IELTS CAM Inspired 20 - Reading Test 2 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Online CAM Inspired 20 - Reading Test 2 được lấy từ cuốn sách IELTS CAM Inspired 20 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking, kèm answer key và list từ vựng IELTS cần học trong bài đọc.
IELTS Mock Test 20 - Reading Test 2 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 6
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
Manatees
Appearance
• look almost the same as sirenes, apart from the shape of the
1.
— broad and blunt in the manatee, but narrowing to a point in the sirene
Movement
• have fewer bones in the neck than most mammals
• unable to move the head sideways, so must swing right round to face one side, with the
2.
doing the steering
• pick up disturbances in the water nearby by means of the
3.
on the skin
Feeding
• feed for the most part on plants that grow underwater, above all
4.
• pull food from the seabed and grip it using the
5.
Breathing
• surface for air every few minutes when active and roughly every twenty minutes when asleep
• can adjust the
6.
of the body by tightening the diaphragm to trap gas inside
Question 7 - 13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
7
The reef manatee spends its whole life in salt water.
8
In cold conditions the mainland subspecies of the reef manatee retreats to warmer water, including water heated by power stations.
9
The number of Kalari manatees living inland has grown in recent years.
10
The Selvana manatee is the largest of the three manatee species.
11
The scale of the losses among Selvana manatees in the mid-twentieth century was not established until many years afterwards.
12
It is now illegal to hunt the Kalari manatee throughout the countries where it occurs.
13
The reef manatee population is expected to stay stable over the coming decades.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 16
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F.
14
a description of the sorts of activity people turn to instead of the task they are avoiding
15
examples of physical ailments commonly reported by frequent procrastinators
16
a link between delaying academic work and dishonest conduct
Question 17 - 22
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Why we put things off
Contrary to what many assume, procrastination springs neither from simple nor from clumsy scheduling; science instead traces it to how badly we regulate our own . We are quickest to postpone work we dislike, above all when merely dwelling on it eats into our or puts us on edge. Brain scans support this, showing differences in the areas that keep our feelings steady and register danger. Demanding jobs that stir up strong feelings — preparing to sit an , say — are among the easiest to put off. Those most given to delay are frequently perfectionists, or else people whose is low. Avoiding a dreaded task strips away the bad feelings attached to it, and this relief is so that it teaches us to keep delaying, even though the boost never lasts.
Question 23 - 24
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO comparisons between employees who often procrastinate and those who do not are mentioned in the text?
A
They form worse relationships with the people they work with.
B
They earn a lower income.
C
They are less satisfied with their working lives.
D
They stay in their jobs for shorter periods.
E
The standard of their work is lower.
Question 25 - 26
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO recommendations for getting out of a cycle of procrastination does the writer give?
A
rewarding yourself each time you complete a task
B
breaking large jobs into smaller targets
C
shielding yourself from things that break your concentration
D
being gentle with yourself rather than critical
E
ranking your tasks in order of importance
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 32
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
27
The verdicts Brandt announced during that opening match were the machine's decisions, not his own.
28
Despite the bowlers' complaints, the Board left the corridor's dimensions exactly as before.
29
Vance is convinced that ridding the game of its disputes will make it better.
30
The years in which very fast bowling prevailed made the game more entertaining to watch.
31
Kessler's staff argued sharply among themselves over the proposed changes to the bat.
32
Corridors of an unusual shape have already been used in real matches.
Question 33 - 37
Complete the summary using the list of phrases, A-H, below.
Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes on your answer sheet.
The umpire's calls
Even after UmpVision was introduced, the Board still expected human officials to call out each decision aloud, just as they had in their . What that job had always demanded, until now, was a as to whether a delivery counted as fair. A ball is fair unless it passes beyond a stretching from the ground to roughly the height of the batter's shoulder, within which the batter can play a stroke.
about such rulings were once a routine feature of the sport, though the flat prohibition on manhandling an official has long been accepted. What set Brandt's first match apart was that his calls drew from the players.
A
notional area
B
tactical planning
C
personal judgement
D
general approval
E
earlier practice
F
frequent disagreements
G
marked line
H
complete quiet
Question 38 - 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
38
In the fifth paragraph, what point does the writer make about UmpVision?
A
It is certain to get important decisions wrong.
B
It will cause human umpires to disappear.
