Improving hearing, especially in a loud environment, is just like any other skill—it takes practice. The din(喧闹声)of a loud r

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问题     Improving hearing, especially in a loud environment, is just like any other skill—it takes practice.
    The din(喧闹声)of a loud restaurant or party can make conversation difficult for anyone— but for the elderly, these settings can make it nearly impossible. The mechanics of hearing decline with age, but the latest research focuses on another part of the problem—the slower processing speed of aging brains, which have to work harder to translate sound into intelligible language.
    Research shows that musicians are better able to pick out speech from surrounding noise as they age compared to non-musicians. And a new study of auditory training with a commercially available brain training program suggests that most people who are hard of hearing can develop the same skills. In a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists showed that people trained for 40 hours over 8 weeks with Posit Science’s "Brain Fitness" were able to pick out 41% more words from background noise compared to those who watched educational DVD’s and were quizzed on their contents after the same amount of time. The authors received no funding from the makers of the program; the study was funded by the university and the National Institutes of Health.
    The auditory training came in the form of computerized hearing tasks that primed the participants to hear better by requiring them to identify various speech sounds and distinguish between similar sounding syllables, for example, as well as repeating words and remembering stories.
    Both those who received the training and those who watched the DVDs were tested on short-term memory, brain processing speed and the ability to hear speech in noisy settings. All of the participants showed improvement in these measures, but for the first time, the scientists also documented that the sharper hearing was accompanied by earlier signaling in the brainstem. EEG electrodes on the head picked up this activity, which was related to how quickly the brain was distinguishing between sounds, such as language vs. background chatter. As the authors write in their paper, the training not only improved the ability to decipher(辨认)speech in noisy situations, it also sped up the brain’s ability to respond to it—bringing it to more "youthful" levels.
What is the main idea of this passage?

选项 A、Hearing can be improved by the auditory training.
B、Hearing can be improved by using the hearing aid.
C、All sounds can be recognized by the auditory training.
D、All sounds can be recognized by making practice.

答案A

解析 主旨大意题。作者主要叙述了听力是可以通过练习得到改善的。这一主题也在文章的开篇重点提出,故选A)。
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