IELTS CAM Inspired 15 - Reading Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS Mock Test 15 - Reading Test 3 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 7
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 there is no information on this
1
Moore abandoned his teacher training by his own choice.
2
In his opening year at the Scarborough School of Art, sketching took up more of Moore's time than any other activity.
3
The Metropolitan College of Art stood near many of the museums Moore visited.
4
Moore felt the Toltec figure had much in common with the other carvings he knew.
5
Once he came back from Italy, Moore carved stone works on several different themes.
6
Moore was among those who set up the Meridian Group.
7
Moore's fellow sculptors disapproved of the work he exhibited in 1930.
Question 8 - 13
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Moore as a working artist
1930s
• The press attacks the show Moore holds at the Bramley Galleries
• Moore's colleagues press him to give up his
8.
and leave the Metropolitan College
1940s
• A lack of the
9.
that carving demanded pushes Moore toward drawing
• On a visit to the town where he grew up, Moore makes drawings of local
10.
• Moore is asked to create a statue depicting a
11.
• Moore's sculptures begin to be bought by
12.
from around the world
• A rise in his
13.
lets Moore take on larger and bolder commissions
1950s
• Moore's series of bronze figures signals a further change in his style
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 20
Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.
List of Headings
I
A benefit that came as a surprise
II
How many people are affected by water shortages
III
The variety of buyers the device could attract
IV
Treating water taken from many different sources
V
Securing the funds needed to manufacture it
VI
Solving difficulties in production
VII
The quality that sets it apart from rival methods
VIII
How a chance observation grew into a product
IX
An enthusiastic reception for the device
X
Why financial gain is not the main aim
14
Paragraph A
15
Paragraph B
16
Paragraph C
17
Paragraph D
18
Paragraph E
19
Paragraph F
20
Paragraph G
Question 21 - 26
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
How the Desolenator works
The Desolenator runs entirely on solar energy. Since the unit comes fitted with a , it can be carried between sites without difficulty. Water is fed in through a pipe and spreads in a shallow across a solar panel before it reaches a boiler, where it is turned into steam. A simple traps any solid matter carried along in the water. Clean water leaves through one outlet, while every kind of is expelled through the other. A built-in display passes the unit's to the maker, so the company can tell when a given unit is due for .
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 31
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F, below.
List of Endings
A
can be obtained through methods developed for the study of memory.
B
is the reason why the stories continue to be retold.
C
differ substantially from one retelling tradition to another.
D
concern dangers concealed within ordinary domestic surroundings.
E
were passed from one person to another through speech alone.
F
were formulated despite uncertainty about the historical evidence.
In different versions of the household tale, details of the plot
27
The researchers reject the idea that practical advice in fairy tales
28
Some explanations of how traditional tales survived
29
Information about the way fairy tales change
30
All the experimental stories used by the researchers
31
Question 32 - 36
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-I, below.
The transmission experiment
The researchers first established that sufficient existed among the experimental stories for them to be compared. They then examined which features underwent the fewest , since these were expected to contribute most strongly to continued transmission.
The results did not support the prediction that in general would remain more stable than roles, objects or settings. Nor did the climactic part of a story prove less changeable than its other sections. Details that appeared to provide useful were also frequently lost or replaced. The feature most consistently retained during repeated retelling was .
A
climax
B
actions
C
instruction
D
connections
E
accounts
F
alterations
G
terror
H
roles
I
pattern
Question 37 - 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
37
What method did the researchers use to investigate the transmission of fairy tales?
A
They measured whether spoken versions preserved more information than written ones.
B
They asked successive participants to retell structurally similar stories.
C
They examined unrelated stories from several cultural traditions.
D
They compared changes in stories directly with changes in communication systems.
38
When discussing the experimental findings, the cultural historian suggests that
A
the researchers failed to consider historical changes in household authority.
B
frightening stories are sometimes dismissed because they appear too extreme.
C
the researchers place too much emphasis on particular descriptions of danger.
D
frightening material survives only when it also carries social meaning.
39
Why does the passage refer to versions involving an elderly traveller, siblings and a caretaker?