C
It may take away part of what makes the game enjoyable.
D
It may lead to demands for the sport's rules to change.
39
What does Nadia Kessler say lay behind the introduction of UmpVision?
A
It was regarded within the Board as a gamble with no certain result.
B
It was meant to help the sport keep the younger following it feared losing.
C
It was prompted by a shift in how people think about the purpose of sport.
D
It was designed to match innovations adopted by other sports.
40
What is the writer's purpose in quoting Marchetti and Rees?
A
to suggest that being accurate is not the same as being enjoyable
B
to show that views on technology differ greatly
C
to claim that people expect too much from sport
D
to imply that the sport needs to attract more spectators
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Manatees
Manatees, sometimes called sea cows, are aquatic mammals placed in a group known as the Nerentia, which also takes in the sirenes. The two are easily confused, being much the same in size, colour and shape, and each carries supple flippers in place of front legs. They differ at the head: a manatee's snout is broad and rounded, while a sirene's tapers to a narrower tip. Three kinds of manatee are recognised — the reef manatee (Nerea litoralis), the Kalari manatee (Nerea kalari) and the Selvana manatee (Nerea selvana).
In a departure from most mammals, which carry seven bones in the neck, a manatee has just five. So short a neck lets it raise and lower its head yet never swing it from side to side; to look left or right it must turn its whole body, and it is the flippers that guide the movement. Propulsion is left to the tail alone, for the hind limbs have vanished, though a pair of pelvic bones survives — a trace of the manatee's descent from four-legged ancestors that took to the water. Something of the elephant clings to it, too, in skin just as thick and creased; scattered across it are fine bristles, through which the manatee picks up movements in the nearby water.
A manatee's diet is built largely around algae and other soft water plants. They graze for perhaps six hours a day, wrenching up vegetation as they go, and may eat as much as a tenth of their body weight in a day. Not every species keeps to plants: the Kalari manatee is omnivorous, small amounts of crustaceans and fish forming part of its diet, whereas the reef and Selvana manatees are strict herbivores.
A manatee's teeth are molars one and all — flat, rounded and made for grinding. Because the water plants they feed on are so abrasive, those teeth wear away and drop out over time, and to keep pace the animal grows fresh molars that are pushed steadily forward to replace whatever is lost. Front cutting teeth for seizing food are absent; in their place the manatee works its supple lips, tearing plants loose from the bed of the sea.
Aquatic through and through, manatees are nonetheless mammals, and so must surface to breathe. A waking animal generally comes up every three to five minutes, though it can hold its breath far longer. Sleep changes the rhythm: an adult may stay submerged for eight to ten hours, rising for air only about every twenty minutes, while a busy manatee breathes more often. Breathing seems to serve a second purpose, that of trimming the animal's buoyancy — by tightening the diaphragm it forces gas into folds of the large intestine and holds it there, which helps keep it afloat.
Largest of the three is the reef manatee, which approaches four metres and a weight near 600 kilogrammes. Fresh water and salt are all one to it, and it uses coastal mangroves and coral reefs as readily as rivers, lakes and inland lagoons. The species has two subspecies. The Sabar manatee ranges from the Sabar Islands down to the coast of Doran, whereas the Doran manatee holds to the mainland waters of Doran, only the odd individual straying as far as the Sabar Islands. Winter tends to pin the Doran manatee within Doran, and once the water drops below 18 degrees it withdraws to spots kept warm by nature or by chance — among them the heated outflows of power stations.
Close to three metres itself, the Kalari manatee occupies the sea along a coast running from Mora in the north to Bansu in the south; rivers suit it no less, and it has been logged far inland, in such landlocked countries as Keshan. The Selvana manatee is smaller than either, though 'small' means little for so bulky a creature, coming to about two metres and 300 kilogrammes. Warmth, calm and shallow water are what it looks for — nothing below 24 degrees — and it keeps entirely to fresh water, in the Selva Basin and the neighbouring states of Corda, Ubari and Pell.
Endangerment, or a sharpening danger of it, now hangs over every manatee species. The Kalari and the Selvana manatees are both entered as Vulnerable on the list kept by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Some 120,000 Selvana manatees are reckoned to have been killed between 1940 and 1960, taken for meat, fat and hides that were then turned into leather. The Kalari manatee's recent losses have been laid to accidental capture in fishing nets and to hunting, though to kill one is now unlawful in every country where it lives.
