IELTS CAM Inspired 12 - Reading Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 12 - Reading Test 3 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 7
The Reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-G.
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
Write the appropriate numbers i-viii
List of Headings
I
The search for a new home for the tortoises
II
How the tortoises first colonised the islands
III
Why acting at the right time is essential
IV
Human actions that reduced tortoise numbers
V
A meeting of young and old
VI
Launching an effort to protect the tortoises
VII
Executing a well-planned mission
VIII
Devising a more ambitious approach
1
Paragraph A
2
Paragraph B
3
Paragraph C
4
Paragraph D
5
Paragraph E
6
Paragraph F
7
Paragraph G
Question 8 - 13
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
How the Cavora tortoise came to decline
• Their ancestors came originally from the African continent
• Their numbers on the islands rose because nothing preyed on them
• 1600s: a few animals were removed on ships owned by
8.
• 1780s: huge quantities were loaded onto whaling vessels, where they served as
9.
, and their bodies were also rendered into
10.
• On the islands themselves, they were killed by
11.
• Loss of habitat: caused partly by the clearing of land for crops, and partly by assorted
12.
foreign to the islands, which also broke into their
13.
and ate the young
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 19
Reading Passage 2 has eight sections, A-H.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-H.
14
recognition that certain illnesses can never be completely wiped out
15
instances of bodily complaints that arise from human activity
16
a mention of grouping diseases according to how widely they spread
17
an account of why medical care may be unequally available inside a single country
18
a portrayal of health geography as combining separate areas of study
19
a description of the sort of place where a specific disease is seldom seen
Question 20 - 26
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
20
A number of illnesses no longer exist, owing to advances in
and in the healthcare people can obtain.
21
As populations mix more freely, the
used against infections are becoming less effective.
22
Having once been almost eradicated,
is a disease that is now becoming widespread again.
23
The
responsible for passing on one infection thrive in warm, slow-moving water.
24
Apart from road traffic, pollution is also produced by
, which run on one specific fuel.
25
Expanding cities frequently take their toll on the surrounding
.
26
A natural obstacle such as a
may stop people from getting to a hospital.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 31
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
The Uppsala Study
Volunteers were selected after replying to public that called for people who felt 'chills' when they heard purely instrumental music. As each participant listened to songs from a personal , scanners tracked the brain's activity, which showed the music prompting a release of dopamine in two regions linked to pleasure. Activity in the caudate reached its height a little before a listener's favourite moment — the stretch of time the researchers called the . The same structure also becomes active when a person is expecting a reward such as . Turning from the brain to the music, the writer adds that a listener soon grows bored when a piece is too .
Question 32 - 36
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
32
What point is made in the first paragraph?
A
how varied listeners' reactions to the same piece can be
B
how much a person's mood shapes their taste in music
C
how powerfully music can affect us physically
D
how little scientists understand about music's effects
33
In the second paragraph, what does the writer suggest about the study?
A
Its results were unusually precise and detailed.
B
Its central aim was highly original.
C
Its method was needlessly elaborate.
D
Its design was too basic to be useful.
34
What most surprises the writer about the study's findings?
A
which style of music affected the brain most strongly
B
how the music altered the listeners' mood
C
which part of the brain the music switched on
D
when, in relation to the music, the brain cells were most active
35
Why does the writer bring in Lindqvist's work?
A
to put forward a brand-new theory of her own
B
to call for more research into the topic
C
to lend weight to what the Uppsala team had found
D
to set out a position that contradicts the researchers
36
What, according to Lindqvist, is the real source of the emotion a listener feels?
A
the personal memories that a piece stirs up
B
the way the composition is built and unfolds from within
C
the link between particular chords and particular feelings
D
the listener's grasp of what the composer intended
Question 37 - 40
Complete each of the following statements with the best ending A-F from the box below.
List of Endings
A
the brain's cells fire more strongly in the short span before a piece reaches its peak.
B
moving music can call real places and happenings to mind.
C
a person's response to a piece is shaped by the mood they start in.
D
these cells respond less and less strongly once an outcome can be foreseen.
E
our earlier experiences can colour how we react to a piece.
F
powerful music withholds from listeners the sound they are expecting.
The Uppsala team found that
37
A number of experiments have shown that
38
Lindqvist's study of Brahms's quintet reveals that
39
Traditional views of music held that
40
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Flying tortoises
By moving young tortoises through the air, conservationists have made real progress in safeguarding the threatened Cavora tortoise.
