IELTS CAM Inspired 11 - Reading Test 4 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 11 - Reading Test 4 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?
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
If two identical twins have differently aged skin, the likely cause is external rather than genetic.
2
Fraternal twins have, on average, as much of their DNA in common as identical twins do.
3
Brunner's project gathered more data from its twins than any earlier twin study had.
4
Molnar believes that the features she likens to chalk cannot be changed.
Question 5 - 9
Look at the following statements and the list of researchers below.
Match each statement with the correct researcher, A-C.
Write the correct letter, A-C.
List of Findings
A
Lukas Brunner
B
Petra Molnar
C
Aksel Vorhaug
5
came up with a label for the two forces that mould what a person is like
6
foresaw that digging deeper into epigenetics would add to what we know
7
made a statistical technique the core of a way to measure genetic influence
8
was the earliest to put forward the use of twins for this kind of study
9
led a project that followed twins who had grown up in separate households
Question 10 - 13
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-F, below.
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes on your answer sheet.
Epigenetic processes
In epigenetics, tiny shape how actively each gene works - for instance, as the body's various are put together. This field is uncovering a route by which our can act upon the genes themselves. When a mouse is stressed during pregnancy, its young later develop changes in their .
A
chemicals
B
behaviour
C
organs
D
environment
E
heredity
F
instructions
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 18
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
14
The opening paragraph mainly argues that
A
the director should settle the sound before filming begins.
B
those working on a film's audio should be given sole charge of it.
C
the part sound plays in a film's artistry should not be dismissed.
D
a film's music matters more than its remaining audio components.
15
The writer mentions the actor Lucian Reyes in order to illustrate
A
how a performer's appearance must suit the role they play.
B
how actors draw on their own emotions to play a part.
C
why audiences prefer dialogue that sounds natural.
D
how an actor and the role can come to seem indistinguishable.
16
What point does the writer make about the science-fiction film Orbital Dawn?
A
Dialogue that seems dull can be a deliberate artistic choice.
B
Science-fiction films tend to rely less on dialogue than other genres.
C
Audiences may dislike films in which very little is said.
D
Technically ambitious films often have weak scripts.
17
In discussing the comedy Chasing Daisy, the writer suggests that
A
its humour comes mainly from the plot rather than from the dialogue.
B
the style of the dialogue reinforces central features of the film.
C
the rapid dialogue makes the story difficult to follow.
D
it ranks among the finest comedies of its kind.
18
The door 'click' example is used to show that lifelike sounds
A
can be adjusted to steer the way viewers react.
B
are noticed by audiences only when they seem out of place.
C
are more convincing in scenes set indoors.
D
mean different things to different viewers.
Question 19 - 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
19
Viewers are unlikely to notice when a film has no background music at all.
20
Background music supplies a film with both feeling and a sense of pace.
21
Most viewers can consciously sense the influence a film's music has on them.
22
Unsettling, discordant music affects audiences more strongly than gentler music does.
23
A tune heard repeatedly in a film can jog the audience's memory of its main themes.
Question 24 - 26
Complete each of the following statements with the best ending A-E from the box below.
List of Endings
A
once the three strands of sound are brought into a proper balance.
B
when a performer's looks, voice and gestures all match one another.
C
whenever the storyline touches on matters the viewers themselves care about.
D
from the words the characters actually speak.
E
once the director can predict the way an audience will feel.
A film can steer how viewers react at different moments
24
What a character is feeling and what motivates them come across
25
A screen role can come to feel like a living, breathing individual instead of an actor
26
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 32
The Reading Passage has six paragraphs A-F.
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
Write the appropriate numbers i-vii
List of Headings
I
Why nothing we have built can rival language
II
The single skill shared by all human beings
III
Significance carried by silence itself
IV
Reasons the same sounds differ from one tongue to another
V
Contradictory qualities that coexist within language
VI
A handful of sounds producing boundless meaning
VII
How the strangeness of foreign tongues reveals their genius
27
Paragraph A
28
Paragraph B
29
Paragraph C
30
Paragraph D
31
Paragraph E
32
Paragraph F
Question 33 - 36
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-G, below.