A step above sits the reef manatee, whose two subspecies are both classed as Endangered, each forecast to fall by some 30% across the coming three decades. A review of close to 2,000 recorded cases of marine mammals caught in nets or swallowing plastic in the region's waters between 2010 and 2021 turned up manatees in no fewer than 600. For the Doran manatee, collisions with boats kill most often; in answer, a number of districts now cap boat speeds right through the winter, leaving the unhurried animals more time to move clear.
A psychologist explains why we put off important tasks and how we can break this habit
A
A. To procrastinate is to postpone something that genuinely needs doing, typically by turning instead to activities that feel lighter, pleasanter and less pressing. It is a habit none of us entirely escapes. Perhaps we are drafting an awkward reply to a friend we are about to disappoint, or assembling a major report for our studies or our job; whatever the task, we busy ourselves avoiding it even though, somewhere inside, we know the sensible course would be to simply begin. Scolding ourselves, sadly, does nothing to prevent the next bout — indeed, few responses are more counterproductive. Why should any of this concern us? Because, as my own work has demonstrated, putting things off costs us far more than lost hours; it keeps company with a whole range of other difficulties.
B
Popular opinion pins procrastination on idleness or an inability to organise time, yet neither explanation stands up. What the scientific evidence points to instead is a failure to manage our moods. The link makes sense once we notice how readily we shelve jobs we simply have no appetite for. Should merely picturing a task chip away at our sense of self-worth, or leave us feeling anxious, the pull towards delay grows all the stronger. This is borne out by brain-imaging research: among people who procrastinate habitually, the regions that handle the spotting of threats and the steadying of our moods turn out to look measurably unlike those same regions in people who rarely put things off.
C
The likeliest candidates for delay are jobs that feel emotionally charged or hard going, and revising for an examination is a textbook case. A fragile sense of self-esteem makes the habit more common, and so does perfectionism, since perfectionists live in fear that others will find fault with what they produce. The reasoning is plain enough: a report never finished, or home repairs never begun, is work that nobody can yet judge. To dodge the task is also to dodge the disagreeable feelings tied to it, and because that escape feels rewarding, we are slowly conditioned to reach for delay whenever our mood wants mending. Turning to something more enjoyable delivers a further lift. Over the longer term, though, this is a poor way to keep our moods in check, for the 'mood repair' it offers is only fleeting. What usually comes next is guilt, which both sinks the mood lower and tightens the grip of the very habit behind it.
D
Why should all this trouble us? Pressed to name the price of procrastination, most people picture a loss of output, and the evidence bears that out: delay has been shown to drag down how well students perform. Yet the harm spreads beyond coursework. Tracking some 2,500 Dutch undergraduates across a single academic year, researchers found that those who admitted delaying their university work were also readier to slip into academic wrongdoing, from copying to passing off others' writing as their own. The behaviour bound most tightly to procrastination, though, was the invention of dishonest excuses to prise extra days out of a deadline. A similar pattern surfaces at work. Employees, on average, let close to a fifth of each working day drain away into delay, and the consequences are again unwelcome: a survey of more than 17,000 Canadian workers showed that self-described regular procrastinators earned less and clung to their jobs less securely, with yearly earnings sliding by roughly CA$12,000 for every single-point rise on a scale of chronic procrastination.
E
Health and well-being suffer alongside all this. A leaning towards delay travels with poorer mental health, depression and anxiety included. Pooling my studies, I have found that habitual procrastinators report a greater load of physical complaints — headaches, coughs and colds, and stomach trouble among them — while also carrying more stress and sleeping badly. Wholesome routines such as balanced eating and steady exercise are the first to lapse, and when pressure mounts these people lean more often on self-defeating ways of coping. One project of mine, following roughly 850 volunteers, showed that a disposition to procrastinate brought a 58% greater risk of poor cardiac health, even after other features of personality and background had been allowed for.
F
One way out of this self-feeding trap is to grow more skilful at handling what we feel. A sensible first move is to take charge of our surroundings and of the way we frame the task ahead. A number of research-backed techniques exist for beating back the distractions that flood our minds at exactly the moment we ought to be bearing down on the job in front of us. Calling to mind why a task genuinely matters and where its worth lies, for one, can warm our feelings toward it. Self-forgiveness and a measure of compassion after a bout of delay help, too, in loosening the cycle: we can own up to feeling bad without tipping into harsh self-reproach. Recalling that we are neither the first to have delayed nor the last blunts the sting of the criticism we aim at ourselves — and all of this makes the return to work that much smoother.