A
A. Much of the rugged lava plains that divide the interior of Terenza — one of the Cavora islands — from the open ocean lies beneath forests of spiny cacti. Four volcanic cones lend the island the look of a lunar surface, and only among the dense vegetation skirting the cloud-wrapped summit of Cerro Aldán does the bare ground below give way to anything greener. It is here that the giant Cavora tortoise makes its home. Roughly three million years after the archipelago itself took shape, one or more tortoises drifted across from the African mainland and gained a foothold on the islands. Settling separately on each one, these founding populations slowly adjusted to their particular surroundings, and out of them arose no fewer than twelve subspecies. The islands suited the animals well. With no serious predators to trouble them, they grew into the heaviest and most long-lived tortoises found anywhere on Earth, some passing 350 kilograms, occasionally stretching beyond 1.7 metres, and outliving their hundredth year.
B
Before people settled the archipelago, its tortoises could be counted in the hundreds of thousands. Sealers had, from the seventeenth century onwards, carried off the occasional animal to eat, yet it was the appearance of whaling fleets in the 1780s that made such exploitation soar. Because they moved slowly and could survive for months without feeding or drinking, the tortoises were loaded aboard the whalers to provide fresh provisions on long crossings, and their carcasses were occasionally boiled down for valuable fat. Perhaps 180,000 in all were stripped from the islands before the twentieth century began. Matters grew worse still once colonists established themselves: they killed the tortoises for their meat and cleared away the habitat to open ground for farming. The newcomers also let loose a range of non-native animals — among them cattle, pigs, goats, rats and dogs — that either raided the tortoises' nests and devoured the hatchlings or ruined the habitat; imported plants and ants did further harm.
C
Of the subspecies that once existed, just nine remain today, and several of those are in grave danger. A centre for breeding the island's tortoises was set up in 1991 on the edge of Villa Sereno, the small town on Terenza. So effective did its captive-breeding programme prove that the centre was in time confronted with the reverse difficulty — far too many tortoises.
D
The timing of all this, moreover, was critical. A captive-bred tortoise cannot be returned to the wild until it has reached at least six years of age and weighs no less than five kilograms, for only then are its bulk and its toughened shell enough to see off predators. Wait much longer than that, though, and the animal grows too heavy to move.
E
For a long stretch, the animals had been returned only a handful at a time, borne on men's backs through weeks of gruelling treks along narrow paths. Then a far bolder scheme took shape in October 2011, when three people met over a table in a small café at Puerto Lorca, on the island of Media Luna: Emil Rasmussen, an environmentalist serving as liaison officer for the Cavora National Park, the visiting captain of a private motor yacht, and a helicopter pilot. What they proposed was to fly 300 of the breeding centre's tortoises out by helicopter and set them down at various spots near Cerro Aldán.
F
What made this remarkable undertaking feasible were the owners of the 72-metre yacht Silver Petrel, who let the Cavora National Park use their helicopter and its seasoned pilot free of charge, and threw in the yacht, its captain and crew besides. Once an air ambulance, the helicopter had a double door at the rear and a roomy interior well suited to cargo, so a purpose-built crate was made that could take as many as thirty tortoises weighing somewhere near 140 kilograms altogether. Added to the fuel, the pilot and the four crew, that load came close to the helicopter's ceiling, and at moments it plainly sat right at the limit of what the aircraft could manage. Across three days, volunteers from the breeding centre laboured without pause to ready the young tortoises for the journey. Wardens, meanwhile, had been set down beforehand in far-off spots, where they hacked out landing places amid the dense scrub, cacti and lava.
G
Once freed, the young tortoises fanned out across the land of their ancestors, exploring what lay around them and grazing on the plants. In time, one small tortoise happened upon a fully grown giant that had been plodding about the island for something like a century. Side by side the two of them stood — a striking emblem of an ancient species being reborn.
A. Thanks to better sanitation and to the wider medical care people can now obtain, a great many of the illnesses that once troubled humankind have been wiped out; even so, particular health problems remain far commoner in some corners of the world than in others. Our planet is now more tightly interconnected than at any earlier point in history, with people constantly meeting through travel and settling ever nearer to one another. One upshot of this is that so-called super-viruses, along with other infections that no longer respond to the drugs meant to treat them, are cropping up with growing frequency.
