問題詳情

第 48 至 51 題為題組    Screaming is one of the primal responses humans share with other animals. Conventional thinkingsuggests that what sets a scream apart from other sounds is its loudness or high pitch. However, manysounds that are loud and high-pitched do not raise goose bumps like screams can. To find out what makeshuman screams unique, neuroscientist Luc Arnal and his team examined a bank of sounds containingsentences spoken or screamed by 19 adults. The result shows screams and screamed sentences had a qualitycalled “roughness,” which refers to how fast a sound changes in loudness. While normal speech soundsonly have slight differences in loudness—between 4 and 5 Hz, screams can switch very fast, varyingbetween 30 and 150 Hz, thus perceived as being rough and unpleasant.    Arnal’s team asked 20 subjects to judge screams as neutral or fearful, and found that the scariest almostalways corresponded with roughness. The team then studied how the human brain responds to roughnessusing fMRI brain scanners. As expected, after hearing a scream, activity increased in the brain’s auditorycenters where sound coming into the ears is processed. But the scans also lit up in the amygdala, the brain’sfear center.    The amygdala is the area that regulates our emotional and physiological response to danger. When athreat is detected, our adrenaline rises, and our body prepares to react to danger. The study discovered thatscreams have a similar influence on our body. It also found that roughness isn’t heard when we speaknaturally, regardless of the language we use, but it is prevalent in artificial sounds. The most aggravatingalarm clocks, car horns, and fire alarms possess high degrees of roughness.    One potential application for this research might be to add roughness to alarm sounds to make themmore effective, the same way a bad smell is added to natural gas to make it easily detectable. Warningsounds could also be added to electric cars, which are particularly silent, so they can be efficiently detectedby pedestrians.
48. What is the first paragraph mainly about?
(A) Different types of screams.
(B) Human sounds and animal cries.
(C) Specific features of screams.
(D) Sound changes and goose bumps.

參考答案

答案：C
難度：適中0.632653
統計：A(10),B(5),C(31),D(3),E(0)

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