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes on your answer sheet.
The importance of language
Inventions such as the wheel reshaped the side of human life, yet nothing has proved as to us as language. Assembled from only a small stock of sounds, language is nonetheless remarkably . It gives the impression of being to handle, which is why the skill behind it so often goes unnoticed.
A
fundamental
B
effortless
C
admired
D
physical
E
intricate
F
original
G
difficult
Question 37 - 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
37
All of humanity's accomplishments can ultimately be traced back to language.
38
In the writer's view, the Morvenna grammarians had already grasped that language, for all its genius, was never actually invented.
39
In some tongues, one short word can carry everything that English would need a full sentence to say.
40
The Ashkuni-speaking people developed their writing system chiefly in order to record commercial transactions.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Research using twins
For scientists in laboratories worldwide, a pair of twins offers a rare chance to separate two tangled influences on a life: the genes a person is born with and the surroundings they grow up in. Identical twins begin as a single fertilised egg that later divides in two, so the genetic instructions each carries are essentially the same. Where the two differ, with one, for example, keeping smoother skin into later life, the cause must lie in something external, perhaps fewer hours spent in strong sunlight.
A second strategy places identical twins alongside fraternal twins (pairs who grow from two separate eggs and share, on average, only half their DNA) so that researchers can put a figure on how far our genes steer our lives. If a particular illness appears far more consistently in both members of identical pairs than in both members of fraternal pairs, then the tendency to develop it must be at least partly inherited.
Together, these two approaches — examining how identical twins diverge to isolate the effect of environment, and setting identical against fraternal twins to gauge the weight of inheritance — have proved essential to understanding how the born and the raised combine to shape our characters, our conduct and our proneness to illness.
Using twins to gauge the pull of heredity is not new: it dates to 1881, when a Danish physiologist, Aksel Vorhaug, first proposed it and, in the same breath, coined the phrase 'stock and setting'. The field took an unexpected turn in the 1980s, once researchers began tracking down identical twins parted in infancy and reunited only as adults. Across some twenty-five years, 152 such pairs came to the laboratory of the Swiss psychologist Lukas Brunner, in a project called the Basel Study of Twins Raised Apart. Each twin sat through many tests and answered, in all, upwards of 18,000 questions.
From this vast heap of data, Brunner and his team worked out how strongly a person's genetic inheritance shapes them. Central to their method was a statistical idea called heritability, which gauges how much of the variation across a population can be traced to genetic differences between its members. Nearly everywhere they looked, they seemed to find genes quietly at work behind the scenes, moulding how our lives unfold.
More recently, though, work with twins has pushed scientists toward a striking idea: that heredity and environment are not, after all, the only fundamental forces at work. A young field called epigenetics points to a third influence—one that sometimes links the outside world to our genes, and at other times acts alone to make us what we are.
The reactions of epigenetics are chemical, belonging to neither heredity nor environment but forming what scientists call a 'third component'. They govern how the instructions in our genes are carried out: dialling each gene up or down, or switching it fully on or off, as our bones, brains and every other structure in the body are assembled.
Picture the DNA in each of us as the wiring of an enormous building and our genes as the many individual lamps it feeds, each lamp standing for a stretch of DNA responsible for one feature, and the lamps together lighting up the person we become. Epigenetic processes are the switches and dimmers: they decide which lamps come on, and how brightly, altering the pattern of light.
Among the ways epigenetics is reshaping biology, one stands out: it reveals an actual route by which the environment reaches in and acts on genes directly. In animal experiments, stress in a pregnant mouse has been found to trigger epigenetic changes in the developing young - changes that surface later as difficulties in the animal's behaviour. Other epigenetic events seem to occur at random, while others are routine, such as those steering cells in the early embryo as they become heart, brain or liver tissue.
