2026年真题26

Listen to a lecture in an art history class (woman) Let’s talk about a classic example of land art, Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson. Picture yourself at the edge of the Great Salt Lake in the state of Utah in the United States. Stretching out into the water is a massive spiral made of dark basalt rocks about one-thousand-five-hundred feet long. The title tells you a lot. A jetty is a structure that sticks out into a body of water, usually to protect a shoreline or dock. Smithson took that idea and twisted it, literally, into a spiral. Land art is an art movement that wanted to break free from museums and galleries and put art directly into nature. Smithson was fascinated by big concepts like geological time and change. He never intended Spiral Jetty to be permanent. The lake rises and falls, salt crystals form on the rocks and the spiral slowly transforms. He wanted people to experience that reality firsthand, to make the journey and see the work in its natural setting. Here’s the irony, though. Relatively few people have actually seen Spiral Jetty firsthand. Most people know it only through photographs and films that have been made about it. All this undermines Smithson’s idea because the work is supposedly about being there, about sensing its scale and its shifting relationship with the Great Salt Lake. When we only see pictures, it becomes a static image, raising questions about whether land art, or at least this particular example of land art, can actually ever fulfill its intent.

Listen to a talk in a linguistics class (man) Linguists have designed experiments to study infant language learning. Take the now famous WUG test. In the test, a child is shown a drawing of a made-up creature called a wug. Then they’re shown two of them and asked, “Now, there are two?” Most children say wugs, adding the plural s, although they’re never heard the word before. This shows young kids not only memorize words, but apply grammatical rules to words they’ve never heard before. Another study how babies learn word boundaries. From the sound of spoken language, it isn’t obvious where one word ends and another begins. You can tell that only if you already know a lot about the language. So how can children pick out words and learn them? In an experiment, eight-month-old infants listened to a stream of made-up syllables with no pauses. After two minutes, researchers tested the babies using the head-turn preference method. They played two types of audio, one with sound patterns that are like real words and that is appeared frequently in the stream, and another with random syllables. Babies tended to turn their heads and listen longer to the familiar sounds. This showed that they had picked up on statistical patterns, like which syllables tended to follow each other, and use that to segment speech. Turns out babies are highly sophisticated pattern seekers. This suggests language learning might be linked to other cognitive abilities like attention and memory. Do they correlate? Let’s discuss some studies on that next.

Listen to a talk in a social sciences class (man) Let’s talk about how ideas and values are transmitted across national borders, leading to an interconnected and interdependent world. This process, known as cultural globalization, has been going on for millennia, but it has been accelerated by advancements in communication, technology, and transportation. Certainly one of the most visible aspects of cultural globalization is the spread of popular culture. Movies, music, fashion, and food from one part of the world often become popular in other regions. American films, for instance, are watched all over the world, and American fast food chains are found in numerous countries as well. This diffusion of culture can lead to greater cultural understanding and exchange, fostering a sense of global community. However, if also raises concerns about the erosion of local cultures and identities. The dominance of Western culture, in particular, can overshadow indigenous traditions and practices, leading to worldwide cultural homogenization. This can result in the loss of cultural diversity, as unique customs and languages may fade away. There’s also the issue of cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation occurs when elements of one culture are taken and used by another, often without understanding and respect. On the other hand, cultural globalization can empower cultures by providing platforms for them to reach a global audience.

Listen to a talk in a science podcast (woman) When we study ecosystems, we’re not just looking at a collection of plants and animals scattered across the landscape, we’re diving into a dynamic web of interactions, all of which shape the structure and function of the natural world. One particularly fascinating concept within this field is that of keystone species. In architecture, a keystone is a central stone that locks an arch together. Remove it and the arch collapses. Similarly, a keystone species has a disproportionately large effect on its environment. It cannot be removed without threatening the whole ecosystem. A striking example is the gray wolf in Yellowstone National Park in the US. In the early twentieth century, wolves were eradicated from the region due to widespread hunting through government predator control programs driven by concerns over livestock and human safety. Without wolves, elk populations, you probably know elk are a type of deer that wolves hunt and eat, um, the elk population surged dramatically with their main predator gone. And all these elk, which eat many kinds of vegetation, began overgrazing, which suppressed the growth of trees and other plants in the area. This destabilized the whole ecosystem. Birds had fewer places to nest, mice and rabbits couldn’t use plants to hide from predators, and even bees had fewer flowers to feed from. When wolves were reintroduced in the 1990s, their presence reshaped the landscape. Elk populations decreased, which allowed plant and tree populations to recover and, in turn, all the animals who depended on them.