IELTS CAM Inspired 19 - Reading Test 1 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 19 - Reading Test 1 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
Before 2018, Marchetti had competed at the major tournaments without ever winning one.
2
The arrival of Bjorn Halvorsen on the coaching team made no difference to how Marchetti played.
3
The Prescott twins spend more on their customised frames than other leading players do.
4
The rackets the Prescotts currently favour are weightier than a standard one.
5
A governing body in tennis eventually prohibited the comb-strung racket.
6
Co-polyester strings deliver less spin than natural gut does.
7
Dominic Vance won more matches after adding lead to his frames.
Question 8 - 13
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
The tennis racket and how it has changed
• Marchetti replaced the strings running horizontally with a
8.
type, keeping natural gut in the mains.
• The Prescott twins altered their frames'
9.
as well as the paint on them.
• Adjustments to a racket divide into two kinds: work on the string bed and work on the
10.
.
• Natural gut was taken from the outer
11.
of certain animals' insides.
• Dominic Vance added several thin pieces of
12.
to his frames to strengthen his serve.
• Some players have the
13.
from one racket fitted onto another racket's frame.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 19
Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-G.
14
the suggestion that piracy was taking place even earlier than the first surviving record of it
15
a description of the way the operation against the pirates was organised
16
a reference to states making use of pirates in time of war
17
an account of the image that comes to most people's minds today at the mention of pirates
18
a ruler's undertaking to discipline any of his own people who turned to piracy
19
mention of a state benefiting economically from a supply of captured people
Question 20 - 21
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make about the coastal communities of the harsher districts of the Mediterranean in the ancient world?
A
They knew the local waters better than anyone else.
B
They built their own boats using timber from nearby forests.
C
They depended on the sea rather than on farming for their livelihood.
D
They deliberately targeted vessels that were carrying weapons.
E
They demanded payment from merchants in return for safe passage.
Question 22 - 23
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make about piracy in the Doran world?
A
Some of its written literature expresses approval of piracy.
B
The Dorans considered piracy acceptable only during war.
C
The number of active pirates dropped sharply once a new law was introduced.
D
Even prominent members of society took part in it.
E
Piracy was condemned in the earliest Doran poetry.
Question 24 - 26
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Piracy and the Tarnic Republic
For the Tarnic Republic, piracy was both a problem and, in some ways, an advantage. The raiders kept the Republic supplied with the forced labourers its farms and mines could not do without. Trouble arose only when the pirates began preying on ships that were carrying to Tarnis, which provoked demands in the Council for against those to blame. Even so, nothing was done and the raiding continued; in time the pirates grew confident enough to seize high-ranking Tarnic figures and release them only in return for a .
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
27
In the first paragraph, what does the writer suggest about misinformation?
A
People may spread it for several different motives.
B
It has grown harder to recognise than it once was.
C
It is largely a product of modern communication.
D
Its meaning tends to shift as it is retold.
28
How does the writer regard the part played by technology?
A
It has transformed the way organisations exploit false information.
B
It has made verifying information far easier for ordinary people.
C
It may eventually offer a means of tackling misinformation.
D
It could change people's basic attitude toward information itself.
29
In the fourth paragraph, the writer is
A
explaining how the impact of misinformation has shifted over the years.
B
setting out the aspects of misinformation that matter most at present.
C
contrasting the various opinions people hold about misinformation.
D
describing how policy makers regard misinformation in the media.
30
According to the writer, what is true of regulation in New Zealand?
A
It does not stop false claims from reaching the public.
B
Its published guidance ought to be made easier to follow.
C
It has little bearing on how people view newly released medicines.
D
The country maintains an unusually large number of regulatory bodies.
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.
What happens when people come across misinformation?
Encountering false claims is, for most people, a matter of ; even so, exactly how and when the mind marks something as genuine or false remains disputed. On the question of how individuals deal with incoming information, the philosophers Bettani and Verhelst put forward . Bettani held that a claim is weighed first and only then accepted or rejected, whereas Verhelst maintained that whatever a person meets — misinformation included — is accepted at once and left unchecked until afterwards. Verhelst also suggested that a distinct is at work across these two stages. More recent studies have offered for Verhelst's account: the mind, it seems, registers each new piece of information as correct, though perhaps only for a , and delays labelling it true or false. This fits the discovery that the resources for doubt and the resources for perception and recording occupy in the brain.
A
fleeting moment
B
opposing views
C
deep suspicion
D
regular contact
E
test participants
F
cognitive step
G
questionable motive
H
fresh backing
I
different areas
J
wide readership
Question 37 - 40
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
37
According to the writer, a corrective campaign will succeed even when its audience cannot make sense of it.
