IELTS Forcast Reading Test 2026 - Q1 Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Forcast Reading Test 2026 - Q1 Test 3 được lấy từ cuốn sách Forcast Test 2026 - Q1 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 Forcast Reading Test 2026 - Q1 Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 3
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
High school assessment in New Zealand
New Zealanders are worried at the outcomes of their high school assessment system, because the of girls are higher than those of boys by 10%. A gender gap has been apparent for over a . This situation is not unique to New Zealand, and has been noticed in also.
Question 4 - 7
Reading Passage has eight paragraphs A-H
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-H
4
An advantage of New Zealand’s secondary school tests.
5
A mention of current government initiatives to boost male achievement.
6
When gender difference in literacy skills first becomes evident.
7
Findings that relate academic achievement to race.
Question 8 - 13
Look at the following people and the list of statements below.
Match each person with the correct statement, A–H.
List of Findings
A
Boys gain lower marks on NCEA if they attend an all-boys’ school.
B
Boys are disadvantaged by girls tending to take over at school.
C
Good teaching is more important than whether classrooms are single-sex or mixed.
D
Mathematical skills were not so important in the past.
E
The difference in achievement between school boys and girls is only evident in some subjects.
F
Older boys are more motivated to study than younger boys.
G
The NCEA exams have higher literacy standards than past exams did.
H
The New Zealand government is reluctant to take action on behalf of boys.
8
Celia Lashlie
9
Steve Benson
10
Roger Moses
11
Rob Burroughs
12
Stuart Martin
13
Paul Baker
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 17
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
The pronunciation of living language undergoes changes throughout thousands of years. Large-scale regular changes are usually called . There are three reasons for these changes.
Firstly, the influence of one language on another; when one person imitates another pronunciation (the most prestige’s), the imitation always partly involves factor of .
Secondly, the imitation of children from adults' language sometimes is , and may also contribute to this change if there are insignificant deviations, though later they may be corrected.
Finally, for those random variations in pronunciation, the deeper evidence lies in the or minimization of effort.
Question 18 - 23
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 it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
18
It is impossible for modern people to find pronunciation of words in an earlier age.
19
The great change of language in Russian history is related to the rising status and fortune of middle classes.
20
All the children learn speech from adults while they assume that certain language is difficult to imitate exactly.
21
Pronunciation with casual inaccuracy will not exert a big influence on language changes.
22
The link of [mt] can be influenced being pronounced as [nt].
23
The sound of ‘temporary’ cannot wholly present its spelling.
Question 24 - 26
Complete each of the following statements with the best ending A-D from the box below.
List of Endings
A
since the speakers can pronounce it with less effort.
B
due to assimilation of a sound under the influence of a neighbouring one.
C
as it is a trend for changes in pronunciation in a large scale in a given period.
D
because the speaker can pronounce [n] and [t] both in the same time.
As a consequence, ‘b’ will be pronounced as 'p'
24
The pronunciation of [mt] changed to [nt]
25
The omission of /t/ in the pronunciation of Christmas occurred
26
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 32
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
The Discovery of the Antikythera Mechanism
The Antikythera mechanism was discovered by a diver who was looking for . Instead, he found the remains of an ancient ship, from which he took proof to show his fellow divers. Having been commissioned to recover the relics, the same divers spent retrieving items such as sculptures made of for the National Museum. Another item they found was a which contained a piece of metal.
This was ignored until over a year later when a renowned archaeologist noticed that the inside was composed of several pieces, one of which had on it, and others appeared to be apparatus of some sort, leading the investigators to think at first that the artefact might have been a , although the historical origin of it suggested this was impossible.
Question 33 - 37
Complete each of the following statements with the best ending A-H from the box below.
List of Endings
A
to calculate how the calendar operated.
B
to identify problems in aeronautical components.
C
to discover historical artifacts.
D
to link the ancient device to theories about extra terrestrials.
E
to use gears to calculate astronomical movements.
