IELTS CAM Inspired 11 - Reading Test 2 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Online CAM Inspired 11 - Reading Test 2 được lấy từ cuốn sách IELTS CAM Inspired 11 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 CAM Inspired 11 - Reading Test 2 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 4
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
In following statements below, choose
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
1
There is some doubt about what caused the Mary Rose to sink.
2
The Mary Rose was the only ship to sink in the battle of 19 July 1545.
3
Most of one side of the Mary Rose lay undamaged under the sea.
4
Alexander McKee knew that the wreck would contain many valuable historical objects.
Question 5 - 8
Look at the following statements and the list of dates below.
Match each statement with the correct date, A-G
List of Findings
A
1836
B
1840
C
1965
D
1967
E
1971
F
1979
G
1982
5
A search for the Mary Rose was launched
6
One person’s exploration of the Mary Rose site stopped
7
It was agreed that the hull of the Mary Rose should be raised.
8
The site of the Mary Rose was found by chance
Question 9 - 13
Label the diagram below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 20
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
A finding that backs a traditional story
II
Dwindling supplies of food
III
Two contrasting interpretations of the islanders
IV
What lies ahead for the carved figures
V
Signs of clever land-management methods
VI
Ruin brought about by forces beyond the settlers' control
VII
The island's prospects in the years to come
VIII
A settled answer to a disputed question of origin
IX
How the monuments deepened the crisis
14
Paragraph A
15
Paragraph B
16
Paragraph C
17
Paragraph D
18
Paragraph E
19
Paragraph F
20
Paragraph G
Question 21 - 24
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Rowan Aldiss's View
In Aldiss's account, the seafaring settlers brought about the loss of the island's forests, clearing woodland for firewood and opening up land for their . Pollen recovered by twentieth-century researchers confirms that the island had once lain beneath dense palm forest, all of which had become open grassland before any European arrived. When the islanders could no longer make the that their fishing required, Aldiss maintains, they fell back on to feed themselves. He further argues that the great stone figures were raised to advertise the standing of the island's chiefs, and that manoeuvring them into position demanded not only a large workforce but also a great deal of .
Question 25 - 26
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
On which TWO of the following points do Marsh and Brennan take a different view from Aldiss?
A
the way in which the great figures were moved across the island
B
the region from which the island's first inhabitants originally came
C
the techniques used to cut and shape the figures
D
whether the building of the figures damaged the islanders' society
E
the length of time for which the island remained cut off
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
The shape-matching experiment mentioned in the second paragraph is included as an example of
A
how readily our judgements are swayed by those around us.
B
the difficulty the brain has in making sense of visual information.
C
why abstract art leans so heavily on simple forms.
D
the lack of any correct response where taste is concerned.
28
What Ingrid Solvang's study reveals is that people
A
tend to prefer pictures that are already familiar to them.
B
can sense the purpose an artist brought to a work.
C
are strongly swayed by the way a work has been labelled.
D
hold firm opinions about what counts as good art.
29
The work carried out with Tomas Renard's ambiguous pieces implies that people
A
can enjoy a picture even when its meaning escapes them.
B
differ considerably in how long they spend studying a work.
C
take pleasure in puzzling out what a work depicts.
D
prefer art that represents the world to art that does not.
30
According to the experiments in the fifth paragraph, Mondrian's canvases
A
are open to a range of competing readings.
B
upend the way we normally think about line and colour.
C
are more approachable than other abstract works.
D
are constructed with far more care than they seem to be.
Question 31 - 33
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-H, below.
Write the correct letters, A-H, in boxes on your answer sheet.
Art and the Brain
Neuroaesthetics attempts to study art with the objectivity of science. Brain research shows, for instance, how strongly Impressionist paintings act on our . Ewan Marsh of the University of Brenmar argues that many artists build into their work precisely the level of that the human brain responds to most. He further notes that art we enjoy often contains recurring that also appear widely in nature.
