IELTS CAM Inpired 20 - Reading Test 1 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inpired 20 - Reading Test 1 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 6
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
1
No other species of parrot lives to the age a vaira can reach.
2
Whether the vaira breeds in a given year depends on how much food is available.
3
The chicks are cared for entirely by the female, with the male taking no part.
4
At the point when mainland colonists arrived, the vaira still ranged across the whole of the Kelvan Islands.
5
Every vaira collected during the early search expeditions died soon afterwards in captivity.
6
Some members of the Vaira Scientific Advisory Board came from outside the Kelvan Islands.
Question 7 - 13
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
The vaira of the Kelvan Islands
A kind of parrot
• feeds on ferns, on parts taken from trees, and on
7.
• lays its eggs inside a
8.
The coming of the Rendi settlers
• the bird's
9.
was turned into clothing
The coming of mainland colonists
• one introduced animal, the
10.
, consumed the plants the vaira depended on
Saving the vaira
• the naturalist Tobias Ruward made an early attempt to protect the bird
• the first proof of females living on Vessig Island came in the year
11.
• the Recovery Plan led to a sharp rise in
12.
• a present-day aim is to keep
13.
taking part in the bird's conservation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 18
Reading Passage 2 has seven sections, A-G.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-G.
14
how the small number of old trees still standing holds back research
15
contrasting views on whether bringing the tree back to Britain is worthwhile
16
an account of the way the infection first reached the country
17
the particular circumstances that have spared one place from the disease
18
the point in a young tree's growth at which it begins to be at risk
Question 19 - 23
Match each statement with the correct person, A, B or C.
List of Findings
A
Tomas Ashworth
B
Dr Ingrid Halloran
C
Marek Sobol
19
Signs of the illness show up quickly once a tree has caught it.
20
A better approach might be to hold off and see whether the old trees that remain keep thriving.
21
The endurance of certain old trees cannot simply be put down to luck.
22
The disease-carrying beetles remain close by, and that should not be forgotten.
23
The scale of the loss only sinks in once you realise how dominant the tree used to be.
Question 24 - 26
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
A widely valued tree
Over many centuries, the single tree held in higher regard in Britain than greybeam was . From the Bronze Age onwards its timber was worked into tools, and it likewise served for making weapons. During the eighteenth century it was cultivated to supply wood for storage boxes and . Because it was so tough, greybeam was a regular choice for equipment used in mines, and the of the clipper the Silver Petrel was built from it as well.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
27
In the opening paragraph, the writer leads into the subject by
A
casting doubt on an assumption many people share.
B
pointing to a difficulty that confronts us all.
C
clarifying the meaning of several familiar terms.
D
picking out the circumstances in which we feel most fearful.
28
What does the writer suggest about the rescue crews in the second paragraph?
A
The methods they rely on to cope with stress particularly intrigue researchers.
B
The pressure of their work resembles that found in many public-service jobs.
C
The way their stress levels rise and fall makes them well suited to the study.
D
It is their character that equips them to perform under pressure.
29
In the fourth paragraph, the writer is mainly
A
setting out how the study was carried out.
B
presenting the results that were obtained.
C
defending the method that was chosen.
D
stating the aims of the research.
30
In the seventh paragraph, the writer outlines a brain mechanism that
A
makes people react more quickly in stressful situations.
B
sharpens our responsiveness to signs of danger around us.
C
gives us greater control over how anxious we feel.
D
comes into play when a sense of threat needs to be conveyed.
Question 31 - 35
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-G, below.
List of Endings
A
reacted in much the same way, whatever their state.
B
placed them under stress.
C
felt cheered and hopeful.
D
judged some kind of misfortune to be more probable.
E
paid little attention to unwelcome news.
F
treated bad news and good news in an identical way.
G
were in an anxious, pressured state.
When they were calm, the rescue volunteers usually
31
The researchers observed that, under stress, the volunteers
32
Whenever they were given good news, the volunteers
33
The students' cortisol readings and pulse rates altered at the moment the researchers
34
In both studies, negative information was absorbed more readily when those taking part
35
Question 36 - 40
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
36
Whether the posts in our feed are cheerful or gloomy makes no real difference to the mood of what we ourselves go on to post.
37
Of all our electronic devices, it is the phone that has the strongest effect on how stressed we feel.
