第二篇：
      Humans first started creating music 500,000 years ago, yet speech and language was only developed 200,000years ago. Evolutionary evidence, as interpreted by leading researchers, indicates that speech as a form ofcommunication has evolved from our original development and use of music. This explains why our music andlanguage neural networks significantly overlap, and why children who learn music become better at learning thegrammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of any language.               There has been a growing interest in the advantages that come with learning foreign languages. There are manylanguages that can benefit us in immense ways, from culture to trade—Chinese, Russian, Arabic, French and Spanishto name but a few—and what better way to ensure your child can pick up all these languages than by teaching themthe master language that transcends all others: music.
      Music training plays a key role in the development of a foreign language in its grammar, colloquialisms andvocabulary. One recent study found that when children aged nine and under were taught music for just one hour aweek, they exhibited a higher ability to learn both the grammar and the pronunciation of foreign languages, comparedto their classmates who had learned a different extracurricular activity.
       Finnish children are commonly musically trained from a young age with a playful method, but they only startschool at age seven and start language learning at nine or older. Despite this "late exposure" to everything excludingmusic skills, they commonly end up speaking three to five foreign languages. Any English-speaking person who hasever visited Finland can attest to the fact that nearly every Finnish person speaks English without any problems.
       Take Ken Stringfellow, the American singer-songwriter, as an example of the impact of music on the ability tolearn foreign languages. Ten years ago, well into his thirties, he married a French woman and subsequently picked upa whole new language from scratch. People recording with him in Paris were often amazed at how he had learned itso well without any prior background, but the research explains it. As a musician who made music from toddlerhood,he would have significantly boosted his brain’s capacity for learning the syntax, semantics and pronunciation of anynew language in adulthood.
46. What is the passage mainly about?
(A) The connection between music and language learning
(B) Why Finland is such a strong country
(C) How speaking foreign languages can benefit us
(D) The history of human languages