B
Circumstances of this kind are exactly where a discipline known as health geography proves its worth. Its importance keeps climbing in an era when illnesses such as measles are staging a comeback, breathing disorders continue to spread, and regions plagued by tropical infections are still hunting for more effective remedies. At its core, the field marries two bodies of knowledge: a command of geography, together with the techniques for analysing and interpreting geographical data, and the study of health, disease and medical care as practised across the globe. What this hybrid science sets out to do is devise remedies for health problems that are rooted in place. Human beings may never be wholly free of sickness, yet examining how geography shapes our health might one day allow some diseases to be stamped out and others headed off before they ever take hold. Grasping the reasons and the mechanisms behind illness lets us reshape the way we tackle the diseases tied to particular parts of the world.
C
The health worries facing any given community are frequently shaped by geography to a striking degree. Where a person happens to live, in other words, largely dictates the sorts of ailments they are exposed to, and these will differ from the ones threatening someone in another part of the world. Schistosomiasis offers perhaps the clearest illustration: the freshwater snails that pass this infection on to people flourish in the warm, sluggish waters typical of many tropical lowlands. Across arid highlands, by contrast, the disease is hardly ever encountered.
D
In certain nations the sway that geographical factors hold over people's health and well-being is unmistakable. Within sprawling cities the breeze is frequently too weak to sweep away the dense smog and pollution that leave residents suffering from asthma, damaged lungs, poor eyesight and a host of other complaints. Much of the blame lies with the sheer volume of traffic on the roads, compounded by furnaces that are fired with coal. And as several countries have industrialised at speed in recent years, expanses of woodland have been cleared to make room for the spread of big cities, which only makes the pollution harder to counter, since it removes the clean air that plants would otherwise produce.
E
One major branch of the discipline concerns itself with the geography of healthcare provision. Its practitioners look at how far, or how little, medical resources actually reach individuals and communities around the globe. Whether a country is wealthy or poor, a marked gap tends to separate the choices open to people of differing social class, income level and schooling. Those working in this branch try to gauge the standard of care on offer in a given place; reaching a doctor may be genuinely hard, for example, when a wide river lies between a settlement and the nearest hospital. Such specialists stand at the forefront of advising international bodies, local authorities and others on the policies they ought to adopt.
F
A second strand, the geography of disease and ill health, looks at how often particular illnesses crop up in different corners of the world and lays that information over the region's geography, hunting for any link between the two. Specialists here also probe the conditions that might leave a given person or community more susceptible to a specific complaint than people living elsewhere. As a rule, those who work in this strand have trained as healthcare professionals and possess a working grasp of the basic epidemiology that governs how disease travels through a population.
G
The researchers in this second strand examine the ways in which human beings interact with their surroundings such that illness can result, asthma in heavily polluted places being one instance, and they set about devising a clear system for sorting illnesses, diseases and epidemics by whether their reach is local or global. Through charting how sicknesses spread, they try to pin down what lies behind a rise or a fall in particular illnesses, all with the aim of checking the further advance, or the return, of diseases among populations at risk.
H
Health geography may be a frequently neglected field, yet it answers an enormous need at the meeting point of geography and healthcare. Once we grasp the way our location shapes our health, wherever on the map we happen to be, we become far better placed to treat disease, to ward off illness, and to keep people well and out of harm.
Science writer Elias Thorne considers the emotional power of music
How can an art form made from no words move us so deeply? Music, after all, carries neither language nor plain ideas; it is abstract through and through. Yet whatever it leaves unsaid it more than repays in feeling. Put on a song we love and the body quietly gives the game away, showing every sign of being emotionally stirred. Our pupils widen while heart rate and blood pressure climb; the skin's electrical resistance drops, and the cerebellum — the part of the brain we normally tie to movement — flares up in a way that seems out of place. Even the flow of blood is rerouted, drawn towards the muscles of the legs. Sound, in short, takes hold of us somewhere deep in our biology.
Much of what we now know about music's grip on us comes from a recent article in the journal Neural Frontiers, produced by a research team based in Uppsala, Sweden. For all the elaborate equipment it leaned on — functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) together with positron emission tomography (PET) scanning — the design of the experiment could hardly have been plainer. From 184 people who had answered notices asking for volunteers prone to 'chills' while listening to music without words, just eight were finally kept. Each arrived with a personal playlist, the selections ranging across almost every style imaginable, techno and tango side by side; these tracks were played back while the listener's brain was watched. Running the two scanning methods at once let the team assemble a portrait of the musical brain that was strikingly exact. Their opening result was that hearing music pushes the brain's nerve cells to manufacture dopamine — a substance that does much to govern how we feel — across the dorsal as well as the ventral parts of the brain. Because both areas have been bound up with pleasure for a very long time, little here was surprising.