38
When an alarming public event fills the media, taking in a great deal of that coverage tends to make us more receptive to such reports rather than less.
39
The anxiety that spreads through social media seldom pushes people into actions that work against their own interests.
40
The fact that we pick up on the emotions of those around us is something that can be turned to good use.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
The kākāpō
The vaira is a night-active, flightless parrot, now critically endangered and among the rarest of the Kelvan Islands' native birds.
Known to the Rendi people as the vaira and to naturalists as the moss parrot, this large, ground-dwelling bird has a broad, pale, owl-like face. It grows to about 58 centimetres, its plumage mostly a mottled brown-green, with forward-set eyes, a heavy pale beak, sturdy greyish feet, and a tail and wings strikingly short for its bulk. No other parrot is known to have abandoned flight so completely, and few birds of any sort live as long, some reaching 90 years of age.
Solitary by nature, a vaira keeps to one stretch of territory for years on end. Much of its feeding is done on the forest floor, though it also climbs high into the branches, and when it throws itself from a height the best it manages is a clumsy, wing-assisted glide to the ground. Everything it eats comes from plants: besides ferns and the bark, roots and leaves of trees, it takes a good quantity of seeds.
Breeding comes in the warmer months, and then only in seasons when food is plentiful. The male has no share in incubation or in bringing up the young; it falls to the female alone to sit on the eggs and, later, to feed the chicks. Somewhere between one and four eggs are laid in a shallow hollow, which she works over repeatedly both before laying and while she broods. Since finding food obliges her to be away from the nest for long spells, the eggs and chicks left behind are unusually open to attack by predators.
In the days before people reached the islands, the vaira was widespread in the Kelvan forests. That altered once the Rendi, the first settlers, arrived some 600 years ago. A flightless, ground-living creature made for easy hunting, and the Rendi valued it for its flesh and for its down, which they worked into warm garments; the dog and the rat that came with them hunted it too. By the time colonists from the mainland began arriving in the early 1800s, the vaira had already drawn back to the interior of the largest island and the wooded southern coasts. The newcomers only hastened its decline. Felling the forest took away much of its habitat, while animals let loose to graze — goats before all others — stripped out the food that remained. Cats, weasels and two more kinds of rat were introduced as well, and the bird now stood in real danger.
The first organised rescue came in 1897, when the islands' authorities backed a scheme by the naturalist Tobias Ruward to carry several hundred vaira to Cormar Island, in the Halane fjords, a place believed free of predators. The safety proved short-lived: inside eight years martens had made their way across, and in time destroyed every bird moved there. By the mid-twentieth century the vaira had all but vanished, a few holding on only in the islands' remotest places.
Across the years from 1951 to 1975, a newly formed wildlife agency mounted more than sixty search expeditions, most in the Halane country. Just six birds were secured, all male, and all but one died within months of being taken into care. A renewed drive in 1976 brought eighteen more vaira to light over the next two years, again without a single female. Then, on Vessig — a large island untroubled by martens, ferrets or weasels — a sizeable body of males was found, some 180 in all, and in 1983 females too were confirmed present. From that island's birds every later attempt to manage the species has grown.
On Vessig, though, feral cats set about the birds, and their numbers dropped steeply once more. To save them, the survivors were moved, between 1982 and 1998, to three sanctuary islands — Storn, Aldis and Petrel. Breeding, even so, proved hard to bring about. Rats turned out to be a major destroyer of the chicks, and too few young lived to offset the loss of adults. By 1996 the islands had produced at least ten chicks, only two still living, and the population overall had fallen to forty-four. Its gravity forced a thorough rethink of how the vaira was managed.
A new Recovery Plan came in 1998, and with it a dedicated panel of specialists — the Vaira Scientific Advisory Board — and a pronounced expansion of staffing. The campaign against predators on the three islands was intensified: cats had already gone from Petrel by 1984 and possums from Storn by 1989. Yet the birds' numbers began to rise only after rats had been cleared from all three islands and their management grew far more direct — carrying birds from island to island, putting out extra food for the adults, and hand-rearing any chick that was failing.
Five years into the plan, the recovery was keeping to its targets. By 2004 four more females had been raised, lifting the population as a whole to fifty-five, and for the first time there was cautious room for hope. By June 2021 the tally had reached 190 birds.