A
To show that the historian’s explanation is not applicable to every version
B
To suggest that conflict between age groups occurs in many societies
C
To demonstrate that all household tales express the same idea
D
To provide further support for the historian’s interpretation
40
What does the developmental psychologist believe about frightening fairy tales?
A
They provide a safe opportunity to practise responding to fear.
B
They are a form of entertainment that many listeners try to avoid.
C
They preserve social rules that remain constant across communities.
D
They may weaken people’s responses to danger outside the story.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Henry Moore (1898–1986)
One of the leading figures of the twentieth-century art world was the British sculptor Henry Moore.
Henry Moore was born in Saltmoor, a small town on the north-east coast of England near Whitby, the sixth child of Reuben Moore and his wife Edith Calvert. From 1908 to 1914 he attended the Saltmoor Council School, where a teacher named Dora Pennington nurtured the interest in art he had already begun to show. A career in sculpture was what Moore wanted; his father, though, wished him to qualify as a schoolteacher, and it was this training he dutifully took up instead. His studies were cut short in 1916, when he was called away to fight in France in the First World War.
Once the war was over, it was at the Scarborough School of Art that Moore spent the next two years. Drawing occupied most of his first year. Sculpture was what he wished to study, yet the school appointed no sculpture teacher until his second year had begun. He passed the sculpture examination as that year closed, winning a scholarship to the Metropolitan College of Art in the capital. The move to London followed in October 1920, where he began three years of advanced sculptural training.
His lessons at the Metropolitan College were not his only education: Moore spent much time in London's museums, above all the Hartwell Museum, whose holdings of ancient sculpture were especially broad. It was there that the strength and beauty of old Assyrian and Polynesian carvings first struck him, and the more these 'primitive' kinds of art appealed to him, the further he drifted from the sculptural conventions of Europe.
Graduation was followed by half a year of travel in Italy, in the early months of 1924. A cast in the Villa Sabatini Museum in Rome made a deep impression on him: it reproduced a Toltec* carving of the wind spirit, a reclining male whose knees were pulled up together and whose head sat at a right angle to the trunk. To Moore this stone piece held a force and inventiveness he had found in no other. Stone carvings of his own soon followed, on subjects ranging from reclining women to mother-and-child groupings and masks.
Recognition of Moore's unusual gifts was not long in coming, and by 1925 he had begun teaching sculpture at the Metropolitan College. A few years later, in 1932, he joined the Meridian Group, an association of young artists whose purpose was to persuade the English public of the value of the new international movement then emerging in modern art and architecture.
It was also about now that Moore left the human figure behind to experiment with abstract forms. An exhibition of his followed at the Bramley Galleries in London in 1930. Other sculptors greeted the work warmly; the newspaper critics, by contrast, were savage, and their notices made Moore a scandalous name. His colleagues at the Metropolitan College called on him to resign his position, and once his contract ran out the following year, he left to set up a sculpture department at the Fenwick School of Art.
Across the 1930s Moore showed no wish to win the approval of the British public. What captured his attention were the paintings of the French artist Émile Rousset, and under their influence he came to distort the human body in radical ways. There were moments when the figure vanished from his work entirely. In the sketchbooks he filled during these years lie designs for abstract sculptures that carry hardly any trace of the human form.
The Second World War brought further change: in 1939 Moore gave up teaching at the Fenwick School and settled in a cottage some thirty miles west of London. With supplies for sculpture hard to come by, he had little choice but to devote himself to drawing. Many small studies of ordinary city-dwellers came from his hand, worked up later in the studio into large colour drawings. A return to Saltmoor in 1941 let him sketch the fishermen who worked in the town.
In 1943 a commission came from Stevenford, a town not far from London, which asked Moore for a sculpture of a couple. A striking shift in his manner is marked by the piece, which moved away from the experiments of the 1930s toward warmer, more human subjects. Dozens of clay studies went into its making; these were cast in bronze and released in editions of six to eight copies apiece, and by this route Moore's sculpture reached patrons the world over. As his earnings grew, he was able to undertake more ambitious projects and to work at last on the scale his sculpture called for.
