单选题：(材料)回答题Speaking two languages rather than just。one has obvio

(材料)
回答题
Speaking two languages rather than just。one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of biling ualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even
shielding against dementia in old age.This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child' s academic and intellectualdevelopment.
They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual' s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn' t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive mu
scles Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists EIlen Bialystok and Michelle Martin- Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins- one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle.
In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the in marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain' s so-called executive function一 -acommand system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding
tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding informationin mind一-like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.
Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects 0f cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be
inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a |ine through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.
The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. "Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often一you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language," says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. "It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving." In a study comparing German-ltalian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his collagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better,but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.
What can be inferred from the passage about the traditional view of bilingualism? A．Bilinguals are cognitively disadvantaged
B．The pros of bilingualism outweigh the con.
C．Bilinguals have advantages over monolinguals.
D．Bilinguals and monolinguals are intellectually similar.