IELTS CAM Inspired 10 - Reading Test 2 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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Đề thi IELTS Online Test IELTS CAM Inspired 10 - Reading Test 2 - Download PDF Câu hỏi, Transcript và Đáp án
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 7
The Reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-G.
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
Write the appropriate numbers i-ix
List of Headings
I
The growth of urban centres in Japan
II
The preconditions a society must meet to industrialise
III
When and where industry first emerged
IV
Looking to Japan to test the idea
V
Two everyday drinks as the decisive elements
VI
Avoiding machines for fear of losing jobs
VII
Investigating why the population began to rise
VIII
The examples of Holland, France and China
IX
Shifts in what the British chose to drink
1
Paragraph A
2
Paragraph B
3
Paragraph C
4
Paragraph D
5
Paragraph E
6
Paragraph F
7
Paragraph G
Question 8 - 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 it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
8
The professor argues that the full set of factors he identifies would, by themselves, have been sufficient to trigger industrialisation.
9
The historian of medicine who endorsed the study had earlier collaborated with the professor.
10
The sharp drop in the number of babies who died reached households of every income level.
11
The tax placed on malt was intended by the government to reduce beer drinking.
12
Tea stayed expensive for people in Britain until a direct shipping route to China was opened up.
13
Japan carried on relying on draught animals and similar labour-saving aids well into the 1800s.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 17
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F.
14
mention of how a child's home surroundings can affect their exceptional ability
15
a description of what a pupil may forfeit when directed too closely
16
an account of the harm that fear can do
17
instances of teaching approaches that benefit pupils from poorer backgrounds
Question 18 - 22
Look at the following statements and the list of people below.
Match each statement with the correct person or people, A-E.
Write the correct letter, A-E.
List of Findings
A
Brandt and Nyström
B
Ferraro
C
Halloran
D
Lindqvist
E
Verhoeven
18
Should the ablest learners rarely slip up, the amount of drilling they are set can be reduced.
19
Beyond a certain point it is a learner's self-sufficiency, more than intellect, that carries them to the top.
20
Children of exceptional ability can put their feelings to work in support of their learning.
21
A child's remarkable talent is helped along by encouragement from those they live with.
22
The most accomplished learners are those who have accumulated extensive knowledge of their chosen area.
Question 23 - 26
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
23
Halloran's work showed that how well a child does on an intelligence test is bound up with the overall
available in the home.
24
The thinking of the most able pupils appears to differ in a
way from that of average learners.
25
As well as mapping out and keeping track of how they learn, children who use metacognition also carry out
and decide what to study.
26
Teaching known as
tends to generate excellent marks in class examinations.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 31
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-L, below.
Write the correct letter, A-L, in boxes on your answer sheet.
The importance placed on original artworks
Visitors will readily travel to a gallery to see an authentic painting, yet they make no comparable effort to consult a novelist's handwritten original. One reason may be that books have for centuries been distributed by means of , and another is that what a reader chiefly pursues in a novel is its rather than the physical page. Even a master such as Ferranti was content to let his replicate his pictures, while present-day copying techniques can capture an image's colouring and the raised grain of its surface, and even its exact . That galleries nonetheless keep asserting the primacy of the authentic object is to be regretted, for such an attitude may work against what would most benefit .
A
conveyed meaning
B
mechanical processes
C
mass duplication
D
decorative frames
E
commercial galleries
F
physical dimensions
G
private collectors
H
surface texture
I
ordinary viewers
J
studio assistants
K
art dealers
L
paint pigments
Question 32 - 35
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
32
The writer refers to the Aldermoor Gallery in Manchester in order to illustrate
A
the high price a nation pays to keep a vast collection intact.
B
the way a gallery can lower visitors' sense of their own worth.
C
the clash that can arise between money and art.
D
the case for putting personal welfare ahead of grand cultural schemes.
33
According to the writer, viewers today may be reluctant to criticise a painting because
A
they sense that their own response counts for nothing.
B
they are anxious about the financial consequences of doing so.
C
they cannot see how the work's price has been decided.
D
they lack the expertise needed to defend a view.
34
In the writer's account, the 'displacement effect' experienced by the visitor results from
A
the difficulty of studying any one piece at length.
B
the poor quality of much of what is shown.
