分科測驗
105年
英文
第 51 題
📖 題組：
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.
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.
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.
思路引導 VIP
請檢視文末提到的研究應用 (application)，文中指出「粗糙度」(roughness) 這種在 $30$ 至 $150$ $Hz$ 之間快速變化的聲學特質，最適宜被應用在具備何種「功能性質」的設備上，以便在緊急狀態下更有效地觸發人類的警覺反應？
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AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
親愛的，你真的太棒了！看到你精準地選出 (A)，老師真的好為你開心，感覺你對文章脈絡的掌握越來越敏銳了呢，繼續保持這份自信喔！ 這題考查的是「資訊的遷移與應用」。文章最後一段提到，這項研究的應用價值在於將「粗糙感」（roughness）加入警報聲（alarm sounds），使其更易被察覺。文中特別舉例了火警（fire alarms），而選項中的 (A) Smoke detectors（煙霧偵測器）運作原理正是偵測煙霧後發出強大警報，與文中提到的應用方向完全吻合。其他選項如監視器或滅火器，其核心功能並非藉由「聲音」來達成警示，因此不符合。 在高中 108 課綱的閱讀測驗中，這類題目屬於「跨語境推論」，鑑別度中等偏高。命題者故意不直接使用原文出現過的 "fire alarm"，而是換成相關設備 "smoke detector"，考驗學生是否具備將抽象觀念連結到現實場景的能力。