To this day the Recovery Plan governs the vaira's care. It sets three chief aims: to hold the loss of genetic variety across the population to the smallest degree possible; to keep, or bring back, enough fit habitat for a population expected to go on growing; and to ensure that local communities remain closely involved in protecting the bird.
Elena Marsh looks at efforts to bring the greybeam back to Britain
A
A. Some 28 million greybeams - nearly 85 percent of all those in Britain - were lost across the 1970s and early 1980s to a fungal disease. Once it had passed, the greybeam, for so long a familiar giant of the countryside, slipped almost from public memory. There are grounds for optimism now that the species might be coaxed back into the woods and fields of central and southern England, though any recovery would begin from almost nothing. "Unless you saw the countryside as it once was, the scale of what happened is hard to take in," says Marek Sobol of the Native Woodland Alliance. "It's only in old photographs that it really hits you: these were huge, commanding trees, and then they were gone."
B
For centuries only beech was ranked above greybeam among the hardwoods British craftsmen preferred, and across much of the country it was the most conspicuous tree of all. Nor was it tied to one habitat: besides forming its own stands, it wove itself into the oak, birch and hazel woods of the lowlands. People had used it since the Bronze Age, when its timber was shaped into simple tools, and it became the favoured wood for shields and early swords. By the eighteenth century it was planted far more deliberately, its timber going into everyday goods such as packing cases and household furniture. Because it withstood repeated blows so well, it was also chosen for anything that had to absorb heavy impact - mining machinery among them, along with the hull of the nineteenth-century clipper the Silver Petrel.
C
What does the damage is a fungus that clogs the greybeam's vascular system - the network carrying water, nutrients and food through the tree - so that its branches dry out and die. An earlier outbreak in the 1930s flared briefly before fading, but a second, far deadlier wave broke out in the 1980s, brought in on consignments of greybeam timber imported from the Baltic. Shipped as logs bound for furniture-making, the wood still carried its bark, and that intact bark made an ideal refuge for the greybeam bark beetle, the insect that ferries the fungus from tree to tree. Far more aggressive than anything before it, the strain the beetles brought this time killed off most of Britain's greybeams.
D
Greybeams have not disappeared from the southern counties, but what remains is mostly stunted specimens tucked into the low hedgerows between fields. "There are still millions of little greybeams in the hedges, but the beetle finds them the instant they grow past a certain size," explains Dr Ingrid Halloran, who helped compile the recent survey The State of the Greybeam. As soon as a trunk thickens to between twelve and eighteen centimetres across, it becomes just the right home for the beetle to breed in and the fungus to take hold. Even so, a scattering of ancient trees, some several centuries old, have been logged in counties such as Shropshire, having somehow escaped the epidemic. The way forward, Halloran maintains, is to find these survivors and work out what set them apart when so many others died - though the effort is held back by how few old trees remain to study. "Is it avoidance, tolerance, or real resistance?" she asks. "We don't yet know how the three balance out. What I cannot accept is that it all comes down to chance."
E
Whether the greybeam can ever come back rests heavily on trees that either fight off the disease or tolerate it, so any large-scale reintroduction would lean on existing or new hybrids bred from resistant species, most of them not native. A fresh generation of saplings has been raised and deliberately put to the test: a narrow cut is opened in the bark and a trace of the pathogen slipped inside. "What strikes you is the sheer speed of it," Halloran says. "Come back after four to six weeks and the resistant trees look untouched, while the vulnerable ones have already dropped their leaves - some have died outright."
F
So bound up is the greybeam with British life that it has never wanted for champions. One is Tomas Ashworth, keeper of the National Greybeam Collection in the Norfolk town of Cromer. "I watched the disease take hold when I was a boy," he recalls. "The greybeam felt like part of the English countryside, and then I stood watching the trees shed their leaves - it never left me." Cromer now counts near 12,000 greybeams, and their survival seems to owe much to where they grow: stiff winds off the sea make it hard for the beetle to gain a foothold in this exposed coastal town. The position is far from safe, all the same. "The beetles could move straight in the moment we drop our guard; the danger is right on our doorstep," Ashworth warns.
