English Language · English

The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage. For years, movies and television series like Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) paint an unrealistic picture of the 'science of voices.' In the 1994 movie Clear and Present Danger an expert listens to a brief recorded utterance and declares that the speaker is 'Cuban, aged 35 to 45, educated in the […] eastern United States.' The recording is then fed to a supercomputer that matches the voice to that of a suspect, concluding that the probability of correct identification is 90%. This sequence sums up a good number of misimpressions about forensic phonetics, which have led to errors in real-life justice. Indeed, that movie scene exemplifies the so-called 'CSI effect'—the phenomenon in which judges hold unrealistic expectations of the capabilities of forensic science.