Be careful what you say around a pregnant woman. As a fetus grows inside a mother’s belly, it can hear sounds from the outside w

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问题     Be careful what you say around a pregnant woman. As a fetus grows inside a mother’s belly, it can hear sounds from the outside world—and can understand them well enough to retain memories of them after birth, according to a new research.
    【F1】It may seem incredible that fetuses(胎儿)can listen to speech within the womb(子宫), but the sound-processing parts of their brain become active in the last three months of pregnancy, and sound carries fairly well through the mother’s abdomen. " If you put your hand over your mouth and speak, that’s very similar to the situation the fetus is in," says cognitive neuroscientist Eino Partanen of the University of Helsinki. "You can hear the rhythm of speech, rhythm of music, and so on. "
    A 1988 study suggested that newborns recognize the theme song from their mother’s favorite soap opera. More recent studies have expanded on the idea of fetal learning, indicating that newborns already familiarized themselves with sounds of their parent’s native language;【F2】one showed that American newborns seem to perceive Swedish vowel sounds as unfamiliar, sucking on a high-tech pacifier to hear more of the new sounds. Swedish infants showed the same response to English vowels.
    But those studies were based on babies’ behaviors, which can be tricky to test. Partanen and his team decided instead to outfit babies with EEG sensors to look for neural traces of memories from the womb. "Once we learn a sound, if it’s repeated to us often enough, we form a memory of it, which is activated when we hear the sound again," he explains.【F3】This memory speeds up recognition of sounds in the learner’s native language and can be detected as a pattern of brain waves, even in a sleeping baby.
    【F4】The team gave expectant women(孕妇)a recording to play several times a week during their last few months of pregnancy, which included a made-up word, "tatata," repeated many times with music. Sometimes the middle syllable was varied, with a different pitch or vowel sound. By the time the babies were born, they had heard the made-up word, on average, more than 25,000 times. And when they were tested after birth, these infants’ brains recognized the word and its variations, while infants in a control group did not.
    【F5】Babies who had heard the recordings showed the neural signal for recognizing vowel and pitch changes in the made-up word, and the signal was strongest for the infants whose mothers played the recording most often. "This leads us to believe that the fetus can learn much more detailed information than we previously thought," Partanen says, "and that the memory traces are detectable after birth. "
【F4】

选项

答案该研究小组给那些怀孕的妇女提供了一段录音,让她们在孕期的最后几个月里每周都播放几次,录音中包含一个编造的词语“tatata”,这个词会伴随音乐重复播放很多遍。

解析 该句包含一个由which引导的非限制性定语从句,句子的主干部分是The team gaveexpectant women a recording to…。翻译难点在于掌握不定式结构to play several times a week,它在主句中作状语。根据语法常识,该句中不定式结构表目的。考虑到主句中句子成分较多,我们可以利用切分法,把它译成两个分句。在which引导的定语从句中,repeated many times这一过去分词结构作word的后置定语,可采用增词法为其添加主语。
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