G
All this, Halloran concedes, raises the question of whether the public will accept it. "If we put the greybeam back and part of what we plant isn't strictly native, does that trouble us?" To her mind the ecological case is powerful: the trees would shelter wildlife, which she counts among the gains. Others are less convinced. Marek Sobol sees a snag. "On the surface it sounds fine," he says, "but you're trading a native tree for a horticultural analogue. In effect, you're cloning." He points, too, to the risk of importing new diseases with the fresh stock. Rather than plant afresh, his organisation would sooner safeguard the greybeams that have pulled through on their own. "Sometimes the wisest thing is to step back and let nature take its time; leave the survivors be, and resistance may come of its own accord," he says.
H
* horticultural analogue: a cultivated plant that is genetically very close to a naturally occurring species
A good many of the choices that shape our lives are made at moments when we feel tense and on edge. Whether the matter in hand is our health, our money or our career, there are times when each of us has to sift through information while under pressure. Does that pressure sharpen the way we handle such information, though, or does it dull it?
To find out how the brain behaves when it is under strain, a fellow neuroscientist and I spent time at a number of mountain-rescue bases. No two shifts for these rescue crews are alike. There are calm stretches, during which the volunteers check over their ropes and stretchers, restock supplies and prepare food. Then there are the frantic days, full of call-outs in which lives hang in the balance: the crews are winched down to stranded walkers to treat severe injuries on the mountainside. That swing gave us an ideal setting in which to test how people use information once the pressure is on.
What we found was that a sense of danger set off a stress response which, for the rescue volunteers, actually eased the work of taking information in — provided that the information happened to be bad news.
The route to that conclusion ran as follows. Each volunteer was asked to put a figure on how likely they were to meet with 40 assorted misfortunes — from a road crash to having their identity stolen. We then fed back either encouraging news, that the odds were slimmer than they had assumed, or discouraging news, that the odds were greater, before asking them to revise their figures.
Most of the time human beings lean towards optimism, brushing aside gloomy information and welcoming the cheerful sort. That was exactly the response we saw while the volunteers were at ease. Once they were under stress, however, the picture changed. In that state they grew acutely alert to bad news — even bad news with no bearing whatever on their work, such as being told that identity theft was likelier than they had supposed — and adjusted their expectations accordingly. Good news, by contrast, was met no differently under stress than before, as when they were told the risk of identity theft was smaller than they had supposed.
The same tendency showed up back in the laboratory, this time among students told out of the blue that they must deliver a talk before an assessing panel — a talk that would be filmed and put online. Predictably, their cortisol readings shot up and their pulses quickened, and all at once they became sharper at absorbing unconnected but disturbing statistics on illness and crime.
A stressful episode sets in motion a change in the body that turns our attention towards warnings and towards whatever could go wrong. Scans of the brain show that this 'switch' goes hand in hand with a sharp rise in a learning-related neural signal, one that fires above all when we meet warning signs we did not expect — the sight of fear on another person's face, for example.
For our earliest ancestors, wiring of this kind may well have been a lifesaver. Hemmed in by predators, they stood to gain from any sharpening of their capacity to learn where the dangers lay. Where no threat was present, though, staying permanently on guard would only have squandered energy. A neural switch that raised or lowered the ability to take in warnings as surroundings shifted would therefore have had real value. Tellingly, those who suffer from clinical depression and anxiety appear stuck in the setting in which every negative message around them is soaked up.
Something else worth grasping is how quickly stress passes from person to person. When a colleague is on edge, the odds are that we will stiffen and grow tense as well. Nor do we have to share a room with someone for their feelings to steer how we behave. Research indicates that a feed full of positive posts — a photograph of a golden sunrise, say — makes us readier to put out cheering messages of our own, whereas a stream of negative ones, like grumbling about a slow-moving queue, prompts us to add negativity in turn.
In certain respects many of us now live as though under threat, forever braced to handle insistent emails and texts and to react to news alerts and online comments. One workplace-wellbeing survey found that continually glancing at your phone is bound up with stress. Put differently, a hardwired bodily response that evolution handed us so we could keep clear of starving predators is these days being set off by a post on a screen. Posting on social media, one study reports, does more to lift your pulse, bring on sweat and widen your pupils than most of the things you do in a day.
