IELTS CAM Inspired 12 - Reading Test 2 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 12 - Reading Test 2 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 3
Reading Passage 1 has nine paragraphs, A-I.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-I.
1
a description of what makes the supplying of food unlike any other industry
2
an account of hardships that burden growers in only some regions of the world
3
a reminder that getting farmers to pool their efforts is far from cost-free
Question 4 - 9
Look at the following statements and the list of people below.
Match each statement with the correct person, A-G.
Write the correct letter, A-G.
List of Findings
A
Amara Diallo
B
Dario Fenwick
C
Helena Marsh
D
Priya Nandakumar
E
Lars Ostergaard
F
Ronan Petrescu
G
Tomas Vogel
4
Government payments meant for agriculture frequently reach people other than the neediest farmers.
5
Working collectively can bring real advantages to farmers.
6
State welfare provision can raise the living standards of farming families.
7
Farmers can gain when the people who buy their food also help finance the farms.
8
The state can play a part in steadying prices that would otherwise swing.
9
Better basic facilities such as roads can substantially lower the risks farmers run.
Question 10 - 11
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO problems are mentioned which affect farmers with small farms in developing countries?
A
the growing difficulty of predicting the weather
B
being unable to obtain insurance for their crops
C
being forced to accept prices dictated by middlemen
D
insufficient demand for food produced in the area
E
the lack of any scheme to irrigate their land
Question 12 - 13
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO actions are recommended for improving conditions for farmers?
A
cutting the volume of food that is kept in reserve
B
getting a broad range of stakeholders to work in concert
C
timing sales so that prices climb at particular times of year
D
explaining to shoppers why food prices rise and fall
E
persuading food buyers to fund local growers through a subscription
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-viii
List of Headings
I
A widely shared explanation
II
The purpose behind the expedition
III
Two versions of one expedition
IV
An unfamiliar path down the valley
V
Little eagerness to investigate
VI
Making the find public
VII
A vivid, spellbinding account
VIII
Winning others' backing
14
Paragraph A
15
Paragraph B
16
Paragraph C
17
Paragraph D
18
Paragraph E
19
Paragraph F
20
Paragraph G
Question 21 - 24
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
21
Vellacott had explored other parts of the Sarapo mountains on expeditions before 1911.
22
Hardly any of the travellers before Vellacott had passed near Sacyamarca.
23
Vellacott reports seeing several snakes as he made his way up the hill.
24
Vellacott's belief about the site later proved to be well founded.
Question 25 - 26
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
25
The route down the valley had originally been opened up to allow
to be moved out of the lowland forest.
26
Vellacott was told about the ruins by a
who lived in the valley.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 31
Complete the table below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Method used
What researchers found
Recording the
27
of German-English speakers as they were asked to pick out particular items
A bilingual's two languages are switched on together, an effect researchers call
28
An exercise known as the
29
, in which people report which way a central arrow points
When rival cues must be filtered out, bilinguals cope better, drawing on what is termed
30
An exercise in which people repeatedly shift from sorting by one feature to sorting by another
As they rewrite their approach, bilinguals display greater
31
Question 32 - 36
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
32
Being raised with two languages was once seen as putting a child ahead of those raised with only one.
33
The mind begins to identify a word before it has finished hearing it.
34
Speakers of two languages arrive at the 'tip-of-the-tongue' feeling less often than speakers of one.
35
Bilingual adults find a third language easier to learn than their own second language once was.
36
Bilingual patients with Alzheimer's disease generally noticed the illness's early signs later than monolingual patients did.
Question 37 - 40
Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-G.
37
a demonstration that the benefits of bilingualism can be seen even in the first months of life
38
an account of the brain responding more powerfully to a sound when there is competing noise
39
the claim that people who speak more than one language now make up most of the world's population
40
a surprising observation that stronger bodily evidence of illness went with no greater loss of everyday ability
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
The risks agriculture faces in developing countries
Synthesis of an online debate*
A
A. What sets the growing of food apart from all other production comes down to two facts — one political, one natural. Politically, each of us needs food every day and can claim it as a right; naturally, no other industry leans so heavily on the natural world. Together these leave food production peculiarly exposed, unlike any ordinary business; and the cultural weight of food and farming runs deep everywhere.
