IELTS CAM Inspired 18 - Reading Test 4 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Online CAM Inspired 18 - Reading Test 4 được lấy từ cuốn sách IELTS CAM Inspired 18 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking, kèm answer key và list từ vựng IELTS cần học trong bài đọc.
IELTS Mock Test 18 - Reading Test 4 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 5
Reading Passage 1 has 5 paragraphs, A-E.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-E.
1
a set of practical obstacles that must be settled before installing a green roof
2
mention of somewhere that has backed rooftop greenery over a long period
3
the view that schemes already in place should guide future projects
4
examples of green roofs being combined with a city's other eco-friendly installations
5
the point that a strong economic argument has to be made in order to secure support
Question 6 - 9
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Advantages of green roofs
Green roofs bring a variety of advantages. They cut the chance of flooding, lower the amount a building pays for and produce surroundings in which wildlife can live. In many cases the rooftop is also used to produce .
Green roofs are valuable socially as well. Members of the medical profession, for instance, now suggest as a way of helping people manage difficulties with their mental health. Research further shows that being able to reach green areas can ward off bodily conditions such as .
Question 10 - 11
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO benefits of building green roofs on newer buildings does the writer mention in Paragraph C?
A
a longer harvest period for edible crops
B
a greater capacity to store water at height
C
more efficient consumption of water
D
a larger surface area for planting
E
the chance to cultivate a broader variety of plants
Question 12 - 13
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO aims of the new variations on the green-roof idea are mentioned in Paragraph E?
A
to lower the temperature of the surrounding area
B
to produce electricity from a renewable supply
C
to hold water back so that nearby buildings can use it
D
to keep plants alive through very dry spells
E
to shelter as broad a range of animal species as possible
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 16
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
14
The first paragraph is mainly concerned with
A
the reason reformers rejected the belief that ability is inborn.
B
where the belief in unchangeable intelligence came from.
C
the period in which attitudes to intelligence started shifting.
D
the way researchers reacted to fresh theories of the mind.
15
According to the second paragraph, what is the chief aim of teachers who adopt this method?
A
to help students believe they have it in them to improve
B
to help students pinpoint the areas in which they are most talented
C
to prompt students to lay out their own personal goals
D
to get students to support one another in reaching their targets
16
In the third paragraph, what does the writer suggest about children who have a fixed mindset?
A
They need continual praise before they will make an effort.
B
They shy away from anything that might expose the limits of their ability.
C
They tend to be less concerned with competing against others.
D
They usually think poorly of themselves.
Question 17 - 22
Match each statement with the correct person or people, A-E.
List of Findings
A
Roland Achterberg
B
Nils Bergstrom
C
Adrien Delacroix and Louis Fenwick
D
Petra Sundqvist
E
Henri Vasseur
17
The studies were set up too loosely to be reliable.
18
People have taken the growth mindset to mean something other than what was intended.
19
A person's intellectual capacity stays the same throughout their life.
20
For the growth mindset to help, learners ought not to notice that it is being encouraged.
21
The purpose of the growth mindset goes beyond simply lifting students' spirits.
22
Efforts to arrive at the same outcome a second time reveal no gain in the marks pupils achieve.
Question 23 - 26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
23
The writer feels that Sundqvist has largely brushed aside the criticisms directed at her work.
24
A student's accomplishments influence their self-image more than their self-image influences their accomplishments.
25
Teaching a specific skill and then acknowledging the effort involved builds confidence more effectively than praising students' uniqueness.
26
The writer considers motivational talks to be more damaging than motivational posters.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 30
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
27
Few people paid much attention to Wegener's continental-drift theory during his own lifetime.
28
Wegener made use of evidence from a broad spread of scientific disciplines when building his case.
29
Wegener regretted that his work on continental drift overshadowed his other research.
30
Greene gives more space in the book to how Wegener's continental-drift ideas were received than to the rest of his science.
Question 31 - 36
Complete the summary using the list of phrases, A-J, below.
Write the correct letter, A-J, in boxes on your answer sheet.
Wegener's life and work
Seen from , one of the striking things about Wegener is that he devised a theory of continental drift despite having no training as a geologist. His lay entirely within atmospheric physics. Even so, by the time he unveiled that theory in 1912, he had already earned a measure of . Back in 1906 he had claimed by staying airborne in a balloon for 48 hours, an episode followed by his much-publicised but along the shores of Spitsbergen. His textbook on the upper atmosphere had, moreover, brought him to the notice of of scientists in Germany.