Far more telling was a second result. Within the caudate — a structure that helps the brain forge links between a stimulus and a response, and that fires whenever we expect money or some other kind of reward — the dopamine cells hit their peak roughly fifteen seconds ahead of each listener's best-loved moment in a piece. This interval the Uppsala team named the 'build-up phase', proposing that its role is to let us sense the approach of the part we are waiting for. But what are all these dopamine cells busy doing? Why should they burn brightest in the seconds that lead up to the musical high point rather than at the high point itself? As a rule a rush of dopamine travels hand in hand with pleasure, with a reward that has actually arrived. Here, strangely, the cells blaze most fiercely while the 'chills' are still on their way and the melody has yet to settle.
To make sense of this, it helps to turn from the neurons towards the music itself. To an outsider a piece may resemble a maze of interlocking patterns, and yet the moment that counts for most in any song or symphony is exactly the one where those patterns give way and the sound turns unpredictable. Music that stays too plain merely bores us, no more welcome than a ringing alarm clock. This squares with what many experiments have found: once a reward becomes predictable, dopamine cells soon stop reacting to it. Our excitement drains away the instant the next step is obvious. That is why a composer will sound an important note near the start, then take care to skirt that pattern through most of what follows, before at last letting it ring out again in the closing bars. And the longer the pattern we await is held back, the fiercer the release when it finally comes home.
A striking illustration of this idea comes from the musicologist Rosa Lindqvist, whose well-known study Expectation and Feeling in Music (1959) works its way through the finale of Brahms's Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115. Her purpose was to show that music lives by teasing our sense of order without ever quite surrendering to it. Over forty-four bars of the score she traces the way Brahms first lays out a clear rhythmic and harmonic figure and then, with real cunning, keeps putting off its return. In its place he offers hints and reworkings of that figure, keeping a thread of uncertainty pulled tight so that the listener's mind aches for the single resolving chord he withholds. That chord he releases only at the very close.
For Lindqvist, the feeling we hear in music rises out of just this suspense — the tension of expectations left unmet. Older accounts had dwelt on how a sound can point outward to real scenes and lived experience, a sort of 'outward' meaning; Lindqvist argued instead that musical emotion is born from the unfolding of the music on its own terms. This 'inner' meaning grows out of the very patterns a work summons up and then declines to supply. And it is that uncertainty which sets off the flood of dopamine within the caudate, as we labour to guess what is coming next. A few notes we can foresee, yet never the whole run of them, and it is this that keeps us there, listening on, waiting in hope for our reward and for the pattern to be made whole at last.
B. Before people settled the archipelago, its tortoises could be counted in the hundreds of thousands. Sealers had, from the seventeenth century onwards, carried off the occasional animal to eat, yet it was the appearance of whaling fleets in the 1780s that made such exploitation soar. Because they moved slowly and could survive for months without feeding or drinking, the tortoises were loaded aboard the whalers to provide fresh provisions on long crossings, and their carcasses were occasionally boiled down for valuable fat. Perhaps 180,000 in all were stripped from the islands before the twentieth century began. Matters grew worse still once colonists established themselves: they killed the tortoises for their meat and cleared away the habitat to open ground for farming. The newcomers also let loose a range of non-native animals — among them cattle, pigs, goats, rats and dogs — that either raided the tortoises' nests and devoured the hatchlings or ruined the habitat; imported plants and ants did further harm.
C. Of the subspecies that once existed, just nine remain today, and several of those are in grave danger. A centre for breeding the island's tortoises was set up in 1991 on the edge of Villa Sereno, the small town on Terenza. So effective did its captive-breeding programme prove that the centre was in time confronted with the reverse difficulty — far too many tortoises.
D. The timing of all this, moreover, was critical. A captive-bred tortoise cannot be returned to the wild until it has reached at least six years of age and weighs no less than five kilograms, for only then are its bulk and its toughened shell enough to see off predators. Wait much longer than that, though, and the animal grows too heavy to move.
