentioned briefly, but the focus is conclusions about biology. This is a Partial truth trap.
Key Vocabulary:
- continuum = smooth connection
- regulate = control
General Tips:
- Read all headings first and underline key words before matching.
- Focus on the main idea of each paragraph, not one interesting detail.
- Matching headings follow paragraph order from top to bottom.
- If two headings seem possible, choose the one that covers more of the paragraph.
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