A
perilous expedition
B
moderate renown
C
a biographer's standpoint
D
professional concerns
E
record-setting feat
F
broad field
G
small circle
H
investigative techniques
I
narrow inquiry
J
scholarly dispute
Question 37 - 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
37
In the fifth paragraph, what is Adamczyk trying to do?
A
describe what first drew him to write about Wegener
B
explain why Wegener switched between so many fields
C
recommend that the book be read in its entirety
D
point out which parts of Wegener's life he finds most compelling
38
What is said about Wegener in the sixth paragraph?
A
He made careful written records of all his observations.
B
He had little interest in promoting himself or his ideas.
C
He preferred to debate his theories with fellow scientists.
D
He held membership of numerous scientific societies.
39
What does Adamczyk say about some other famous scientists?
A
They can be more easily understood by their biographers than Wegener can.
B
Their theories proved more durable than Wegener's did.
C
Their published work reached a wider readership than Wegener's.
D
They felt greater certainty about their ideas than Wegener did.
40
What is Adamczyk's main point in the final paragraph?
A
People ought to plan carefully in order to reach their goals.
B
Much of what happens in people's lives is beyond their control.
C
Having good intentions is not by itself enough to succeed.
D
People place great value on the freedom to make their own choices.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Green roofs
A
A. Across the world's cities it has become an ordinary sight: rooftops planted with turf, vegetable plots and dense greenery. Investment in these green roofs keeps climbing, from private firms and municipal authorities alike, drawn by the sheer range of returns — smaller sums paid out for cooling, a lower threat of flooding, fresh habitat for urban wildlife, cleaner air, and even the chance to raise crops several storeys up. Faced with competition for resources and shrinking open land, cities turn to such bold designs to adapt. What settles their success is not the technology alone but the readiness of councils, companies and other bodies to take part, backed by study of which solutions suit a city's varied roofs. Increasingly, planners also design green roofs to work alongside other environmentally minded features — 'living walls' clad in vegetation over soil or water, and street-level drainage such as lines of trees — so that rainfall is managed better and the built landscape grows more sustainable. Ireland came late to all this, and its local authorities are largely the ones driving it along; Dublin, where a far-sighted measure called the City Canopy Scheme has more than doubled the green-roof area, holds much of the national market.
B
Beyond these practical gains, a steadily widening body of study is drawing attention to what green roofs do for people directly. Physicians now quite frequently write out prescriptions for time spent gardening in the fresh air, reaching for it as a way of supporting patients who are wrestling with anxiety or low spirits. Investigators have found, too, that contact with even the plainest scrap of greenery can lift the day-to-day quality of life of those living with dementia, and can leave a person less likely to go on to develop diabetes. Discoveries of this kind are gradually strengthening the argument that a rooftop need be neither large nor elaborate to be worth planting.
C
In Australia and New Zealand, by contrast, planted roofs slipped into the mainstream long ago, and large, publicly accessible and crop-bearing examples now sit atop buildings across both countries. Once again it has fallen to mayors and civic authorities to push things along: Sydney only lately obliged every new building to carry a green roof, whereas Wellington's encouragement of rooftop farming reaches back to schemes drawn up in the 1990s. A further edge is their young building stock, which makes fitting a roof simpler. Holding enough water up at roof level, and spreading it evenly across the surface, is what keeps the planting alive — the demands running highest on the 'edible' roofs given over to fruit and vegetables. This is far easier on recent structures, generally built to bear heavier loads, than on an older one adapted afterwards; and since a sturdier roof takes a deeper layer of soil, it also allows a wider assortment of plants. What has worked in these cities, many argue, ought to serve as a template elsewhere.
D
If green roofs are ever to become routine on new developments, backing from the public sector and from private investors alike will be indispensable. Those charged with looking after a building may find they have to take on unfamiliar skills, landscaping among them, and here and there a team of volunteers might be called on to lend a hand. Yet when the point comes to win over investors and developers, it is the economic reasoning that still counts for most, and a convincing financial case has to be set out before any of them will commit. A phrase has even been minted for the purpose — 'natural capital' — to pin down the monetary worth of the natural world: the savings, say, that follow from picking natural defences against flood damage, from adjusting to a shifting climate, or from helping people lead healthier and more contented lives.
