CET-6 Listening Passages: The Anchoring Effect and the Brains of London Taxi Drivers

Passage One.

Can a completely random number change the way you think?

In 1974, the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed that it can.

They spun a wheel of fortune that was secretly set to stop at either ten or sixty-five.

Then they asked people what percentage of African countries were in the United Nations.

Those who saw ten guessed around twenty-five percent.

Those who saw sixty-five guessed around forty-five!

This is known as the anchoring effect.

The first number we hear becomes an anchor, and our guesses stay close to it.

Shops know this well, which is why a crossed-out high price makes a sale so tempting.

Questions nine to eleven are based on the passage you have just heard.

Question nine. What was special about the wheel used in the experiment?

Question ten. How did people who saw the higher number answer?

Question eleven. Why does the speaker mention crossed-out prices in shops?

Passage Two.

To get a licence, London taxi drivers must pass a famously difficult test called the Knowledge.

They spend three to four years learning around twenty-five thousand streets.

In 2000, the neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire and her team scanned the brains of these drivers.

The back of the hippocampus, an area linked to navigation, was larger than in other people!

And the longer someone had driven a taxi, the larger that area tended to be.

But perhaps people with a bigger hippocampus simply chose to drive taxis?

A later study compared taxi drivers with London bus drivers.

Bus drivers follow fixed routes, and they showed no such difference.

It seems the brain really does change with the way we use it.

Questions twelve to fifteen are based on the passage you have just heard.

Question twelve. What must London taxi drivers do to get a licence?

Question thirteen. What did Eleanor Maguire find in the taxi drivers' brains?

Question fourteen. Why did researchers compare taxi drivers with bus drivers?

Question fifteen. What conclusion does the speaker draw?