Not long ago, in a second-tier fixture of the Halcyon Cricket League, an umpire called Tomas Brandt became the first official anywhere to hand the hardest part of his job to a machine. Rather than decide for himself whether a delivery had passed too far from the batter to count as fair, Brandt took each verdict through an earpiece linked to UmpVision, a device built around radar once used to follow aircraft. Bolted to the roof of the main stand, it resembled a narrow grey case with a single amber lens that never seemed to blink.
UmpVision had been commissioned by the Halcyon League Board, which was keen that the announcing stay in human hands, as spectators were used to. So when the opening delivery arrived, a recorded voice in Brandt's ear pronounced it fair, and Brandt repeated the call aloud. Judging such things had always rested on the umpire's eye. A delivery is ruled a wide*, an illegal ball, when it slips outside an imaginary corridor beside the batter, a lane perhaps a metre across running from the ground to shoulder height, within which the ball can reasonably be reached. On that first evening, as Brandt echoed the machine's calls, not one player muttered, protested, or raised an eyebrow.
For the better part of two centuries, that thin strip of doubt has been the beating heart of the game. Bowlers have appealed, captains have marched up to query a ruling, and countless quarrels have turned on whether a ball strayed beyond the batter's reach. The etiquette has shifted over the years. A player today may voice fierce disagreement, yet the unwritten law holds firm: you never abuse an official in person, and you never lay a hand on one. Once UmpVision began delivering its verdicts, though, the quarrels simply died away.
In UmpVision's first season, several bowlers grumbled about calls that struck them as odd, and the Board responded by quietly adjusting the boundaries of the corridor; by the next season the general view was that the system had become remarkably consistent, accurate to within a centimetre or two. Roderick Vance, its chief executive, puts it plainly: it will take the arguments out of cricket, and the game will be better for it. Whether those arguments were ever a fault to be corrected, or the mark of something human in the sport, is the real question.
A human being, at any rate, answers back. Devon Aldous, who coaches in the northern division, told me that UmpVision does just what it was built to do, yet also called it merciless and hair-splitting, almost legalistic. Vance trained as a barrister, Aldous remarked. More than a few bowlers say the machine's sense of a fair ball feels tighter than any umpire's ever did. Aldous had bowled at the top level himself, and back then officials made allowances for craft: land it where you meant to, and it was given fair even if it slipped an inch past the line. A conversation went on between bowler and umpire.
The person the Board put in charge of the trial, its head of cricket operations, is Nadia Kessler. As she tells it, UmpVision belonged to a wider push to make cricket more thrilling, driven by administrators' fear of losing the young, the way horse racing and boxing have. They began by asking supporters which sort of cricket excited them most, and the answers all pointed one way: more scoring, more sharp fielding, more running between the wickets. Cricket of that kind had barely been seen since the 1970s, when ferociously quick bowling, hard to score off and hard to control, came to dominate and ground many matches down into a war of watchful defence, extras, and the occasional heave over the ropes.
Kessler's team had hunted for every conceivable remedy. Nothing was off the table; they weighed reshaping the bat, shifting the boundary ropes, even redrawing the markings on the pitch. One by one those notions were discarded, and UmpVision alone survived as the instrument that could genuinely bring change. Get the technology right, Kessler argues, and you can feed it whatever definition of a fair ball you like. You could make the corridor a wedge, a diamond, or something shaped like a boot; as the game shifts across the decades, the system can be told to shift with it.
Across the past twenty years, one sport after another has surrendered its judgement calls to machinery. Football uses video review to settle offside; tennis has electronic tracking for line calls; rugby leans on a television match official to judge whether a try was grounded. Most followers welcome it, even where the exactness sometimes creates trouble. Yet every one of those cases turns on something solid: a line, a try-line, a point of contact, with edges as clean as the frets on a guitar. A wide is nothing of the sort. A little latitude in calling it has long been quietly prized.