Some critics had started to feel the revolutionary edge had gone out of Moore's work; the first of his bronze standing figures, unveiled in 1949, proved them mistaken, for these were harsh, angular, pierced forms that gave off a clear air of threat. His subject matter widened, too, in the 1950s, in pieces such as Sentinel with Spear and Fallen Guardian. Male figures were rare in Moore's output, and these owed a debt to the ancient art he examined on a visit to Turkey in 1952.
Late in life Moore established the Henry Moore Foundation, a body meant both to further the appreciation of art and to keep his own work on view. No modern English sculptor before him had won international critical acclaim, and he is counted still among the most significant sculptors the 20th century produced.
—
*Toltec: belonging to an ancient civilization that flourished in central Mexico before the rise of the Aztecs.
A. During the 1990s, while making his way across the Philippines, Anton Vervloet found himself struck by the simple rooftop water heaters fitted to so many houses there: a panel would soak up the sun's energy, and that heat was then put to work warming water for use around the home. It would be another twenty years before Vervloet took that modest concept, first encountered in Southeast Asia, and turned it into a portable machine that harnesses solar energy to make water safe to drink.
B
B.
Essentially a desalination unit on the move, the Desolenator can draw on whatever water is available — the sea, rivers, boreholes or rainfall — and render it fit to drink. Its usefulness is greatest in places where the underground water has become contaminated, or where nothing but seawater can be had. It was after relocating to Oman, where he witnessed water being treated on an industrial scale, that Vervloet became convinced a cleaner approach was needed in richer and poorer nations alike. 'What struck me was the sheer size of the carbon footprint the Gulf states carry, simply because of the amount of desalination they rely on,' he recalls.
C
Each day the Desolenator can turn out around 20 litres of drinking water, which is plenty to keep a household supplied for cooking and drinking. Where it parts company with conventional desalination is in its power source: no mains electricity is called for, only sunshine. The unit is 110 cm by 80 cm, and a folding handle built into it means a single person can shift it from one spot to another with ease. Water is fed in along a pipe and then travels as a thin layer between a pane of double glazing and the top of a solar panel, which the sun warms. From there the heated water passes into a compact boiler — powered by a solar-charged battery — and is boiled off into steam; once that steam cools, what remains is distilled water. A basic mesh catches any particles, and it need only be shaken to clear them away. Two outlet pipes carry the liquid off: one takes the drinking water, while the other removes the residue — the salt extracted from seawater, fluoride and the like. The machine's condition is displayed on an LCD screen and relayed to the company, so that maintenance can be arranged whenever it is required.
D
According to a recent study, no fewer than two-thirds of people worldwide endure severe water shortages for at least one month in every year. By 2030, Vervloet notes, half of humanity will be coping with water stress — the situation that arises when demand outstrips supply across a given stretch of time. 'Getting a sustainable answer onto the market, one that can actually help these people, matters enormously,' he says. Plenty of countries, he points out, 'can't afford to build desalination plants in the first place — they're hugely expensive. They can't afford to run them either; the plants demand constant upkeep, and there's no money for the diesel to keep them going. It's a genuinely bad position to be in.'
E
A broad spread of customers is in Vervloet's sights, ranging from householders in poorer countries who lack a dependable water supply to people living off-grid in remote corners of Australia. Once field trials are complete, the first commercial Desolenators are due to be up and running in Indonesia early in the coming year. In the developing world the market splits in two: buyers who cannot pay the full cost at once and instead use microfinance, and households on middling incomes able to lease a unit of their own. 'In Indonesia people don't buy a fridge in one go — they spread the cost over six months. They'd mount the Desolenator on the roof, connect it to the municipal mains, and have dependable drinking water every single day,' Vervloet says. Among wealthier nations, the target is specialist corners of the market where tap water isn't on hand — think camping trips, boats, or military use.
F
What a buyer pays will hinge on where the purchase is made. Across the developing world, the figure will turn on whatever terms aid agencies manage to strike. In wealthier countries, Vervloet expects a single unit to sell for somewhere near $1,200 (£820). 'Ours is a business built around a social purpose. We know full well that the device we've dreamed up will chiefly serve the developing world and the humanitarian sector, and that is the path we intend to follow. All the same, we're under no illusions — staying a going concern means keeping an eye on the bottom line,' he says.