38
The writer supports teaching children about misinformation from an early age.
39
The writer believes ordinary people have a part to play in challenging claims that lack solid evidence.
40
Funding for research into misinformation has increased in recent years.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
How tennis rackets have changed
When Theo Marchetti of Canada rose to the top of the world rankings in 2018, it was a feat that would have looked scarcely believable only seasons before. What made it the more striking was the era in which it came about - reckoned by many to be among the most fiercely contested the game has known, with challengers of the calibre of Sergio Ballester, Lars Henriksson and Tomas Novak all pursuing the same trophies. A mere five years earlier, Marchetti had counted as no more than a promising outsider, forever entering the sport's biggest tournaments yet never carrying one off.
Two developments, in the end, lay behind this turnaround. One of them was common knowledge and much talked about at the time: the former world number one Bjorn Halvorsen joined Marchetti's coaching staff in 2013, and what that did to his game could be seen at a glance. The other went almost entirely unremarked. Marchetti had always, like so many of his peers, favoured a frame strung with two separate materials - one threaded through the mains, the vertical strings, the other through the crosses, or horizontals. His mains he kept in natural gut; the crosses, though, he re-strung in a synthetic in 2014. Slight as it sounds, the move would be badly underrated if anyone dismissed it.
What Marchetti did to his crosses is only one of many tweaks a player can reach for in the hope of sharpening their game. 'Every frame out on tour is fitted to the person who wields it,' says Devin Marsh, a professional stringer based in New Zealand. 'Getting that exactly right is a large part of drawing out the last drop of performance.' It follows that the rackets the very best players rely on are never sold to the public as they are; each is built around the individual who plays with it. The Australian doubles pair Liam and Noah Prescott, twins with exacting requirements, are a case in point. 'We ask for very precise specifications,' they explain. 'Our manufacturer sends each frame to Adelaide, where it undergoes a meticulous round of customisation.' Among the things they have changed are the frame's length and even the paint over it, and the rackets they now prefer are heavier than an ordinary model, strung to a tighter pattern of crosses and mains.
The reasoning behind it all is plain enough. As the margin separating a win from a defeat shrinks ever further, alterations that would once have seemed negligible come to weigh heavily indeed. And so the players, with their support teams, grow steadily more inventive in reworking their equipment, each chasing whatever narrow advantage it might yield.
The habit goes back to the 1970s, when a Dutch amateur by the name of Bram de Wit took to playing with what became known as the comb-strung racket. So much topspin poured off its string bed that the International Tennis Federation banned it before long. Yet across the next twenty years or so, adjusting one's racket hardened into a routine part of the sport - something widely held today to rank beside diet and fitness for sheer importance.
In the main, these alterations sort into two families: those done to the string bed and those done to the frame. The first kind is much more usual. Which strings to choose, and how tightly to set them, is something nearly every professional tinkers with, revising the decision again and again in light of the surface underfoot, the weather, the style of an opponent - some on no firmer basis than their mood that afternoon.
Once upon a time, every racket was strung with natural gut, taken from the outer lining of a sheep's or a cow's intestines. The early 1990s brought a shift, as synthetic strings - cheaper and longer-lasting - appeared. Three substances go into these: nylon, tough and cheap; Kevlar, far too rigid to string on its own; and co-polyester, a polyester carrying additives that lift its performance. Even now, a good many professionals keep to a 'hybrid' set-up, in which synthetic and natural strings are combined.
Among the synthetics, co-polyester reigns supreme. It answers particularly well to the tennis of the present day, in which rallies are settled for the most part along the baseline rather than up at the net. Research suggests that a co-polyester string throws off roughly a fifth more spin than natural gut or any rival synthetic can offer. Its coming, one might say, has transformed the game.
A fair number of players, however, go further than the strings and take the frame itself in hand. Much of the ferocious serve of the American Dominic Vance, to take one case, was credited to the three or four strips of lead he had attached to his frames; these days the weighting is more often decided as the racket is built than added later on.
Further changes to the frame have to do with the handle. Taste here is personal - one player wants a certain shape and may have the handle of a cherished racket transplanted onto another frame entirely, while another does something else again. The Portuguese player Rafael Mendonca, for one, found the grips he was given clumsy in the hand and exchanged them for slimmer versions.
Customising and modifying rackets has driven the standard of play to heights few would have dared imagine in the era of gut strings and cumbersome wooden frames - and where it goes from here no one can say, though the watching promises to be a pleasure.