I wrote to Ivo Marchetti, a philosopher at Ashcombe University, to ask what he made of it all. Barely a morning passes when I don't lie awake going over the reasons this whole robot-umpire business is such a mistake, he answered. It was, he added, one more attempt to hand the difficult judgements of living over to a formula. Perhaps he is right. We turn to cricket to pass the time, not to spend it efficiently. A number of players I met were no fonder of the machines, doubting that precision is what the game lacks. Everyone wants technology to make things flawless, said Callum Rees, who turns out for a southern county, but life is not flawless. A flawless world would be strange: your side always wins, the job always goes smoothly, there is always cash in your pocket, the car never lets you down. What would be left to talk about?
*wide: a delivery judged to have passed too far from the batter to be played with a normal stroke, for which the batting side is awarded a run.
Manatees, sometimes called sea cows, are aquatic mammals placed in a group known as the Nerentia, which also takes in the sirenes. The two are easily confused, being much the same in size, colour and shape, and each carries supple flippers in place of front legs. They differ at the head: a manatee's snout is broad and rounded, while a sirene's tapers to a narrower tip. Three kinds of manatee are recognised — the reef manatee (Nerea litoralis), the Kalari manatee (Nerea kalari) and the Selvana manatee (Nerea selvana).
In a departure from most mammals, which carry seven bones in the neck, a manatee has just five. So short a neck lets it raise and lower its head yet never swing it from side to side; to look left or right it must turn its whole body, and it is the flippers that guide the movement. Propulsion is left to the tail alone, for the hind limbs have vanished, though a pair of pelvic bones survives — a trace of the manatee's descent from four-legged ancestors that took to the water. Something of the elephant clings to it, too, in skin just as thick and creased; scattered across it are fine bristles, through which the manatee picks up movements in the nearby water.
A manatee's diet is built largely around algae and other soft water plants. They graze for perhaps six hours a day, wrenching up vegetation as they go, and may eat as much as a tenth of their body weight in a day. Not every species keeps to plants: the Kalari manatee is omnivorous, small amounts of crustaceans and fish forming part of its diet, whereas the reef and Selvana manatees are strict herbivores.
A manatee's teeth are molars one and all — flat, rounded and made for grinding. Because the water plants they feed on are so abrasive, those teeth wear away and drop out over time, and to keep pace the animal grows fresh molars that are pushed steadily forward to replace whatever is lost. Front cutting teeth for seizing food are absent; in their place the manatee works its supple lips, tearing plants loose from the bed of the sea.
Aquatic through and through, manatees are nonetheless mammals, and so must surface to breathe. A waking animal generally comes up every three to five minutes, though it can hold its breath far longer. Sleep changes the rhythm: an adult may stay submerged for eight to ten hours, rising for air only about every twenty minutes, while a busy manatee breathes more often. Breathing seems to serve a second purpose, that of trimming the animal's buoyancy — by tightening the diaphragm it forces gas into folds of the large intestine and holds it there, which helps keep it afloat.
Largest of the three is the reef manatee, which approaches four metres and a weight near 600 kilogrammes. Fresh water and salt are all one to it, and it uses coastal mangroves and coral reefs as readily as rivers, lakes and inland lagoons. The species has two subspecies. The Sabar manatee ranges from the Sabar Islands down to the coast of Doran, whereas the Doran manatee holds to the mainland waters of Doran, only the odd individual straying as far as the Sabar Islands. Winter tends to pin the Doran manatee within Doran, and once the water drops below 18 degrees it withdraws to spots kept warm by nature or by chance — among them the heated outflows of power stations.
Close to three metres itself, the Kalari manatee occupies the sea along a coast running from Mora in the north to Bansu in the south; rivers suit it no less, and it has been logged far inland, in such landlocked countries as Keshan. The Selvana manatee is smaller than either, though 'small' means little for so bulky a creature, coming to about two metres and 300 kilogrammes. Warmth, calm and shallow water are what it looks for — nothing below 24 degrees — and it keeps entirely to fresh water, in the Selva Basin and the neighbouring states of Corda, Ubari and Pell.
Endangerment, or a sharpening danger of it, now hangs over every manatee species. The Kalari and the Selvana manatees are both entered as Vulnerable on the list kept by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Some 120,000 Selvana manatees are reckoned to have been killed between 1940 and 1960, taken for meat, fat and hides that were then turned into leather. The Kalari manatee's recent losses have been laid to accidental capture in fishing nets and to hunting, though to kill one is now unlawful in every country where it lives.