G
As for the company, its home is Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, even though its chief executive, Vervloet, remains based in Oman. To date it has secured £410,000 in backing. His ambition is that, inside two years, it will be shifting some 1,200 units every month, largely for humanitarian purposes. The likely markets include Namibia, northern Chile, Bolivia, Arizona and Nevada.
A. In one version of an old household tale, a traveller reaches an isolated house after dark and is offered shelter on condition that one room remains unopened. Elsewhere, the same narrative begins with several siblings sent to recover an object from a deserted building. The entrance may be secured by a key, a spoken formula, a loose wall panel or nothing at all. Escape is equally unstable: the intruder may deceive the owner, receive help from an animal, signal to people outside or remain concealed until morning. What allows listeners to treat these markedly different accounts as instances of one tale is not immediately apparent.
B
One common explanation is that tales of this sort survive because they preserve useful rules. A listener may learn not to disobey a host, accept unidentified food or cross a forbidden boundary. The difficulty is that the directions vary sharply. One version rewards silence, another requires shouting for help, while a third makes delay rather than disobedience the fatal mistake. Preliminary studies of repeated retellings also indicated that practical advice was not unusually durable. Explanations based on its usefulness had nevertheless been proposed from historical collections whose evidential value was uncertain, since editors often simplified language, removed repetitions or made separate versions resemble one another. To examine transmission without this interference, researchers turned to a controlled method derived from studies of memory and communication.
C
The procedure, usually called serial reproduction, follows information as it passes from one person to the next. A participant hears a narrative once and retells it from memory; the new version is then given to another participant, who repeats the process. Omissions, substitutions and additions can therefore be traced across a chain rather than observed only in the final account. Applied to structurally comparable fairy tales, the method can reveal both the relationships that persist among retellings and the kinds of material least affected by repeated transmission.
D
For the experiment, several narratives were written around the same broad pattern: a visitor enters a secluded dwelling, violates a restriction, discovers a concealed threat and attempts to escape. Their wording, characters and settings were deliberately different. Every experimental version was transmitted by speech alone through successive participants, while a separate archive of earlier written retellings served only as background material. Initial coding showed that the narratives shared enough of the same underlying structure to be compared. Only then did the researchers examine what changed from one telling to the next.
E
The first prediction concerned action sequence. If some elements are essential to a story’s identity, the order of entering, disobeying, discovering and escaping might be expected to survive more reliably than the identity of the visitor, the object that opens the room or the location of the house. A low rate of change was therefore treated as evidence that a feature contributed strongly to continued transmission. Familiar human roles were also expected to be remembered more consistently than unusual objects or settings.
F
The results gave little support to either expectation. Actions as a class did not show an overall advantage over roles, objects or locations: participants sometimes preserved a minor descriptive feature while merging two major events or placing them in reverse order. A few strongly causal actions remained stable, particularly when removing one would make the escape impossible, but many others were freely rearranged. Nor was the climactic discovery protected from change. Material at that point proved no less flexible than the visitor’s arrival or the account of what happened after the escape.
G
The researchers next examined directions that seemed applicable beyond the story. Advice to wait until daylight, refuse food or remain outside a marked space appeared to offer obvious practical value. Yet these details were omitted, replaced or contradicted at much the same rate as descriptions of furniture, clothing and weather. Some survived within individual chains, but there was no systematic advantage for useful advice over decoration. The analysis therefore shifted from what listeners ought to remember to the material that repeatedly reappeared even after much of the surrounding narrative had been lost.
H
The clearest pattern in the transmission chains involved sensory threat. Blocked exits, hidden remains, breathing behind a wall and footsteps moving towards a closed room were retained more consistently than other material, even when their exact wording disappeared. One explanation is that such scenes recover attention after earlier parts of a retelling have become vague. A small surviving cue can be enough for the next teller to rebuild a coherent danger: a faint scraping sound may become knocking, clawing or a tool being dragged against a door, while the sense that something is approaching remains. The specific image changes, but the threat continues to organise the scene around it.
I
A cultural historian has objected that attention alone cannot explain why a tale lasts beyond a laboratory chain. Frightening scenes, on this view, persist because they express conflicts that matter socially. In many household tales, a dependent young person is placed under the authority of an older host and punished for resisting control. That pattern is common in some collections, but it is not indispensable. Other versions centre on an elderly traveller acting independently, a group of siblings with no adult guardian, or a caretaker who becomes the threatened person. In these cases, the danger remains while the proposed relationship between dependence and household authority has disappeared.
