雅思阅读 39: The Song That Won't Stop（停不下来的歌）

改编自 UNSW / Psychology of Music（2025-2026年）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/10/why-do-some-songs-get-stuck-in-our-heads-so-easily-the-science-of-earworms

Reading Passage

A. Almost everyone has been there: a fragment of a tune begins to play, uninvited, behind the eyes, and loops itself over and over for an hour or a whole afternoon. It might be a television jingle, a nursery rhyme learned in childhood, or the chorus of a pop song heard on the car radio that morning. The experience is so common that it has its own informal name — the earworm — and a more clinical one, "involuntary musical imagery". It can be mildly pleasant, actively distracting, or almost maddening, depending on the tune and the listener; the same melody that charms one person may drive another from a room. Far from a trivial annoyance, these intrusive tunes have become a serious object of study, because they expose something surprising about how memory works when no one is trying to recall anything at all. An earworm is, in effect, a window onto the machinery that the brain uses to store, retrieve and replay sound, and researchers have begun to map, with real precision, what makes one melody stick and another slide away, sometimes within the space of a single, well-placed note.

B. Not every song is equally contagious. Analyses of more than three thousand reported earworms, collected by asking volunteers to keep diaries and to name the tunes that plagued them, have found that the melodies most likely to lodge themselves share a handful of features. They tend to move at a fairly brisk tempo; their melodic shape uses intervals that are common enough to feel familiar yet varied enough to hold attention; and, most importantly, they contain a fragment that repeats immediately, with no gap between one hearing and the next — the classic pop chorus, in which the same hook returns again and again, as in a certain ubiquitous song about a shark. An unusual leap or a phrase that breaks an established pattern just slightly can also help, by creating a small surprise that the brain wants to resolve. Familiarity and popularity matter too. Songs that were high in the charts or played heavily on the radio at the time people heard them are over-represented in earworm reports, because the brain has simply met them more often and stored them more strongly; a tune heard a dozen times on the commute is, predictably, far more likely to return than one heard once, quietly, at a concert.

C. The reason the replay feels so vivid lies in the brain. When people are shown a familiar tune and asked to imagine it, the same auditory regions that light up when they actually hear music become active — particularly the higher-order auditory association cortex, which handles the more complex processing of melody rather than the mere detection of raw sound. The distinction between hearing a sound and recalling it is, at neural level, far smaller than common sense suggests; an earworm is not an abstract idea of a song but something close to a silent hearing, which is why it can be mistaken, fleetingly, for a real sound coming from elsewhere. Nor does the brain store a whole song like a track on a phone. It keeps music as a network of linked fragments — a phrase, a rhythm, a chorus — any one of which can be triggered and replayed on its own, which is why an earworm is almost always a looping segment rather than a complete piece running dutifully from beginning to end, as a played recording would.

D. Many earworms are set off by something external. Recent exposure is the most obvious trigger: hear a jingle in the supermarket or a ringtone on a stranger's phone, and it may accompany you all the way home. But researchers have also noticed a subtler effect, related to the well-known tendency of the mind to hold on to unfinished tasks. A jingle you have only ever heard a snippet of, or a song whose ending you never quite learned, seems to loop more stubbornly than one you know completely, as if the brain is trying and failing to close an open loop it has been unable to finish. Mood and state of mind play their part as well. Earworms are reported more often by people who are bored, slightly anxious, or resting, when attention has little else to occupy it; and people with musical training or a particular sensitivity to music also experience them more frequently, and not always with pleasure — a fact that says something about how easily the ear rewards the attentive ear.

E. For the great majority of people, an earworm is a harmless, even amusing quirk of memory, and there are simple ways to dislodge it. Chewing gum, which engages the same inner-speech system that the looping melody uses, has been shown in experiments to reduce the effect; deliberately finishing the tune through to its very end, or replacing it with a different, more absorbing piece, can also break the cycle. Yet the phenomenon sits on a spectrum, and at its severe end intrusive tunes merge into something more troubling. A small number of people are plagued by repeated music that will not stop and causes real distress, a pattern that overlaps with conditions in which unwanted thoughts recur and are hard to dismiss, and that can interfere with sleep and concentration. Studying the cheerful, everyday earworm, researchers argue, is not merely a distraction. It offers a controlled way to watch involuntary memory in action — and, in doing so, to understand both why a three-note jingle can haunt a whole morning and, at the limits of the spectrum, how memory can turn against the mind it serves, refusing to let go.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The musical features that make a tune stick ii. Why the replay feels so real — the brain's response iii. The history of pop music in the charts iv. Triggers, moods and the unfinished loop v. How to record music in a studio vi. When the harmless quirk becomes a problem vii. Why chewing gum damages the teeth

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. What is an "earworm"? A. A parasite that infects the ear. B. A tune that repeats involuntarily in the mind. C. A type of modern pop song. D. A technique for learning music.

6. According to the studies, which feature makes a song most likely to stick? A. A very slow and quiet tempo. B. A fragment that repeats immediately without a gap. C. Lyrics written in Latin. D. A length of over ten minutes.

7. What happens in the brain when someone imagines a familiar tune? A. No brain regions are active. B. The same auditory regions used in listening become active. C. Only the visual cortex lights up. D. The brain shuts down completely.

8. Why might a half-known song loop more stubbornly? A. The brain tries to close an unfinished loop. B. It is too long to remember. C. The brain finds it boring. D. It is played too loudly.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. The brain stores a song as a complete track running from start to finish.
10. Familiar, heavily played songs are over-represented among earworms.
11. Earworms are reported more often when people are bored or slightly anxious.
12. Chewing gum has been shown to worsen earworms.
13. Most people who experience earworms have a serious mental illness.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The brain stores music as a network of linked (14) __________ rather than a whole track. A common way to break the loop is to chew (15) __________, which engages the inner-speech system.

答案与解析

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