A
patterns
B
emotions
C
skill
D
complexity
E
movements
F
layout
G
interpretation
H
images
Question 34 - 39
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
34
The writer suggests that the human visual system may cope comparatively easily with imagery built from small repeating forms.
35
It is now firmly established that mirror neurons account for the energetic quality of Pollock's paintings.
36
Works of art that survive for many generations usually become more valuable than more recent works.
37
The writer feels that our response to art cannot be captured completely by scientific principles alone.
38
The writer suggests that abstract art is, on the whole, more difficult to appreciate than art which depicts the world.
39
For the writer, searching for meaning in science is something quite unlike doing so in art.
Question 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
40
Which of the following would make the best subtitle for the passage?
A
A survey of the leading artists whose work inspired neuroaesthetics
B
Why abstract art provokes stronger emotions than representational art
C
What brain science is beginning to reveal about our response to abstract art
D
How neuroscience has changed the way the public values abstract art
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Raising the Mary Rose
How a sixteenth-century warship was recovered from the seabed
On 19 July 1545, English and French fleets were engaged in a sea battle off the coast of southern England in the area of water called the Solent, between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. Among the English vessels was a warship by the name of Mary Rose. Built in Portsmouth some 35 years earlier, she had had a long and successful fighting career, and was a favourite of King Henry VIII. Accounts of what happened to the ship vary: while witnesses agree that she was not hit by the French, some maintain that she was outdated, overladen and sailing too low in the water, others that she was mishandled by undisciplined crew. What is undisputed, however, is that the Mary Rose sank into the Solent that day, taking at least 500 men with her. After the battle, attempts were made to recover the ship, but these failed.
The Mary Rose came to rest on the seabed, lying on her starboard (right) side at an angle of approximately 60 degrees. The hull (the body of the ship) acted as a trap for the sand and mud carried by Solent currents. As a result, the starboard side filled rapidly, leaving the exposed port (left) side to be eroded by marine organisms and mechanical degradation. Because of the way the ship sank, nearly all of the starboard half survived intact. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the entire site became covered with a layer of hard grey clay, which minimised further erosion.
Then, on 16 June 1836, some fishermen in the Solent found that their equipment was caught on an underwater obstruction, which turned out to be the Mary Rose. Diver John Deane happened to be exploring another sunken ship nearby, and the fishermen approached him, asking him to free their gear. Deane dived down, and found the equipment caught on a timber protruding slightly from the seabed. Exploring further, he uncovered several other timbers and a bronze gun. Deane continued diving on the site intermittently until 1840, recovering several more guns, two bows, various timbers, part of a pump and various other small finds.
The Mary Rose then faded into obscurity for another hundred years. But in 1965, military historian and amateur diver Alexander McKee, in conjunction with the British Sub-Aqua Club, initiated a project called ‘Solent Ships’. While on paper this was a plan to examine a number of known wrecks in the Solent, what McKee really hoped for was to find the Mary Rose. Ordinary search techniques proved unsatisfactory, so McKee entered into collaboration with Harold E. Edgerton, professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1967, Edgerton’s side-scan sonar systems revealed a large, unusually shaped object, which McKee believed was the Mary Rose. Further excavations revealed stray pieces of timber and an iron gun. But the climax to the operation came when, on 5 May 1971, part of the ship’s frame was uncovered. McKee and his team now knew for certain that they had found the wreck, but were as yet unaware that it also housed a treasure trove of beautifully preserved artefacts. Interest in the project grew, and in 1979, The Mary Rose Trust was formed, with Prince Charles as its President and Dr Margaret Rule its Archaeological Director. The decision whether or not to salvage the wreck was not an easy one, although an excavation in 1978 had shown that it might be possible to raise the hull. While the original aim was to raise the hull if at all feasible, the operation was not given the go-ahead until January 1982, when all the necessary information was available.