J
A developmental psychologist offers a broader interpretation. Social rules concerning obedience, hospitality and family rank differ across communities, whereas the tendency to direct attention towards possible danger is more stable. Fairy tales allow listeners to anticipate threat while remaining aware that no immediate action is required. The movement from alarm to escape or release may provide practice in shifting attention and recovering control, rather than teaching people to become fearless. On this account, frightening material is not an obstacle to a tale’s survival but one reason it remains memorable.
Henry Moore was born in Saltmoor, a small town on the north-east coast of England near Whitby, the sixth child of Reuben Moore and his wife Edith Calvert. From 1908 to 1914 he attended the Saltmoor Council School, where a teacher named Dora Pennington nurtured the interest in art he had already begun to show. A career in sculpture was what Moore wanted; his father, though, wished him to qualify as a schoolteacher, and it was this training he dutifully took up instead. His studies were cut short in 1916, when he was called away to fight in France in the First World War.
Once the war was over, it was at the Scarborough School of Art that Moore spent the next two years. Drawing occupied most of his first year. Sculpture was what he wished to study, yet the school appointed no sculpture teacher until his second year had begun. He passed the sculpture examination as that year closed, winning a scholarship to the Metropolitan College of Art in the capital. The move to London followed in October 1920, where he began three years of advanced sculptural training.
His lessons at the Metropolitan College were not his only education: Moore spent much time in London's museums, above all the Hartwell Museum, whose holdings of ancient sculpture were especially broad. It was there that the strength and beauty of old Assyrian and Polynesian carvings first struck him, and the more these 'primitive' kinds of art appealed to him, the further he drifted from the sculptural conventions of Europe.
Graduation was followed by half a year of travel in Italy, in the early months of 1924. A cast in the Villa Sabatini Museum in Rome made a deep impression on him: it reproduced a Toltec* carving of the wind spirit, a reclining male whose knees were pulled up together and whose head sat at a right angle to the trunk. To Moore this stone piece held a force and inventiveness he had found in no other. Stone carvings of his own soon followed, on subjects ranging from reclining women to mother-and-child groupings and masks.
Recognition of Moore's unusual gifts was not long in coming, and by 1925 he had begun teaching sculpture at the Metropolitan College. A few years later, in 1932, he joined the Meridian Group, an association of young artists whose purpose was to persuade the English public of the value of the new international movement then emerging in modern art and architecture.
It was also about now that Moore left the human figure behind to experiment with abstract forms. An exhibition of his followed at the Bramley Galleries in London in 1930. Other sculptors greeted the work warmly; the newspaper critics, by contrast, were savage, and their notices made Moore a scandalous name. His colleagues at the Metropolitan College called on him to resign his position, and once his contract ran out the following year, he left to set up a sculpture department at the Fenwick School of Art.
Across the 1930s Moore showed no wish to win the approval of the British public. What captured his attention were the paintings of the French artist Émile Rousset, and under their influence he came to distort the human body in radical ways. There were moments when the figure vanished from his work entirely. In the sketchbooks he filled during these years lie designs for abstract sculptures that carry hardly any trace of the human form.
The Second World War brought further change: in 1939 Moore gave up teaching at the Fenwick School and settled in a cottage some thirty miles west of London. With supplies for sculpture hard to come by, he had little choice but to devote himself to drawing. Many small studies of ordinary city-dwellers came from his hand, worked up later in the studio into large colour drawings. A return to Saltmoor in 1941 let him sketch the fishermen who worked in the town.
In 1943 a commission came from Stevenford, a town not far from London, which asked Moore for a sculpture of a couple. A striking shift in his manner is marked by the piece, which moved away from the experiments of the 1930s toward warmer, more human subjects. Dozens of clay studies went into its making; these were cast in bronze and released in editions of six to eight copies apiece, and by this route Moore's sculpture reached patrons the world over. As his earnings grew, he was able to undertake more ambitious projects and to work at last on the scale his sculpture called for.