E
As shared know-how has deepened, formal standards have taken shape to guarantee that green roofs are properly designed, built and cared for. Advances in the underlying science have meanwhile spawned fresh takes on the idea. 'Blue roofs' let a building cling to water over longer stretches rather than shedding it at once, which matters when downpours turn heavier; there are pairings of planted roofs with solar panels, whose purpose is to draw power from a renewable source; and 'brown roofs', left deliberately wilder, set out to give a home to as many kinds of wildlife as they can. None of it comes free of complication, however. Before a single roof goes in, a run of hurdles must be cleared — laying drainage routes, meeting health-and-safety rules, at times arranging public access, and living with planning limits and the upheaval that building work brings to a structure and its surroundings. Clear these, and the trend could bring new jobs and a livelier local food economy; the evidence so far hints that such roofs might remake our cities and keep them working sustainably for years to come.
Across the last hundred years, one influential idea has reshaped how we think about schooling. Where intelligence was once treated as something people are born with, it has come to be seen as flexible — a capacity we can help shape, given the right training. When Henri Vasseur devised the earliest intelligence tests, he shared the assumption of many nineteenth-century researchers: that cognitive ability was a fixed quantity waiting to be measured. That assumption came under attack in the early twentieth century, when reform-minded thinkers rejected the claim that a person's inborn ability determines their fate. Educators like Wallace Reinholt insisted instead that any child's mind could be nurtured and grown, provided the surroundings allowed it.
The theory of the 'growth mindset' is a fairly recent, and wildly fashionable, descendant of that outlook. Walk through many schools now and the corridors are lined with encouraging slogans, while assemblies dwell on the attitude of celebrated athletes who supposedly reached the top on self-belief alone. What teachers using the approach mostly try to do is shift how pupils read failure: rather than treating a poor result as proof of how able they are, students learn to see it as an opening to get better. The educationalist Marcus Reeve put it plainly decades ago: 'Being clever isn't a state you're stuck in — cleverness is something a person can acquire.'
All of this traces back to studies carried out in Copenhagen during the 1990s by the psychologist Petra Sundqvist. In one influential trial, she split a group of ten- to twelve-year-olds in two. Every child was told they had scored highly on a test; but where one half were commended for the cleverness behind the result, the other half were commended for how hard they had worked. It was the second half — the children in whom a 'growth mindset' had been fostered — who then proved much readier to tackle demanding new tasks. The first half, by contrast, gravitated only to challenges that posed no threat to their self-image. Having concluded that doing well or badly comes down to inborn talent, these pupils had absorbed a 'fixed mindset', and with it a dread of failure and a reluctance to try. Being praised for ability worsened their performance, whereas praise for effort signalled that improvement lay within reach.
Ironically, the single biggest obstacle to putting a growth mindset into practice may be the schooling system itself. In much of the world, the atmosphere in schools revolves around performance — an endless cycle of examining, measuring and ranking pupils — which is precisely the hallmark of the fixed mindset. And schools routinely send mixed messages: they will praise everything a growth mindset has to offer, and then, in the same breath, issue fixed target grades pegged to how pupils have performed.
Setbacks in the classroom aside, the founding research on the growth mindset has itself drawn sharp attack. According to the statistician Roland Achterberg, 'the way these studies are designed leaves so much room for manoeuvre that the same data could be made to back almost any conclusion you like.' Nils Bergstrom, a professor of psychology who has repeatedly attempted to reproduce Sundqvist's findings, keeps arriving at nothing: 'Those with a growth mindset are no better at weathering failure,' he observes, 'and children who have it aren't earning higher marks — not before our intervention study, and not after it either.'
None of this has escaped Sundqvist, who has earned considerable respect for engaging with the objections and revising her work in light of them. Her own position is that the theory has been misread and misused in numerous ways. She has warned, in particular, that schools are distorting her ideas by folding them into the self-esteem movement: 'To my mind the growth mindset is an instrument for learning and getting better. It was never meant simply as a way of making youngsters feel pleased with themselves.'
Yet something else may be going on. Perhaps the growth mindset stumbles in the classroom because we misunderstand what teaching and learning actually involve. Two of the approach's advocates, Adrien Delacroix and Louis Fenwick, contend that for such interventions to work they must be introduced with a light touch. The moment a teenager reads a teacher's intervention as a signal that they are being singled out as needing help, they argue, whatever benefit it might have had is likely to evaporate.