B
B. For those taking part, the question that mattered most was why the farming system so often fails to feed everyone. The root causes had to be tackled first, they argued, and two stood out: a heavy reliance on fossil fuels and a lack of supportive government policy.
C
Risk is familiar to anyone who farms. Violent weather, the slow shift of the climate and swinging prices for supplies and produce threaten growers everywhere. Smallholders in poorer countries carry more still, hemmed in by natural obstacles — thin soils, unreliable rain — and human ones alike, from patchy roads and finance to weak markets and little access to knowledge and technology. The bitter irony is that many of these small farmers go hungry themselves.
D
On easing these risks, most contributors looked to the state to do more. Dario Fenwick, who heads the Global Fund for Rural Development, argued that a government can lower farmers' exposure simply by supplying the basics — roads that carry crops to market faster, or stores for water and food that stop so much being lost. Helena Marsh, a senior adviser at the Centre for Farming and Trade Policy, added that when governments buy up and hold reserves, sharp lurches in food prices tend to soften, since doubts about market supply are eased.
E
Ronan Petrescu, who directs the World Food Policy Institute, pointed to the welfare schemes run in countries such as Kenya, Peru and Guatemala as a real way to lift farming households out of poverty and cushion them against agricultural shocks. Several commentators were unconvinced: handing cash to poor families, they noted, does not automatically buy food security, since such schemes neither guarantee a bigger harvest nor a larger income. On subsidies, Amara Diallo, who runs the Rural Women's Advancement Network, was blunt — the payments, she wrote, 'have done nothing to loosen the grip of private traders. Close to seventy percent of those who collect subsidies are not the poor at all, but wealthy landowners and dealers who never farm.'
F
For Fenwick, Marsh and Petrescu there was also a place for private instruments — insurance, commodity futures and rural credit — which help a small producer spread risk and find money to invest in improvements. Diallo warned that such financial support often nudges farmers towards input-hungry methods that, a few seasons on, push the cost of growing above what the crop will fetch. Marsh cautioned that futures markets, once too financial in character, may themselves stir up the short-term price swings that leave farmers less food-secure. A recurring theme was that markets must be far more open, so volatility is blunted and it becomes plain whether stocks are sufficient. Some added that agribusiness firms ought to foot the bill for the harm they cause.
G
Another current favoured letting farmers manage risk from the ground up, through co-operatives, producer bodies and other collective action. Banding together, the argument ran, opens markets otherwise closed to a small grower, trims selling costs, and times buying and selling to seasonal prices. Marsh put it plainly: acting together is among the surest ways for farmers to build political and economic bargaining muscle and take the edge off the risks of the trade. Tomas Vogel offered a note of realism, cautioning that collective action is never had for nothing — organising it, earning trust and trying things out all swallow time, effort and money. Others, among them Joris Halbertsma and Ruben Klaassen, held that to 'act on what we already know', everyone with a stake — companies, governments, scientists, citizens — must pull together from the first link in the value chain.
H
Climate change ran through many essays as a threat to small-scale farming. As Petrescu put it, a warming world not only cuts harvests but makes violent weather fiercer and more frequent, leaving the smallholder yet more exposed; and the harder the weather is to predict, the harder it is to plan against. His remedy was to breed crop varieties tougher in the face of the new climate and its extremes. Lars Ostergaard, who co-founded and directs the AgroWatch Collective, pushed the same way: surviving the changing climate, he argued, will need policies that let farming people widen the range of plants and animals — the species and breeds — from which our meals are drawn.