Some critics had started to feel the revolutionary edge had gone out of Moore's work; the first of his bronze standing figures, unveiled in 1949, proved them mistaken, for these were harsh, angular, pierced forms that gave off a clear air of threat. His subject matter widened, too, in the 1950s, in pieces such as Sentinel with Spear and Fallen Guardian. Male figures were rare in Moore's output, and these owed a debt to the ancient art he examined on a visit to Turkey in 1952.
Late in life Moore established the Henry Moore Foundation, a body meant both to further the appreciation of art and to keep his own work on view. No modern English sculptor before him had won international critical acclaim, and he is counted still among the most significant sculptors the 20th century produced.
—
*Toltec: belonging to an ancient civilization that flourished in central Mexico before the rise of the Aztecs.
Essentially a desalination unit on the move, the Desolenator can draw on whatever water is available — the sea, rivers, boreholes or rainfall — and render it fit to drink. Its usefulness is greatest in places where the underground water has become contaminated, or where nothing but seawater can be had. It was after relocating to Oman, where he witnessed water being treated on an industrial scale, that Vervloet became convinced a cleaner approach was needed in richer and poorer nations alike. 'What struck me was the sheer size of the carbon footprint the Gulf states carry, simply because of the amount of desalination they rely on,' he recalls.
C. Each day the Desolenator can turn out around 20 litres of drinking water, which is plenty to keep a household supplied for cooking and drinking. Where it parts company with conventional desalination is in its power source: no mains electricity is called for, only sunshine. The unit is 110 cm by 80 cm, and a folding handle built into it means a single person can shift it from one spot to another with ease. Water is fed in along a pipe and then travels as a thin layer between a pane of double glazing and the top of a solar panel, which the sun warms. From there the heated water passes into a compact boiler — powered by a solar-charged battery — and is boiled off into steam; once that steam cools, what remains is distilled water. A basic mesh catches any particles, and it need only be shaken to clear them away. Two outlet pipes carry the liquid off: one takes the drinking water, while the other removes the residue — the salt extracted from seawater, fluoride and the like. The machine's condition is displayed on an LCD screen and relayed to the company, so that maintenance can be arranged whenever it is required.
D. According to a recent study, no fewer than two-thirds of people worldwide endure severe water shortages for at least one month in every year. By 2030, Vervloet notes, half of humanity will be coping with water stress — the situation that arises when demand outstrips supply across a given stretch of time. 'Getting a sustainable answer onto the market, one that can actually help these people, matters enormously,' he says. Plenty of countries, he points out, 'can't afford to build desalination plants in the first place — they're hugely expensive. They can't afford to run them either; the plants demand constant upkeep, and there's no money for the diesel to keep them going. It's a genuinely bad position to be in.'
E. A broad spread of customers is in Vervloet's sights, ranging from householders in poorer countries who lack a dependable water supply to people living off-grid in remote corners of Australia. Once field trials are complete, the first commercial Desolenators are due to be up and running in Indonesia early in the coming year. In the developing world the market splits in two: buyers who cannot pay the full cost at once and instead use microfinance, and households on middling incomes able to lease a unit of their own. 'In Indonesia people don't buy a fridge in one go — they spread the cost over six months. They'd mount the Desolenator on the roof, connect it to the municipal mains, and have dependable drinking water every single day,' Vervloet says. Among wealthier nations, the target is specialist corners of the market where tap water isn't on hand — think camping trips, boats, or military use.
F. What a buyer pays will hinge on where the purchase is made. Across the developing world, the figure will turn on whatever terms aid agencies manage to strike. In wealthier countries, Vervloet expects a single unit to sell for somewhere near $1,200 (£820). 'Ours is a business built around a social purpose. We know full well that the device we've dreamed up will chiefly serve the developing world and the humanitarian sector, and that is the path we intend to follow. All the same, we're under no illusions — staying a going concern means keeping an eye on the bottom line,' he says.
G. As for the company, its home is Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, even though its chief executive, Vervloet, remains based in Oman. To date it has secured £410,000 in backing. His ambition is that, inside two years, it will be shifting some 1,200 units every month, largely for humanitarian purposes. The likely markets include Namibia, northern Chile, Bolivia, Arizona and Nevada.