Much of what motivates a pupil comes down to the beliefs they already hold and the way they view themselves. Self-image and accomplishment do go firmly together, yet the evidence hints that achievement shapes self-image more forcefully than self-image shapes achievement. Standing up in front of a class and delivering a genuinely good talk is a real accomplishment — and that, in all likelihood, motivates far more powerfully than any hazy appeal to 'motivation' on its own.
The latest findings imply that growth mindset interventions are hardly the cure-all for learning that their champions make them out to be. In the laboratory the growth mindset looks like a sound idea; delivered through pointed interventions in a real classroom, it appears to fall flat. Nobody would deny that believing in one's own capacity to change is valuable for a student. The paradox is that this very belief is poorly served by head-on attempts to plant it.
More often than not, pep talks and inspirational posters achieve little beyond leaving students with a distorted picture of what success involves. Confidence is far more likely to grow if a pupil is taught a definite skill — composing a strong opening paragraph, for instance — and is then commended for the work that went into it, rather than being told how exceptional they are or how freely they can reshape their own brains. The growth mindset, perhaps, is at its most useful as an outlook to live by, not as something to be administered.
Alfred Wegener: science, exploration and the theory of continental drift
Introduction
Alfred Wegener is remembered above all for what he called the theory of continental displacements — the idea now familiar to everyone as 'continental drift' — and this book examines his life and scientific work. He first advanced the theory in 1912 and spent close to two decades elaborating it. On the Drift of the Continents, the volume in which he set it out, ran to three editions and became the centre of a controversy that crossed national borders both in his lifetime and for many years after his death.
At its core, his proposal held that a great many puzzles in the Earth's past would fall into place once the continents were treated as bodies that drifted sideways over time, instead of as landmasses locked permanently in one position. Drawing on findings from a wide array of disciplines — among them geology, geophysics, paleontology and climatology — he set out at length why such wandering was credible and how it might operate. That single notion, that the continents are in motion, now underpins the framework on which the modern Earth sciences depend, namely plate tectonics. The relationship is much like the one between present-day evolutionary theory and the account of biological evolution that Charles Darwin put forward in the 1850s: plate tectonics diverges from Wegener's original scheme in numerous ways, and yet it descends directly from his theory of continental drift, just as today's evolutionary thinking descends from Darwin's theory of natural selection.
What first drew me to Wegener, as I began writing about his life and work, was a striking contradiction: the man who conceived the theory of continental drift was no geologist at all. His training had been in astronomy, and the career he built afterwards lay in atmospheric physics. At the point when he introduced his theory of continental displacements in 1912, he held a lectureship in physics and astronomy at a university in central Germany. He was hardly an obscure figure, though. Back in 1906 he and his brother Emil had stayed aloft in a hot-air balloon for 48 hours, setting a world record; and between 1906 and 1908 he took part in a widely reported and exceptionally perilous expedition to the Spitsbergen coast. Among a small circle of German meteorologists and atmospheric physicists he had additionally made his name as the author of a clutch of notable scientific papers and of a textbook, The Physics of the Upper Air (1911).
However significant his continental-drift research has proved to be, for Wegener himself it remained something of a sideline to his real preoccupations — atmospheric physics, geophysics and paleoclimatology. For that reason I have taken considerable trouble to set that research within the wider frame of his remaining scientific output, and within the wider frame still of the atmospheric sciences of his day. Only in so far as the subject engaged him, and eventually made him famous, is this a book 'about continental drift'. I have treated the rest of his science in no less depth — although the reception of his continental-displacement ideas, being far more contentious than anything else he did, has admittedly drawn more of my attention.
Anyone who follows the particulars of his career closely will notice that Wegener repeatedly set aside a given line of enquiry — occasionally for years at a stretch — before returning to it. To help the reader through these abruptly changing interests, I have treated the successive phases of his life as though each were a career in a separate science, and the chapter headings reflect that choice. Readers after one specific facet of his life, rather than the whole of it, should therefore find the index guide enough. My own conviction, all the same, is that the individual pieces mean far less in isolation than the whole of his activity does when taken together, and on that account I would encourage readers to try to live through Wegener's life as he himself experienced it — interruptions, reversals of opinion, fresh starts and all.
Only a handful of published works came from Wegener's pen, and these, following the usual practice of his era, laid out what he had found rather than how he came to find it. Of the thousands upon thousands of letters he sent and received across a lifetime, barely a few hundred remain, for he kept no notebook or diary documenting his days. He rarely took part in scientific societies, a few exceptions aside, and made no attempt to win influence or promote his ideas through professional networking and intrigue; his hours went instead on reading and writing in his study, or gathering observations out in the field.