E. For a long stretch, the animals had been returned only a handful at a time, borne on men's backs through weeks of gruelling treks along narrow paths. Then a far bolder scheme took shape in October 2011, when three people met over a table in a small café at Puerto Lorca, on the island of Media Luna: Emil Rasmussen, an environmentalist serving as liaison officer for the Cavora National Park, the visiting captain of a private motor yacht, and a helicopter pilot. What they proposed was to fly 300 of the breeding centre's tortoises out by helicopter and set them down at various spots near Cerro Aldán.
F. What made this remarkable undertaking feasible were the owners of the 72-metre yacht Silver Petrel, who let the Cavora National Park use their helicopter and its seasoned pilot free of charge, and threw in the yacht, its captain and crew besides. Once an air ambulance, the helicopter had a double door at the rear and a roomy interior well suited to cargo, so a purpose-built crate was made that could take as many as thirty tortoises weighing somewhere near 140 kilograms altogether. Added to the fuel, the pilot and the four crew, that load came close to the helicopter's ceiling, and at moments it plainly sat right at the limit of what the aircraft could manage. Across three days, volunteers from the breeding centre laboured without pause to ready the young tortoises for the journey. Wardens, meanwhile, had been set down beforehand in far-off spots, where they hacked out landing places amid the dense scrub, cacti and lava.
G. Once freed, the young tortoises fanned out across the land of their ancestors, exploring what lay around them and grazing on the plants. In time, one small tortoise happened upon a fully grown giant that had been plodding about the island for something like a century. Side by side the two of them stood — a striking emblem of an ancient species being reborn.
B. Circumstances of this kind are exactly where a discipline known as health geography proves its worth. Its importance keeps climbing in an era when illnesses such as measles are staging a comeback, breathing disorders continue to spread, and regions plagued by tropical infections are still hunting for more effective remedies. At its core, the field marries two bodies of knowledge: a command of geography, together with the techniques for analysing and interpreting geographical data, and the study of health, disease and medical care as practised across the globe. What this hybrid science sets out to do is devise remedies for health problems that are rooted in place. Human beings may never be wholly free of sickness, yet examining how geography shapes our health might one day allow some diseases to be stamped out and others headed off before they ever take hold. Grasping the reasons and the mechanisms behind illness lets us reshape the way we tackle the diseases tied to particular parts of the world.
C. The health worries facing any given community are frequently shaped by geography to a striking degree. Where a person happens to live, in other words, largely dictates the sorts of ailments they are exposed to, and these will differ from the ones threatening someone in another part of the world. Schistosomiasis offers perhaps the clearest illustration: the freshwater snails that pass this infection on to people flourish in the warm, sluggish waters typical of many tropical lowlands. Across arid highlands, by contrast, the disease is hardly ever encountered.
D. In certain nations the sway that geographical factors hold over people's health and well-being is unmistakable. Within sprawling cities the breeze is frequently too weak to sweep away the dense smog and pollution that leave residents suffering from asthma, damaged lungs, poor eyesight and a host of other complaints. Much of the blame lies with the sheer volume of traffic on the roads, compounded by furnaces that are fired with coal. And as several countries have industrialised at speed in recent years, expanses of woodland have been cleared to make room for the spread of big cities, which only makes the pollution harder to counter, since it removes the clean air that plants would otherwise produce.
E. One major branch of the discipline concerns itself with the geography of healthcare provision. Its practitioners look at how far, or how little, medical resources actually reach individuals and communities around the globe. Whether a country is wealthy or poor, a marked gap tends to separate the choices open to people of differing social class, income level and schooling. Those working in this branch try to gauge the standard of care on offer in a given place; reaching a doctor may be genuinely hard, for example, when a wide river lies between a settlement and the nearest hospital. Such specialists stand at the forefront of advising international bodies, local authorities and others on the policies they ought to adopt.
F. A second strand, the geography of disease and ill health, looks at how often particular illnesses crop up in different corners of the world and lays that information over the region's geography, hunting for any link between the two. Specialists here also probe the conditions that might leave a given person or community more susceptible to a specific complaint than people living elsewhere. As a rule, those who work in this strand have trained as healthcare professionals and possess a working grasp of the basic epidemiology that governs how disease travels through a population.
G. The researchers in this second strand examine the ways in which human beings interact with their surroundings such that illness can result, asthma in heavily polluted places being one instance, and they set about devising a clear system for sorting illnesses, diseases and epidemics by whether their reach is local or global. Through charting how sicknesses spread, they try to pin down what lies behind a rise or a fall in particular illnesses, all with the aim of checking the further advance, or the return, of diseases among populations at risk.