C
the mix of very different works and the manner of their display.
D
the unsuitability of the specific pieces chosen for display.
35
What distinguishes a painting from other art forms, in the writer's view, is that it does not
A
bring the artist face to face with an audience.
B
possess any definite moment at which looking begins or ends.
C
rely on a particular setting in which to be presented.
D
call for the involvement of other skilled professionals.
Question 36 - 40
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
In following statements below, choose
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
Even highly accurate reproductions of paintings could be made many centuries ago.
37
Museums earn a considerable income from selling reproductions of the paintings they exhibit.
38
Spirited, audience-led commentary of the sort seen in literary criticism is just as widespread in the discussion of paintings.
39
If accurate reproductions were made freely available to all, people might feel less overawed by original paintings.
40
The writer claims that music reaches a wider audience than painting does.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Tea and the Industrial Revolution
One Cambridge academic believes that a shift in what people drank set off the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Farah Idris reports.
A
A. For decades the riddle of the Industrial Revolution has occupied Anselm Trevisan, professor of historical anthropology at Ashcombe College, Cambridge, as it had many historians before him. Two questions in particular have nagged at him. Why should this era-defining burst of industry have started in Britain of all places - and why should it have arrived only in the closing years of the eighteenth century?
B
Trevisan likens the mystery to a combination lock. 'Roughly twenty separate factors have to be in place at once before a revolution of this sort can occur,' he explains. Getting industry off the ground calls for machinery and power to run the factories, sizeable city populations to supply inexpensive labour, goods that move about easily, a comfortably-off middle class ready to purchase manufactured items, an economy shaped by market forces, and a government that permits all of this. England satisfied these conditions; yet France, the Netherlands and Japan, which met a fair number of them too, showed no sign of industrialising. Each factor, then, was needed - and none was enough on its own. 'Holland, remember, possessed everything but coal, and a great many of these same conditions were present in China too,' Trevisan points out. 'Most of us feel sure that one or two further pieces have to fall into place before the catch will release.'
C
Those extra pieces, he suggests, sit in nearly every household's cupboards. It was tea and beer - the two drinks the country loved best - that powered the transformation. Because tannin, the active substance in tea, and the hops put into beer both kill germs, and because making either meant boiling the water first, people were able to crowd together in towns without falling prey to water-borne illnesses like dysentery. Eccentric as the notion first seems, the doubt tends to soften into grudging respect the moment Trevisan sets out the trail of clues he followed. Respected voices have lent his argument weight too: the eminent medical historian Reinhold Auerbach recently published an approving assessment of the research.
D
How the Industrial Revolution had come about was something Trevisan puzzled over for years. Around the mid-eighteenth century, historians had fixed on one curious development that cried out for explanation. Britain's population had barely stirred between roughly 1650 and 1740, and then all at once it surged. 'Within twenty years the rate at which infants died was cut by half - in the countryside and the towns alike, and among rich and poor households alike,' says Trevisan. 'Four explanations were put forward. Had the viruses and bacteria of the day suddenly altered? That looked improbable. Had medicine been transformed? Hardly - this was a good hundred years before Renwick overhauled surgery. Had the surroundings people lived in shifted? Farming had improved enough to clear malaria from some districts, but such gains were slight, and proper sanitation remained a nineteenth-century development. That leaves only diet - yet the figures for height and weight were falling, so if anything food had grown worse.' Every effort to explain the plunge in child deaths, in short, hit a wall.
E
The timing of that population surge could hardly have suited the Industrial Revolution better, coming exactly when workers were wanted. 'Once a society starts shifting towards industry, packing people closely together makes sound economic sense,' Trevisan notes, 'but disease comes with it, above all from human waste.' Trawling through old records brought to light evidence that water-borne illness, dysentery in particular, did alter in frequency at just that moment. Whatever the population was drinking, he concluded, must have counted for much in holding such diseases down. 'Beer was our drink,' he says. 'For generations the hops added to preserve it - a potent destroyer of bacteria - kept the English safe. Then, late in the seventeenth century, malt, the grain from which beer is brewed, was taxed. The poorest fell back on water and on gin, and by the 1720s deaths were climbing once again. After that the rate fell away sharply - and what lay behind that?'