An important factor in trying to salvage the Mary Rose was that the remaining hull was an open shell. This led to an important decision being taken: namely to carry out the lifting operation in three very distinct stages. The hull was attached to a lifting frame via a network of bolts and lifting wires. The problem of the hull being sucked back downwards into the mud was overcome by using 12 hydraulic jacks. These raised it a few centimetres over a period of several days, as the lifting frame rose slowly up its four legs. It was only when the hull was hanging freely from the lifting frame, clear of the seabed and the suction effect of the surrounding mud, that the salvage operation progressed to the second stage. In this stage, the lifting frame was fixed to a hook attached to a crane, and the hull was lifted completely clear of the seabed and transferred underwater into the lifting cradle. This required precise positioning to locate the legs into the stabbing guides’ of the lifting cradle. The lifting cradle was designed to fit the hull jusing archaeological survey drawings, and was fitted with air bags to provide additional cushioning for the hull’s delicate timber framework. The third and final stage was to lift the entire structure into the air, by which time the hull was also supported from below. Finally, on 11 October 1982, millions of people around the world held their breath as the timber skeleton of the Mary Rose was lifted clear of the water, ready to be returned home to Portsmouth.
9
10
11
12
13
Raising the hull of the Mary Rose: Stages one and two
-
9
attached to hull by wires
-
10
to prevent hull being sucked into mud
-legs are placed into
11
-hull is lowered into
12
-
13
used as extra protection for the hull
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 1
1
True
Giải thích chi tiết
Thông tin trong bài đọc chứa trong 3 câu, và cấu trúc phức tạp, nên bạn áp dụng Linearthinking để nhanh nắm ý chính nha:
1 Among the English vessels was a warship - Mary Rose
2 Built in Portsmouth some 35 years earlier , she had a long and successful fighting career,
3 Accounts of what happened to the ship vary : while witnesses agree that … , some maintain that … , others that …
→ Main idea: Mary Rose được xây dựng vào 35 năm trước + Những giả thuyết đưa ra về việc xảy ra với thuyền Mary Rose
→ So sánh với câu hỏi: some doubt about what caused the Mary Rose to sink = Accounts of what happened to the ship vary
A. Scattered across Easter Island (Rapa Nui to those who live there) stand several hundred colossal stone figures, the moai. Polynesian voyagers reached this isolated speck in the Pacific and were then cut off from the wider world for centuries. Everything the moai demanded — and some rise more than nine metres and weigh over 6,000 kilos — came from the island's own resources. Yet the Spanish sailors who landed in 1740 found a people still living, technologically, in the Stone Age. Shaped with stone tools alone, the figures had somehow been carried many kilometres to the massive stone platforms on which they stood, without draught animals or wheels. Just who made them stayed unresolved deep into the twentieth century. The Danish anthropologist Aksel Vendt held that seafarers from the South American mainland were responsible, while the popular writer Lucien Berne credited survivors of a drowned mid-ocean continent. Linguistic, archaeological and genetic findings have since settled the matter — the builders were the islanders' own ancestors — though how they shifted such weights remains unproven. Island tradition insists the figures simply strode into place; scholars have more often assumed they were dragged with ropes and wooden rollers.
B
By the time Europeans reached it, the island was open grassland dotted with only a few stunted trees. Yet pollen sealed in lake-bed sediments, recovered by researchers in the 1970s and 1980s, told a different story: for thousands of years Rapa Nui had lain under thick palm forest, which vanished only once Polynesian settlers arrived. To the American geographer Rowan Aldiss, the islanders (those settlers' descendants) brought ruin on their own surroundings. Fate had placed them on a peculiarly fragile island, so dry, cool and remote that windblown volcanic ash never reached it to enrich the soil. Trees felled for fuel and to make room for their gardens never grew back. With usable trees ever scarcer, the islanders could no longer build the rafts their fishing relied on, and turned instead to shellfish, while the thinning soil yielded poorer harvests. Long before any European appeared, Aldiss contends, Rapa Nui had slid into warfare and even cannibalism, a collapse he calls 'a worst-case glimpse of what our own future may hold'.