F
to discover that there was more to the mechanism than first thought.
G
to create a visual representation of the inside of the mechanism.
H
to retrieve the outstanding relics.
Elias Stadiatis had not intended
33
The group of divers were asked
34
Valerios Stais was the first
35
Derek de Solla Price first managed
36
The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project used technology originally created
37
Question 38 - 40
Choose the correct answer. Write the appropriate letter A - D for each question.
38
How is the mechanism similar to more contemporary clock designs?
A
It has a small, box shape.
B
The casing is made of wood.
C
It has hands which turn around in a circle.
D
It indicates how many minutes and hours have passed.
39
Which of the following does the Antikythera mechanism NOT display to an observer?
A
The current position of the moon in the sky.
B
Where to look if you want to see Jupiter at night.
C
The number of moons belonging to Mars.
D
The date of the next lunar eclipse.
40
What do our current models of the mechanism show?
A
The mechanism is so advanced in design, we couldn’t understand it until modern times.
B
The creators of the Antikythera mechanism knew far more about astronomy than we do.
C
We have only recently possessed the technology that belonged to the ancient Greeks.
D
There are still things we don’t understand about the Antikythera mechanism.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
05/05/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
The Gender Gap in New Zealand's High School Examination Results
Results from New Zealand's new national examinations for secondary schools are giving that country some cause for concern.
A
A. The issue is the difference in pass rates between the sexes: at each level of the examination and across all school types, the difference is about 10 percentage points. Girls are doing better in every subject, and those in girls-only schools are taking top honours. The results are not a surprise: high school girls have been outperforming boys academically for more than a decade. It is an international phenomenon, and within Australia, it was the subject of much debate and controversy. Within New Zealand back in the 1980s, there was a concerted campaign, called "Girls Can Do Anything," which was aimed at lifting girls' participation rates, achievement levels, and aspirations. This was so successful that the pendulum has now swung to the other extreme. Views differ on how worried people should be. After all, for much of history, girls were excluded from any form of education, and this new phenomenon could be seen as a temporary over-correction before the balance is righted.
B
However, the New Zealand State Ministry of Education says it is taking the issue seriously. It is working with a reference group on boys' education, which has been set up, and it has commissioned an Australian academic to report on interventions that have been found to work for boys, drawing particularly on Australia's experience. But some, such as former prison manager Celia Lashlie, the author of a book for parents of teenage boys, believe there is still resistance within the Education Ministry towards doing anything about the problem.
C
Education Ministry learning policy manager Steve Benson says that the National Certificate in Educational Achievement, or NCEA, as New Zealand's high school exams are called, is useful to employers and to universities because it provides a fine-grained picture of pupils' performance in every aspect of a subject, rather than just a pass or fail in an overall area. In most parts of the curriculum, for example in maths, there isn't really a gender gap. But literacy is a different matter. Even boys who are good at writing tend not to write so much. There's actually a quantity issue.
D
The discrepancy in reading and writing skills between males and females shows up as early as preschool, and the most significant difference is clear by the time these children enter high school. Not being good at literacy was not such a problem in the old days when many students left school for manual jobs after Year 11. But nowadays, many more stay on to higher education, and almost all jobs require literacy skills. Roger Moses, the headmaster of Wellington College, says that the written content of NCEA papers is more demanding than the previous system of secondary school qualifications in New Zealand, even in subjects such as statistics and accounting.
E
New Zealand 15-year-olds do better in international reading tests, but beneath this average lies a wide variance, with New Zealand European girls most represented at the top and New Zealand Pacific Island boys at the bottom. Yet some European girls drop out, and some Pacific Island boys excel. In other words, the range in performance within each gender group is much greater than the gender differences. Ethnic differences, and differences in socio-economic status, may be more significant than the simple boy/girl explanation.