A step above sits the reef manatee, whose two subspecies are both classed as Endangered, each forecast to fall by some 30% across the coming three decades. A review of close to 2,000 recorded cases of marine mammals caught in nets or swallowing plastic in the region's waters between 2010 and 2021 turned up manatees in no fewer than 600. For the Doran manatee, collisions with boats kill most often; in answer, a number of districts now cap boat speeds right through the winter, leaving the unhurried animals more time to move clear.
B. Popular opinion pins procrastination on idleness or an inability to organise time, yet neither explanation stands up. What the scientific evidence points to instead is a failure to manage our moods. The link makes sense once we notice how readily we shelve jobs we simply have no appetite for. Should merely picturing a task chip away at our sense of self-worth, or leave us feeling anxious, the pull towards delay grows all the stronger. This is borne out by brain-imaging research: among people who procrastinate habitually, the regions that handle the spotting of threats and the steadying of our moods turn out to look measurably unlike those same regions in people who rarely put things off.
C. The likeliest candidates for delay are jobs that feel emotionally charged or hard going, and revising for an examination is a textbook case. A fragile sense of self-esteem makes the habit more common, and so does perfectionism, since perfectionists live in fear that others will find fault with what they produce. The reasoning is plain enough: a report never finished, or home repairs never begun, is work that nobody can yet judge. To dodge the task is also to dodge the disagreeable feelings tied to it, and because that escape feels rewarding, we are slowly conditioned to reach for delay whenever our mood wants mending. Turning to something more enjoyable delivers a further lift. Over the longer term, though, this is a poor way to keep our moods in check, for the 'mood repair' it offers is only fleeting. What usually comes next is guilt, which both sinks the mood lower and tightens the grip of the very habit behind it.
D. Why should all this trouble us? Pressed to name the price of procrastination, most people picture a loss of output, and the evidence bears that out: delay has been shown to drag down how well students perform. Yet the harm spreads beyond coursework. Tracking some 2,500 Dutch undergraduates across a single academic year, researchers found that those who admitted delaying their university work were also readier to slip into academic wrongdoing, from copying to passing off others' writing as their own. The behaviour bound most tightly to procrastination, though, was the invention of dishonest excuses to prise extra days out of a deadline. A similar pattern surfaces at work. Employees, on average, let close to a fifth of each working day drain away into delay, and the consequences are again unwelcome: a survey of more than 17,000 Canadian workers showed that self-described regular procrastinators earned less and clung to their jobs less securely, with yearly earnings sliding by roughly CA$12,000 for every single-point rise on a scale of chronic procrastination.
E. Health and well-being suffer alongside all this. A leaning towards delay travels with poorer mental health, depression and anxiety included. Pooling my studies, I have found that habitual procrastinators report a greater load of physical complaints — headaches, coughs and colds, and stomach trouble among them — while also carrying more stress and sleeping badly. Wholesome routines such as balanced eating and steady exercise are the first to lapse, and when pressure mounts these people lean more often on self-defeating ways of coping. One project of mine, following roughly 850 volunteers, showed that a disposition to procrastinate brought a 58% greater risk of poor cardiac health, even after other features of personality and background had been allowed for.
F. One way out of this self-feeding trap is to grow more skilful at handling what we feel. A sensible first move is to take charge of our surroundings and of the way we frame the task ahead. A number of research-backed techniques exist for beating back the distractions that flood our minds at exactly the moment we ought to be bearing down on the job in front of us. Calling to mind why a task genuinely matters and where its worth lies, for one, can warm our feelings toward it. Self-forgiveness and a measure of compassion after a bout of delay help, too, in loosening the cycle: we can own up to feeling bad without tipping into harsh self-reproach. Recalling that we are neither the first to have delayed nor the last blunts the sting of the criticism we aim at ourselves — and all of this makes the return to work that much smoother.
Not long ago, in a second-tier fixture of the Halcyon Cricket League, an umpire called Tomas Brandt became the first official anywhere to hand the hardest part of his job to a machine. Rather than decide for himself whether a delivery had passed too far from the batter to count as fair, Brandt took each verdict through an earpiece linked to UmpVision, a device built around radar once used to follow aircraft. Bolted to the roof of the main stand, it resembled a narrow grey case with a single amber lens that never seemed to blink.
