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46. According to the passage, which of the following is true about the most recent cooking programs?
(A) They are often hosted by rock stars.
(B) They are often not filmed in the studios.
(C) They attract many celebrity viewers.
(D) They invite hungry audience members to be judges.
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47. Which of the following would most likely be a hit cooking show in the ’90s?
(A) A show dedicated to European cuisine and gourmet food.
(B) A show sponsored by food companies advertising new products.
(C) A show hosted by a humorous chef presenting low-calorie dishes.
(D) A show with a professional cook demonstrating systematic ways of cooking.
Screaming is one of the primal responses humans share with other animals. Conventional thinking suggests that what sets a scream apart from other sounds is its loudness or high pitch. However, many sounds that are loud and high-pitched do not raise goose bumps like screams can. To find out what makes human screams unique, neuroscientist Luc Arnal and his team examined a bank of sounds containing sentences spoken or screamed by 19 adults. The result shows screams and screamed sentences had a quality called “roughness,” which refers to how fast a sound changes in loudness. While normal speech sounds only have slight differences in loudness-between 4 and 5 Hz, screams can switch very fast, varying between 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 almost always corresponded with roughness. The team then studied how the human brain responds to roughness using fMRI brain scanners. As expected, after hearing a scream, activity increased in the brain’s auditory centers where sound coming into the ears is processed. But the scans also lit up in the amygdala, the brain’s fear center.
The amygdala is the area that regulates our emotional and physiological response to danger. When a threat is detected, our adrenaline rises, and our body prepares to react to danger. The study discovered that screams have a similar influence on our body. It also found that roughness isn’t heard when we speak naturally, regardless of the language we use, but it is prevalent in artificial sounds. The most aggravating alarm 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 them more effective, the same way a bad smell is added to natural gas to make it easily detectable. Warning sounds could also be added to electric cars, which are particularly silent, so they can be efficiently detected by 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.
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49. According to the passage, which of the following is NOT a finding by Arnal’s team?
(A) Changes in volume make screams different from other sounds.
(B) Only humans can produce sounds with great loudness variation.
(C) Normal human speech sounds vary between 4 to 5 Hz in loudness.
(D) Drastic volume variation in speech can effectively activate the amygdala.
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50. What does “it” in the third paragraph refer to?
(A) The study.
(B) Language.
(C) Roughness.
(D) The amygdala.
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51. Which of the following devices may be improved with the researchers’ findings?
(A) Smoke detectors.
(B) Security cameras.
(C) Electric bug killers.
(D) Fire extinguishers.
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Often named as the most prominent contemporary female architect, Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi-born British woman, is significant for her intellectual toughness and her refusal to compromise on her artistic ideas. For many years, her designs filled the pages of architecture journals but were dismissed as impractical or too radical. Also, being female in a male-dominated field didn’t help her succeed. Despite these setbacks, her star began to rise when her design for Cincinnati’s new Center for Contemporary Art was selected and built, earning her worldwide acclaim. The New York Times described the building as “the most important new building in America since the Cold War.” Once her talent was recognized, commissions started coming in to design a variety of projects, including public transportation, libraries, and opera houses. In 2004, Hadid became the first woman to win the prestigious Pritzker Prize. She also won the Stirling Prize in 2010 and 2011. Hadid’s interest in architecture had roots in a trip her family took to the ancient Sumer region in southern Iraq, the site of one of the world’s oldest civilizations, when she was a teenager. She recalled: “The beauty of the landscape-where sand, water, reeds, birds, buildings, and people all somehow flowed together-has never left me. I’m trying to discover-invent, I suppose-an architecture, and forms of urban planning, that do something of the same thing in a contemporary way.” Nature’s forms appear as a recurrent source of inspiration for Hadid’s architecture. Her designs are daring and visionary experiments with space and with the relationships of buildings to their urban surroundings. She consistently pushes the boundaries of architecture and urban design in the pursuit of a visionary aesthetic that expresses her ideals.
36. According to the passage, what is a major factor in Hadid’s success?
(A) Her family support.
(B) Her ethnic origin.
(C) Her gender and education.
(D) Her vision and talent.
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37. What does the author mean by “…her star began to rise…” in the second paragraph?
(A) She started to make a fortune.
(B) She became more recognized.
(C) Her designs became classical.
(D) Her ideas started to take shape.
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38. What is the third paragraph mainly about?
(A) The cultural background of Hadid’s family.
(B) The beautiful landscape of Hadid’s hometown.
(C) A vivid recollection of Hadid’s life as a teenager.
(D) A fundamental source of Hadid’s architectural philosophy.
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39. According to the passage, which of the following is true about Hadid’s career in architecture?
(A) She built the first Center for Contemporary Art in New York.
(B) Her architecture projects mainly involve museums in urban areas.
(C) Her works can be characterized as boldly contemporary and innovative.
(D) Her early designs were often rejected because of her political background.