F
This makes the Education Ministry nervous about pushing solutions that emphasize stereotyped gender differences, rather than looking at underachievement as a whole. Rob Burroughs, principal of Linwood High School in Christchurch, agrees. For three years, his school ran separate boys' classes to try to address the disparity in performance, before abandoning them. The research showed that the boys did better in their own class than in the co-educational environment. But when he looked at which teachers they had, and how well those teachers' other classes did, it became clear that the difference was, instead, to do with the quality of instruction.
G
At Onslow College, Dr. Stuart Martin would do away with the NCEA Level 1 exam if he could. He says that in Year 11, aged 15, boys are simply not mature enough to cope. They tend to think that just passing is enough, and that it's not necessary to work hard for a Merit or an Excellence grade. Often they are busy with other activities and part-time jobs. Boys' competitive instinct tends to come out later in their schooling years, especially if there is money attached or other tangible rewards. By 17, boys are catching up academically with the girls, and by the end of Year 13, boys are again winning the top prizes.
H
Boys in single-sex schools do better in NCEA across all levels, something economist Brian Easton reported after analysing data from the first year of NCEA's implementation. He said the results were valid, even when socio-economic status was taken into account. Dr Paul Baker, head of Waitaki Boys' High School in Oamaru, agrees. He thinks that although it is possible for all schools to do more to boost boys' performance, it is easier in a boys' school, where activities cannot be 'captured by girls'.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 1
1
pass rates
Giải thích chi tiết
Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài Gap Fill
Step 01: Read the question to understand (main idea + detail) + Predict Word Form + Meaning
Simplified: The _____ of girls are higher than those of boys by 10%
Main idea: _____của nữ sinh → cao hơn nam sinh khoảng 10%.
Prediction: Danh từ (Noun) → Tìm khía cạnh mà nữ được so sánh với nam và gắn với con số cụ thể 10%.
-------
Step 02: Locate relevant information
🔍 Từ khoá: “girls”, “boys”, “10%”, “difference”
→ Dựa vào các từ khoá trên, tìm được trích dẫn ở đoạn A, nơi đề cập đến sự chênh lệch giữa nam và nữ.
-------
Step 03: Read relevant information to understand (main + detail)
📌 Trích dẫn: "The issue is the difference in pass rates between the sexes: at each level of the examination and across all school types, the difference is about 10 percentage points." (Đoạn A)
Simplified: The issue is the difference in pass rates (10%) between the sexes
-------
Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning
Trong bài đọc: Có sự chênh lệch trong tỉ lệ đậu giữa hai giới, khoảng 10%.
Trong câu hỏi: _____của nữ sinh → cao hơn nam sinh khoảng 10%.
→ Cả hai đều nói về tỉ lệ đậu (pass rate) → ý nghĩa trùng khớp hoàn toàn.
A. The changes that have caused the most disagreement are those in pronunciation. We have various sources of evidence for the pronunciations of earlier times, such as the spellings, the treatment of words borrowed from other languages or borrowed by them, the descriptions of contemporary grammarians and spelling-reformers, and the modern pronunciations in all the languages and dialects concerned. From the middle of the sixteenth century, there are in England writers who attempt to describe the position of the speech-organs for the production of English phonemes, and who invent what are in effect systems of phonetic symbols. These various kinds of evidence, combined with a knowledge of the mechanisms of speech-production, can often give us a very good idea of the pronunciation of an earlier age, though absolute certainty is never possible.
B
B.
When we study the pronunciation of a language over any period of a few generations or more, we find there are always large-scale regularities in the changes: for example, over a certain period of time, just about all the long [a:] vowels in a language may change into long [e:] vowels, or all the [b] consonants in a certain position (for example at the end of a word) may change into [p] consonants. Such regular changes are often called sound laws. There are no universal sound laws (even though sound laws often reflect universal tendencies), but simply particular sound laws for one given language (or dialect) at one given period.