I
Part of what makes prices so unstable, some explained, is the middleman — the buyer who steps between farmer and market and, exploiting the grower's weak position, sets the price to suit himself. Cut those buyers out and sell straight to those who eat the food, one contributor suggested, and a farmer regains command over prices and sees them steady. Priya Nandakumar, who founded and advises the Institute for Mountain Environment and Livelihoods (IMEL), made a kindred case for community-supported agriculture, a model she felt deserved more notice: consumers put money into nearby farms by subscription and promise the grower a fair return, so the risk is shared. Selling directly, she added, not only keeps small farms alive but gives buyers more say over what they eat.
J
* The personal names in the text refer to the authors of written contributions to the online debate.
An explorer's encounter with the ruined city of Sacyamarca, the best-known symbol of the Suri civilisation
A
A. Tobias Vellacott, an explorer and academic, reached the Sarapo highlands in 1911 with his sights set on what he expected to be the crowning accomplishment of his career: pushing into the little-known country that lay west of Tambara, once the capital of the Suri empire high in the Sarapo mountains. What he was after were the ruins of Karcona, the settlement that had served as the civilisation's final seat of power. Tambara itself stands on a high plateau more than 3,000 metres up, and Vellacott's plan was to work his way down from there by following the Waylla, a river whose winding course threads through steep gorges and mountain ridges before reaching the lowland jungle.
B
B.
Setting off down the Waylla in the closing days of July, Vellacott's party had something earlier travellers had gone without: a path had lately been blasted through the canyon walls so that mules could carry cocoa up from the forest below. Those who had come before had almost always left the river at Paccar, crossing the mountains by a high pass and rejoining the water some way downstream; this trimmed a good deal off the journey, but it also meant that none of them ever came near the country around Sacyamarca.
C
By 22 July the group had been descending the valley for several days. That morning was slow to get going, with Vellacott busy rounding up enough mules for the next leg of the trek. The evening before, a local herder named Ismael Quenaya had mentioned some ruins on a hill not far off, yet none of Vellacott's companions felt the slightest urge to climb up and see them with him. The weather being grey and damp, Vellacott too had little appetite for the climb. As he tells it in his book, The Lost City of the Suri, he set out up the slope with not the faintest hope of finding anything worthwhile at the top.
D
The account of that climb in Vellacott's book is written with real colour. He opens by dwelling on the ever-present threat of venomous snakes — creatures, as he puts it, 'able to lunge a fair way when chasing their prey' — though as it happens he meets none. After that the reader senses his mounting excitement: first broad sweeps of terracing, then a tomb, then great ceremonial staircases, and at last the towering ritual halls of Sacyamarca. 'The whole scene felt like some impossible dream,' he wrote; 'I stood rooted to the spot, held fast by what lay before me.'
E
It is worth remembering, though, that The Lost City of the Suri is a work of hindsight, not written until 1948, long after the expedition. The diary he kept at the time paints a different picture, one of much slower awareness of what he had done. He spent the afternoon among the ruins, noting the measurements of a building or two, then rejoined his companions, to whom he said next to nothing about the find. At that point neither the scale of the place nor its importance had struck him, still less the use he might one day make of it.
F
Before long, though, it dawned on him that the discovery might be the making of his name. By the time he came to write the piece for the Geographic Chronicle that broke the story to the wider world in April 1913, he knew a bold idea was called for. Could the place, he asked, have been the birthplace of Yawar the First, the earliest of all the Suri rulers, and could it likewise be what the old chronicles termed 'the last city of the Suri'? That name referred to Illawara, the bolt-hole to which the Suri had fled when Almiran invaders poured in during the 1530s. For the best part of forty years Vellacott struggled to prove this claim. His vision of Sacyamarca as at once the birthplace and the burial ground of the Suri world was a magnificent one, and yet it was wrong: Illawara, as we now know, lies some 65 kilometres away, deep in the jungle.