F
Trevisan next turned to Japan, which was raising large cities at much the same period and likewise lacked sanitation, yet where water-borne disease gripped the population far less firmly than in Britain. Could the explanation lie in how central tea was to Japanese life? He went on to remark that the dates in the British story of tea lined up with uncanny precision. Not until Britain opened a direct clipper trade with China, early in the eighteenth century, did tea cease to be a costly luxury; by the 1740s - just as infant deaths were tailing off - it had become an everyday drink. His guess was that boiling the water, together with the settling effect tea had on the stomach, left nursing mothers producing milk healthier than any before. Nowhere else in Europe was tea taken as it was in Britain, and that, by Trevisan's reasoning, put the other nations out of the running.
G
Yet if tea belongs among the pins of the lock, why did Japan itself not rush headlong into an industrial revolution steeped in the drink? The answer, for Trevisan, lies in a choice the Japanese made. Their seventeenth-century cities were large, literacy was broad, there was even trading in futures - but by abandoning the animals and other devices that spare human effort, for fear of throwing people out of employment, they had discarded what any revolution rooted in work depends upon. A nation ranked today among the most technologically advanced thus crossed into the nineteenth century having, as it were, 'turned its back on the wheel'.
* Aldous Renwick was among the earliest surgeons to use antiseptic methods during operations to guard against infection.
A. Across most countries, whether a child counts as gifted is settled by performance on a general intelligence, or IQ, test: those scoring above an agreed threshold, typically the top two to five per cent, qualify. Yet such tests are heavily shaped by what a child has already been taught, so what they really capture is present attainment weighed against age-norms — that is, how skilfully a youngster handles knowledge within the format of the test itself. Vocabulary items illustrate the point neatly, since a word can be recognised only when it has previously been heard. What an IQ score cannot do is reveal how thinking and learning actually unfold, nor can it forecast a child's creative capacity.
B
No one reaches an outstanding level without the right kind of assistance. Genuinely able children require the tools of learning — resources to work with and demanding, well-targeted teaching — together with the encouragement to pursue their ambitions. How the most able think seems to differ in a qualitative way from the thinking of average or older pupils, whose shortage of internal regulation is frequently made up for by the teacher regulating them from outside. Children become most effective at governing themselves once they are helped to recognise their own methods of learning — a capacity known as metacognition, which covers planning, monitoring, evaluation and deciding what to study. Since being aware of one's own emotions forms part of metacognition too, pupils ought to be guided to notice how they feel about whatever is being learned — curiosity or confidence, say.
C
Set beside weaker learners, strong achievers turn to self-regulatory strategies both more frequently and more skilfully, and they carry those strategies across more readily when faced with unfamiliar problems. In certain children the tendency is so pronounced that they look as though they possess a gift for particular subjects. Surveying the evidence on how highly able children think, Brandt and Nyström (1994) framed the teacher's dilemma crisply: were the gifted simply thinking faster, we would only have to teach faster, and were they simply making fewer mistakes, we could trim the amount of practice. Reality, though, is less tidy, and both teaching and learning have to be reshaped to allow for the many different ways in which individuals think.
D
Learning is coloured by feelings — those of the learner and those of the people who matter to them. Where positive emotions open up the creative side of learning, negative ones close it down. Fear is the clearest instance: because curiosity drives the problem-solving that powers scientific progress, anything that breeds anxiety can stunt that curiosity before it can develop. When Lindqvist (1990) examined the part played by emotion in the learning of children with very high IQs and strong records of achievement, she found their emotional energies working in concert with their aims. Such children were not merely inquisitive; many were also keen to take charge of their surroundings, to learn more efficiently and to build up their own store of learning resources.
E
To learn on their own, though, gifted pupils still need a measure of help from their teachers. The danger runs the other way too, for a teacher inclined to 'overdirect' can erode the very autonomy such pupils depend on. Spoon-feeding may deliver spectacular examination marks, yet those marks are not always matched by comparable achievements later in life, and leaning too heavily on teachers puts a child's independence and appetite for discovery at risk. Where teachers instead invite pupils to think back over what and how they have been learning, self-regulation grows; with a young child, even a plain 'What did you learn today?' can do the job. Since one central aim of schooling is to hand control of learning from teacher to pupil, sharpening the skill of learning how to learn ought to rank among its chief results — above all for the ablest. A range of newer approaches serves this end, among them learning that the child sets in motion and tutoring by peers of similar ability, and these have proved especially valuable for able children growing up in disadvantaged districts.