C
It is also possible that fashion plays a part in the process of change. It certainly plays a part in the spread of change: one person imitates another, and people with the most prestige are most likely to be imitated, so that a change that takes place in one social group may be imitated (more or less accurately) by speakers in another group. When a social group goes up or down in the world, its pronunciation may gain or lose prestige. It is said that, after the Russian Revolution of 1917, the upper-class pronunciation of Russian, which had formerly been considered desirable, became on the contrary an undesirable kind of accent to have, so that people tried to disguise it. Some of the changes in accepted English pronunciation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been shown to consist in the replacement of one style of pronunciation by another style already existing, and it is likely that such substitutions were a result of the great social changes of the period: the increased power and wealth of the middle classes, and their steady infiltration upwards into the ranks of the landed gentry, probably carried elements of middle-class pronunciation into upper-class speech.
D
A less specific variant of the argument is that the imitation of children is imperfect: they copy their parents’ speech, but never reproduce it exactly. This is true, but it is also true that such deviations from adult speech are usually corrected in later childhood. Perhaps it is more significant that even adults show a certain amount of random variation in their pronunciation of a given phoneme, even if the phonetic context is kept unchanged. This, however, cannot explain changes in pronunciation unless it can be shown that there is some systematic trend in the failures of imitation: if they are merely random deviations they will cancel one another out and there will be no net change in the language.
E
One such force which is often invoked is the principle of ease, or minimization of effort. The change from fussy to fuzzy would be an example of assimilation, which is a very common kind of change. Assimilation is the changing of a sound under the influence of a neighbouring one. For example, the word scant was once skamt, but the /m/ has been changed to /n/ under the influence of the following /t/. Greater efficiency has hereby been achieved, because /n/ and /t/ are articulated in the same place (with the tip of the tongue against the teeth-ridge), whereas /m/ is articulated elsewhere (with the two lips). So the place of articulation of the nasal consonant has been changed to conform with that of the following plosive. A more recent example of the same kind of thing is the common pronunciation of football as football.
F
Assimilation is not the only way in which we change our pronunciation in order to increase efficiency. It is very common for consonants to be lost at the end of a word: in Middle English, word-final [-n] was often lost in unstressed syllables, so that baken ‘to bake’ changed from [‘ba:kan] to [‘ba:k3], and later to [ba:k]. Consonant-clusters are often simplified. At one time there was a [t] in words like castle and Christmas, and an initial [k] in words like knight and know. Sometimes a whole syllable is dropped out when two successive syllables begin with the same consonant (haplology): a recent example is temporary, which in Britain is often pronounced as if it were 'tempory'.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 2
14
sound laws
Giải thích chi tiết
☺️ Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài Gap Fill
Step 01: Read the question to understand (main idea + detail) + Predict Word Form + Meaning
Simplified: Large-scale regular changes are usually called _____
Prediction: Danh từ (Noun phrase) – tên gọi của quy luật hoặc hiện tượng ngôn ngữ.
-------
Step 02: Locate relevant information
🔍 Từ khoá: “large-scale regular changes”, “called”
-> Dựa vào các từ khoá trên, tìm được trích dẫn ở đoạn B.
-------
Step 03: Read relevant information to understand (main + detail)
📌 Trích dẫn: "Such regular changes are often called sound laws." (Đoạn B)
Simplified: Regular changes are called sound laws
Main idea: Những thay đổi có quy luật được gọi là“sound laws”.
-------
Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning
Trong bài đọc: Những thay đổi có quy luật trong ngôn ngữ được gọi là "sound laws".
Trong câu hỏi: Những thay đổi quy mô lớn và có quy luật thường được gọi là gì.
One spring day in 1900, a party of Greek sponge divers took shelter from a storm near the island of Antikythera, which lies about 50 kilometres northwest of the western tip of Crete. After the storm, one of the group, Elias Stadiatis, decided to dive in search of giant clams to eat for their dinner. On a shelf about 43 metres below the surface of the water, he chanced upon the wreck of an ancient ship. Fragments of statues, looking like body parts, covered this ledge. The diver returned to the surface, bearing an arm made of bronze as proof of what he had discovered. He reported his find to the authorities and, in the autumn, he and his companions returned to dive on the Antikythera wreck on behalf of the Greek government. They spent the next ten months bringing up pieces of marble and bronze statues, amphorae, lamps and coins, all of which were sent to the National Museum in Athens for cleaning and restoration.