Because stress makes us dwell more on alarming messages, and because it also spreads at such speed, the two together can breed a collective fear that the facts do not always warrant. In the wake of a distressing public event — a natural disaster, perhaps, or a serious market crash — traditional and social media tend to fill with worrying reports that people cannot help noticing, and the effect is to make an existing danger look larger than it is. A dependable cycle thus takes shape: stress is set off and jumps from one person to the next, which for a while makes people more receptive to negative reports, which winds the stress up further. Holidays are called off though the catastrophe struck on the far side of the planet; shares are dumped when sitting tight would have been the wiser course. Encouragingly, though, upbeat feelings such as hope spread just as readily, and they carry real force in spurring people towards solutions. Once we appreciate how tightly a person's emotional state is tied to the way they handle information, we can shape our messages with more care and turn ourselves into thoughtful agents of change.
Known to the Rendi people as the vaira and to naturalists as the moss parrot, this large, ground-dwelling bird has a broad, pale, owl-like face. It grows to about 58 centimetres, its plumage mostly a mottled brown-green, with forward-set eyes, a heavy pale beak, sturdy greyish feet, and a tail and wings strikingly short for its bulk. No other parrot is known to have abandoned flight so completely, and few birds of any sort live as long, some reaching 90 years of age.
Solitary by nature, a vaira keeps to one stretch of territory for years on end. Much of its feeding is done on the forest floor, though it also climbs high into the branches, and when it throws itself from a height the best it manages is a clumsy, wing-assisted glide to the ground. Everything it eats comes from plants: besides ferns and the bark, roots and leaves of trees, it takes a good quantity of seeds.
Breeding comes in the warmer months, and then only in seasons when food is plentiful. The male has no share in incubation or in bringing up the young; it falls to the female alone to sit on the eggs and, later, to feed the chicks. Somewhere between one and four eggs are laid in a shallow hollow, which she works over repeatedly both before laying and while she broods. Since finding food obliges her to be away from the nest for long spells, the eggs and chicks left behind are unusually open to attack by predators.
In the days before people reached the islands, the vaira was widespread in the Kelvan forests. That altered once the Rendi, the first settlers, arrived some 600 years ago. A flightless, ground-living creature made for easy hunting, and the Rendi valued it for its flesh and for its down, which they worked into warm garments; the dog and the rat that came with them hunted it too. By the time colonists from the mainland began arriving in the early 1800s, the vaira had already drawn back to the interior of the largest island and the wooded southern coasts. The newcomers only hastened its decline. Felling the forest took away much of its habitat, while animals let loose to graze — goats before all others — stripped out the food that remained. Cats, weasels and two more kinds of rat were introduced as well, and the bird now stood in real danger.
The first organised rescue came in 1897, when the islands' authorities backed a scheme by the naturalist Tobias Ruward to carry several hundred vaira to Cormar Island, in the Halane fjords, a place believed free of predators. The safety proved short-lived: inside eight years martens had made their way across, and in time destroyed every bird moved there. By the mid-twentieth century the vaira had all but vanished, a few holding on only in the islands' remotest places.
Across the years from 1951 to 1975, a newly formed wildlife agency mounted more than sixty search expeditions, most in the Halane country. Just six birds were secured, all male, and all but one died within months of being taken into care. A renewed drive in 1976 brought eighteen more vaira to light over the next two years, again without a single female. Then, on Vessig — a large island untroubled by martens, ferrets or weasels — a sizeable body of males was found, some 180 in all, and in 1983 females too were confirmed present. From that island's birds every later attempt to manage the species has grown.
On Vessig, though, feral cats set about the birds, and their numbers dropped steeply once more. To save them, the survivors were moved, between 1982 and 1998, to three sanctuary islands — Storn, Aldis and Petrel. Breeding, even so, proved hard to bring about. Rats turned out to be a major destroyer of the chicks, and too few young lived to offset the loss of adults. By 1996 the islands had produced at least ten chicks, only two still living, and the population overall had fallen to forty-four. Its gravity forced a thorough rethink of how the vaira was managed.
A new Recovery Plan came in 1998, and with it a dedicated panel of specialists — the Vaira Scientific Advisory Board — and a pronounced expansion of staffing. The campaign against predators on the three islands was intensified: cats had already gone from Petrel by 1984 and possums from Storn by 1989. Yet the birds' numbers began to rise only after rats had been cleared from all three islands and their management grew far more direct — carrying birds from island to island, putting out extra food for the adults, and hand-rearing any chick that was failing.
Five years into the plan, the recovery was keeping to its targets. By 2004 four more females had been raised, lifting the population as a whole to fifty-five, and for the first time there was cautious room for hope. By June 2021 the tally had reached 190 birds.
