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READING
Read the text and choose one answer for each question. Mark the
corresponding letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet.
The first year of life
If you have any experience of babies, then you know that they develop very
quickly. Every week you see huge changes in their bodies and what they have learned
to do. But I’d love to know what babies are thinking about, wouldn’t you? And I’d
love to understand more about how a baby’s brain works.
A newborn baby can see, hear and feel. By the age of five, a child can talk, ride
a bike and invent imaginary friends. How does this development happen? We don’t
understand the way language, thinking and planning develop very well. Now
scientists are using new technology to ‘see’ into children’s brains. And they are
discovering new information about the way a baby’s brain develops.
A study in 2010 showed that the experiences a child has in the first few years
affect the development of the brain. It showed that children who received more
attention often had higher IQs. The brain of a newborn baby has nearly a hundred
billion neurons. This is the same number as an adult’s brain. As they grow, a baby
receives information through the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. This
information creates connections between different parts of the brain. At the age of
three, there are a hundred trillion connections.
One experiment looked at images of babies’ brains while they were listening to
different sounds. The sounds were in different sequences. For example, one sequence
was mu-ba-ba. This is the pattern ‘A-B-B’. Another sequence was mu-ba-ge. This is
the pattern ‘A-B-C’. The images showed that the part of the brain responsible for
speech was more active during ‘A-B-B’ patterns. This shows that babies can tell the
difference between different patterns. This experiment is interesting because
sequences of words are important to grammar and meaning. Compare two sentences
with the same words in a different order: ‘John killed the bear’ is very different from
‘The bear killed John.’ So babies are starting to learn grammatical rules from the
beginning of life.
Researchers also know that babies need to hear a lot of language in order to
understand grammar rules. But there is a big difference between listening to
television, audio books or the Internet, and interacting with people. One study
compared two groups of nine-month-old American babies. One group watched videos
of Mandarin Chinese sounds. In the other group, people spoke the same sounds to the
babies. The test results showed that the second group could recognise different
sounds, however the first group learned nothing. The scientist, Patricia Kuhl, said this
result was very surprising. It suggests that social experience is essential to successful
brain development in babies.
Choose the correct item:
1. The purpose of the article is to ...
a) compare the brains of adults and children.
b) compare American and Chinese babies.
c) explain new studies into the development of babies’ brains.
d) describe how a new-born baby’s brain works.
2. The first paragraph states all of the following except:
a) babies’ bodies change every week.
b) babies’ development is fast.
c) babies learn to do something new every week.
d) it is easy to understand babies thoughts.
3. New technology has revealed …
a) information about child development.
b) that babies see differently from young children.
c) what a new-born child’s brain looks like.
d) how babies learn grammar.
4. What information is given about the baby’s IQ?
a) Attention and IQ are connected.
b) It’s difficult to change a baby’s IQ.
c) Some three-year-old children have a high IQ.
d) A child’s IQ depends on the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch.
5. The listening experiment has proven that:
a) Babies’ brains can’t recognise different sound patterns.
b) The pattern ‘A-B-B’ is easier to understand than ‘A-B-C’.
c) The pattern ‘A-B-C’ is easier to understand than ‘A-B-B’.
d) It’s not known which area of a baby’s brain processes speech.
6. What is the main conclusion from the study?
a) Different languages have different grammar.
b) Babies can understand television at the age of nine months.
c) Social interaction has a big influence on the brain.
d) Watching videos is a good way to develop a child’s brain.
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