Among the artefacts retrieved from the shipwreck was a rather unprepossessing lump of bronze inside what seemed to be a wooden casing. This object was covered in barnacles and badly corroded by seawater, and didn’t attract much attention at first. It wasn’t until May 1902 that the leading Greek archaeologist Valerios Stais noticed that the wooden covering had dried out and split open, and the fused lump of metal inside it had separated into several pieces. The largest of these fragments was a dial about 14cm in diameter, with some inscriptions on it. Some other fragments also appeared to be parts of dials with perfectly formed triangular teeth, like gear wheels.The evidence seemed to point to this being part of a kind of mechanical clock, but the researchers ultimately rejected this possibility as the wreck had been dated to the first century BCE, and it was known that precise gears like these had not existed until fourteen centuries after that.
Little progress on identifying either the purpose or origins of the mechanism was made until the late 1950s, when the device attracted the attention of a British-born polymath, Derek de Solla Price, who was working at Princeton University in the United States. Price realised that the inscriptions on the large dial indicated days, months and zodiac signs and theorised that the device used gears to trace the paths of the sun, moon and other planets in relation to the earth and to indicate their position at any given moment by means of pointers that had since been lost. Although his interpretation was basically sound, further research was hampered by the fact that only a few of the gears appear on the surface of the fused metal fragments of the mechanism.
In 1971, the National Museum in Athens gave permission for Price, working with a Greek radiographer, to X-ray the fragments of the Antikythera mechanism. These two-dimensional images revealed many of the hidden gears and allowed Price to develop schematic drawings of how the mechanism must have worked. What he discovered confounded all previous theories of technology in the Hellenistic era and indicated that the ancient Greeks’ mechanical know-how and knowledge of astronomy came close to that of modern times. However, despite positive scholarly reviews of Price’s work, his idea that the Antikythera mechanism is an ancient analogue computer, published in his 1974 book “Gears from the Greeks”, fell on deaf ears where mainstream historians were concerned. This may have been due, at least in part, to the contemporaneous popularity of books by the Swiss writer Erich von Daniken, who postulated that ancient aliens had brought advanced technology to earth; Price’s work may have inadvertently become associated with fringe theories and UFO-hunters as a result.
Whatever the reason, little more official research was conducted on the mechanism until the 2005 launch of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, an international, multi-disciplinary study that operates under the supervision of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. The project examined the fragments of the Antikythera mechanism using state-of-the-art imaging equipment. One machine, nicknamed BladeRunner, was originally designed to detect cracks in aircraft turbine blades by means of three dimensional X-ray technology. This project is ongoing and new findings are being constantly made and revealed. Enough has already been discovered to vindicate Price.
This modern research places the construction of the mechanism towards the end of the second century BCE and confirms that its bronze dials and gears would have been housed in a wooden box roughly the size of a modern shoebox. Like the clocks our grandparents’ generation kept on the mantelpiece, the mechanism had a circular dial at the front with rotating hands. Rather than showing hours and minutes, however, these hands indicated the positions of the sun and the moon in the sky at any given time, as well as of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the five planets that are visible to the naked human eye. In addition, the mechanism also allowed for the fact that the orbit of some planets around the sun appears to go backwards, or “retrograde”, at certain times during the celestial cycle. It has also been discovered that there were two dials on the back of the mechanism, one of which was a calendar and the other which showed when solar and lunar eclipses would take place. A number of breathtaking models of the mechanism have been produced, including one made out of Lego blocks. These reveal the outstanding mechanical skills and astronomical knowledge of whoever built the Antikythera mechanism two thousand years or more before we developed the technological skills to start unlocking its secrets.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 3
27
giant clams
Giải thích chi tiết
☺️ Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài Gap Fill
Step 01: Read the question to understand (main idea + detail) + Predict Word Form + Meaning
Simplified: The Antikythera mechanism was discovered by a diver who was looking for __________
Prediction: Danh từ (N), chỉ một loại sinh vật biển/đồ ăn mà thợ lặn tìm kiếm
-------
Step 02: Locate relevant information
🔍 Từ khoá: Antikythera mechanism, diver/dive, discovered, search.