A biographer's task is easiest when the subject has left a great deal behind. Einstein, Darwin and Newton, for instance, each handed down an enormous archive — notebooks by the hundred and correspondence running to tens of thousands of items; Michael Faraday, for his part, filled lengthy journals with his musings and guesswork to sit beside his laboratory notebooks. The fuller the record a researcher bequeaths, in short, the more reliably a biographer can reconstruct how that person's thinking first emerged and later changed.
It is my settled view that hardly any of us — and Wegener is no exception — genuinely authors the life we lead. We make plans, we reflect, we act, often to all appearances freely; yet for the most part life simply 'befalls us', and only in hindsight do we shape that run of accidents into a tidy story of intentions carried through. What this book offers, then, is an account at once of the life and science Wegener meant and planned to have and of the life and science that in fact 'befell him' — and the two, as will quickly become apparent, do not always coincide.
B. Beyond these practical gains, a steadily widening body of study is drawing attention to what green roofs do for people directly. Physicians now quite frequently write out prescriptions for time spent gardening in the fresh air, reaching for it as a way of supporting patients who are wrestling with anxiety or low spirits. Investigators have found, too, that contact with even the plainest scrap of greenery can lift the day-to-day quality of life of those living with dementia, and can leave a person less likely to go on to develop diabetes. Discoveries of this kind are gradually strengthening the argument that a rooftop need be neither large nor elaborate to be worth planting.
C. In Australia and New Zealand, by contrast, planted roofs slipped into the mainstream long ago, and large, publicly accessible and crop-bearing examples now sit atop buildings across both countries. Once again it has fallen to mayors and civic authorities to push things along: Sydney only lately obliged every new building to carry a green roof, whereas Wellington's encouragement of rooftop farming reaches back to schemes drawn up in the 1990s. A further edge is their young building stock, which makes fitting a roof simpler. Holding enough water up at roof level, and spreading it evenly across the surface, is what keeps the planting alive — the demands running highest on the 'edible' roofs given over to fruit and vegetables. This is far easier on recent structures, generally built to bear heavier loads, than on an older one adapted afterwards; and since a sturdier roof takes a deeper layer of soil, it also allows a wider assortment of plants. What has worked in these cities, many argue, ought to serve as a template elsewhere.
D. If green roofs are ever to become routine on new developments, backing from the public sector and from private investors alike will be indispensable. Those charged with looking after a building may find they have to take on unfamiliar skills, landscaping among them, and here and there a team of volunteers might be called on to lend a hand. Yet when the point comes to win over investors and developers, it is the economic reasoning that still counts for most, and a convincing financial case has to be set out before any of them will commit. A phrase has even been minted for the purpose — 'natural capital' — to pin down the monetary worth of the natural world: the savings, say, that follow from picking natural defences against flood damage, from adjusting to a shifting climate, or from helping people lead healthier and more contented lives.
E. As shared know-how has deepened, formal standards have taken shape to guarantee that green roofs are properly designed, built and cared for. Advances in the underlying science have meanwhile spawned fresh takes on the idea. 'Blue roofs' let a building cling to water over longer stretches rather than shedding it at once, which matters when downpours turn heavier; there are pairings of planted roofs with solar panels, whose purpose is to draw power from a renewable source; and 'brown roofs', left deliberately wilder, set out to give a home to as many kinds of wildlife as they can. None of it comes free of complication, however. Before a single roof goes in, a run of hurdles must be cleared — laying drainage routes, meeting health-and-safety rules, at times arranging public access, and living with planning limits and the upheaval that building work brings to a structure and its surroundings. Clear these, and the trend could bring new jobs and a livelier local food economy; the evidence so far hints that such roofs might remake our cities and keep them working sustainably for years to come.
Across the last hundred years, one influential idea has reshaped how we think about schooling. Where intelligence was once treated as something people are born with, it has come to be seen as flexible — a capacity we can help shape, given the right training. When Henri Vasseur devised the earliest intelligence tests, he shared the assumption of many nineteenth-century researchers: that cognitive ability was a fixed quantity waiting to be measured. That assumption came under attack in the early twentieth century, when reform-minded thinkers rejected the claim that a person's inborn ability determines their fate. Educators like Wallace Reinholt insisted instead that any child's mind could be nurtured and grown, provided the surroundings allowed it.