C
In Aldiss's reading, the moai merely hastened this collapse. He sees them as displays of power by rival chiefs who, marooned on a tiny island, had few other ways to prove their supremacy, and so competed to raise ever larger figures. Moving them, he suggests, meant hauling each moai on a wooden sledge over rails of logs — a method that consumed huge quantities of both timber and manpower. Feeding those labourers meant clearing still more land. Once no usable trees remained and fighting had begun, the islanders started toppling the statues, and by the nineteenth century none still stood.
D
Two archaeologists, Delia Marsh of Cawley University and Tomas Brennan of Aldergrove State University, accept that Rapa Nui lost its forests and call the episode an 'ecological catastrophe', yet they blame neither the islanders nor the moai. Excavated evidence, they argue, shows the Rapanui working extraordinarily hard to protect what little their wind-battered, barren fields could yield. Thousands of circular stone shelters were built to break the wind, crops were grown inside them, and shattered volcanic rock was spread to keep the soil moist. The prehistoric islanders, they conclude, were early masters of sustainable cultivation.
E
For Marsh and Brennan, building the moai actually kept the peace, binding rival groups together rather than dividing them. Moving the statues, they add, needed only a few people and no wood, since the figures were 'walked' upright to their sites — and here the archaeology confirms what Rapanui tradition had always claimed. In recent trials, a team of as few as twenty, with three stout ropes and a little practice, walked a 1,200-kilogram replica several hundred metres with ease. A heavy, forward-leaning belly tipped each figure's weight ahead of it, while a curved, D-shaped base let handlers rock it from side to side.
F
The two archaeologists are also sure the settlers were not wholly to blame for the loss of the trees. Preserved nuts from the extinct Rapa Nui palm bear tiny grooves gnawed by stowaway rats — creatures that arrived with the earliest settlers and, by Marsh and Brennan's reckoning, would have overrun the island within a few years. By eating the seeds, they would have stopped the slow-growing palms from regenerating, dooming the forest regardless of any clearing by the settlers; the rats surely took birds' eggs too. Nor, they argue, is there evidence that island society collapsed when the palms did. They see a population that grew quickly and then held steady until Europeans arrived with diseases against which the islanders had no defence. Later, in the nineteenth century, slave raiders gutted what remained, until by 1883 just 130 people were left.
G
The picture Marsh and Brennan leave us with is of an island peopled by peaceable, resourceful builders and careful guardians of their land, not by reckless destroyers of their own environment and society. 'Far from a tale of utter collapse,' they maintain, 'Rapa Nui is really an improbable success story.' Whichever account is closer to the truth, the wider world can surely learn something from what happened on this remote island.
Neuroaesthetics, a young field of study, sets out to apply scientific rigour to the way we understand art, and it has already deepened our grasp of numerous celebrated works. Take Impressionist canvases: their soft, indistinct forms appear to activate a part of the brain known as the amygdala. Because our feelings are governed in large part by that same region, this may be why so many viewers are stirred by such paintings.
Might this way of working also illuminate the abstract art of the twentieth century - Mondrian's gridded blocks of colour, say, or the random spatters Pollock let fall across his canvases? To the doubters, people profess admiration for such work only because it is famous. And a pull towards the majority view is something we all feel. Take a simple test of perception, deciding whether one shape is a rotated version of another: shown that others have chosen an answer that is plainly wrong, individuals will often go along with it. Where so slippery a notion as art appreciation is concerned, with no response counting as right or wrong, such herd instinct is likely to weigh heavier still.