Across the first and second millennia BCE, raiders roamed the waters of the Mediterranean, seizing vessels and slipping away from those who pursued them.
A
A. Say 'pirate' and most people picture a crew of rogues and adventurers on a tall masted ship in warm southern waters. Yet long before such adventurers came to terrorise those seas — as far back as the first to the third millennium BCE — raiders were already at work in the Mediterranean, preying on trading vessels and threatening vital trade routes. No ancient state, however mighty, could stop them, and from one century to the next the situation scarcely altered. Only when the raiders began to harm the interests of the Tarnic Republic, the leading power of the later age, was a great fleet at last assembled against them. Command passed to the Tarnic general Corvane Aquila, under whom the Republic scoured the sea clean and renamed it Mare Tarnicum, 'the Sea That Is Ours'.
B
The earliest surviving mention of piracy in the Mediterranean belongs to the kingdom of Amuria, in the reign of King Hadrimel (c 1400–1360 BCE), though it must surely reach back well before that kingdom rose — partly because the sea counted for so much to the surrounding peoples, partly because of the lie of the land. Much of the coast is good farmland, yet parts are broken, steep, in places mountainous, and the communities scratching a living in those harsher spots leaned heavily on whatever the sea could offer, fish and salt included. Almost all owned boats, handled them with skill, and knew the shoreline and its sea-lanes as no outsider could; small wonder that in lean times such men took to raiding. The coast favoured them, too, its many hidden inlets offering places to conceal a boat and strike without warning. No vessel of the day could yet cross open water for any distance — the nimble caravel* lay centuries in the future — so nearly every ship kept to a few familiar lanes along the shore. A slow, cargo-heavy merchantman cornered on one of them could do little but surrender, and by the time a state's warships arrived, the raiders' knowledge of the coast had let them vanish. * caravel: a small, highly manoeuvrable sailing ship, developed in Portugal in the fifteenth century
C
It should be added, too, that rulers of the first and second millennia BCE were by no means above employing pirates themselves, especially in wartime, when a rival could be met with the raiders' numbers and skill. Sent in ahead of the regular navy, a pirate squadron would open an assault and clear the way for the warships behind. And certain coastal districts earned a name for sheltering pirates — an arrangement that repaid them well, for the raiders greatly enriched the local economy.
D
It is under Hadrimel's successor, King Sethuran (c 1360–1340 BCE), that particular bands of pirates are first named, thanks to a store of clay documents called the Halmyra tablets. This correspondence, passing between the king and friendly rulers overseas, took up many pressing concerns, piracy among them. Two crews above all seem to have plagued Sethuran: the Yldari and the Kessoi. Whatever his warships tried, neither could be stopped from doing real harm to the region's trade. In one tablet the ruler of Coryth, an island kingdom, rejected Sethuran's suggestion that his people had any tie to the Yldari — whose base lay far off along the Anthemos coast — and pledged that any subject of his found raiding would be punished without mercy.
E
Piracy wore a different face for the Doran cities than it had for the kings of Amuria. Amurian power rested on the land, whereas the Dorans looked to the sea for nearly everything, trade and warfare alike. Tellingly, the early Doran poet Melanthos, in his epics the Anthedon and the Ereskeia, goes beyond excusing the pirate's life and openly praises it. Nor did later ages think otherwise: the historian Kriton of Halea wrote with plain delight of daring strikes on ships and even whole towns. For the Dorans, piracy was simply part of ordinary life, and not even the highest officers of state kept clear of it. The orator Praxandros relates that in 340 BCE envoys from the city of Thelane broke from their official errand to seize a ship returning from Amuria and keep its riches. Such tolerance was not the same as approval, but with so many pirates abroad, any attempt to rein them in came to little.
F
As Tarnis grew into the foremost power around, its Republic too had to confront the pirates. The matter was grave — and yet the Republic profited from the very thing that troubled it, for the captives the raiders seized supplied the slaves on which Tarnic farming and mining relied. That bargain could last only while the pirates left everything Tarnic untouched. The moment they began taking ships laden with the wheat that fed the Republic's people, furious voices in the Council demanded revenge on those to blame. Tarnis, though, did precisely nothing, which only emboldened the raiders. By the first century BCE they had grown brazen enough to carry off leading Tarnic notables and hold them for a heavy payment; best remembered of these prisoners was the young statesman Lucan Verr, seized in 82 BCE.