To this day the Recovery Plan governs the vaira's care. It sets three chief aims: to hold the loss of genetic variety across the population to the smallest degree possible; to keep, or bring back, enough fit habitat for a population expected to go on growing; and to ensure that local communities remain closely involved in protecting the bird.
B. For centuries only beech was ranked above greybeam among the hardwoods British craftsmen preferred, and across much of the country it was the most conspicuous tree of all. Nor was it tied to one habitat: besides forming its own stands, it wove itself into the oak, birch and hazel woods of the lowlands. People had used it since the Bronze Age, when its timber was shaped into simple tools, and it became the favoured wood for shields and early swords. By the eighteenth century it was planted far more deliberately, its timber going into everyday goods such as packing cases and household furniture. Because it withstood repeated blows so well, it was also chosen for anything that had to absorb heavy impact - mining machinery among them, along with the hull of the nineteenth-century clipper the Silver Petrel.
C. What does the damage is a fungus that clogs the greybeam's vascular system - the network carrying water, nutrients and food through the tree - so that its branches dry out and die. An earlier outbreak in the 1930s flared briefly before fading, but a second, far deadlier wave broke out in the 1980s, brought in on consignments of greybeam timber imported from the Baltic. Shipped as logs bound for furniture-making, the wood still carried its bark, and that intact bark made an ideal refuge for the greybeam bark beetle, the insect that ferries the fungus from tree to tree. Far more aggressive than anything before it, the strain the beetles brought this time killed off most of Britain's greybeams.
D. Greybeams have not disappeared from the southern counties, but what remains is mostly stunted specimens tucked into the low hedgerows between fields. "There are still millions of little greybeams in the hedges, but the beetle finds them the instant they grow past a certain size," explains Dr Ingrid Halloran, who helped compile the recent survey The State of the Greybeam. As soon as a trunk thickens to between twelve and eighteen centimetres across, it becomes just the right home for the beetle to breed in and the fungus to take hold. Even so, a scattering of ancient trees, some several centuries old, have been logged in counties such as Shropshire, having somehow escaped the epidemic. The way forward, Halloran maintains, is to find these survivors and work out what set them apart when so many others died - though the effort is held back by how few old trees remain to study. "Is it avoidance, tolerance, or real resistance?" she asks. "We don't yet know how the three balance out. What I cannot accept is that it all comes down to chance."
E. Whether the greybeam can ever come back rests heavily on trees that either fight off the disease or tolerate it, so any large-scale reintroduction would lean on existing or new hybrids bred from resistant species, most of them not native. A fresh generation of saplings has been raised and deliberately put to the test: a narrow cut is opened in the bark and a trace of the pathogen slipped inside. "What strikes you is the sheer speed of it," Halloran says. "Come back after four to six weeks and the resistant trees look untouched, while the vulnerable ones have already dropped their leaves - some have died outright."
F. So bound up is the greybeam with British life that it has never wanted for champions. One is Tomas Ashworth, keeper of the National Greybeam Collection in the Norfolk town of Cromer. "I watched the disease take hold when I was a boy," he recalls. "The greybeam felt like part of the English countryside, and then I stood watching the trees shed their leaves - it never left me." Cromer now counts near 12,000 greybeams, and their survival seems to owe much to where they grow: stiff winds off the sea make it hard for the beetle to gain a foothold in this exposed coastal town. The position is far from safe, all the same. "The beetles could move straight in the moment we drop our guard; the danger is right on our doorstep," Ashworth warns.
G. All this, Halloran concedes, raises the question of whether the public will accept it. "If we put the greybeam back and part of what we plant isn't strictly native, does that trouble us?" To her mind the ecological case is powerful: the trees would shelter wildlife, which she counts among the gains. Others are less convinced. Marek Sobol sees a snag. "On the surface it sounds fine," he says, "but you're trading a native tree for a horticultural analogue. In effect, you're cloning." He points, too, to the risk of importing new diseases with the fresh stock. Rather than plant afresh, his organisation would sooner safeguard the greybeams that have pulled through on their own. "Sometimes the wisest thing is to step back and let nature take its time; leave the survivors be, and resistance may come of its own accord," he says.