→ Dựa vào các từ khoá trên → Tìm được trích dẫn ở đoạn 1.
-------
Step 03: Read relevant information to understand (main + detail)
📌Trích dẫn: "After the storm, one of the group, Elias Stadiatis, decided to dive in search of giant clams to eat for their dinner."
Simplified: Elias Stadiatis decided to dive in search ofgiant clams
Main idea: Elias Stadiatis - lặn xuống - để tìm nghêu khổng lồ cho bữa tối.
-------
Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning
Trong bài đọc: Elias Stadiatis lặn để tìm giant clams.
Trong câu hỏi: Người thợ lặn đang tìm kiếm ______.
B. However, the New Zealand State Ministry of Education says it is taking the issue seriously. It is working with a reference group on boys' education, which has been set up, and it has commissioned an Australian academic to report on interventions that have been found to work for boys, drawing particularly on Australia's experience. But some, such as former prison manager Celia Lashlie, the author of a book for parents of teenage boys, believe there is still resistance within the Education Ministry towards doing anything about the problem.
C. Education Ministry learning policy manager Steve Benson says that the National Certificate in Educational Achievement, or NCEA, as New Zealand's high school exams are called, is useful to employers and to universities because it provides a fine-grained picture of pupils' performance in every aspect of a subject, rather than just a pass or fail in an overall area. In most parts of the curriculum, for example in maths, there isn't really a gender gap. But literacy is a different matter. Even boys who are good at writing tend not to write so much. There's actually a quantity issue.
D. The discrepancy in reading and writing skills between males and females shows up as early as preschool, and the most significant difference is clear by the time these children enter high school. Not being good at literacy was not such a problem in the old days when many students left school for manual jobs after Year 11. But nowadays, many more stay on to higher education, and almost all jobs require literacy skills. Roger Moses, the headmaster of Wellington College, says that the written content of NCEA papers is more demanding than the previous system of secondary school qualifications in New Zealand, even in subjects such as statistics and accounting.
E. New Zealand 15-year-olds do better in international reading tests, but beneath this average lies a wide variance, with New Zealand European girls most represented at the top and New Zealand Pacific Island boys at the bottom. Yet some European girls drop out, and some Pacific Island boys excel. In other words, the range in performance within each gender group is much greater than the gender differences. Ethnic differences, and differences in socio-economic status, may be more significant than the simple boy/girl explanation.
F. This makes the Education Ministry nervous about pushing solutions that emphasize stereotyped gender differences, rather than looking at underachievement as a whole. Rob Burroughs, principal of Linwood High School in Christchurch, agrees. For three years, his school ran separate boys' classes to try to address the disparity in performance, before abandoning them. The research showed that the boys did better in their own class than in the co-educational environment. But when he looked at which teachers they had, and how well those teachers' other classes did, it became clear that the difference was, instead, to do with the quality of instruction.
G. At Onslow College, Dr. Stuart Martin would do away with the NCEA Level 1 exam if he could. He says that in Year 11, aged 15, boys are simply not mature enough to cope. They tend to think that just passing is enough, and that it's not necessary to work hard for a Merit or an Excellence grade. Often they are busy with other activities and part-time jobs. Boys' competitive instinct tends to come out later in their schooling years, especially if there is money attached or other tangible rewards. By 17, boys are catching up academically with the girls, and by the end of Year 13, boys are again winning the top prizes.