G
Ever since Vellacott's time, a single question has puzzled tourists, historians and archaeologists alike: why the site appears to have been left empty even before the Almiran Conquest. No Almiran chronicle refers to it at all, and had those writers had any idea that such a place stood so close to Tambara, they would certainly have come looking for gold. The view that has gained wide acceptance in recent years is that Sacyamarca was a sayana, a country estate raised by a Suri emperor as a refuge from the harsh winters of Tambara, somewhere the elite could enjoy grand architecture and magnificent views. What is more, the distinctive style of its buildings points to its being built in the reign of Rumaya (c. 1440–72), the greatest of all the Suri emperors. Custom dictated that each of Rumaya's descendants put up a similar estate of his own, and so Sacyamarca would have been abandoned after his death, roughly fifty years before the Almiran Conquest.
A. Most people alive today, the newest counts suggest, speak two or more languages, raised with them from childhood rather than with just one. There was a time when such a child was thought worse off than a classmate brought up with a single language. That view has been overturned in recent decades: as scientists' tools have grown more powerful, it has become possible to trace in far greater detail how speaking more than one language reshapes brain and mind, and doing so has revealed a number of unmistakable advantages.
B
Whenever someone who speaks two languages uses one of them, studies find, the second does not switch off but stays live in the background. Consider how hearing works: a word reaches us not in a single instant but as a string of sounds unfolding bit by bit, and the mind's language machinery starts betting on the word's identity well before the last sound has landed. Hear the fragment 'can', and 'candy' and 'candle' are likely to stir alongside it, at least while recognition is still under way. In a bilingual listener, that stirring respects no boundary between the two tongues, an incoming sound waking matching words in whichever language they sit. The strongest support for this effect, which specialists label parallel activation, comes from tracking bilinguals' gaze patterns. Tell a German-English speaker to 'pick up the rock' from an array of items and, unlike a listener with no German, they will let their eyes drift towards a skirt, since Rock, the German for 'skirt', echoes the English word just heard. The pull arises because the sound reaching the ear fits a word in either language equally well.
C
This never-ending rivalry between a person's languages does, it must be said, carry a cost. Naming a picture, for one thing, tends to take a bilingual speaker a fraction longer, and the maddening 'tip-of-the-tongue' sensation, the word hovering just out of reach, crops up more often. Because the two languages must be kept in balance moment by moment, a speaker has to regulate how far each one is allowed to surface at any instant. This seems to leave bilinguals sharper on jobs that demand inhibitory control. Take the well-known flanker task: a row of arrows flashes up and the participant must call out which way the middle one points. Where the arrows on either side aim the same way as the target, the answer comes faster than where they aim the opposite way, the neighbours pulling against the central arrow. At challenges of this sort, the knack of brushing aside distracting signals to fix on what matters, bilinguals frequently shine. They also change tack between two jobs more nimbly: asked to stop sorting shapes by colour and start sorting them by form, they make the shift faster than someone with only one language, a sign of stronger cognitive flexibility whenever strategy must be rewritten on the fly.
D
The bilingual edge, it appears, is not confined to thinking; its neurological reach stretches into regions the brain devotes to making sense of what the senses take in. Play a plain speech sound to teenagers in a quiet room and those with one language and those with two register it almost identically, deep in the brain stem. Add background hubbub, though, and the picture changes: now the bilingual brain answers far more strongly, locking on to the sound's fundamental frequency, the property our ears read as pitch, with markedly greater fidelity.
E
Gains of this kind may sharpen how a bilingual person takes in the surrounding world, and they may also explain a curious fact: adults who already speak two languages pick up a third more readily than one-language adults manage a second. At the root of it, perhaps, lies a talent for keeping attention on the new language while holding at bay the interference thrown up by those already known.
F
Growing old is where another finding comes in. Speaking two languages, research suggests, may keep the mind's machinery in good order, since the brain can press alternative networks into service to make up for circuits age has worn down. Memory holds up better in elderly bilinguals than in one-language contemporaries, with a tangible payoff for health. When more than 180 people with Alzheimer's disease, a condition that steadily destroys brain tissue, were followed, those who spoke two languages had noticed the tell-tale early symptoms close to four years later than those who spoke only one. A later phase matched bilingual and monolingual sufferers for how far their symptoms had advanced; startlingly, the bilingual brains bore heavier physical traces of the illness, yet the two groups acted and coped no differently. Picture the brain as an engine, and bilingualism lets it travel farther on the same tank.