Petra Molnar, a geneticist who has worked with twins for years, has thought deeply about what such research reveals. 'Look at twins and one thing is obvious at once - a great deal of what they share is fixed from the start,' she says. 'Many things about them are identical and cannot be altered. But spend time with them and it is just as clear that they differ in other respects. To my mind, epigenetics is where many of those differences come from.'
Molnar credits much of today's boom in twin studies to Lukas Brunner's work. 'He blazed the trail,' she says. 'It is easy to forget that half a century ago, conditions such as heart disease were put down entirely to how people lived, and schizophrenia was blamed on poor mothering. Twin research has let us think more carefully about what a person is truly born with and what comes from experience.'
Even so, Molnar adds, the newest epigenetic work looks set to carry our understanding further still. 'The way I put it,' she says, 'is that nature sets some things down in ink and others in chalk. Whatever is in ink you are stuck with - that is DNA. Whatever is in chalk can be rubbed out and redone - that is epigenetics. Being able, at last, to examine the DNA and see where the chalk marks lie feels like a whole new landscape.'
It is tempting to regard cinema as something we take in chiefly through our eyes, yet a film's sound should never be brushed aside. Every bit as intricate as whatever appears on screen, the sound track answers in the end no less to the director than the pictures do. Three basic elements go into it — the human voice, sound effects and music — and these have to be blended and weighted against one another so that the right moments stand out and the intended effects follow. Whatever is examined in the pages below traces back to those same three elements: dialogue, sound effects of both the synchronous and asynchronous kinds, and music.
Dialogue is the natural place to begin. Much as on the theatrical stage, dialogue in a film pushes the narrative along while also laying bare what the characters feel and what drives them. A curious thing about screen characterisation is that audiences often sense hardly any gap between the person performing and the role being performed. When the actor Lucian Reyes turns up as the detective Nate Corvino, the on-screen figure and the real one seem to merge. Perhaps this is because the very grain of a performer's voice is itself read as character.
Once the sound of a voice settles comfortably against a performer's face and movements, a full and believable personality emerges, and what we are watching ceases to be someone practising a craft and becomes instead a fellow human wrestling with existence. Both the handling of dialogue and the sheer quantity of it differ enormously from one film to another. Take the science-fiction hit Orbital Dawn: speech in it is scarce, and the little there is stays purposely flat and unremarkable. By means of that restraint the director captured what the critics Mara Ostrowski and Piet Ostrowski, in their study The Language of Cinema, term 'the smallness of human reaction set against the grandeur of the machines we have built and the visual splendour of the cosmos'.
The comedy Chasing Daisy, by contrast, rests on an almost unbroken flood of talk fired off at dizzying speed. That relentless chatter serves two ends: it points up the scatterbrained streak in the character Vivienne Marsh plays, and it sharpens the film's own absurdity, the very source of its comedy. Flung without a break from one gag to the next and from one exchange to another, viewers get no space in which to stop and reflect. Simply staying abreast of the story pulls them into a storm of activity, and the picture turns into sheer escapism largely because the talk never eases off.
The synchronous sound effects are the ones that fall in step with what is on view, tied to a source we can see. Should a character be shown seated at a piano, then piano notes are what reach us. Besides giving a film its air of reality, sounds of this sort also help summon a particular mood. That faint click as a door swings open might do no more than persuade viewers that the scene before them is real — a noise they barely register, since they expected it. Attach the same click instead to something menacing, a burglary perhaps, and the sound mixer may lift its volume to throw a spotlight on it, drawing the audience into a moment of tension.
Asynchronous effects run the opposite way, having no source visible anywhere in the frame. They are worked in to lend a suitable shade of feeling, and they too can deepen a film's realism. A director might, for instance, let the wail of an ambulance carry through the background while the foreground is held by a couple in the middle of a row. That off-screen siren echoes the emotional damage being inflicted in the quarrel, and in the very same stroke it plants the scene in its city setting, making everything feel more real.
Background music is something almost every filmgoer knows, so widespread that we notice it only once it has gone missing. Its purpose, we recognise, is to lend feeling and pace. Designed as a rule to pass by unremarked, it commonly tints our sense of the story, or of the characters, with a certain mood or leaning. Often, too, it drops a hint of some coming change in atmosphere: harsh, clashing music, for one, can warn that danger is closing in well before anything of the kind appears.