G
By now Tarnis was under no illusion: the pirates had become far more a liability than an asset, and the time for concerted action had come. A law of 71 BCE placed vast resources in the hands of Corvane Aquila for ridding the sea of its plague. Taking charge in person, Aquila split the whole Mediterranean into fifteen sectors and set a fleet and a commander over each. Once a sector was swept clear, its fleet moved on to reinforce the next, and so the campaign rolled on until nowhere at sea was left to the raiders. Thousands of pirates fell to Aquila's men, but his more lasting answer was milder: greater numbers still were resettled on fertile land well away from the coast. The menace of the sea was thus turned, by Tarnic design, into farmers who enriched the Republic further.
Marek Voss examines how the human brain checks incoming information, and weighs the difficulties of countering falsehoods that spread widely.
False information is nothing new, even if it feels like a defining feature of our age; whether spread deliberately or passed on by accident, it may simply be unavoidable. For roughly as long as people have been able to speak, they have almost certainly told one another untruths. Deception carries obvious rewards: it can win a strategic edge, prod others into action, or help hold a relationship together. And quite apart from deliberate lying, mistaken claims have circulated unintentionally for many thousands of years.
What has altered is the scale. Because today's technology carries information to vast audiences spread right across the globe, a false claim now threatens the kind of immediate, sweeping harm that earlier generations never had to face. And yet the cure, given time, may lie in those very same channels of mass communication that let information travel so readily.
So why should this matter so much? What chiefly troubles researchers, among them the teams led by Dahlia Merrick at the University of Ashworth and Corin Blaise at Talmadge University, is that false information can bend both what people think and how they behave, steering them toward decisions they would never have reached had the truth been clear. The worry, put another way, is that misinformation plants mistaken beliefs; and once such beliefs are shared not by a single mind but by great numbers, the damage to public health, social harmony and political life may prove severe.
Three features of the modern media environment, in particular, call for close attention, and not merely from scholars and lawmakers but from anyone who switches on a television, tunes in to the radio, or reads something on a screen. The first is that people who meet a false claim generally believe it, at least to begin with. The second is that broadcast and print outlets frequently let misinformation through before it reaches a mass audience. The third is that pushing back against a falsehood, once widely seen, can swallow up a great deal of effort and money.
Grasping what takes place at that very first moment of contact matters enormously if we are to judge the troubles that may follow. Running into something untrue is, admittedly, an ordinary event; and yet the precise manner, and the precise instant, in which the mind stamps a claim as genuine or false has long been argued over by philosophers. Two seventeenth-century thinkers, Aurelio Bettani and Jonas Verhelst, set the problem out sharply, and their rival predictions have only lately faced rigorous experimental test. For Bettani, a claim is embraced or dismissed only once its truth has been weighed; for Verhelst, by contrast, every incoming statement, misinformation and all, is swallowed whole at first, and only afterwards, by way of a separate mental step, confirmed or thrown out. Over recent decades experimental work by groups led by Ines Kovac at Rowan State University and Peder Lindqvist at Vahlen University has come down on Verhelst's side: the mind seems to log each fresh item as though it were correct, if only for a brief instant, before labelling it true or false only later. That fits the finding that the brain's machinery for doubt sits in a physically separate region from the machinery used to perceive and record.
Turn now to the second observation, that false claims frequently slip into broadcast and printed media with nothing stopping them beforehand. New Zealand's regulatory set-up illustrates the point, since the agencies there are generally geared toward catching troublesome content after it has aired rather than before. A body like the National Medicines Authority, for instance, does much monitoring and public notification, yet censoring material in advance forms no part of its role. Direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs falls within the NMA's oversight, and the authority has built tools such as its Flag-an-Ad scheme, by which the public may report advertisements that seem to breach the rules on presenting a drug's risks. Worthy though such schemes are, they do nothing to keep misleading advertising off the air in the first place. What is more, even a falsehood that has been successfully put right can go on shaping people's attitudes.
Turning to the third observation: mounting an effective correction, however persuasive its wording, calls for resources and careful planning if it is ever to achieve the reach and frequency required. A corrective message will only work where its audience can genuinely follow it, and that means either casting it in terms people find accessible or else alerting them, in advance, to the very chance of being misled. Because some audiences will not even suspect that what they read might be false, there is a strong case for teaching media literacy to children as young as primary-school age. And strikingly, even now, with reporters and academics drawing attention to fake news, readers skimming a passage still fail to tell apart stories that are plainly untrue from those that rest on fact.