One response to this argument came from Ingrid Solvang, of Ashcombe College in Massachusetts, who showed volunteers paintings two at a time. In each pair, one was by a well-known abstract painter, the other the scribblings of a young child or of animals such as chimpanzees and elephants, and participants simply said which they preferred. Some pictures went unlabelled; others bore captions that were deliberately false, so that what looked like an elephant's clumsy daubs might in fact be a prized painting. Across the trials, people tended to favour the celebrated artists' work even when told a child or a beast was responsible. Somehow the observer can detect the guiding hand of the artist, without quite being able to put that feeling into words.
Tomas Renard, a practising artist attached to Haldane University, makes deliberately equivocal pieces that sit somewhere between pure abstraction and plain representation. In an experiment he ran with colleagues, viewers were asked to rate how 'powerful' each work struck them as being, and to say whether anything in it looked familiar. Those who dwelt longest over these judgements not only awarded the work higher marks but also showed stronger activity in the brain. The mind, it appears, treats such pictures as riddles to be solved, and the more stubborn the meaning is to pin down, the greater the pleasure when it finally clicks into place.
Consider, too, a painter like Mondrian, whose canvases are built entirely from horizontal and vertical lines penning in rectangles of colour. Simple though they look, such works are in fact assembled with great care, as eye-tracking research bears out, and merely turning a composition round alters our reading of it completely. Faced with the unaltered paintings, viewers let their gaze rest longer on particular spots; confronted with the rotated ones, their eyes darted about far more restlessly. That difference told: asked to score the pictures, they rated the tampered versions the less enjoyable.
A comparable investigation was carried out by Nadia Voss at Kelso University, who had her participants set original paintings beside copies in which she had shifted elements to different positions within the frame. Whether the picture was a still life by Chardin or an abstract by Kandinsky, virtually all of them came down on the side of the original. Rearranging a work's composition, Voss further discovered, dampened activity in precisely those regions of the brain that deal with meaning and its interpretation.
A further study, by Ewan Marsh of the University of Brenmar, looked at how visually elaborate various artworks were, and points to a particular pitch of detail that artists rely on to satisfy the brain. Supply too little and the piece falls flat; too much, and the eye suffers what Marsh calls 'perceptual overload'. Appealing works, whether they represent the world or not, also tend to display 'fractals', the same forms cropping up at different sizes. Such repetition fills the natural world, in the jagged outlines of mountains or the forking of a tree's branches, and eyes shaped by life in the open country may cope more readily with imagery of this kind.
Equally curious is the discovery that the brain registers motion when we look at handwriting, almost as though we were living again the instant the writer set pen to paper. Some researchers accordingly ask whether the reason Pollock's canvases feel so charged with energy is that the brain re-creates the vigorous movements he made while painting. The explanation may lie in the so-called 'mirror neurons', cells that echo the actions we observe in others, though the idea still awaits rigorous testing. There is even a suggestion that neuroaesthetic research could help account for why certain works endure. Passing fashions may dictate what enjoys favour at any given moment, yet the pieces that suit our visual apparatus best are perhaps the ones that outlast the tastes of earlier ages.
The study of neuroaesthetics remains in its infancy, and the work done so far is in all likelihood only a foretaste of what lies ahead. Even so, it would be a mistake to boil art appreciation down to a tidy set of scientific rules. The particular manner of an artist, the moment they occupy in history, the creative climate they worked within - none of these should be played down. What abstract art holds out is at once a difficulty and a liberty: room to try one reading against another. In that respect it is not, perhaps, so far from science, where the constant hunt for underlying order and hidden meaning lets us see the world afresh.
On 19 July 1545, English and French fleets were engaged in a sea battle off the coast of southern England in the area of water called the Solent, between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. Among the English vessels was a warship by the name of Mary Rose. Built in Portsmouth some 35 years earlier, she had had a long and successful fighting career, and was a favourite of King Henry VIII. Accounts of what happened to the ship vary: while witnesses agree that she was not hit by the French, some maintain that she was outdated, overladen and sailing too low in the water, others that she was mishandled by undisciplined crew. What is undisputed, however, is that the Mary Rose sank into the Solent that day, taking at least 500 men with her. After the battle, attempts were made to recover the ship, but these failed.
