2026年真题06

Listen to a lecture in a music class. If you're familiar with ancient Greece, you know how important music was in everyday life. You can probably imagine people sitting in a Greek amphitheater, completely absorbed by the sounds filling the air. But music wasn't only heard in theater performances. It played a role in all kinds of settings, including religious ceremonies and athletic competitions. One instrument that stands out is the aulos. This aulos is a double reeded wind instrument that was a big part of Greek musical life, and it has a distinctive design. It has two pipes, each with a reed, usually made from a plant, similar to what you'd find in a modern oboe. And because the pipes are cylindrical, not conical like some other wind instruments, it produces a sound that's rich and sharp. That unique sound helped bring out emotion in plays and public events, which brought depth to the drama unfolding on stage. To really master the aulos, the player had to be highly skilled. One technique they used was circular breathing. It means inhaling air through the nose while simultaneously pushing air out through the cheeks. This allowed them to play long, continuous passages without stopping for breath. Even though the aulos was hugely important in ancient times, it eventually faded from use as other instruments and musical styles took over. Still, its legacy lives on as it gives us a glimpse into the musical world of ancient Greece.

Listen to a talk in a psychology class. Have you ever been so engrossed in a task that you completely missed something obvious? This is called inattentional blindness, a phenomenon where concentrating on one thing can make us overlook something happening right in front of us. A classic study illustrates this perfectly. Participants watched a video of people passing a basketball and were asked to count passes made by players in white shirts. Midway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the scene, thumped its chest and left. Astonishingly, about half the viewers never saw the gorilla. Their attention was locked on counting passes. In real world situations, inattentional blindness can have serious consequences. For example, while driving, focusing on finding a street sign might make you miss a pedestrian stepping into the road. Recognizing this tendency can help us stay safer and more aware. Interestingly, psychologists trace this phenomenon to a useful ability, selective attention. This is the brains way of filtering sensory input to avoid overload, allowing us to concentrate on important tasks. Think about sitting in a noisy open plan office writing a report. Phones are ringing, people are talking, but you managed to tune it all out and focus on your work. That's selective attention at its best.

Listen to a talk on a psychology podcast. There are many different factors that influence human behaviour. One is related to social influence, or the idea that our behaviour can be shaped by group pressure. To test this idea, a psychologist named Solomon Ashe conducted a famous study in the 1950s, which has become hugely influential in the field. In his experiment, Ashe invited American University students to take part in a simple visual judgement task. Each participant was placed in a group of seven to nine people, all but one of whom were working with the researcher. The group members were shown a standard line on one card and three comparison lines on another card. One comparison line matched the standard, while the other two were clearly different lengths. Basically, the correct choice was totally obvious. Each person announced aloud which line matched the standard, and those who were in on the study deliberately gave the wrong answer first. The real participant answered last. Across 12 trials, 75% of participants conformed with the incorrect answers that people in the group had given before them at least once, so they chose the line that was clearly wrong. This indicates strong influence of group pressure. This study was replicated in 1980, roughly 30 years after Ashe conducted his experiment. The subjects in this experiment were British university students. Interestingly, conformity was much lower with these participants. This suggests that conformity may be influenced by culture and the country people grow up in.

Listen to a talk in an environmental science class. Some years ago, the government of Tanzania in Africa proposed building a 452 kilometer paved Rd. in the north of the country, with the goal of boosting transportation and economic growth. The proposed route, though, would go through Serengeti National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and conservationists raised alarms. The road would bisect the annual migration corridor of wildebeests and other animals, potentially putting enormous pressure on their populations and disrupting the ecosystem in general. The models used by the conservationists showed that blocking the corridor with the road could reduce wildebeest populations by up to 1/3, disrupt predator prey dynamics and fragment an ecosystem that supports lions, cheetahs and countless other species. Increased traffic would also heighten poaching risks and introduce invasive species. The evidence wasn't conclusive, but because the risk was so serious and the consequences probably irreversible, the government decided to halt the project. That decision reflects what's known as the precautionary principle. When an action or policy poses A plausible risk of serious or irreversible harm, we shouldn't wait for absolute scientific certainty before deciding what to do. Why is this important? The consequences of indecision can be expensive or impossible to repair. Consider asbestos, once a widely used material for insulation and fire proofing, it was later linked to life threatening adverse effects on human health. But for decades, lack of consensus among researchers delayed government action, and by the time bans on asbestos were enacted, millions had been exposed, leading to costly litigation, clean up and preventable deaths.