B. One common explanation is that tales of this sort survive because they preserve useful rules. A listener may learn not to disobey a host, accept unidentified food or cross a forbidden boundary. The difficulty is that the directions vary sharply. One version rewards silence, another requires shouting for help, while a third makes delay rather than disobedience the fatal mistake. Preliminary studies of repeated retellings also indicated that practical advice was not unusually durable. Explanations based on its usefulness had nevertheless been proposed from historical collections whose evidential value was uncertain, since editors often simplified language, removed repetitions or made separate versions resemble one another. To examine transmission without this interference, researchers turned to a controlled method derived from studies of memory and communication.
C. The procedure, usually called serial reproduction, follows information as it passes from one person to the next. A participant hears a narrative once and retells it from memory; the new version is then given to another participant, who repeats the process. Omissions, substitutions and additions can therefore be traced across a chain rather than observed only in the final account. Applied to structurally comparable fairy tales, the method can reveal both the relationships that persist among retellings and the kinds of material least affected by repeated transmission.
D. For the experiment, several narratives were written around the same broad pattern: a visitor enters a secluded dwelling, violates a restriction, discovers a concealed threat and attempts to escape. Their wording, characters and settings were deliberately different. Every experimental version was transmitted by speech alone through successive participants, while a separate archive of earlier written retellings served only as background material. Initial coding showed that the narratives shared enough of the same underlying structure to be compared. Only then did the researchers examine what changed from one telling to the next.
E. The first prediction concerned action sequence. If some elements are essential to a story’s identity, the order of entering, disobeying, discovering and escaping might be expected to survive more reliably than the identity of the visitor, the object that opens the room or the location of the house. A low rate of change was therefore treated as evidence that a feature contributed strongly to continued transmission. Familiar human roles were also expected to be remembered more consistently than unusual objects or settings.
F. The results gave little support to either expectation. Actions as a class did not show an overall advantage over roles, objects or locations: participants sometimes preserved a minor descriptive feature while merging two major events or placing them in reverse order. A few strongly causal actions remained stable, particularly when removing one would make the escape impossible, but many others were freely rearranged. Nor was the climactic discovery protected from change. Material at that point proved no less flexible than the visitor’s arrival or the account of what happened after the escape.
G. The researchers next examined directions that seemed applicable beyond the story. Advice to wait until daylight, refuse food or remain outside a marked space appeared to offer obvious practical value. Yet these details were omitted, replaced or contradicted at much the same rate as descriptions of furniture, clothing and weather. Some survived within individual chains, but there was no systematic advantage for useful advice over decoration. The analysis therefore shifted from what listeners ought to remember to the material that repeatedly reappeared even after much of the surrounding narrative had been lost.
H. The clearest pattern in the transmission chains involved sensory threat. Blocked exits, hidden remains, breathing behind a wall and footsteps moving towards a closed room were retained more consistently than other material, even when their exact wording disappeared. One explanation is that such scenes recover attention after earlier parts of a retelling have become vague. A small surviving cue can be enough for the next teller to rebuild a coherent danger: a faint scraping sound may become knocking, clawing or a tool being dragged against a door, while the sense that something is approaching remains. The specific image changes, but the threat continues to organise the scene around it.
I. A cultural historian has objected that attention alone cannot explain why a tale lasts beyond a laboratory chain. Frightening scenes, on this view, persist because they express conflicts that matter socially. In many household tales, a dependent young person is placed under the authority of an older host and punished for resisting control. That pattern is common in some collections, but it is not indispensable. Other versions centre on an elderly traveller acting independently, a group of siblings with no adult guardian, or a caretaker who becomes the threatened person. In these cases, the danger remains while the proposed relationship between dependence and household authority has disappeared.
J. A developmental psychologist offers a broader interpretation. Social rules concerning obedience, hospitality and family rank differ across communities, whereas the tendency to direct attention towards possible danger is more stable. Fairy tales allow listeners to anticipate threat while remaining aware that no immediate action is required. The movement from alarm to escape or release may provide practice in shifting attention and recovering control, rather than teaching people to become fearless. On this account, frightening material is not an obstacle to a tale’s survival but one reason it remains memorable.