The Mary Rose came to rest on the seabed, lying on her starboard (right) side at an angle of approximately 60 degrees. The hull (the body of the ship) acted as a trap for the sand and mud carried by Solent currents. As a result, the starboard side filled rapidly, leaving the exposed port (left) side to be eroded by marine organisms and mechanical degradation. Because of the way the ship sank, nearly all of the starboard half survived intact. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the entire site became covered with a layer of hard grey clay, which minimised further erosion.
Then, on 16 June 1836, some fishermen in the Solent found that their equipment was caught on an underwater obstruction, which turned out to be the Mary Rose. Diver John Deane happened to be exploring another sunken ship nearby, and the fishermen approached him, asking him to free their gear. Deane dived down, and found the equipment caught on a timber protruding slightly from the seabed. Exploring further, he uncovered several other timbers and a bronze gun. Deane continued diving on the site intermittently until 1840, recovering several more guns, two bows, various timbers, part of a pump and various other small finds.
The Mary Rose then faded into obscurity for another hundred years. But in 1965, military historian and amateur diver Alexander McKee, in conjunction with the British Sub-Aqua Club, initiated a project called ‘Solent Ships’. While on paper this was a plan to examine a number of known wrecks in the Solent, what McKee really hoped for was to find the Mary Rose. Ordinary search techniques proved unsatisfactory, so McKee entered into collaboration with Harold E. Edgerton, professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1967, Edgerton’s side-scan sonar systems revealed a large, unusually shaped object, which McKee believed was the Mary Rose. Further excavations revealed stray pieces of timber and an iron gun. But the climax to the operation came when, on 5 May 1971, part of the ship’s frame was uncovered. McKee and his team now knew for certain that they had found the wreck, but were as yet unaware that it also housed a treasure trove of beautifully preserved artefacts. Interest in the project grew, and in 1979, The Mary Rose Trust was formed, with Prince Charles as its President and Dr Margaret Rule its Archaeological Director. The decision whether or not to salvage the wreck was not an easy one, although an excavation in 1978 had shown that it might be possible to raise the hull. While the original aim was to raise the hull if at all feasible, the operation was not given the go-ahead until January 1982, when all the necessary information was available.
An important factor in trying to salvage the Mary Rose was that the remaining hull was an open shell. This led to an important decision being taken: namely to carry out the lifting operation in three very distinct stages. The hull was attached to a lifting frame via a network of bolts and lifting wires. The problem of the hull being sucked back downwards into the mud was overcome by using 12 hydraulic jacks. These raised it a few centimetres over a period of several days, as the lifting frame rose slowly up its four legs. It was only when the hull was hanging freely from the lifting frame, clear of the seabed and the suction effect of the surrounding mud, that the salvage operation progressed to the second stage. In this stage, the lifting frame was fixed to a hook attached to a crane, and the hull was lifted completely clear of the seabed and transferred underwater into the lifting cradle. This required precise positioning to locate the legs into the stabbing guides’ of the lifting cradle. The lifting cradle was designed to fit the hull jusing archaeological survey drawings, and was fitted with air bags to provide additional cushioning for the hull’s delicate timber framework. The third and final stage was to lift the entire structure into the air, by which time the hull was also supported from below. Finally, on 11 October 1982, millions of people around the world held their breath as the timber skeleton of the Mary Rose was lifted clear of the water, ready to be returned home to Portsmouth.
