We hear with our ears, right? Yes, but scientists have known for years that we also hear with our eyes. In a study published in 1976, researchers found that people combined both auditory cues(聽(tīng)力提示) and visual ones，like mouth and face movements, when they heard speech.
A new study that looks at a different set of sensory cues adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests such combination is natural. In a paper, Bryan Gick and Donald Derrick report that people can hear with their skin.
The researchers had volunteers listen to spoken syllables. Meanwhile, they connected the volunteers to a device that would blow a tiny puff (氣流) of air onto the skin of their hands or necks. The syllables included “ba” and “pa”, which produce brief puffs from the mouth when spoken, and “da” and “ta,” which do not produce puffs. They found that when listeners heard “da” or “ta” while a puff of air was blown onto their skin, they considered the sounds as “ba” or “pa”.
Dr. Gick said the findings were similar to those from the 1976 study, in which visual cues defeated auditory ones — volunteers listened to one syllable but thought it another because they were watching a video of mouth movements corresponding to the second syllable. In his study，he said，cues from sensory receivers on the skin defeated the ears as well. “Our skin is doing the hearing for us,” he said.
Dr. Gick noted that it would normally be rare that someone actually sensed a puff of air produced by another, although people might occasionally sense their own puffs. “What’s so persuasive about this particular effect,” he added. “is that people are picking up on this information that they don’t know they are using.” That supports the idea that combining different sensory cues is natural.
Dr. Gick said the finding also suggested that other sensory cues might be at work in speech perception(知覺(jué)) — that, as he put it, “we are these fantastic perception machines that take in all the information available to us and combine it faultlessly.”
【小題1】“Da” or “ta” were considered as “ba” or “pa” when __________.

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Modcm inventions have speeded up people’s lives amazingly. Motor-cars cover a bundred miles in little more than an hour. Aireraft cross the world a day, while computers operate at lightning speed. Indeed, this love of speed seems never-ending. Every ycar motor-cars are produced which go even faster each new computer boasts（吹噓）of saving preeious seconds in handling tasks.
All this saves timc, but at a prick.When we lose or gain half a day in speeding aeross the world in an airplane, our bodies tell us so. We get the uncomfoerable feeling known as jet-lag; our bodies feel tlru they have been left bebind in anot ar nine zoors Again pending too long at compulers resul’s in painti ninrts and fingers. Mobile phones also to dange according to some seientists; too much uss may thesmit h bul radiation into our brains, a we do not like to think about.
Howave, what do we do with the time we have saved?Certainly not or so it seems. We are so accustomed to constant activity that we find it difficult to sit and do nothing, or even just one thing at a time. Pcrhaps the days are long gone when we might listen quietly to a story on the radio, letting imavination take us into another world.
There was a time when some people’s lives were devotcd simply to the cultivation of the land or the eare of eattle. No multi-tasking there; their lives wenl on at a much gentler pace, and in a familiar pattern. There is much that we might envy about a way of life like this. Yet before we do so ,we must think of the hard tasks our ancestors faeed;:they farmed with bare hands, often lived close to hunger, and had to fashion tools from wood and stone. Modem machinery has freed peope fre that primitive existcnee.
1.The new rooucts opcome more and more time-saving beeause_________.
A.our love of speed secure never-ending
B.time is limited
C.theprices are increasingly high
D.the manufacturers boast a lot
2.What does“the days”in Paragraph 3 refer to?
A.I maginary life               B.Simple life in the past
C.Times of inventions           D.Time for constant activity
3.What is the author’s attitude towards the modem teehnology?
A.Critical            B.Objective        C.Optimistic            D.Negative
4.What does the pa mge mainly diseuss?
A.The present and past times             B.Machinary and human beings
C.Imaginations and inventions            D.Modem technology and its influenec

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Experts debunk Maya doomsday（末日） predictions -- But that hasn't stopped books, movies from cashing in.

If the ancient Maya and filmmaker Roland Emmerich are correct, the apocalypse（大災(zāi)變） will happen very fast, maybe quicker than his new 2½-hour movie.

Predictions of global ruination are rippling around the globe with seismic（地震的） force, all loosely based on a 5,000-year Maya calendar that ends Dec. 21, 2012. Countless Web sites and blogs anticipate(預(yù)料) the end of days, as do various New Age groups and would-be prophets(預(yù)言者) offering guidance and how-to tips. On Amazon.com , you can read hundreds of book titles combining the year 2012 with terms such as “apocalypse,” “catastrophe” and “end of the world.”

As always, doomsday sells — and a lot of people are buying it.

“There's the psychobabble(心理囈語(yǔ)) aspect,” said Robert Epstein, former editor of Psychology Today magazine and a lecturer at the University of California San Diego. “It's the Sigmund Freud/death wish idea: People glom onto（對(duì)…感興趣） doomsday predictions because there's some small part of them that wants to die, and die spectacularly（壯觀的）. I don't believe it, but it's one way to look at this.”

It's Emmerich's way. The German director specializes in wreaking havoc on an epic scale, from climatic cataclysm in 2004's “The Day After Tomorrow” to angry aliens and reptiles in “Independence Day” and “Godzilla.”  In “2012,” he finishes the job.

The digitized disasters of “2012” are oversized, overwrought and sometimes literally over the top, as when a humongous tsunami washes over the Himalayan mountains, whose average height exceeds 20,000 feet. Meanwhile in Los Angeles, a 10.5-magnitude earthquake — a temblor at least 30 times more powerful than any real quake ever recorded — yanks the city apart like a giant zipper, sending chunks sliding into the Pacific Ocean.

That's not physically possible, of course. Nor is a 10.5-magnitude quake, said Thomas Rockwell, a geologist at San Diego State University. To generate that much energy, “you'd need a rupture that extends all around the planet.”

All of that other stuff “is pure Hollywood bunk,” said Bernard Jackson at the UCSD Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences.

Entertaining, though, unless you happen to believe the Maya really predicted the end of the world. They didn't, said Geoff Braswell, a UCSD anthropologist. The long-count calendar doesn't signal the end of anything except the end of that particular calendar. “It's just like a car odometer. Unfortunately, hardly anybody reads ancient Mayan. Modern media hype（騙局）, on the other hand, is almost inescapable.

Nicholas Christenfeld, a professor of psychology at UCSD, suggests a more elemental human need. Being swallowed by the Earth or incinerated in a giant fireball “fits neatly with the idea that people want to believe there's a plan, that existence isn't random and pointless,” Christenfeld said.

“We all missed creation, but if we can bear witness at the other end, be part of some grand cosmic destruction, that gives life meaning,” he said. 

It helps, too, not to think very hard about the facts, said Lou Manza, a professor of psychology at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa. “These claims have been around forever, and they have all been false, 100 percent wrong,” Manza said.

Of course, prognosticators（預(yù)言者, 占卜者） usually have an explanation for that, Christenfeld said.

“They might say it was a misinterpretation,” he said. “They got the date wrong. They might claim humanity acted in time to prevent the destruction. Or faith came to the rescue because people believed something bad was going to happen, it didn't have to happen.”