IELTS CAM Inspired 16 - Reading Test 2 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation

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IELTS CAM Inspired 16 - Reading Test 2 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation

Passage

📖 Bài đọc passage 1

The White Horse of Uffington
For more than three thousand years, people have been carving enormous figures, or ‘geoglyphs’, into the turf of England’s hillsides. Around forty-eight such hill figures are dotted across the country, though nearly all of them lie on the chalk downland of England’s southern counties. Among the shapes that have been cut are horses, giants, crosses and the badges of army regiments. Most of these carvings were made only within the past three centuries or so, yet a small number are a great deal older.

Probably the best known of them, and certainly the most puzzling, is the Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire. Recent re-dating has revealed the figure to be older still than the pre-Roman Iron Age* date once assigned to it. The age of another strange carving — the Striding Man of Ashcombe, in Dorset — is far harder to settle. A good many historians take the figure to be prehistoric, while others argue that it was cut by an artistic monk from a priory nearby at some point between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries.

Making one of these figures was a straightforward matter of stripping away the covering turf so that the bright white chalk beneath was exposed. Left alone, though, the grass would quickly close over the design again, so a sizeable group of people had to clean, or ‘scour’, it at regular intervals. When the customs attached to a figure died out, people stopped troubling to clear the grass and lay bare the chalk outline, and it is largely for this reason that most hill figures have been lost. In addition, because those doing the cutting did not always follow precisely the same line, an outline could gradually shift over the centuries until its shape no longer matched the original. That any ancient hill figure has come down to us at all says much about the endurance of local custom and belief — which, in at least one instance, must reach back thousands of years.

*Iron Age: a period in Britain (800 BCE – 43 CE) that is characterised by the use of iron tools

A one-of-a-kind, highly stylised image, the Uffington White Horse has a long slender body, thin unconnected legs, a flowing tail and a head that ends in a bird-like beak. The graceful animal seems almost to dissolve into the hillside around it. It lies 2.5 km from the village of Uffington, on a sharp slope just beneath Hartsdown Camp — a Late Bronze Age* hillfort of roughly the seventh century BCE — and below the Hartway, a long-distance Neolithic** track.

Bronze Age burial mounds ring the site as well. Close by is the Bronze Age cemetery of Harrowfield Barrows, where more than twenty-five mounds survive in good condition. The carving was set out in a way that makes it very hard to pick out from nearby, and, as with many geoglyphs, it is seen to best effect from overhead. Even so, a reasonable view can be had from several points within the Vale of the White Horse — the valley that takes its name from the mysterious figure — and, when the weather is clear, the outline is visible from as far off as 25 km.

Written traces of a horse at Uffington go back to the 1070s CE, when ‘White Horse Hill’ is named in charters from the nearby Priory of Ashbury; a reference to the horse itself follows shortly afterwards, in 1188 CE. The carving, however, is thought to be far older than this. Because the creature so closely resembles the stylised horses stamped on coins of the first century BCE, it was long supposed that it too belonged to that era.

That view changed after 1994, when the Wessex Archaeological Trust applied Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) testing to sediment drawn from two of the lower layers of the horse’s body, together with a further cut near its base. The technique returned a construction date of somewhere between 1380 and 550 BCE — placing the horse’s origins in the Late Bronze Age or the Early Iron Age.

Should the later end of that span be the true one, the horse’s making would fall within the years the nearby hillfort was in use; on that reading, it may have served as a tribal badge that staked out the land belonging to the fort’s people. A ritual origin is another possibility, the figure having perhaps been cut during some ceremony of the Bronze or Iron Age. Nantia, a goddess of horses honoured both as their guardian and for her ties to the harvest, is what a number of researchers believe the carving depicts. Her cult, though, only crossed to Britain from Gaul (France) at about the start of the first century CE, fully six hundred years or so after the likely date of the carving. What is not in doubt is the powerful ritual and economic role the horse played across the Bronze and Iron Ages, something its recurrence on jewellery and other metalwork confirms. Another candidate is a goddess of home-grown legend: Melwen, whom later Welsh myth pictures as a shining woman robed in gold upon a pale horse.

The ease with which geoglyphs — and the rituals and meanings bound up with them — can vanish suggests that they were only ever meant as passing gestures. That, however, does nothing to diminish their significance. These vast carvings offer an absorbing window onto the minds of the people who made them, and onto the way those people saw the country around them.

*Bronze Age: a period in Britain (c. 2,500 BCE – 800 BCE) characterised by the development of bronze tools **Neolithic: a period in Britain (c. 4,000 BCE – c. 2,500 BCE) significant for the spread of agriculture and the use of stone tools

❓ Câu hỏi passage 1

England's geoglyphs are spread fairly evenly across every part of the country.