vary
while witnesses agree that …
some maintain that …
others that …
some doubt about what caused the Mary Rose to sink
Accounts of what happened to the ship vary
B. By the time Europeans reached it, the island was open grassland dotted with only a few stunted trees. Yet pollen sealed in lake-bed sediments, recovered by researchers in the 1970s and 1980s, told a different story: for thousands of years Rapa Nui had lain under thick palm forest, which vanished only once Polynesian settlers arrived. To the American geographer Rowan Aldiss, the islanders (those settlers' descendants) brought ruin on their own surroundings. Fate had placed them on a peculiarly fragile island, so dry, cool and remote that windblown volcanic ash never reached it to enrich the soil. Trees felled for fuel and to make room for their gardens never grew back. With usable trees ever scarcer, the islanders could no longer build the rafts their fishing relied on, and turned instead to shellfish, while the thinning soil yielded poorer harvests. Long before any European appeared, Aldiss contends, Rapa Nui had slid into warfare and even cannibalism, a collapse he calls 'a worst-case glimpse of what our own future may hold'.
C. In Aldiss's reading, the moai merely hastened this collapse. He sees them as displays of power by rival chiefs who, marooned on a tiny island, had few other ways to prove their supremacy, and so competed to raise ever larger figures. Moving them, he suggests, meant hauling each moai on a wooden sledge over rails of logs — a method that consumed huge quantities of both timber and manpower. Feeding those labourers meant clearing still more land. Once no usable trees remained and fighting had begun, the islanders started toppling the statues, and by the nineteenth century none still stood.
D. Two archaeologists, Delia Marsh of Cawley University and Tomas Brennan of Aldergrove State University, accept that Rapa Nui lost its forests and call the episode an 'ecological catastrophe', yet they blame neither the islanders nor the moai. Excavated evidence, they argue, shows the Rapanui working extraordinarily hard to protect what little their wind-battered, barren fields could yield. Thousands of circular stone shelters were built to break the wind, crops were grown inside them, and shattered volcanic rock was spread to keep the soil moist. The prehistoric islanders, they conclude, were early masters of sustainable cultivation.
E. For Marsh and Brennan, building the moai actually kept the peace, binding rival groups together rather than dividing them. Moving the statues, they add, needed only a few people and no wood, since the figures were 'walked' upright to their sites — and here the archaeology confirms what Rapanui tradition had always claimed. In recent trials, a team of as few as twenty, with three stout ropes and a little practice, walked a 1,200-kilogram replica several hundred metres with ease. A heavy, forward-leaning belly tipped each figure's weight ahead of it, while a curved, D-shaped base let handlers rock it from side to side.
F. The two archaeologists are also sure the settlers were not wholly to blame for the loss of the trees. Preserved nuts from the extinct Rapa Nui palm bear tiny grooves gnawed by stowaway rats — creatures that arrived with the earliest settlers and, by Marsh and Brennan's reckoning, would have overrun the island within a few years. By eating the seeds, they would have stopped the slow-growing palms from regenerating, dooming the forest regardless of any clearing by the settlers; the rats surely took birds' eggs too. Nor, they argue, is there evidence that island society collapsed when the palms did. They see a population that grew quickly and then held steady until Europeans arrived with diseases against which the islanders had no defence. Later, in the nineteenth century, slave raiders gutted what remained, until by 1883 just 130 people were left.
G. The picture Marsh and Brennan leave us with is of an island peopled by peaceable, resourceful builders and careful guardians of their land, not by reckless destroyers of their own environment and society. 'Far from a tale of utter collapse,' they maintain, 'Rapa Nui is really an improbable success story.' Whichever account is closer to the truth, the wider world can surely learn something from what happened on this remote island.
Neuroaesthetics, a young field of study, sets out to apply scientific rigour to the way we understand art, and it has already deepened our grasp of numerous celebrated works. Take Impressionist canvases: their soft, indistinct forms appear to activate a part of the brain known as the amygdala. Because our feelings are governed in large part by that same region, this may be why so many viewers are stirred by such paintings.
