LESSON 1: LIFE-CHANGING TECHNOLOGY

& AMAZING ABILITIES

Practice 10

Welcome to today’s lecture in our Introduction to Psychology course.

Over the last few lectures, we looked at (1) _the development of the
brain________________, and this week I want to talk about abilities.

Now, we all have various abilities, but I want to talk about two that some
people have and others don’t. These are (2) _perfect pitch___________
and (3) ___avanced language
learning____________________________ .

To begin with, people with perfect pitch can hear a (4) ___musical
nose__________ and tell you exactly what it is. According to the
magazine Psychology Today, only 1 in 10,000 people has this ability.
Mariah Carey has perfect pitch, and so did Mozart. As you probably
know, Mozart could play the violin and the keyboard at the age of five.
And he (5) _______________manage to
write____________________________Symphony at the age of eight.
He wrote amazing music for the whole of his short life. He died of (6)
_____illness________________ at the age of 35, but his music still
brings happiness to people today. Interestingly, more people have perfect
pitch in Asia. There is a possibility that this is because some languages in
Asia use different tones.

Moving on to language learning, we all have the ability to learn a

language. In fact, we all learn (7) ________at least one
language____________________, our own, to a high level. And (8)
____________________________________learn___________________
one or two foreign languages. However, some people (9) __________are
able to____________________________ languages with incredible
speed. For example, Daniel Tammet, a writer from England, can speak 10
languages. For a TV program, he went to Iceland and gave himself one
week to learn Icelandic. Amazingly, after a week, he could speak the
language (10)
__________wailling_________________________________ on national
TV. That was a real achievement.

Now I’d like to explore what is happening in the brains of people with
these amazing abilities