Ielts reading recent actual tests (2016 2017) with answers published by ieltsmaterial com

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Section D:
Schwartz's study also casts light on the long-running question of whether 
animals understand or appreciate music. Despite the apparent abundance of "music" in 
the natural world- birdsong, whalesong, wolf howls, synchronized chimpanzee hooting 
previous studies have found that many laboratory animals don't show a great affinity for 
the human variety of music making. Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott of Harvard argued 
in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience that animals don't create or perceive music the 
way we do. The act that laboratory monkeys can show recognition of human tunes is 
evidence, they say, of shared general features of the auditory system, not any specific 
chimpanzee musical ability. As for birds, those most musical beasts, they generally 
recognize their own tunes - a narrow repertoire - but don't generate novel melodies like 
we do. There are no avian Mozarts. 
But what's been played to the animals, Schwartz notes, is human music. If animals evolve 
preferences for sound as we do - based upon the soundscape in which they live - then 
their "music" would be fundamentally different from ours. In the same way our scales 
derive from human utterances, a cat's idea of a good tune would derive from yowls and 
meows. To demonstrate that animals don't appreciate sounds the way we do, we'd need 
evidence that they don't respond to "music" constructed from their own sound 
environment. 
Section E:
No matter how the connection between language and music is parsed, what 
is apparent is that our sense of music, even our love for it, is as deeply rooted in our 
biology and in our brains as language is. This is most obvious with babies, says Sandra 
Trehub at the University of Toronto, who also published a paper in the Nature 
Neuroscience special issue. 
For babies, music and speech are on a continuum. Mothers use musical speech to 
"regulate infants' emotional states." Trehub says. Regardless of what language they 
speak, the voice all mothers use with babies is the same: "something between speech 
and song." This kind of communication "puts the baby in a trance-like state, which may 
proceed to sleep or extended periods of rapture." So if the babies of the world could 
understand the latest research on language and music, they probably wouldn't be very 

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