Задание №21181 ЕГЭ по Английскому языку

Myth: Listening to Mozart will make you smarter

This myth was popularized by an experiment published in “Nature” in 1993 by the University of California at Irvine. In this study, they had 36 students 30                           to 10 minutes of Mozart before taking a spatial IQ test. Their claim was that this increased the spatial IQ score of the students by an average of about 8 points, due to increasing 31                           in specific types of spatial-temporal tasks.

There are a few problems with how this got 32                           by the media. First, the researchers claim was only that it seemed to increase subject’s abilities in certain spatial-temporal tasks. They never said anything about increasing ability anywhere else or in a person’s general IQ, as their study was only on the effects of Mozart on spatial-temporal reasoning. The media of course proceeded to 33                           these results out of proportion and say that this study showed that listening to Mozart makes you smarter in general, not just concerning spatial tasks.

Yet another problem with the media and companies like Baby Genius portraying of this is that the results only showed an increase in IQ for about 15 minutes. There is no research to date that shows listening to Mozart, or any other music, can boost IQ permanently.

Now to the problems with the actual study itself and their results. First, they used a very small sample-size in this study. That should instantly be the first warning flag that one should wait for 34                           research on this issue before 35                           to conclusions or taking the results as fact. When you are dealing with small sample-sizes, filtering out the noise from what is actually happening is impossible in most cases. With that in 36                          , it turns out, other researchers have had very little success in replicating the original results.