Music laid beneath a film can likewise help audiences keep track of it by knitting scenes together. A given melody bound up with one character or one situation might come back at several points across the film, prompting viewers to recall whichever motifs or ideas count for most.
Sound in film blends the familiar with the inventive. We have been trained to expect music to quicken through a car chase, or a hinge to creak in a horror picture. Even so, it is worth keeping in mind how cleverly sound is frequently devised; much of what it does is quiet work, registered by nothing but the subconscious. To give the modern film its due — an art form that came to life across the twentieth century — we have to grow an ear for its sound quite as much as an eye for its space.
A. Among all the things the human species has ever devised, none deserves higher standing than language. Tools such as the wheel, farming or the printed page reshaped the material fabric of our lives, and yet it was the arrival of speech, more than any of these, that turned us into human beings. Set beside language, every other invention shrinks, for whatever we have accomplished grows out of it and leans upon it. Strip language away and the long climb that carried us to mastery over every other creature - and over the natural world itself - could never even have begun.
B
B.
Language does not hold this place merely by being the earliest of our inventions. Considered on its own terms, it is an instrument of astonishing refinement that rests, all the same, on a strikingly simple principle. Some four centuries ago the grammarians of the Morvenna abbey, in the town of Aldwyk, tried to capture what this amounts to: the wonder, as they put it, of taking a few dozen bare sounds and weaving from them an endless range of expressions which, resembling nothing in our thoughts, still lay those thoughts open to others and carry to distant minds everything we picture and every stirring of our feelings. No one since has praised the achievement more finely. And yet beneath all this admiration a single contradiction lies unnoticed by its admirers, for the very tribute to language's unmatched feat quietly conceals an awkward truth: language may be the greatest of human inventions, except that it was, of course, never invented at all. It is this paradox that sits at the heart of our fascination, and much of language's mystery is bound up in it.
C
So neatly does language seem to be put together that it is hard to picture it as anything but the finished work of some masterly craftsman. How otherwise could a mere thirty-odd sounds be made to yield so much? Taken by themselves, the shapes the mouth produces - p, t, k, s, m, a, o and the rest - are little more than stray puffs and hisses, chance noises that mean nothing, state nothing, explain nothing. Feed them through the gears of the language machine, though, and let it set them in its own precise arrangements, and there is scarcely anything these empty currents of breath cannot manage: from murmuring the endless tedium of being alive to laying bare the deepest workings of the cosmos.
D
What is most remarkable, though, is that setting this machinery in motion calls for no exceptional gift. From hunter-gatherers on some ancient grassland to modern theorists in their city offices, virtually everyone can knit these bare sounds together into an unlimited range of fine distinctions, and seemingly without the least effort. But it is precisely this apparent ease that makes language a victim of its own success, since in everyday life we simply treat its successes as a matter of course. So smoothly do its wheels turn that we rarely pause to weigh all the ingenuity and skill that must have gone into making it work. Language keeps its own artistry out of sight.
E
Often it takes the strangeness of an unfamiliar language, thick with features that strike us as exotic or bizarre, to bring the brilliance of the design suddenly home. One of the showier tricks that certain languages can pull off is the stacking-up of enormously long words, so that a single word does the work of a whole English sentence. Consider Kessan, a tongue of the northern steppe: its word tavurkanisheledmegizsiniz means, no less, 'you are among those we could not manage to turn into a townsman.' And this genuinely is one word, not a heap of separate ones clumsily forced together - most of its parts cannot even stand up on their own.