H. Boys in single-sex schools do better in NCEA across all levels, something economist Brian Easton reported after analysing data from the first year of NCEA's implementation. He said the results were valid, even when socio-economic status was taken into account. Dr Paul Baker, head of Waitaki Boys' High School in Oamaru, agrees. He thinks that although it is possible for all schools to do more to boost boys' performance, it is easier in a boys' school, where activities cannot be 'captured by girls'.
between the sexes
When we study the pronunciation of a language over any period of a few generations or more, we find there are always large-scale regularities in the changes: for example, over a certain period of time, just about all the long [a:] vowels in a language may change into long [e:] vowels, or all the [b] consonants in a certain position (for example at the end of a word) may change into [p] consonants. Such regular changes are often called sound laws. There are no universal sound laws (even though sound laws often reflect universal tendencies), but simply particular sound laws for one given language (or dialect) at one given period.
C. It is also possible that fashion plays a part in the process of change. It certainly plays a part in the spread of change: one person imitates another, and people with the most prestige are most likely to be imitated, so that a change that takes place in one social group may be imitated (more or less accurately) by speakers in another group. When a social group goes up or down in the world, its pronunciation may gain or lose prestige. It is said that, after the Russian Revolution of 1917, the upper-class pronunciation of Russian, which had formerly been considered desirable, became on the contrary an undesirable kind of accent to have, so that people tried to disguise it. Some of the changes in accepted English pronunciation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been shown to consist in the replacement of one style of pronunciation by another style already existing, and it is likely that such substitutions were a result of the great social changes of the period: the increased power and wealth of the middle classes, and their steady infiltration upwards into the ranks of the landed gentry, probably carried elements of middle-class pronunciation into upper-class speech.
D. A less specific variant of the argument is that the imitation of children is imperfect: they copy their parents’ speech, but never reproduce it exactly. This is true, but it is also true that such deviations from adult speech are usually corrected in later childhood. Perhaps it is more significant that even adults show a certain amount of random variation in their pronunciation of a given phoneme, even if the phonetic context is kept unchanged. This, however, cannot explain changes in pronunciation unless it can be shown that there is some systematic trend in the failures of imitation: if they are merely random deviations they will cancel one another out and there will be no net change in the language.
E. One such force which is often invoked is the principle of ease, or minimization of effort. The change from fussy to fuzzy would be an example of assimilation, which is a very common kind of change. Assimilation is the changing of a sound under the influence of a neighbouring one. For example, the word scant was once skamt, but the /m/ has been changed to /n/ under the influence of the following /t/. Greater efficiency has hereby been achieved, because /n/ and /t/ are articulated in the same place (with the tip of the tongue against the teeth-ridge), whereas /m/ is articulated elsewhere (with the two lips). So the place of articulation of the nasal consonant has been changed to conform with that of the following plosive. A more recent example of the same kind of thing is the common pronunciation of football as football.
F. Assimilation is not the only way in which we change our pronunciation in order to increase efficiency. It is very common for consonants to be lost at the end of a word: in Middle English, word-final [-n] was often lost in unstressed syllables, so that baken ‘to bake’ changed from [‘ba:kan] to [‘ba:k3], and later to [ba:k]. Consonant-clusters are often simplified. At one time there was a [t] in words like castle and Christmas, and an initial [k] in words like knight and know. Sometimes a whole syllable is dropped out when two successive syllables begin with the same consonant (haplology): a recent example is temporary, which in Britain is often pronounced as if it were 'tempory'.
sound laws
One spring day in 1900, a party of Greek sponge divers took shelter from a storm near the island of Antikythera, which lies about 50 kilometres northwest of the western tip of Crete. After the storm, one of the group, Elias Stadiatis, decided to dive in search of giant clams to eat for their dinner. On a shelf about 43 metres below the surface of the water, he chanced upon the wreck of an ancient ship. Fragments of statues, looking like body parts, covered this ledge. The diver returned to the surface, bearing an arm made of bronze as proof of what he had discovered. He reported his find to the authorities and, in the autumn, he and his companions returned to dive on the Antikythera wreck on behalf of the Greek government. They spent the next ten months bringing up pieces of marble and bronze statues, amphorae, lamps and coins, all of which were sent to the National Museum in Athens for cleaning and restoration.