Figures of giants occur more often than those of any other kind.

On recent testing, the Horse turned out to be a different age from the one long assumed for it.

Experts do not all share the same view about when the Striding Man of Ashcombe was made.

To make a geoglyph, workers laid white chalk down on top of the turf.

A considerable number of England's hill figures have vanished from sight.

The ancient burial ground near the Horse is visited by large numbers of people today.

The horse goddess Nantia was already being worshipped in Britain before the Horse was cut.

The Uffington White Horse

Where the Horse stands:
• 2.5 km away from the village of Uffington
• just below an age-old routeway called the 9.
            
﻿

• near an ancient burial ground made up of many mounds
Working out the Horse's age:
• the name 'White Horse Hill' is first recorded in 10.
            
﻿
 dating from the 1070s
• horses pictured on coins of 100 BCE – 1 BCE look much the same
• OSL dating of the 11.
            
﻿
 taken from the figure's lower layers places the Horse in the Late Bronze Age / Early Iron Age
Why the Horse may have been made:
• a marker showing who owned the land
• part of a ritual performed long ago
• an image of the goddess Nantia — connected with the safeguarding of horses and with 12.
            
﻿

• an image of a goddess from Welsh legend named 13.
            
﻿
﻿

🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 1

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Passage

📖 Bài đọc passage 2

I contain multitudes
Cordelia Vance reviews Milo Trevethan's book about microbes
Long before the first animals appeared, microbes — most of them bacteria — had already taken possession of the planet, and they will still be here long after we have gone. Far too small for the eye to catch, they are found absolutely everywhere: throughout the soil, air, rocks and water, and within every living thing, from coral and seaweed through to dogs and people. And, as Trevethan explains in a book that is both utterly compelling and deeply important, it is at our own peril that we interfere with them.

The specific community of microbes a species carries is called its 'microbiome', and no two are alike: they differ from species to species, from one individual to the next, and even between one part of a body and another. The astonishing part is the arithmetic. A typical person is built from perhaps 28 trillion human cells, yet harbours still more microbial ones — nearer 37 trillion — so the most we can claim, Trevethan tells us, is to be about half human. A few scientists go further, urging that a species and its microbes be treated as one combined organism, which they label a 'holobiont'.

Look inside any person and you find microbes confined to the mouth, the stomach or the armpit, and mostly they keep the peace there. A 'bad' microbe, then, is merely one that has strayed from its usual home: species resting contentedly in the gut can turn lethal the instant they reach the bloodstream. Nor do these populations ever hold still — set one hand against the other and barely a sixth of their microbes are shared. And we are, of course, permanently awash in them: every gram of food sends a million down with each mouthful, while we trade microbes endlessly with other people, our pets and the world at large.

The subject is a captivating one, and in Trevethan — a young British science journalist — it has found an exceptionally skilful guide. His writing is light and full of flair, and difficult science, in his hands, comes across as not merely intelligible but thoroughly gripping. He is also a writer with a mission. Taking us gently by the hand, he ushers us into the realm of microbes — a strange, otherworldly place — determined to make us cherish them as much as he plainly does; and by the closing pages, we do.

For almost the whole span of human history, nobody had the faintest notion that microbes were there. The first person ever to lay eyes on these tiny yet formidable organisms was a Dutch spectacle-maker, Willem Droste, back in the 1660s. He ground the lenses for microscopes of his own devising, powerful enough to enlarge a thing as much as 240-fold, and when he trained one on a droplet scooped from a nearby pond, he found it alive with minute creatures that he christened 'wrigglers'. Almost two centuries had to pass before the experiments of a German physician, Konrad Steinhauer, pointed to certain microbes as the cause of disease. It was Steinhauer's 'contagion theory' that fixed on bacteria the unflattering reputation they have never quite shaken off.

More than anything, Trevethan's book pleads for a little tolerance towards microbes, reminding us that although under a hundred bacterial species actually cause disease, many thousands of others are indispensable to keeping us well. Our feelings about bacteria, the book admits, are far from straightforward. We fix on the harm they are capable of, and yet in the same breath we are sold drinks and yoghurts that are supposed to foster the 'friendly' varieties. Bacteria, Trevethan insists, are in truth neither allies nor adversaries, neither heroes nor villains. What we should grasp instead is that we share with them a symbiotic bond — one that may serve both parties well or bring both to ruin.