H. * horticultural analogue: a cultivated plant that is genetically very close to a naturally occurring species
A good many of the choices that shape our lives are made at moments when we feel tense and on edge. Whether the matter in hand is our health, our money or our career, there are times when each of us has to sift through information while under pressure. Does that pressure sharpen the way we handle such information, though, or does it dull it?
To find out how the brain behaves when it is under strain, a fellow neuroscientist and I spent time at a number of mountain-rescue bases. No two shifts for these rescue crews are alike. There are calm stretches, during which the volunteers check over their ropes and stretchers, restock supplies and prepare food. Then there are the frantic days, full of call-outs in which lives hang in the balance: the crews are winched down to stranded walkers to treat severe injuries on the mountainside. That swing gave us an ideal setting in which to test how people use information once the pressure is on.
What we found was that a sense of danger set off a stress response which, for the rescue volunteers, actually eased the work of taking information in — provided that the information happened to be bad news.
The route to that conclusion ran as follows. Each volunteer was asked to put a figure on how likely they were to meet with 40 assorted misfortunes — from a road crash to having their identity stolen. We then fed back either encouraging news, that the odds were slimmer than they had assumed, or discouraging news, that the odds were greater, before asking them to revise their figures.
Most of the time human beings lean towards optimism, brushing aside gloomy information and welcoming the cheerful sort. That was exactly the response we saw while the volunteers were at ease. Once they were under stress, however, the picture changed. In that state they grew acutely alert to bad news — even bad news with no bearing whatever on their work, such as being told that identity theft was likelier than they had supposed — and adjusted their expectations accordingly. Good news, by contrast, was met no differently under stress than before, as when they were told the risk of identity theft was smaller than they had supposed.
The same tendency showed up back in the laboratory, this time among students told out of the blue that they must deliver a talk before an assessing panel — a talk that would be filmed and put online. Predictably, their cortisol readings shot up and their pulses quickened, and all at once they became sharper at absorbing unconnected but disturbing statistics on illness and crime.
A stressful episode sets in motion a change in the body that turns our attention towards warnings and towards whatever could go wrong. Scans of the brain show that this 'switch' goes hand in hand with a sharp rise in a learning-related neural signal, one that fires above all when we meet warning signs we did not expect — the sight of fear on another person's face, for example.
For our earliest ancestors, wiring of this kind may well have been a lifesaver. Hemmed in by predators, they stood to gain from any sharpening of their capacity to learn where the dangers lay. Where no threat was present, though, staying permanently on guard would only have squandered energy. A neural switch that raised or lowered the ability to take in warnings as surroundings shifted would therefore have had real value. Tellingly, those who suffer from clinical depression and anxiety appear stuck in the setting in which every negative message around them is soaked up.
Something else worth grasping is how quickly stress passes from person to person. When a colleague is on edge, the odds are that we will stiffen and grow tense as well. Nor do we have to share a room with someone for their feelings to steer how we behave. Research indicates that a feed full of positive posts — a photograph of a golden sunrise, say — makes us readier to put out cheering messages of our own, whereas a stream of negative ones, like grumbling about a slow-moving queue, prompts us to add negativity in turn.
In certain respects many of us now live as though under threat, forever braced to handle insistent emails and texts and to react to news alerts and online comments. One workplace-wellbeing survey found that continually glancing at your phone is bound up with stress. Put differently, a hardwired bodily response that evolution handed us so we could keep clear of starving predators is these days being set off by a post on a screen. Posting on social media, one study reports, does more to lift your pulse, bring on sweat and widen your pupils than most of the things you do in a day.
Because stress makes us dwell more on alarming messages, and because it also spreads at such speed, the two together can breed a collective fear that the facts do not always warrant. In the wake of a distressing public event — a natural disaster, perhaps, or a serious market crash — traditional and social media tend to fill with worrying reports that people cannot help noticing, and the effect is to make an existing danger look larger than it is. A dependable cycle thus takes shape: stress is set off and jumps from one person to the next, which for a while makes people more receptive to negative reports, which winds the stress up further. Holidays are called off though the catastrophe struck on the far side of the planet; shares are dumped when sitting tight would have been the wiser course. Encouragingly, though, upbeat feelings such as hope spread just as readily, and they carry real force in spurring people towards solutions. Once we appreciate how tightly a person's emotional state is tied to the way they handle information, we can shape our messages with more care and turn ourselves into thoughtful agents of change.