F
High achievement, then, is never purely a matter of the individual. Halloran (2011) found a very close positive link between children's IQ scores and the educational resources of their homes: the higher a child's score — particularly beyond an IQ of 130 — the richer the home support, judged by how much parents talked with the child and by the quantity of books and activities on hand. Environment aside, sheer knowledge counts for a great deal, since someone who knows an enormous amount about a given field will, as Verhoeven (1996) showed, outperform someone who does not. Studying creative scientists, Ferraro (1989) concluded that past a certain elevated level it is qualities such as independence, rather than raw intellectual ability, that do most to lift a person to the summit of expertise — a reflection of the sheer effort and time that deep learning and practice demand. Creativity of every kind, in the end, can be read as expertise fused with a powerful drive to succeed, as Almeida (1992) puts it.
Reproductions of Lady with a Linnet are available almost everywhere, yet crowds still travel to the Rivenhall Museum in Lyon to stand before the original — a habit that invites us to reconsider what we take for granted about the purpose of fine-art museums in the modern age.
Cosimo Ferranti's Lady with a Linnet ranks among the best-known paintings anywhere. Scarcely a visitor arrives without already knowing the image from countless copies; even so, all of them take it for granted that fine art repays attention far better when met in the original.
Were that painting instead a celebrated novel, hardly anyone would trouble to visit a museum and pore over the author's own manuscript when a printed edition lay to hand. Part of the reason is historical: the novel as a form owes its very existence to the printing technologies that let texts be run off in vast quantities, whereas paintings in oil have always come into being as single, unrepeatable objects. How we are accustomed to 'read' the two also differs. A novel's reader concentrates above all on what the words mean, giving little thought to their arrangement on the page; the viewer of a picture, on the other hand, has to dwell on the physical shapes and marks themselves quite as much as on whatever they may be taken to stand for.
Faithful copies of almost any artwork, however, have always been within reach. That four versions of Lady with a Linnet still survive is proof enough that Renaissance painters thought nothing of handing the copying of their pictures to the assistants in their studios, as routine everyday labour. Reproduction now is easier and more dependable still: modern reprographic methods turn out high-grade prints matched precisely to the scale of the original, true to its colours, and even carrying over the raised texture of the paint across its surface.
Museums, for their part, go on insisting upon the privileged standing of the original, even as they quietly concede that letting good reproductions circulate widely may itself carry genuine cultural worth.
The result of this, regrettably, is to narrow quite sharply the sort of experience that a visitor is offered.
One such limitation has to do with the way in which exhibits are set before us. Because they hold unique historical objects, art museums are often spoken of as 'treasure houses', and the point is made before we reach a single work, by the guards, the attendants, the ropes and the glass cases that keep us at arm's length from what is on show. Frequently the building's very architecture drives the same message home. A great collection like that of the Aldermoor Gallery in Manchester, what is more, fills room upon room with dozens of works apiece, almost any one of which would be worth more than everything the ordinary visitor owns. Where a society measures a person's standing so largely by their material wealth, it grows hard, in surroundings of that sort, not to feel acutely one's own comparative 'worthlessness'.
Dwelling on the 'value' of the original in its treasure-house setting drives home to the viewer, besides, that at some moment since the work was made a person or an institution far more powerful than themselves has fixed an enormous price upon it. Nothing the viewer might think about the piece, clearly, is going to move that price in the slightest, and people today are thereby put off any attempt at the spontaneous, immediate, self-reliant sort of response with which the work would once have been met.
What may next strike the visitor as strange is that paintings, drawings and sculptures of such variety should be gathered into a place that not one of them was ever made for. Sharpening this 'displacement effect' is the sheer quantity of exhibits: a large collection is likely to hold more works than anyone could realistically absorb across weeks, or even months.
That is the more troubling in that time seems to count for a great deal in appreciating any art form. What marks painting off from the rest is that no fixed span is laid down across which a picture is to be looked at. An opera or a play, by contrast, comes to its audience over a set stretch of time — the length of the performance — and novels and poems, likewise, are taken in along an ordered sequence, while a picture affords no plain point at which viewing should start, or where it ought to end. The works, in this way, prompt us to skim over them superficially and to miss the richness of detail and labour bound up in them.
