Taylor Swift, the seven-time Grammy winner, is known for her articulate lyrics, so there was nothing surprising about her writing a long column for The Wall Street Journal about the future of the music industry. Yet there’s reason to doubt the optimism of what she had to say.“This moment in music is so exciting because the creative avenues an artist can explore are limitless,” Swift wrote. “In this moment in music, stepping out of your comfort zone is rewarded, and sonic evolution is not only accepted ... it is celebrated. The only real risk is being too afraid to take a risk at all.”That’s hard to reconcile with Nielsen’s mid-year U.S. music report, which showed a 15 percent year-on-year drop in album sales and a 13 percent decline in digital track sales. This could be the 2013 story all over again, in which streaming services cannibalize their growth from digital downloads, whose numbers dropped for the first time ever last year, except that even including streams, album sales are down 3.3 percent so far in 2014. Streaming has grown even more than it did last year, 42 percent compared to 32 percent, but has failed to make up for a general loss of interest in music.Consider this: in 2014 to date, Americans purchased 593.6 million digital tracks and heard 70.3 million video and audio streams for a sum total of 663.9 million. In the comparable period of 2013, the total came to 731.7 million.Swift, one of the few artists able to pull off stadium tours, believes it’s all about quality. “People are still buying albums, but now they’re buying just a few of them,” she wrote. “They are buying only the ones that hit them like an arrow through the heart.”In 2000, album sales peaked at 785 million. Last year, they were down to 415.3 million. Swift is right, but for many of the artists whose albums pierce hearts like arrows, it’s too late. Sales of vinyl albums have increased 40.4 percent so far this year, according to Nielsen, and the top-selling one was guitar hero Jack White’s Lazaretto. The top 10 also includes records by the aging or dead, such as the Beatles and Bob Marley & the Wailers. More modem entries are not exactly teen sensations, either: the Black Keys, Beck and the Arctic Monkeys. None of these artists is present on the digital sales charts, including or excluding streams. The top-selling album so far this year, by a huge margin, is the saccharine soundtrack to the Disney animated hit, “Frozen”.When, like me, you’re over 40 and you believe the music industry has been in decline since in 1993 (the year Nirvana released in Utero), it’s easy to criticize the music taste of “the kids these days”，a term even the 23-year old Swift uses. My fellow dinosaurs will understand if they compare 1993’s top albums to Nielsen’s 2014 list. But these kids don’t just like to listen to different music than we do, they no longer find much worth hearing.The way the music industry works now may have something to do with that. In the old days, musicians showed their work to industry executives, the way most book authors still do to publishers (although that tradition, too, is eroding). The executives made mistakes and were credited with brilliant finds. Sometimes they followed the public taste, and sometimes they strove to shape it, taking big financial and career risks in the process. These days, according to Swift, it’s all about the social networks. “A friend of mine, who is an actress, told me that when the casting for her recent movie came down to two actresses, the casting director chose the actress with more Twitter followers,” Swift wrote. “In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans—not the other way around.”The social networks are fickle and self-consciously sarcastic (see the recent potato salad phenomenon). They are not about arrow-through-the-heart sincerity. That’s why YouTube made Psy a star, but it couldn’t have been the medium for Beatle mania. Justin Timberlake has 32.9 million Twitter followers, but he’s no Jack White.In the music industry’s heyday, it produced a lot of schlock. But it got

When a teacher says “What do you mean by that?” ，he/she is asking the student for （ ）.

Which of the following is based on the communicative view of language?

Scientists have been surprised at how deeply culture—the language we speak, the values we absorb—shapes the brain, and are rethinking findings derived from studies of Westerners. To take one recent example, a region behind the forehead called the medial prefrontal cortex supposedly represents the self: it is active when we (“we” being the Americans in the study) think of our own identity and traits. But with Chinese volunteers, the results were strikingly different. The “me” circuit hummed not only when they thought whether a particular adjective described themselves, but also when they considered whether it described their mother. The Westerners showed no such overlap between self and mom. Depending whether one lives in a culture that views the self as autonomous and unique or as connected to and part of a larger whole, this neural circuit takes on quite different functions.“Cultural neuroscience”，as this new field is called, is about discovering such differences. Some of the findings, as with the “me/mom” circuit, buttress longstanding notions of cultural differences. For instance, it is a cultural cliche that Westerners focus on individual objects while East Asians pay attention to context and background (another manifestation of the individualism- collectivism split). Sure enough, when shown complex, busy scenes, Asian-Americans and non- Asian-Americans recruited different brain regions. The Asians showed more activity in areas that process figure-ground relations—holistic context—while the Americans showed more activity in regions that recognize objects.Psychologist Nalini Ambady of Tufts found something similar when she and colleagues showed drawings of people in a submissive pose (head down, shoulders hunched) or a dominant one (arms crossed, face forward) to Japanese and Americans. The brain’s dopamine-fueled reward circuit became most active at the sight of the stance—dominant for Americans, submissive for Japanese— that each volunteer’s culture most values, they reported in 2009. This raises an obvious chicken- and-egg question, but the smart money is on culture shaping the brain, not vice versa. Cultural neuroscience wouldn’t be making waves if it found neurobiological bases only for well-known cultural differences. It is also uncovering the unexpected. For instance, a 2006 study found that native Chinese speakers use a different region of the brain to do simple arithmetic (3 + 4) or decide which number is larger than native English speakers do, even though both use Arabic numerals. The Chinese use the circuits that process visual and spatial information and plan movements (the latter may be related to the use of the abacus). But English speakers use language circuits. It is as if the West conceives numbers as just words, but the East imbues them with symbolic, spatial freight. (Insert cliche about Asian math geniuses.) “One would think that neural processes involving basic mathematical computations are universal,” says Ambady, but they “seem to be culture-specific”.Not to be the skunk at this party, but I think it’s important to ask whether neuroscience reveals anything more than we already know from, say, anthropology. For instance, it’s well known that East Asian cultures prize the collective over the individual, and that Americans do the opposite.Does identifying brain correlates of those values offer any extra insight? After all, it’s not as if anyone thought those values are the result of something in the liver.Ambady thinks cultural neuro-science does advance understanding. Take the me/mom finding, which, she argues, “attests to the strength of the overlap between self and people close to you in collectivistic cultures and the separation in individualistic cultures. It is important to push the analysis to the level of the brain." Especially when it shows how fundamental cultural differences are—so fundamental, perhaps, that “universal” notions such as human rights, democracy, and the like may be no such thing.Which of the following is closest in meaning to the underlined phrase “making waves” in

—Do you mind if I smoke here?— （ ）.

What teaching method is used by the teacher if much of his/her class time is spent on drilling sentence patterns followed by exercises like repetition, memorization, mimicry, etc?