G
What is more, the head start seems to arrive remarkably soon. In one experiment, babies of six months, some from one-language and some from two-language homes, were trained to expect a puppet on one side of a screen whenever a soft chiming noise played. Midway through, the rule was quietly reversed and the puppet began appearing on the other side. To keep earning their reward the infants had to abandon what they had learned and grasp the new arrangement, and only those from bilingual homes managed it. The lesson seems to be that, for the youngest as much as the oldest, moving through a world of several languages hands out benefits reaching well past language itself.
C. Risk is familiar to anyone who farms. Violent weather, the slow shift of the climate and swinging prices for supplies and produce threaten growers everywhere. Smallholders in poorer countries carry more still, hemmed in by natural obstacles — thin soils, unreliable rain — and human ones alike, from patchy roads and finance to weak markets and little access to knowledge and technology. The bitter irony is that many of these small farmers go hungry themselves.
D. On easing these risks, most contributors looked to the state to do more. Dario Fenwick, who heads the Global Fund for Rural Development, argued that a government can lower farmers' exposure simply by supplying the basics — roads that carry crops to market faster, or stores for water and food that stop so much being lost. Helena Marsh, a senior adviser at the Centre for Farming and Trade Policy, added that when governments buy up and hold reserves, sharp lurches in food prices tend to soften, since doubts about market supply are eased.
E. Ronan Petrescu, who directs the World Food Policy Institute, pointed to the welfare schemes run in countries such as Kenya, Peru and Guatemala as a real way to lift farming households out of poverty and cushion them against agricultural shocks. Several commentators were unconvinced: handing cash to poor families, they noted, does not automatically buy food security, since such schemes neither guarantee a bigger harvest nor a larger income. On subsidies, Amara Diallo, who runs the Rural Women's Advancement Network, was blunt — the payments, she wrote, 'have done nothing to loosen the grip of private traders. Close to seventy percent of those who collect subsidies are not the poor at all, but wealthy landowners and dealers who never farm.'
F. For Fenwick, Marsh and Petrescu there was also a place for private instruments — insurance, commodity futures and rural credit — which help a small producer spread risk and find money to invest in improvements. Diallo warned that such financial support often nudges farmers towards input-hungry methods that, a few seasons on, push the cost of growing above what the crop will fetch. Marsh cautioned that futures markets, once too financial in character, may themselves stir up the short-term price swings that leave farmers less food-secure. A recurring theme was that markets must be far more open, so volatility is blunted and it becomes plain whether stocks are sufficient. Some added that agribusiness firms ought to foot the bill for the harm they cause.
G. Another current favoured letting farmers manage risk from the ground up, through co-operatives, producer bodies and other collective action. Banding together, the argument ran, opens markets otherwise closed to a small grower, trims selling costs, and times buying and selling to seasonal prices. Marsh put it plainly: acting together is among the surest ways for farmers to build political and economic bargaining muscle and take the edge off the risks of the trade. Tomas Vogel offered a note of realism, cautioning that collective action is never had for nothing — organising it, earning trust and trying things out all swallow time, effort and money. Others, among them Joris Halbertsma and Ruben Klaassen, held that to 'act on what we already know', everyone with a stake — companies, governments, scientists, citizens — must pull together from the first link in the value chain.
H. Climate change ran through many essays as a threat to small-scale farming. As Petrescu put it, a warming world not only cuts harvests but makes violent weather fiercer and more frequent, leaving the smallholder yet more exposed; and the harder the weather is to predict, the harder it is to plan against. His remedy was to breed crop varieties tougher in the face of the new climate and its extremes. Lars Ostergaard, who co-founded and directs the AgroWatch Collective, pushed the same way: surviving the changing climate, he argued, will need policies that let farming people widen the range of plants and animals — the species and breeds — from which our meals are drawn.