What follows is that the leading manner of responding to art becomes the art historian's — a specialised, scholarly undertaking devoted to 'uncovering the meaning' of a work within the cultural setting of its own day. An approach of this kind sits altogether comfortably with what the museum exists to do, bent as it is on tracking down and safeguarding 'authentic', original readings of the exhibits. Once more, the lively, participatory criticism that crowds the commentary on great literary works appears to be shut out, nowhere to be met with in most writing on art history.
What the galleries choose to display stands as a warning of the critical habits that can set in once spontaneous criticism has been stifled. The public who visit museums, like any audience, draw far more from art when they are granted the confidence to voice what they think. Were fitting works of fine art made permanently available to all through high-fidelity reproductions, in the way that literature and music long since have been, people might come to stand a little less in awe of them. That, sadly, is perhaps more than one can ask of those bent on keeping the art establishment firmly within their own grasp.
B. Trevisan likens the mystery to a combination lock. 'Roughly twenty separate factors have to be in place at once before a revolution of this sort can occur,' he explains. Getting industry off the ground calls for machinery and power to run the factories, sizeable city populations to supply inexpensive labour, goods that move about easily, a comfortably-off middle class ready to purchase manufactured items, an economy shaped by market forces, and a government that permits all of this. England satisfied these conditions; yet France, the Netherlands and Japan, which met a fair number of them too, showed no sign of industrialising. Each factor, then, was needed - and none was enough on its own. 'Holland, remember, possessed everything but coal, and a great many of these same conditions were present in China too,' Trevisan points out. 'Most of us feel sure that one or two further pieces have to fall into place before the catch will release.'
C. Those extra pieces, he suggests, sit in nearly every household's cupboards. It was tea and beer - the two drinks the country loved best - that powered the transformation. Because tannin, the active substance in tea, and the hops put into beer both kill germs, and because making either meant boiling the water first, people were able to crowd together in towns without falling prey to water-borne illnesses like dysentery. Eccentric as the notion first seems, the doubt tends to soften into grudging respect the moment Trevisan sets out the trail of clues he followed. Respected voices have lent his argument weight too: the eminent medical historian Reinhold Auerbach recently published an approving assessment of the research.
D. How the Industrial Revolution had come about was something Trevisan puzzled over for years. Around the mid-eighteenth century, historians had fixed on one curious development that cried out for explanation. Britain's population had barely stirred between roughly 1650 and 1740, and then all at once it surged. 'Within twenty years the rate at which infants died was cut by half - in the countryside and the towns alike, and among rich and poor households alike,' says Trevisan. 'Four explanations were put forward. Had the viruses and bacteria of the day suddenly altered? That looked improbable. Had medicine been transformed? Hardly - this was a good hundred years before Renwick overhauled surgery. Had the surroundings people lived in shifted? Farming had improved enough to clear malaria from some districts, but such gains were slight, and proper sanitation remained a nineteenth-century development. That leaves only diet - yet the figures for height and weight were falling, so if anything food had grown worse.' Every effort to explain the plunge in child deaths, in short, hit a wall.
E. The timing of that population surge could hardly have suited the Industrial Revolution better, coming exactly when workers were wanted. 'Once a society starts shifting towards industry, packing people closely together makes sound economic sense,' Trevisan notes, 'but disease comes with it, above all from human waste.' Trawling through old records brought to light evidence that water-borne illness, dysentery in particular, did alter in frequency at just that moment. Whatever the population was drinking, he concluded, must have counted for much in holding such diseases down. 'Beer was our drink,' he says. 'For generations the hops added to preserve it - a potent destroyer of bacteria - kept the English safe. Then, late in the seventeenth century, malt, the grain from which beer is brewed, was taxed. The poorest fell back on water and on gin, and by the 1720s deaths were climbing once again. After that the rate fell away sharply - and what lay behind that?'