So what exactly is the work of these countless organisms? Very nearly all of it, as it happens. One after another, new studies are teasing out how bacteria break our food down, hold the immune system in order, clear away poisons, turn out vitamins, colour the way we behave and even keep obesity in check. 'They are a part of what makes us ourselves,' Trevethan writes. And yet a difficulty is growing. Our fixation on hygiene, our heavy reliance on antibiotics and the poor, low-fibre manner in which so many of us eat are together throwing the bacterial balance into disorder, and may well lie behind the steep rise in allergies and immune disorders, inflammatory bowel disease among them.

If anything, the newest findings tend to stand the received wisdom squarely on its head. One line of study suggests, for example, that scouring the house with detergents and products designed to kill bacteria destroys the very microbes that would otherwise hold the nastier germs in check. Another finds that a dog in the household gives youngsters an early brush with a broad variety of bacteria, something that may go on to guard them against allergies.

Readers of Trevethan's book should steel themselves for a distinctly unglamorous world. Take two of its less appetising cases: a fungus that is wiping out whole frog populations, yet can be checked by one scarce microbial bacterium, and a squid whose glowing bacteria fend off attackers. Look past the distaste such stories arouse, however, and the reason for his excitement is clear — wonders fill this realm. To keep mosquitoes from carrying dengue fever, which strikes roughly 390 million people annually, the insects are already being armed with a bacterium that blocks it. One day, as we learn to direct microbes, useful strains might be woven into the walls of our buildings to fend off infection — picture a newborn ward lined with a tailored blend of microbes, giving each baby the best possible start.

❓ Câu hỏi passage 2

In the first paragraph, what does the writer emphasise about microbes?

They react quickly to shifts in their surroundings.

They will outlive the human race.

They occur in greater numbers in animals than in plants.

The danger they represent has been overstated.

The writer regards it as remarkable that

a typical body holds more microbial cells than human ones.

the microbes of one species differ enormously from those of another.

some parts of the body contain comparatively few microbes.

scientists still understand little about how microbial cells work.

In the fifth paragraph, the writer is

weighing up competing theories about microbes.

pointing to disagreement among researchers.

recounting how certain findings first came about.

setting out the way in which microbes cause disease.

We should be more tolerant of microbes

Trevethan's book urges us to be more tolerant of microbes. The majority are helpful, and only a comparatively small number result in ﻿. And while it is misleading to regard microbes as 'friendly', we should equally give up seeing them as our enemy. Our connection with microbes, in fact, is best understood as a form of ﻿.
Recent research points to numerous ways in which microbes benefit us. They assist digestion, get rid of poisons, make vitamins and might even help limit obesity. There is, however, a mounting problem. Our inadequate ﻿, our over-reliance on antibiotics, and our excessive concern with ﻿ are unsettling the bacterial balance and may be adding to the steep rise in allergies and immune-system disorders.

nutrition

exposure

sickness

conflict

balance

partnership

cleanliness

regulation

In the writer's account, bacteria ought to be thought of as basically good for us.

Microbes can have an effect on human behaviour.

Antibacterial cleaning products used in the home may fail to achieve their aim.

The book uses a larger number of case studies than it needed to.

Attempts to bring dengue fever under control have proved unexpectedly effective.

Beneficial microbes have already been placed inside the walls of certain hospitals.

🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 2

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Passage

📖 Bài đọc passage 3

How to make wise decisions
In almost every society, few human qualities have been prized as highly as wisdom. We tend to imagine the genuinely wise as a rare breed – a thin scattering of grey-bearded sages – yet the findings researchers have gathered point elsewhere. Wisdom, this body of work suggests, is no exceptional gift reserved for the select few; place ordinary people in the right circumstances and most turn out to be quite capable of choosing wisely.

The forces that shape wisdom – what we live through, the situations we land in, the surrounding culture – carry far more weight than anyone previously credited, says Associate Professor Elias Vantorre of the University of Craymoor in Alberta, Canada. ‘Recent work across cognitive, developmental, social and personality psychology shows that how soundly a person reasons can swing enormously from one setting to the next,’ he says. ‘Grasp the pull of these conditions, and we gain a rare view of how wisdom works in daily life – and of how it might be strengthened and passed on.’

The truth, then, is less that a lucky few come equipped with wisdom while everyone else does without, and more that the circumstances around us decide how well any of us can reason. ‘There is no describing the sort of thinking we label wise without reckoning with the setting in which it occurs,’ Vantorre explains. ‘Wisdom is not merely some quality lodged inside a person; it takes shape according to whatever situation that person happens to occupy, and certain situations coax it out far more readily than others.’