F
Lest that look like a single freak of nature, take Ashkuni as well. Five thousand years or so ago, on the banks of the river Serel, it was spoken by the same people who gave the world writing and, through it, the very possibility of committing history to record. Set against the towering Kessan specimen above, an Ashkuni word such as immadurtuna - which renders the English 'once he had made it fitting for her' - can look positively compact. And compactness, rather than length, is exactly what makes it remarkable: the whole word is assembled with extraordinary thrift. Picture a row of slots, each one filled by a single fragment of meaning; under this economical scheme, even lone sounds are made to carry useful information. Stranger still, meaning has been squeezed out of the very absence of sound. Suppose you hunt through immadurtuna for whatever answers to the pronoun 'it' in that English gloss: you will find nothing at all - yet a highly specific nothing, the gap sitting in the slot at the word's core. The design is tuned so exactly that a non-sound, dropped into precisely the right place, is handed a role of its own. What mind, one wonders, could ever have contrived so ingenious a device?
For scientists in laboratories worldwide, a pair of twins offers a rare chance to separate two tangled influences on a life: the genes a person is born with and the surroundings they grow up in. Identical twins begin as a single fertilised egg that later divides in two, so the genetic instructions each carries are essentially the same. Where the two differ, with one, for example, keeping smoother skin into later life, the cause must lie in something external, perhaps fewer hours spent in strong sunlight.
A second strategy places identical twins alongside fraternal twins (pairs who grow from two separate eggs and share, on average, only half their DNA) so that researchers can put a figure on how far our genes steer our lives. If a particular illness appears far more consistently in both members of identical pairs than in both members of fraternal pairs, then the tendency to develop it must be at least partly inherited.
Together, these two approaches — examining how identical twins diverge to isolate the effect of environment, and setting identical against fraternal twins to gauge the weight of inheritance — have proved essential to understanding how the born and the raised combine to shape our characters, our conduct and our proneness to illness.
Using twins to gauge the pull of heredity is not new: it dates to 1881, when a Danish physiologist, Aksel Vorhaug, first proposed it and, in the same breath, coined the phrase 'stock and setting'. The field took an unexpected turn in the 1980s, once researchers began tracking down identical twins parted in infancy and reunited only as adults. Across some twenty-five years, 152 such pairs came to the laboratory of the Swiss psychologist Lukas Brunner, in a project called the Basel Study of Twins Raised Apart. Each twin sat through many tests and answered, in all, upwards of 18,000 questions.
From this vast heap of data, Brunner and his team worked out how strongly a person's genetic inheritance shapes them. Central to their method was a statistical idea called heritability, which gauges how much of the variation across a population can be traced to genetic differences between its members. Nearly everywhere they looked, they seemed to find genes quietly at work behind the scenes, moulding how our lives unfold.
More recently, though, work with twins has pushed scientists toward a striking idea: that heredity and environment are not, after all, the only fundamental forces at work. A young field called epigenetics points to a third influence—one that sometimes links the outside world to our genes, and at other times acts alone to make us what we are.
The reactions of epigenetics are chemical, belonging to neither heredity nor environment but forming what scientists call a 'third component'. They govern how the instructions in our genes are carried out: dialling each gene up or down, or switching it fully on or off, as our bones, brains and every other structure in the body are assembled.
Picture the DNA in each of us as the wiring of an enormous building and our genes as the many individual lamps it feeds, each lamp standing for a stretch of DNA responsible for one feature, and the lamps together lighting up the person we become. Epigenetic processes are the switches and dimmers: they decide which lamps come on, and how brightly, altering the pattern of light.
Among the ways epigenetics is reshaping biology, one stands out: it reveals an actual route by which the environment reaches in and acts on genes directly. In animal experiments, stress in a pregnant mouse has been found to trigger epigenetic changes in the developing young - changes that surface later as difficulties in the animal's behaviour. Other epigenetic events seem to occur at random, while others are routine, such as those steering cells in the early embryo as they become heart, brain or liver tissue.
Petra Molnar, a geneticist who has worked with twins for years, has thought deeply about what such research reveals. 'Look at twins and one thing is obvious at once - a great deal of what they share is fixed from the start,' she says. 'Many things about them are identical and cannot be altered. But spend time with them and it is just as clear that they differ in other respects. To my mind, epigenetics is where many of those differences come from.'