The theory of the 'growth mindset' is a fairly recent, and wildly fashionable, descendant of that outlook. Walk through many schools now and the corridors are lined with encouraging slogans, while assemblies dwell on the attitude of celebrated athletes who supposedly reached the top on self-belief alone. What teachers using the approach mostly try to do is shift how pupils read failure: rather than treating a poor result as proof of how able they are, students learn to see it as an opening to get better. The educationalist Marcus Reeve put it plainly decades ago: 'Being clever isn't a state you're stuck in — cleverness is something a person can acquire.'
All of this traces back to studies carried out in Copenhagen during the 1990s by the psychologist Petra Sundqvist. In one influential trial, she split a group of ten- to twelve-year-olds in two. Every child was told they had scored highly on a test; but where one half were commended for the cleverness behind the result, the other half were commended for how hard they had worked. It was the second half — the children in whom a 'growth mindset' had been fostered — who then proved much readier to tackle demanding new tasks. The first half, by contrast, gravitated only to challenges that posed no threat to their self-image. Having concluded that doing well or badly comes down to inborn talent, these pupils had absorbed a 'fixed mindset', and with it a dread of failure and a reluctance to try. Being praised for ability worsened their performance, whereas praise for effort signalled that improvement lay within reach.
Ironically, the single biggest obstacle to putting a growth mindset into practice may be the schooling system itself. In much of the world, the atmosphere in schools revolves around performance — an endless cycle of examining, measuring and ranking pupils — which is precisely the hallmark of the fixed mindset. And schools routinely send mixed messages: they will praise everything a growth mindset has to offer, and then, in the same breath, issue fixed target grades pegged to how pupils have performed.
Setbacks in the classroom aside, the founding research on the growth mindset has itself drawn sharp attack. According to the statistician Roland Achterberg, 'the way these studies are designed leaves so much room for manoeuvre that the same data could be made to back almost any conclusion you like.' Nils Bergstrom, a professor of psychology who has repeatedly attempted to reproduce Sundqvist's findings, keeps arriving at nothing: 'Those with a growth mindset are no better at weathering failure,' he observes, 'and children who have it aren't earning higher marks — not before our intervention study, and not after it either.'
None of this has escaped Sundqvist, who has earned considerable respect for engaging with the objections and revising her work in light of them. Her own position is that the theory has been misread and misused in numerous ways. She has warned, in particular, that schools are distorting her ideas by folding them into the self-esteem movement: 'To my mind the growth mindset is an instrument for learning and getting better. It was never meant simply as a way of making youngsters feel pleased with themselves.'
Yet something else may be going on. Perhaps the growth mindset stumbles in the classroom because we misunderstand what teaching and learning actually involve. Two of the approach's advocates, Adrien Delacroix and Louis Fenwick, contend that for such interventions to work they must be introduced with a light touch. The moment a teenager reads a teacher's intervention as a signal that they are being singled out as needing help, they argue, whatever benefit it might have had is likely to evaporate.
Much of what motivates a pupil comes down to the beliefs they already hold and the way they view themselves. Self-image and accomplishment do go firmly together, yet the evidence hints that achievement shapes self-image more forcefully than self-image shapes achievement. Standing up in front of a class and delivering a genuinely good talk is a real accomplishment — and that, in all likelihood, motivates far more powerfully than any hazy appeal to 'motivation' on its own.
The latest findings imply that growth mindset interventions are hardly the cure-all for learning that their champions make them out to be. In the laboratory the growth mindset looks like a sound idea; delivered through pointed interventions in a real classroom, it appears to fall flat. Nobody would deny that believing in one's own capacity to change is valuable for a student. The paradox is that this very belief is poorly served by head-on attempts to plant it.
More often than not, pep talks and inspirational posters achieve little beyond leaving students with a distorted picture of what success involves. Confidence is far more likely to grow if a pupil is taught a definite skill — composing a strong opening paragraph, for instance — and is then commended for the work that went into it, rather than being told how exceptional they are or how freely they can reshape their own brains. The growth mindset, perhaps, is at its most useful as an outlook to live by, not as something to be administered.
Introduction
Alfred Wegener is remembered above all for what he called the theory of continental displacements — the idea now familiar to everyone as 'continental drift' — and this book examines his life and scientific work. He first advanced the theory in 1912 and spent close to two decades elaborating it. On the Drift of the Continents, the volume in which he set it out, ran to three editions and became the centre of a controversy that crossed national borders both in his lifetime and for many years after his death.