Boiling wisdom down to a tidy definition is far from straightforward, yet Vantorre and his colleagues have isolated four features that together make up wise reasoning. The first is a readiness to admit how little we may truly grasp – an honest modesty about the limits of what we understand. The second is a willingness to weigh standpoints reaching well past the matter in hand. Alertness to the way bonds between people can shift over time makes a third; the fourth is an ability to reconcile competing beliefs and attitudes rather than clinging to just one.

Vantorre’s team has also hit upon one particularly reliable device for bringing wisdom into our routine choices: to regard a situation as an outsider would, much as we might were a friend seeking our counsel. Take the first-person angle, the research indicates, and our focus tightens onto whatever sits directly before us; move to the position of a removed observer, and our reasoning widens, pulled instead toward shared, ethical matters such as justice and even-handedness. It is this roomier vantage point that appears to activate the mental machinery behind wise decision-making.

So how should we proceed when a situation demands that we ourselves have something at stake – a quarrel with a partner, say, or thrashing out terms in a workplace negotiation? Vantorre’s answer is that changing the situation isn’t the point; what matters is that we can still weigh up such episodes through more than one lens, even those we are caught up in.

Take a study run at the height of a recent economic slump. Those taking part were asked to picture their working life in one of two ways – either ‘through the eyes of someone watching from a distance’ or ‘as though it were unfolding right in front of you’. Set against a control group, the volunteers assigned the distant-observer framing produced noticeably more of the reasoning tied to wisdom, including a certain modesty about the limits of one’s knowledge and an openness to change.

A separate study worked with couples who had been together for many years. Each was asked to call to mind an unsettled, ongoing dispute, picturing it either as a stranger might see it or strictly from their own side. The partners then spent ten minutes talking the episode over, and afterwards set their reflections down on paper. Those who had imagined the quarrel through a stranger’s eyes proved far readier to reason wisely – taking in the other’s point of view and hunting for middle ground – than the couples who had stayed locked inside their own.

‘Stepping outside the self pushes attention toward other people and lets a broader, more conceptual picture emerge, which in turn makes room for a modest sense of one’s own limits and for an acceptance of change,’ Vantorre observes.

We are inclined to tie wisdom to raw intelligence or to particular traits of character, yet the data reveal only a slight positive link between reasoning wisely and both accumulated knowledge and the personality dimensions of openness and agreeableness. ‘What strikes me is how widely one person’s wisdom can swing from moment to moment, and how much more these situational effects tell us – about someone’s feelings, or whether they will forgive or hit back – than any broad label of character ever could,’ Vantorre says. ‘Knowing how wisely someone acts in a particular spot tells you more than knowing whether they are wise across the board.’

❓ Câu hỏi passage 3

Which point does the writer make in the opening paragraph?

Wisdom is valued more highly in some societies than in others.

Researchers largely disagree about what wisdom actually is.

A widely held assumption about wise people may be mistaken.

Wisdom has attracted less study than other human qualities.

What does Elias Vantorre suggest about the capacity to make wise decisions?

The strength of certain influences on it had been underestimated.

It is more widespread in some cultures than in others.

It rests mainly on what a person experienced early in life.

It is most accurately measured under laboratory conditions.

In the third paragraph, what does Vantorre claim about the level of wisdom a person shows?

It becomes largely fixed once they reach adulthood.

It reflects a quality they either have or do not have.

It is governed above all by the culture they grew up in.

It can differ according to the circumstances they are in.

What does the fifth paragraph describe?

a method that can help people to think more wisely

a warning about the limits of wise reasoning

an unexpected obstacle to reaching wise decisions

a disagreement over how wisdom ought to be defined

The features of wise reasoning

Elias Vantorre and his fellow researchers have identified four qualities that let us arrive at wise decisions. We need a degree of ﻿ concerning just how much we genuinely know, and we must give consideration to ﻿ that are unlike our own. It also pays to approach any problem from a broad ﻿. A further quality is an awareness that the ties connecting individuals are liable to change.
Vantorre further holds that we fare better if we treat our circumstances with a measure of ﻿. Once the first-person outlook is set aside, our attention shifts toward ﻿ and similar ethical values, and it is this that guides us toward wiser choices.

confidence

detachment

experiences

honesty

humility

impartiality

opinions

perspective

range

reasons

The people who took part in the economic-downturn study did not choose for themselves which viewpoint to take.

In the couples study, those who pictured the disagreement from their personal viewpoint reasoned more wisely than those who took a stranger's view of it.

The couples study showed that partners in longer relationships reasoned more wisely.

In both studies, taking the position of an onlooker led to wiser reasoning.

Vantorre's research indicates that intelligence is strongly linked to the ability to reason wisely.

🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 3

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