Might this way of working also illuminate the abstract art of the twentieth century - Mondrian's gridded blocks of colour, say, or the random spatters Pollock let fall across his canvases? To the doubters, people profess admiration for such work only because it is famous. And a pull towards the majority view is something we all feel. Take a simple test of perception, deciding whether one shape is a rotated version of another: shown that others have chosen an answer that is plainly wrong, individuals will often go along with it. Where so slippery a notion as art appreciation is concerned, with no response counting as right or wrong, such herd instinct is likely to weigh heavier still.
One response to this argument came from Ingrid Solvang, of Ashcombe College in Massachusetts, who showed volunteers paintings two at a time. In each pair, one was by a well-known abstract painter, the other the scribblings of a young child or of animals such as chimpanzees and elephants, and participants simply said which they preferred. Some pictures went unlabelled; others bore captions that were deliberately false, so that what looked like an elephant's clumsy daubs might in fact be a prized painting. Across the trials, people tended to favour the celebrated artists' work even when told a child or a beast was responsible. Somehow the observer can detect the guiding hand of the artist, without quite being able to put that feeling into words.
Tomas Renard, a practising artist attached to Haldane University, makes deliberately equivocal pieces that sit somewhere between pure abstraction and plain representation. In an experiment he ran with colleagues, viewers were asked to rate how 'powerful' each work struck them as being, and to say whether anything in it looked familiar. Those who dwelt longest over these judgements not only awarded the work higher marks but also showed stronger activity in the brain. The mind, it appears, treats such pictures as riddles to be solved, and the more stubborn the meaning is to pin down, the greater the pleasure when it finally clicks into place.
Consider, too, a painter like Mondrian, whose canvases are built entirely from horizontal and vertical lines penning in rectangles of colour. Simple though they look, such works are in fact assembled with great care, as eye-tracking research bears out, and merely turning a composition round alters our reading of it completely. Faced with the unaltered paintings, viewers let their gaze rest longer on particular spots; confronted with the rotated ones, their eyes darted about far more restlessly. That difference told: asked to score the pictures, they rated the tampered versions the less enjoyable.
A comparable investigation was carried out by Nadia Voss at Kelso University, who had her participants set original paintings beside copies in which she had shifted elements to different positions within the frame. Whether the picture was a still life by Chardin or an abstract by Kandinsky, virtually all of them came down on the side of the original. Rearranging a work's composition, Voss further discovered, dampened activity in precisely those regions of the brain that deal with meaning and its interpretation.
A further study, by Ewan Marsh of the University of Brenmar, looked at how visually elaborate various artworks were, and points to a particular pitch of detail that artists rely on to satisfy the brain. Supply too little and the piece falls flat; too much, and the eye suffers what Marsh calls 'perceptual overload'. Appealing works, whether they represent the world or not, also tend to display 'fractals', the same forms cropping up at different sizes. Such repetition fills the natural world, in the jagged outlines of mountains or the forking of a tree's branches, and eyes shaped by life in the open country may cope more readily with imagery of this kind.
Equally curious is the discovery that the brain registers motion when we look at handwriting, almost as though we were living again the instant the writer set pen to paper. Some researchers accordingly ask whether the reason Pollock's canvases feel so charged with energy is that the brain re-creates the vigorous movements he made while painting. The explanation may lie in the so-called 'mirror neurons', cells that echo the actions we observe in others, though the idea still awaits rigorous testing. There is even a suggestion that neuroaesthetic research could help account for why certain works endure. Passing fashions may dictate what enjoys favour at any given moment, yet the pieces that suit our visual apparatus best are perhaps the ones that outlast the tastes of earlier ages.
The study of neuroaesthetics remains in its infancy, and the work done so far is in all likelihood only a foretaste of what lies ahead. Even so, it would be a mistake to boil art appreciation down to a tidy set of scientific rules. The particular manner of an artist, the moment they occupy in history, the creative climate they worked within - none of these should be played down. What abstract art holds out is at once a difficulty and a liberty: room to try one reading against another. In that respect it is not, perhaps, so far from science, where the constant hunt for underlying order and hidden meaning lets us see the world afresh.