I. Part of what makes prices so unstable, some explained, is the middleman — the buyer who steps between farmer and market and, exploiting the grower's weak position, sets the price to suit himself. Cut those buyers out and sell straight to those who eat the food, one contributor suggested, and a farmer regains command over prices and sees them steady. Priya Nandakumar, who founded and advises the Institute for Mountain Environment and Livelihoods (IMEL), made a kindred case for community-supported agriculture, a model she felt deserved more notice: consumers put money into nearby farms by subscription and promise the grower a fair return, so the risk is shared. Selling directly, she added, not only keeps small farms alive but gives buyers more say over what they eat.
J. * The personal names in the text refer to the authors of written contributions to the online debate.
Setting off down the Waylla in the closing days of July, Vellacott's party had something earlier travellers had gone without: a path had lately been blasted through the canyon walls so that mules could carry cocoa up from the forest below. Those who had come before had almost always left the river at Paccar, crossing the mountains by a high pass and rejoining the water some way downstream; this trimmed a good deal off the journey, but it also meant that none of them ever came near the country around Sacyamarca.
C. By 22 July the group had been descending the valley for several days. That morning was slow to get going, with Vellacott busy rounding up enough mules for the next leg of the trek. The evening before, a local herder named Ismael Quenaya had mentioned some ruins on a hill not far off, yet none of Vellacott's companions felt the slightest urge to climb up and see them with him. The weather being grey and damp, Vellacott too had little appetite for the climb. As he tells it in his book, The Lost City of the Suri, he set out up the slope with not the faintest hope of finding anything worthwhile at the top.
D. The account of that climb in Vellacott's book is written with real colour. He opens by dwelling on the ever-present threat of venomous snakes — creatures, as he puts it, 'able to lunge a fair way when chasing their prey' — though as it happens he meets none. After that the reader senses his mounting excitement: first broad sweeps of terracing, then a tomb, then great ceremonial staircases, and at last the towering ritual halls of Sacyamarca. 'The whole scene felt like some impossible dream,' he wrote; 'I stood rooted to the spot, held fast by what lay before me.'
E. It is worth remembering, though, that The Lost City of the Suri is a work of hindsight, not written until 1948, long after the expedition. The diary he kept at the time paints a different picture, one of much slower awareness of what he had done. He spent the afternoon among the ruins, noting the measurements of a building or two, then rejoined his companions, to whom he said next to nothing about the find. At that point neither the scale of the place nor its importance had struck him, still less the use he might one day make of it.
F. Before long, though, it dawned on him that the discovery might be the making of his name. By the time he came to write the piece for the Geographic Chronicle that broke the story to the wider world in April 1913, he knew a bold idea was called for. Could the place, he asked, have been the birthplace of Yawar the First, the earliest of all the Suri rulers, and could it likewise be what the old chronicles termed 'the last city of the Suri'? That name referred to Illawara, the bolt-hole to which the Suri had fled when Almiran invaders poured in during the 1530s. For the best part of forty years Vellacott struggled to prove this claim. His vision of Sacyamarca as at once the birthplace and the burial ground of the Suri world was a magnificent one, and yet it was wrong: Illawara, as we now know, lies some 65 kilometres away, deep in the jungle.
G. Ever since Vellacott's time, a single question has puzzled tourists, historians and archaeologists alike: why the site appears to have been left empty even before the Almiran Conquest. No Almiran chronicle refers to it at all, and had those writers had any idea that such a place stood so close to Tambara, they would certainly have come looking for gold. The view that has gained wide acceptance in recent years is that Sacyamarca was a sayana, a country estate raised by a Suri emperor as a refuge from the harsh winters of Tambara, somewhere the elite could enjoy grand architecture and magnificent views. What is more, the distinctive style of its buildings points to its being built in the reign of Rumaya (c. 1440–72), the greatest of all the Suri emperors. Custom dictated that each of Rumaya's descendants put up a similar estate of his own, and so Sacyamarca would have been abandoned after his death, roughly fifty years before the Almiran Conquest.