Molnar credits much of today's boom in twin studies to Lukas Brunner's work. 'He blazed the trail,' she says. 'It is easy to forget that half a century ago, conditions such as heart disease were put down entirely to how people lived, and schizophrenia was blamed on poor mothering. Twin research has let us think more carefully about what a person is truly born with and what comes from experience.'
Even so, Molnar adds, the newest epigenetic work looks set to carry our understanding further still. 'The way I put it,' she says, 'is that nature sets some things down in ink and others in chalk. Whatever is in ink you are stuck with - that is DNA. Whatever is in chalk can be rubbed out and redone - that is epigenetics. Being able, at last, to examine the DNA and see where the chalk marks lie feels like a whole new landscape.'
It is tempting to regard cinema as something we take in chiefly through our eyes, yet a film's sound should never be brushed aside. Every bit as intricate as whatever appears on screen, the sound track answers in the end no less to the director than the pictures do. Three basic elements go into it — the human voice, sound effects and music — and these have to be blended and weighted against one another so that the right moments stand out and the intended effects follow. Whatever is examined in the pages below traces back to those same three elements: dialogue, sound effects of both the synchronous and asynchronous kinds, and music.
Dialogue is the natural place to begin. Much as on the theatrical stage, dialogue in a film pushes the narrative along while also laying bare what the characters feel and what drives them. A curious thing about screen characterisation is that audiences often sense hardly any gap between the person performing and the role being performed. When the actor Lucian Reyes turns up as the detective Nate Corvino, the on-screen figure and the real one seem to merge. Perhaps this is because the very grain of a performer's voice is itself read as character.
Once the sound of a voice settles comfortably against a performer's face and movements, a full and believable personality emerges, and what we are watching ceases to be someone practising a craft and becomes instead a fellow human wrestling with existence. Both the handling of dialogue and the sheer quantity of it differ enormously from one film to another. Take the science-fiction hit Orbital Dawn: speech in it is scarce, and the little there is stays purposely flat and unremarkable. By means of that restraint the director captured what the critics Mara Ostrowski and Piet Ostrowski, in their study The Language of Cinema, term 'the smallness of human reaction set against the grandeur of the machines we have built and the visual splendour of the cosmos'.
The comedy Chasing Daisy, by contrast, rests on an almost unbroken flood of talk fired off at dizzying speed. That relentless chatter serves two ends: it points up the scatterbrained streak in the character Vivienne Marsh plays, and it sharpens the film's own absurdity, the very source of its comedy. Flung without a break from one gag to the next and from one exchange to another, viewers get no space in which to stop and reflect. Simply staying abreast of the story pulls them into a storm of activity, and the picture turns into sheer escapism largely because the talk never eases off.
The synchronous sound effects are the ones that fall in step with what is on view, tied to a source we can see. Should a character be shown seated at a piano, then piano notes are what reach us. Besides giving a film its air of reality, sounds of this sort also help summon a particular mood. That faint click as a door swings open might do no more than persuade viewers that the scene before them is real — a noise they barely register, since they expected it. Attach the same click instead to something menacing, a burglary perhaps, and the sound mixer may lift its volume to throw a spotlight on it, drawing the audience into a moment of tension.
Asynchronous effects run the opposite way, having no source visible anywhere in the frame. They are worked in to lend a suitable shade of feeling, and they too can deepen a film's realism. A director might, for instance, let the wail of an ambulance carry through the background while the foreground is held by a couple in the middle of a row. That off-screen siren echoes the emotional damage being inflicted in the quarrel, and in the very same stroke it plants the scene in its city setting, making everything feel more real.
Background music is something almost every filmgoer knows, so widespread that we notice it only once it has gone missing. Its purpose, we recognise, is to lend feeling and pace. Designed as a rule to pass by unremarked, it commonly tints our sense of the story, or of the characters, with a certain mood or leaning. Often, too, it drops a hint of some coming change in atmosphere: harsh, clashing music, for one, can warn that danger is closing in well before anything of the kind appears.