At its core, his proposal held that a great many puzzles in the Earth's past would fall into place once the continents were treated as bodies that drifted sideways over time, instead of as landmasses locked permanently in one position. Drawing on findings from a wide array of disciplines — among them geology, geophysics, paleontology and climatology — he set out at length why such wandering was credible and how it might operate. That single notion, that the continents are in motion, now underpins the framework on which the modern Earth sciences depend, namely plate tectonics. The relationship is much like the one between present-day evolutionary theory and the account of biological evolution that Charles Darwin put forward in the 1850s: plate tectonics diverges from Wegener's original scheme in numerous ways, and yet it descends directly from his theory of continental drift, just as today's evolutionary thinking descends from Darwin's theory of natural selection.
What first drew me to Wegener, as I began writing about his life and work, was a striking contradiction: the man who conceived the theory of continental drift was no geologist at all. His training had been in astronomy, and the career he built afterwards lay in atmospheric physics. At the point when he introduced his theory of continental displacements in 1912, he held a lectureship in physics and astronomy at a university in central Germany. He was hardly an obscure figure, though. Back in 1906 he and his brother Emil had stayed aloft in a hot-air balloon for 48 hours, setting a world record; and between 1906 and 1908 he took part in a widely reported and exceptionally perilous expedition to the Spitsbergen coast. Among a small circle of German meteorologists and atmospheric physicists he had additionally made his name as the author of a clutch of notable scientific papers and of a textbook, The Physics of the Upper Air (1911).
However significant his continental-drift research has proved to be, for Wegener himself it remained something of a sideline to his real preoccupations — atmospheric physics, geophysics and paleoclimatology. For that reason I have taken considerable trouble to set that research within the wider frame of his remaining scientific output, and within the wider frame still of the atmospheric sciences of his day. Only in so far as the subject engaged him, and eventually made him famous, is this a book 'about continental drift'. I have treated the rest of his science in no less depth — although the reception of his continental-displacement ideas, being far more contentious than anything else he did, has admittedly drawn more of my attention.
Anyone who follows the particulars of his career closely will notice that Wegener repeatedly set aside a given line of enquiry — occasionally for years at a stretch — before returning to it. To help the reader through these abruptly changing interests, I have treated the successive phases of his life as though each were a career in a separate science, and the chapter headings reflect that choice. Readers after one specific facet of his life, rather than the whole of it, should therefore find the index guide enough. My own conviction, all the same, is that the individual pieces mean far less in isolation than the whole of his activity does when taken together, and on that account I would encourage readers to try to live through Wegener's life as he himself experienced it — interruptions, reversals of opinion, fresh starts and all.
Only a handful of published works came from Wegener's pen, and these, following the usual practice of his era, laid out what he had found rather than how he came to find it. Of the thousands upon thousands of letters he sent and received across a lifetime, barely a few hundred remain, for he kept no notebook or diary documenting his days. He rarely took part in scientific societies, a few exceptions aside, and made no attempt to win influence or promote his ideas through professional networking and intrigue; his hours went instead on reading and writing in his study, or gathering observations out in the field.
A biographer's task is easiest when the subject has left a great deal behind. Einstein, Darwin and Newton, for instance, each handed down an enormous archive — notebooks by the hundred and correspondence running to tens of thousands of items; Michael Faraday, for his part, filled lengthy journals with his musings and guesswork to sit beside his laboratory notebooks. The fuller the record a researcher bequeaths, in short, the more reliably a biographer can reconstruct how that person's thinking first emerged and later changed.
It is my settled view that hardly any of us — and Wegener is no exception — genuinely authors the life we lead. We make plans, we reflect, we act, often to all appearances freely; yet for the most part life simply 'befalls us', and only in hindsight do we shape that run of accidents into a tidy story of intentions carried through. What this book offers, then, is an account at once of the life and science Wegener meant and planned to have and of the life and science that in fact 'befell him' — and the two, as will quickly become apparent, do not always coincide.