B. Whenever someone who speaks two languages uses one of them, studies find, the second does not switch off but stays live in the background. Consider how hearing works: a word reaches us not in a single instant but as a string of sounds unfolding bit by bit, and the mind's language machinery starts betting on the word's identity well before the last sound has landed. Hear the fragment 'can', and 'candy' and 'candle' are likely to stir alongside it, at least while recognition is still under way. In a bilingual listener, that stirring respects no boundary between the two tongues, an incoming sound waking matching words in whichever language they sit. The strongest support for this effect, which specialists label parallel activation, comes from tracking bilinguals' gaze patterns. Tell a German-English speaker to 'pick up the rock' from an array of items and, unlike a listener with no German, they will let their eyes drift towards a skirt, since Rock, the German for 'skirt', echoes the English word just heard. The pull arises because the sound reaching the ear fits a word in either language equally well.
C. This never-ending rivalry between a person's languages does, it must be said, carry a cost. Naming a picture, for one thing, tends to take a bilingual speaker a fraction longer, and the maddening 'tip-of-the-tongue' sensation, the word hovering just out of reach, crops up more often. Because the two languages must be kept in balance moment by moment, a speaker has to regulate how far each one is allowed to surface at any instant. This seems to leave bilinguals sharper on jobs that demand inhibitory control. Take the well-known flanker task: a row of arrows flashes up and the participant must call out which way the middle one points. Where the arrows on either side aim the same way as the target, the answer comes faster than where they aim the opposite way, the neighbours pulling against the central arrow. At challenges of this sort, the knack of brushing aside distracting signals to fix on what matters, bilinguals frequently shine. They also change tack between two jobs more nimbly: asked to stop sorting shapes by colour and start sorting them by form, they make the shift faster than someone with only one language, a sign of stronger cognitive flexibility whenever strategy must be rewritten on the fly.
D. The bilingual edge, it appears, is not confined to thinking; its neurological reach stretches into regions the brain devotes to making sense of what the senses take in. Play a plain speech sound to teenagers in a quiet room and those with one language and those with two register it almost identically, deep in the brain stem. Add background hubbub, though, and the picture changes: now the bilingual brain answers far more strongly, locking on to the sound's fundamental frequency, the property our ears read as pitch, with markedly greater fidelity.
E. Gains of this kind may sharpen how a bilingual person takes in the surrounding world, and they may also explain a curious fact: adults who already speak two languages pick up a third more readily than one-language adults manage a second. At the root of it, perhaps, lies a talent for keeping attention on the new language while holding at bay the interference thrown up by those already known.
F. Growing old is where another finding comes in. Speaking two languages, research suggests, may keep the mind's machinery in good order, since the brain can press alternative networks into service to make up for circuits age has worn down. Memory holds up better in elderly bilinguals than in one-language contemporaries, with a tangible payoff for health. When more than 180 people with Alzheimer's disease, a condition that steadily destroys brain tissue, were followed, those who spoke two languages had noticed the tell-tale early symptoms close to four years later than those who spoke only one. A later phase matched bilingual and monolingual sufferers for how far their symptoms had advanced; startlingly, the bilingual brains bore heavier physical traces of the illness, yet the two groups acted and coped no differently. Picture the brain as an engine, and bilingualism lets it travel farther on the same tank.
G. What is more, the head start seems to arrive remarkably soon. In one experiment, babies of six months, some from one-language and some from two-language homes, were trained to expect a puppet on one side of a screen whenever a soft chiming noise played. Midway through, the rule was quietly reversed and the puppet began appearing on the other side. To keep earning their reward the infants had to abandon what they had learned and grasp the new arrangement, and only those from bilingual homes managed it. The lesson seems to be that, for the youngest as much as the oldest, moving through a world of several languages hands out benefits reaching well past language itself.