Music laid beneath a film can likewise help audiences keep track of it by knitting scenes together. A given melody bound up with one character or one situation might come back at several points across the film, prompting viewers to recall whichever motifs or ideas count for most.
Sound in film blends the familiar with the inventive. We have been trained to expect music to quicken through a car chase, or a hinge to creak in a horror picture. Even so, it is worth keeping in mind how cleverly sound is frequently devised; much of what it does is quiet work, registered by nothing but the subconscious. To give the modern film its due — an art form that came to life across the twentieth century — we have to grow an ear for its sound quite as much as an eye for its space.
Language does not hold this place merely by being the earliest of our inventions. Considered on its own terms, it is an instrument of astonishing refinement that rests, all the same, on a strikingly simple principle. Some four centuries ago the grammarians of the Morvenna abbey, in the town of Aldwyk, tried to capture what this amounts to: the wonder, as they put it, of taking a few dozen bare sounds and weaving from them an endless range of expressions which, resembling nothing in our thoughts, still lay those thoughts open to others and carry to distant minds everything we picture and every stirring of our feelings. No one since has praised the achievement more finely. And yet beneath all this admiration a single contradiction lies unnoticed by its admirers, for the very tribute to language's unmatched feat quietly conceals an awkward truth: language may be the greatest of human inventions, except that it was, of course, never invented at all. It is this paradox that sits at the heart of our fascination, and much of language's mystery is bound up in it.
C. So neatly does language seem to be put together that it is hard to picture it as anything but the finished work of some masterly craftsman. How otherwise could a mere thirty-odd sounds be made to yield so much? Taken by themselves, the shapes the mouth produces - p, t, k, s, m, a, o and the rest - are little more than stray puffs and hisses, chance noises that mean nothing, state nothing, explain nothing. Feed them through the gears of the language machine, though, and let it set them in its own precise arrangements, and there is scarcely anything these empty currents of breath cannot manage: from murmuring the endless tedium of being alive to laying bare the deepest workings of the cosmos.
D. What is most remarkable, though, is that setting this machinery in motion calls for no exceptional gift. From hunter-gatherers on some ancient grassland to modern theorists in their city offices, virtually everyone can knit these bare sounds together into an unlimited range of fine distinctions, and seemingly without the least effort. But it is precisely this apparent ease that makes language a victim of its own success, since in everyday life we simply treat its successes as a matter of course. So smoothly do its wheels turn that we rarely pause to weigh all the ingenuity and skill that must have gone into making it work. Language keeps its own artistry out of sight.
E. Often it takes the strangeness of an unfamiliar language, thick with features that strike us as exotic or bizarre, to bring the brilliance of the design suddenly home. One of the showier tricks that certain languages can pull off is the stacking-up of enormously long words, so that a single word does the work of a whole English sentence. Consider Kessan, a tongue of the northern steppe: its word tavurkanisheledmegizsiniz means, no less, 'you are among those we could not manage to turn into a townsman.' And this genuinely is one word, not a heap of separate ones clumsily forced together - most of its parts cannot even stand up on their own.
F. Lest that look like a single freak of nature, take Ashkuni as well. Five thousand years or so ago, on the banks of the river Serel, it was spoken by the same people who gave the world writing and, through it, the very possibility of committing history to record. Set against the towering Kessan specimen above, an Ashkuni word such as immadurtuna - which renders the English 'once he had made it fitting for her' - can look positively compact. And compactness, rather than length, is exactly what makes it remarkable: the whole word is assembled with extraordinary thrift. Picture a row of slots, each one filled by a single fragment of meaning; under this economical scheme, even lone sounds are made to carry useful information. Stranger still, meaning has been squeezed out of the very absence of sound. Suppose you hunt through immadurtuna for whatever answers to the pronoun 'it' in that English gloss: you will find nothing at all - yet a highly specific nothing, the gap sitting in the slot at the word's core. The design is tuned so exactly that a non-sound, dropped into precisely the right place, is handed a role of its own. What mind, one wonders, could ever have contrived so ingenious a device?
