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  3. Mathematical ability and musical ability may not seem on the surface to be connected, but people who have researched the subject

Mathematical ability and musical ability may not seem on the surface to be connected, but people who have researched the subject

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问题    Mathematical ability and musical ability may not seem on the surface to be connected, but people who have researched the subject and studied the brain say that they are. Three quarters of the bright but speech-delayed children in the group I studied had a close relative who was an engineer, mathematician or scientist, and four fifths had a close relative who played a musical instrument. The children themselves usually took readily to math and other analytical subjects and to music.
   Black, white and Asian children in this group show the same patterns. However, it is clear that blacks have been greatly overrepresented in the development of American popular music and greatly underrepresented in such fields as mathematics, science and engineering.
   If the abilities required in analytical fields and in music are so closely related, how can there be this great discrepancy? One reason is that the development of mathematical and other such abilities requires years of formal schooling, while certain musical talents can be developed with little or no formal training, as has happened with a number of well-known black musicians.
   It is precisely in those kinds of music where one can acquire great skill without formal training that blacks have excelled popular music rather than classical music, piano rather than violin, blues rather than opera. This is readily understandable, given that most blacks, for most of American history, have not had either the money or the leisure for long years of formal study in music.
   Blacks have not merely held their own in American popular music. They have played a disproportionately large role in the development of jazz, both traditional and modem. A long string of names comes to mind—Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin, W.C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker... and so on.
   None of this indicates any special innate ability of blacks in music. On the contrary, it is perfectly consistent with blacks having no more such inborn ability than anyone else, but being limited to being able to express such ability in narrower channels than others who have had the money, the time and the formal education to spread out over a wider range of music, as well as into mathematics, science and engineering.
The word "discrepancy"(Para. 3) most probably means______.
选项 A、difference
B、excellence
C、inborn ability
D、inability
答案A
解析 含义题。文章第一段中心意思是数学能力和音乐能力有联系，文章第二段却说黑人在美国流行音乐中是主力军，然而在数学等方面却默默无闻，因此产生discrepancy。根据前文可推断discrepancy应该是“差距，差异”的意思。因此，正确答案是A。
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