UmpVision had been commissioned by the Halcyon League Board, which was keen that the announcing stay in human hands, as spectators were used to. So when the opening delivery arrived, a recorded voice in Brandt's ear pronounced it fair, and Brandt repeated the call aloud. Judging such things had always rested on the umpire's eye. A delivery is ruled a wide*, an illegal ball, when it slips outside an imaginary corridor beside the batter, a lane perhaps a metre across running from the ground to shoulder height, within which the ball can reasonably be reached. On that first evening, as Brandt echoed the machine's calls, not one player muttered, protested, or raised an eyebrow.
For the better part of two centuries, that thin strip of doubt has been the beating heart of the game. Bowlers have appealed, captains have marched up to query a ruling, and countless quarrels have turned on whether a ball strayed beyond the batter's reach. The etiquette has shifted over the years. A player today may voice fierce disagreement, yet the unwritten law holds firm: you never abuse an official in person, and you never lay a hand on one. Once UmpVision began delivering its verdicts, though, the quarrels simply died away.
In UmpVision's first season, several bowlers grumbled about calls that struck them as odd, and the Board responded by quietly adjusting the boundaries of the corridor; by the next season the general view was that the system had become remarkably consistent, accurate to within a centimetre or two. Roderick Vance, its chief executive, puts it plainly: it will take the arguments out of cricket, and the game will be better for it. Whether those arguments were ever a fault to be corrected, or the mark of something human in the sport, is the real question.
A human being, at any rate, answers back. Devon Aldous, who coaches in the northern division, told me that UmpVision does just what it was built to do, yet also called it merciless and hair-splitting, almost legalistic. Vance trained as a barrister, Aldous remarked. More than a few bowlers say the machine's sense of a fair ball feels tighter than any umpire's ever did. Aldous had bowled at the top level himself, and back then officials made allowances for craft: land it where you meant to, and it was given fair even if it slipped an inch past the line. A conversation went on between bowler and umpire.
The person the Board put in charge of the trial, its head of cricket operations, is Nadia Kessler. As she tells it, UmpVision belonged to a wider push to make cricket more thrilling, driven by administrators' fear of losing the young, the way horse racing and boxing have. They began by asking supporters which sort of cricket excited them most, and the answers all pointed one way: more scoring, more sharp fielding, more running between the wickets. Cricket of that kind had barely been seen since the 1970s, when ferociously quick bowling, hard to score off and hard to control, came to dominate and ground many matches down into a war of watchful defence, extras, and the occasional heave over the ropes.
Kessler's team had hunted for every conceivable remedy. Nothing was off the table; they weighed reshaping the bat, shifting the boundary ropes, even redrawing the markings on the pitch. One by one those notions were discarded, and UmpVision alone survived as the instrument that could genuinely bring change. Get the technology right, Kessler argues, and you can feed it whatever definition of a fair ball you like. You could make the corridor a wedge, a diamond, or something shaped like a boot; as the game shifts across the decades, the system can be told to shift with it.
Across the past twenty years, one sport after another has surrendered its judgement calls to machinery. Football uses video review to settle offside; tennis has electronic tracking for line calls; rugby leans on a television match official to judge whether a try was grounded. Most followers welcome it, even where the exactness sometimes creates trouble. Yet every one of those cases turns on something solid: a line, a try-line, a point of contact, with edges as clean as the frets on a guitar. A wide is nothing of the sort. A little latitude in calling it has long been quietly prized.
I wrote to Ivo Marchetti, a philosopher at Ashcombe University, to ask what he made of it all. Barely a morning passes when I don't lie awake going over the reasons this whole robot-umpire business is such a mistake, he answered. It was, he added, one more attempt to hand the difficult judgements of living over to a formula. Perhaps he is right. We turn to cricket to pass the time, not to spend it efficiently. A number of players I met were no fonder of the machines, doubting that precision is what the game lacks. Everyone wants technology to make things flawless, said Callum Rees, who turns out for a southern county, but life is not flawless. A flawless world would be strange: your side always wins, the job always goes smoothly, there is always cash in your pocket, the car never lets you down. What would be left to talk about?
*wide: a delivery judged to have passed too far from the batter to be played with a normal stroke, for which the batting side is awarded a run.