Across the last hundred years, one influential idea has reshaped how we think about schooling. Where intelligence was once treated as something people are born with, it has come to be seen as flexible — a capacity we can help shape, given the right training. When Henri Vasseur devised the earliest intelligence tests, he shared the assumption of many nineteenth-century researchers: that cognitive ability was a fixed quantity waiting to be measured. That assumption came under attack in the early twentieth century, when reform-minded thinkers rejected the claim that a person's inborn ability determines their fate. Educators like Wallace Reinholt insisted instead that any child's mind could be nurtured and grown, provided the surroundings allowed it.
The theory of the 'growth mindset' is a fairly recent, and wildly fashionable, descendant of that outlook. Walk through many schools now and the corridors are lined with encouraging slogans, while assemblies dwell on the attitude of celebrated athletes who supposedly reached the top on self-belief alone. What teachers using the approach mostly try to do is shift how pupils read failure: rather than treating a poor result as proof of how able they are, students learn to see it as an opening to get better. The educationalist Marcus Reeve put it plainly decades ago: 'Being clever isn't a state you're stuck in — cleverness is something a person can acquire.'
All of this traces back to studies carried out in Copenhagen during the 1990s by the psychologist Petra Sundqvist. In one influential trial, she split a group of ten- to twelve-year-olds in two. Every child was told they had scored highly on a test; but where one half were commended for the cleverness behind the result, the other half were commended for how hard they had worked. It was the second half — the children in whom a 'growth mindset' had been fostered — who then proved much readier to tackle demanding new tasks. The first half, by contrast, gravitated only to challenges that posed no threat to their self-image. Having concluded that doing well or badly comes down to inborn talent, these pupils had absorbed a 'fixed mindset', and with it a dread of failure and a reluctance to try. Being praised for ability worsened their performance, whereas praise for effort signalled that improvement lay within reach.
Ironically, the single biggest obstacle to putting a growth mindset into practice may be the schooling system itself. In much of the world, the atmosphere in schools revolves around performance — an endless cycle of examining, measuring and ranking pupils — which is precisely the hallmark of the fixed mindset. And schools routinely send mixed messages: they will praise everything a growth mindset has to offer, and then, in the same breath, issue fixed target grades pegged to how pupils have performed.
Setbacks in the classroom aside, the founding research on the growth mindset has itself drawn sharp attack. According to the statistician Roland Achterberg, 'the way these studies are designed leaves so much room for manoeuvre that the same data could be made to back almost any conclusion you like.' Nils Bergstrom, a professor of psychology who has repeatedly attempted to reproduce Sundqvist's findings, keeps arriving at nothing: 'Those with a growth mindset are no better at weathering failure,' he observes, 'and children who have it aren't earning higher marks — not before our intervention study, and not after it either.'
None of this has escaped Sundqvist, who has earned considerable respect for engaging with the objections and revising her work in light of them. Her own position is that the theory has been misread and misused in numerous ways. She has warned, in particular, that schools are distorting her ideas by folding them into the self-esteem movement: 'To my mind the growth mindset is an instrument for learning and getting better. It was never meant simply as a way of making youngsters feel pleased with themselves.'
Yet something else may be going on. Perhaps the growth mindset stumbles in the classroom because we misunderstand what teaching and learning actually involve. Two of the approach's advocates, Adrien Delacroix and Louis Fenwick, contend that for such interventions to work they must be introduced with a light touch. The moment a teenager reads a teacher's intervention as a signal that they are being singled out as needing help, they argue, whatever benefit it might have had is likely to evaporate.
Much of what motivates a pupil comes down to the beliefs they already hold and the way they view themselves. Self-image and accomplishment do go firmly together, yet the evidence hints that achievement shapes self-image more forcefully than self-image shapes achievement. Standing up in front of a class and delivering a genuinely good talk is a real accomplishment — and that, in all likelihood, motivates far more powerfully than any hazy appeal to 'motivation' on its own.
The latest findings imply that growth mindset interventions are hardly the cure-all for learning that their champions make them out to be. In the laboratory the growth mindset looks like a sound idea; delivered through pointed interventions in a real classroom, it appears to fall flat. Nobody would deny that believing in one's own capacity to change is valuable for a student. The paradox is that this very belief is poorly served by head-on attempts to plant it.
More often than not, pep talks and inspirational posters achieve little beyond leaving students with a distorted picture of what success involves. Confidence is far more likely to grow if a pupil is taught a definite skill — composing a strong opening paragraph, for instance — and is then commended for the work that went into it, rather than being told how exceptional they are or how freely they can reshape their own brains. The growth mindset, perhaps, is at its most useful as an outlook to live by, not as something to be administered.