H. Health geography may be a frequently neglected field, yet it answers an enormous need at the meeting point of geography and healthcare. Once we grasp the way our location shapes our health, wherever on the map we happen to be, we become far better placed to treat disease, to ward off illness, and to keep people well and out of harm.
How can an art form made from no words move us so deeply? Music, after all, carries neither language nor plain ideas; it is abstract through and through. Yet whatever it leaves unsaid it more than repays in feeling. Put on a song we love and the body quietly gives the game away, showing every sign of being emotionally stirred. Our pupils widen while heart rate and blood pressure climb; the skin's electrical resistance drops, and the cerebellum — the part of the brain we normally tie to movement — flares up in a way that seems out of place. Even the flow of blood is rerouted, drawn towards the muscles of the legs. Sound, in short, takes hold of us somewhere deep in our biology.
Much of what we now know about music's grip on us comes from a recent article in the journal Neural Frontiers, produced by a research team based in Uppsala, Sweden. For all the elaborate equipment it leaned on — functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) together with positron emission tomography (PET) scanning — the design of the experiment could hardly have been plainer. From 184 people who had answered notices asking for volunteers prone to 'chills' while listening to music without words, just eight were finally kept. Each arrived with a personal playlist, the selections ranging across almost every style imaginable, techno and tango side by side; these tracks were played back while the listener's brain was watched. Running the two scanning methods at once let the team assemble a portrait of the musical brain that was strikingly exact. Their opening result was that hearing music pushes the brain's nerve cells to manufacture dopamine — a substance that does much to govern how we feel — across the dorsal as well as the ventral parts of the brain. Because both areas have been bound up with pleasure for a very long time, little here was surprising.
Far more telling was a second result. Within the caudate — a structure that helps the brain forge links between a stimulus and a response, and that fires whenever we expect money or some other kind of reward — the dopamine cells hit their peak roughly fifteen seconds ahead of each listener's best-loved moment in a piece. This interval the Uppsala team named the 'build-up phase', proposing that its role is to let us sense the approach of the part we are waiting for. But what are all these dopamine cells busy doing? Why should they burn brightest in the seconds that lead up to the musical high point rather than at the high point itself? As a rule a rush of dopamine travels hand in hand with pleasure, with a reward that has actually arrived. Here, strangely, the cells blaze most fiercely while the 'chills' are still on their way and the melody has yet to settle.
To make sense of this, it helps to turn from the neurons towards the music itself. To an outsider a piece may resemble a maze of interlocking patterns, and yet the moment that counts for most in any song or symphony is exactly the one where those patterns give way and the sound turns unpredictable. Music that stays too plain merely bores us, no more welcome than a ringing alarm clock. This squares with what many experiments have found: once a reward becomes predictable, dopamine cells soon stop reacting to it. Our excitement drains away the instant the next step is obvious. That is why a composer will sound an important note near the start, then take care to skirt that pattern through most of what follows, before at last letting it ring out again in the closing bars. And the longer the pattern we await is held back, the fiercer the release when it finally comes home.
A striking illustration of this idea comes from the musicologist Rosa Lindqvist, whose well-known study Expectation and Feeling in Music (1959) works its way through the finale of Brahms's Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115. Her purpose was to show that music lives by teasing our sense of order without ever quite surrendering to it. Over forty-four bars of the score she traces the way Brahms first lays out a clear rhythmic and harmonic figure and then, with real cunning, keeps putting off its return. In its place he offers hints and reworkings of that figure, keeping a thread of uncertainty pulled tight so that the listener's mind aches for the single resolving chord he withholds. That chord he releases only at the very close.
For Lindqvist, the feeling we hear in music rises out of just this suspense — the tension of expectations left unmet. Older accounts had dwelt on how a sound can point outward to real scenes and lived experience, a sort of 'outward' meaning; Lindqvist argued instead that musical emotion is born from the unfolding of the music on its own terms. This 'inner' meaning grows out of the very patterns a work summons up and then declines to supply. And it is that uncertainty which sets off the flood of dopamine within the caudate, as we labour to guess what is coming next. A few notes we can foresee, yet never the whole run of them, and it is this that keeps us there, listening on, waiting in hope for our reward and for the pattern to be made whole at last.