Among the artefacts retrieved from the shipwreck was a rather unprepossessing lump of bronze inside what seemed to be a wooden casing. This object was covered in barnacles and badly corroded by seawater, and didn’t attract much attention at first. It wasn’t until May 1902 that the leading Greek archaeologist Valerios Stais noticed that the wooden covering had dried out and split open, and the fused lump of metal inside it had separated into several pieces. The largest of these fragments was a dial about 14cm in diameter, with some inscriptions on it. Some other fragments also appeared to be parts of dials with perfectly formed triangular teeth, like gear wheels.The evidence seemed to point to this being part of a kind of mechanical clock, but the researchers ultimately rejected this possibility as the wreck had been dated to the first century BCE, and it was known that precise gears like these had not existed until fourteen centuries after that.
Little progress on identifying either the purpose or origins of the mechanism was made until the late 1950s, when the device attracted the attention of a British-born polymath, Derek de Solla Price, who was working at Princeton University in the United States. Price realised that the inscriptions on the large dial indicated days, months and zodiac signs and theorised that the device used gears to trace the paths of the sun, moon and other planets in relation to the earth and to indicate their position at any given moment by means of pointers that had since been lost. Although his interpretation was basically sound, further research was hampered by the fact that only a few of the gears appear on the surface of the fused metal fragments of the mechanism.
In 1971, the National Museum in Athens gave permission for Price, working with a Greek radiographer, to X-ray the fragments of the Antikythera mechanism. These two-dimensional images revealed many of the hidden gears and allowed Price to develop schematic drawings of how the mechanism must have worked. What he discovered confounded all previous theories of technology in the Hellenistic era and indicated that the ancient Greeks’ mechanical know-how and knowledge of astronomy came close to that of modern times. However, despite positive scholarly reviews of Price’s work, his idea that the Antikythera mechanism is an ancient analogue computer, published in his 1974 book “Gears from the Greeks”, fell on deaf ears where mainstream historians were concerned. This may have been due, at least in part, to the contemporaneous popularity of books by the Swiss writer Erich von Daniken, who postulated that ancient aliens had brought advanced technology to earth; Price’s work may have inadvertently become associated with fringe theories and UFO-hunters as a result.
Whatever the reason, little more official research was conducted on the mechanism until the 2005 launch of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, an international, multi-disciplinary study that operates under the supervision of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. The project examined the fragments of the Antikythera mechanism using state-of-the-art imaging equipment. One machine, nicknamed BladeRunner, was originally designed to detect cracks in aircraft turbine blades by means of three dimensional X-ray technology. This project is ongoing and new findings are being constantly made and revealed. Enough has already been discovered to vindicate Price.
This modern research places the construction of the mechanism towards the end of the second century BCE and confirms that its bronze dials and gears would have been housed in a wooden box roughly the size of a modern shoebox. Like the clocks our grandparents’ generation kept on the mantelpiece, the mechanism had a circular dial at the front with rotating hands. Rather than showing hours and minutes, however, these hands indicated the positions of the sun and the moon in the sky at any given time, as well as of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the five planets that are visible to the naked human eye. In addition, the mechanism also allowed for the fact that the orbit of some planets around the sun appears to go backwards, or “retrograde”, at certain times during the celestial cycle. It has also been discovered that there were two dials on the back of the mechanism, one of which was a calendar and the other which showed when solar and lunar eclipses would take place. A number of breathtaking models of the mechanism have been produced, including one made out of Lego blocks. These reveal the outstanding mechanical skills and astronomical knowledge of whoever built the Antikythera mechanism two thousand years or more before we developed the technological skills to start unlocking its secrets.
