Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 23 to 30.
DOES LISTENING TO MUSIC REALLY HELP YOU STUDY?
There's nothing quite like exam season on a university campus. Students turn to various vices to increase their chances of receiving a good mark. While some chug caffeine, others turn up the music as they hit the books.
Although listening to music can make studying more enjoyable, psychologists from the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences have found that this popular study habit is more distracting than beneficial.
"Multitasking is a fallacy; human beings are not capable of truly multitasking because attention is a limited resource, and you can only focus on so much without a cost”, cognitive psychologist Brian Anderson said. "So when you’re doing two things at the same time, like studying and listening to music, and one of the things requires cognitive effort, there will be a cost to how much information you can retain doing both activities.”
In basic terms of memory, Anderson explained that we do a better job of recalling information in the same conditions in which we learn the material. So when studying for an exam, it's best to mimic the exam conditions. Steven Smith, cognitive neuroscientist for the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, said, "Some people need a study place that is boring, predictable, and exactly the same so that they can concentrate, and others find it more beneficial to go to different places to study. It's true that there are different personalities, so try and find what study habit works best for you.”
(Adapted from https://liberalarts.tamu.edu/)