F. Trevisan next turned to Japan, which was raising large cities at much the same period and likewise lacked sanitation, yet where water-borne disease gripped the population far less firmly than in Britain. Could the explanation lie in how central tea was to Japanese life? He went on to remark that the dates in the British story of tea lined up with uncanny precision. Not until Britain opened a direct clipper trade with China, early in the eighteenth century, did tea cease to be a costly luxury; by the 1740s - just as infant deaths were tailing off - it had become an everyday drink. His guess was that boiling the water, together with the settling effect tea had on the stomach, left nursing mothers producing milk healthier than any before. Nowhere else in Europe was tea taken as it was in Britain, and that, by Trevisan's reasoning, put the other nations out of the running.
G. Yet if tea belongs among the pins of the lock, why did Japan itself not rush headlong into an industrial revolution steeped in the drink? The answer, for Trevisan, lies in a choice the Japanese made. Their seventeenth-century cities were large, literacy was broad, there was even trading in futures - but by abandoning the animals and other devices that spare human effort, for fear of throwing people out of employment, they had discarded what any revolution rooted in work depends upon. A nation ranked today among the most technologically advanced thus crossed into the nineteenth century having, as it were, 'turned its back on the wheel'.
* Aldous Renwick was among the earliest surgeons to use antiseptic methods during operations to guard against infection.
B. No one reaches an outstanding level without the right kind of assistance. Genuinely able children require the tools of learning — resources to work with and demanding, well-targeted teaching — together with the encouragement to pursue their ambitions. How the most able think seems to differ in a qualitative way from the thinking of average or older pupils, whose shortage of internal regulation is frequently made up for by the teacher regulating them from outside. Children become most effective at governing themselves once they are helped to recognise their own methods of learning — a capacity known as metacognition, which covers planning, monitoring, evaluation and deciding what to study. Since being aware of one's own emotions forms part of metacognition too, pupils ought to be guided to notice how they feel about whatever is being learned — curiosity or confidence, say.
C. Set beside weaker learners, strong achievers turn to self-regulatory strategies both more frequently and more skilfully, and they carry those strategies across more readily when faced with unfamiliar problems. In certain children the tendency is so pronounced that they look as though they possess a gift for particular subjects. Surveying the evidence on how highly able children think, Brandt and Nyström (1994) framed the teacher's dilemma crisply: were the gifted simply thinking faster, we would only have to teach faster, and were they simply making fewer mistakes, we could trim the amount of practice. Reality, though, is less tidy, and both teaching and learning have to be reshaped to allow for the many different ways in which individuals think.
D. Learning is coloured by feelings — those of the learner and those of the people who matter to them. Where positive emotions open up the creative side of learning, negative ones close it down. Fear is the clearest instance: because curiosity drives the problem-solving that powers scientific progress, anything that breeds anxiety can stunt that curiosity before it can develop. When Lindqvist (1990) examined the part played by emotion in the learning of children with very high IQs and strong records of achievement, she found their emotional energies working in concert with their aims. Such children were not merely inquisitive; many were also keen to take charge of their surroundings, to learn more efficiently and to build up their own store of learning resources.
E. To learn on their own, though, gifted pupils still need a measure of help from their teachers. The danger runs the other way too, for a teacher inclined to 'overdirect' can erode the very autonomy such pupils depend on. Spoon-feeding may deliver spectacular examination marks, yet those marks are not always matched by comparable achievements later in life, and leaning too heavily on teachers puts a child's independence and appetite for discovery at risk. Where teachers instead invite pupils to think back over what and how they have been learning, self-regulation grows; with a young child, even a plain 'What did you learn today?' can do the job. Since one central aim of schooling is to hand control of learning from teacher to pupil, sharpening the skill of learning how to learn ought to rank among its chief results — above all for the ablest. A range of newer approaches serves this end, among them learning that the child sets in motion and tutoring by peers of similar ability, and these have proved especially valuable for able children growing up in disadvantaged districts.
F. High achievement, then, is never purely a matter of the individual. Halloran (2011) found a very close positive link between children's IQ scores and the educational resources of their homes: the higher a child's score — particularly beyond an IQ of 130 — the richer the home support, judged by how much parents talked with the child and by the quantity of books and activities on hand. Environment aside, sheer knowledge counts for a great deal, since someone who knows an enormous amount about a given field will, as Verhoeven (1996) showed, outperform someone who does not. Studying creative scientists, Ferraro (1989) concluded that past a certain elevated level it is qualities such as independence, rather than raw intellectual ability, that do most to lift a person to the summit of expertise — a reflection of the sheer effort and time that deep learning and practice demand. Creativity of every kind, in the end, can be read as expertise fused with a powerful drive to succeed, as Almeida (1992) puts it.
