题型：阅读理解 题类：常考题 难易度：普通
辽宁省实验中学、大连八中、大连二十四中、鞍山一中、东北育才学校2017-2018学年高一上学期英语期末考试试卷
Music for Humans and Humpback Whales (座头鲸)
As researchers conclude in Science, the love of music is not only a universal feature of the human species but is also deeply fixed in complex structures of the human brain and is far more ancient than previously suspected.
In the articles, researchers present various evidence to show that music-making is at once an original human “business”, and an art form with skillful performers throughout the animal kingdom.
The new reports stress that humans hold no copyright on sound wisdom, and that a number of nonhuman animals produce what can rightly be called music, rather than random sound. Recent in-depth analyses of the songs sung by humpback whales show that, even when their organ would allow them to do otherwise, the animals converge on the same choices related to sounds and beauty, and accept the same laws of song composition as those preferred by human musicians, and human ears, everywhere.
For example, male humpback whales, who spend six months of each year doing little else but singing, use rhythms (节奏) similar to those found in human music and musical phrases of similar length—a few seconds. Whales are able to make sounds over a range of at least seven octaves (八度音阶), yet they tend to move on through a song in beautiful musical intervals (间隔), rather than moving forwards madly. They mix the sounds like drums and pure tones in a ratio (比例) which agrees with that heard in much western music. They also use a favorite technique of human singers, the so-called A-B-A form, in which a theme is stated, then developed, and then returned to in slightly revised form.
Perhaps most impressive, humpback songs contain tunes that rhyme. “This suggests that whales use rhyme, the same way we do: as a technique in poem to help them remember complex materials,” the researchers write.
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