Cosimo Ferranti's Lady with a Linnet ranks among the best-known paintings anywhere. Scarcely a visitor arrives without already knowing the image from countless copies; even so, all of them take it for granted that fine art repays attention far better when met in the original.
Were that painting instead a celebrated novel, hardly anyone would trouble to visit a museum and pore over the author's own manuscript when a printed edition lay to hand. Part of the reason is historical: the novel as a form owes its very existence to the printing technologies that let texts be run off in vast quantities, whereas paintings in oil have always come into being as single, unrepeatable objects. How we are accustomed to 'read' the two also differs. A novel's reader concentrates above all on what the words mean, giving little thought to their arrangement on the page; the viewer of a picture, on the other hand, has to dwell on the physical shapes and marks themselves quite as much as on whatever they may be taken to stand for.
Faithful copies of almost any artwork, however, have always been within reach. That four versions of Lady with a Linnet still survive is proof enough that Renaissance painters thought nothing of handing the copying of their pictures to the assistants in their studios, as routine everyday labour. Reproduction now is easier and more dependable still: modern reprographic methods turn out high-grade prints matched precisely to the scale of the original, true to its colours, and even carrying over the raised texture of the paint across its surface.
Museums, for their part, go on insisting upon the privileged standing of the original, even as they quietly concede that letting good reproductions circulate widely may itself carry genuine cultural worth.
The result of this, regrettably, is to narrow quite sharply the sort of experience that a visitor is offered.
One such limitation has to do with the way in which exhibits are set before us. Because they hold unique historical objects, art museums are often spoken of as 'treasure houses', and the point is made before we reach a single work, by the guards, the attendants, the ropes and the glass cases that keep us at arm's length from what is on show. Frequently the building's very architecture drives the same message home. A great collection like that of the Aldermoor Gallery in Manchester, what is more, fills room upon room with dozens of works apiece, almost any one of which would be worth more than everything the ordinary visitor owns. Where a society measures a person's standing so largely by their material wealth, it grows hard, in surroundings of that sort, not to feel acutely one's own comparative 'worthlessness'.
Dwelling on the 'value' of the original in its treasure-house setting drives home to the viewer, besides, that at some moment since the work was made a person or an institution far more powerful than themselves has fixed an enormous price upon it. Nothing the viewer might think about the piece, clearly, is going to move that price in the slightest, and people today are thereby put off any attempt at the spontaneous, immediate, self-reliant sort of response with which the work would once have been met.
What may next strike the visitor as strange is that paintings, drawings and sculptures of such variety should be gathered into a place that not one of them was ever made for. Sharpening this 'displacement effect' is the sheer quantity of exhibits: a large collection is likely to hold more works than anyone could realistically absorb across weeks, or even months.
That is the more troubling in that time seems to count for a great deal in appreciating any art form. What marks painting off from the rest is that no fixed span is laid down across which a picture is to be looked at. An opera or a play, by contrast, comes to its audience over a set stretch of time — the length of the performance — and novels and poems, likewise, are taken in along an ordered sequence, while a picture affords no plain point at which viewing should start, or where it ought to end. The works, in this way, prompt us to skim over them superficially and to miss the richness of detail and labour bound up in them.
What follows is that the leading manner of responding to art becomes the art historian's — a specialised, scholarly undertaking devoted to 'uncovering the meaning' of a work within the cultural setting of its own day. An approach of this kind sits altogether comfortably with what the museum exists to do, bent as it is on tracking down and safeguarding 'authentic', original readings of the exhibits. Once more, the lively, participatory criticism that crowds the commentary on great literary works appears to be shut out, nowhere to be met with in most writing on art history.
What the galleries choose to display stands as a warning of the critical habits that can set in once spontaneous criticism has been stifled. The public who visit museums, like any audience, draw far more from art when they are granted the confidence to voice what they think. Were fitting works of fine art made permanently available to all through high-fidelity reproductions, in the way that literature and music long since have been, people might come to stand a little less in awe of them. That, sadly, is perhaps more than one can ask of those bent on keeping the art establishment firmly within their own grasp.