Ours is an age in which misinformation is everywhere; happily, it is also one in which many people are pouring their energy into possible cures. The road ahead will certainly prove long and hard. What it demands is not only further theoretical thought but also the building and upkeep of dependable monitoring tools, together with a shared readiness, among ordinary citizens, to push back against prominent public claims resting on too little scientific consensus or social fact. Since misinformation springs from human fallibility and from our very hunger for information, no single one-off cure will ever suffice; what is called for instead is sustained, coordinated work carried on over the long term.
When Theo Marchetti of Canada rose to the top of the world rankings in 2018, it was a feat that would have looked scarcely believable only seasons before. What made it the more striking was the era in which it came about - reckoned by many to be among the most fiercely contested the game has known, with challengers of the calibre of Sergio Ballester, Lars Henriksson and Tomas Novak all pursuing the same trophies. A mere five years earlier, Marchetti had counted as no more than a promising outsider, forever entering the sport's biggest tournaments yet never carrying one off.
Two developments, in the end, lay behind this turnaround. One of them was common knowledge and much talked about at the time: the former world number one Bjorn Halvorsen joined Marchetti's coaching staff in 2013, and what that did to his game could be seen at a glance. The other went almost entirely unremarked. Marchetti had always, like so many of his peers, favoured a frame strung with two separate materials - one threaded through the mains, the vertical strings, the other through the crosses, or horizontals. His mains he kept in natural gut; the crosses, though, he re-strung in a synthetic in 2014. Slight as it sounds, the move would be badly underrated if anyone dismissed it.
What Marchetti did to his crosses is only one of many tweaks a player can reach for in the hope of sharpening their game. 'Every frame out on tour is fitted to the person who wields it,' says Devin Marsh, a professional stringer based in New Zealand. 'Getting that exactly right is a large part of drawing out the last drop of performance.' It follows that the rackets the very best players rely on are never sold to the public as they are; each is built around the individual who plays with it. The Australian doubles pair Liam and Noah Prescott, twins with exacting requirements, are a case in point. 'We ask for very precise specifications,' they explain. 'Our manufacturer sends each frame to Adelaide, where it undergoes a meticulous round of customisation.' Among the things they have changed are the frame's length and even the paint over it, and the rackets they now prefer are heavier than an ordinary model, strung to a tighter pattern of crosses and mains.
The reasoning behind it all is plain enough. As the margin separating a win from a defeat shrinks ever further, alterations that would once have seemed negligible come to weigh heavily indeed. And so the players, with their support teams, grow steadily more inventive in reworking their equipment, each chasing whatever narrow advantage it might yield.
The habit goes back to the 1970s, when a Dutch amateur by the name of Bram de Wit took to playing with what became known as the comb-strung racket. So much topspin poured off its string bed that the International Tennis Federation banned it before long. Yet across the next twenty years or so, adjusting one's racket hardened into a routine part of the sport - something widely held today to rank beside diet and fitness for sheer importance.
In the main, these alterations sort into two families: those done to the string bed and those done to the frame. The first kind is much more usual. Which strings to choose, and how tightly to set them, is something nearly every professional tinkers with, revising the decision again and again in light of the surface underfoot, the weather, the style of an opponent - some on no firmer basis than their mood that afternoon.
Once upon a time, every racket was strung with natural gut, taken from the outer lining of a sheep's or a cow's intestines. The early 1990s brought a shift, as synthetic strings - cheaper and longer-lasting - appeared. Three substances go into these: nylon, tough and cheap; Kevlar, far too rigid to string on its own; and co-polyester, a polyester carrying additives that lift its performance. Even now, a good many professionals keep to a 'hybrid' set-up, in which synthetic and natural strings are combined.
Among the synthetics, co-polyester reigns supreme. It answers particularly well to the tennis of the present day, in which rallies are settled for the most part along the baseline rather than up at the net. Research suggests that a co-polyester string throws off roughly a fifth more spin than natural gut or any rival synthetic can offer. Its coming, one might say, has transformed the game.
A fair number of players, however, go further than the strings and take the frame itself in hand. Much of the ferocious serve of the American Dominic Vance, to take one case, was credited to the three or four strips of lead he had attached to his frames; these days the weighting is more often decided as the racket is built than added later on.
Further changes to the frame have to do with the handle. Taste here is personal - one player wants a certain shape and may have the handle of a cherished racket transplanted onto another frame entirely, while another does something else again. The Portuguese player Rafael Mendonca, for one, found the grips he was given clumsy in the hand and exchanged them for slimmer versions.
Customising and modifying rackets has driven the standard of play to heights few would have dared imagine in the era of gut strings and cumbersome wooden frames - and where it goes from here no one can say, though the watching promises to be a pleasure.
B. The earliest surviving mention of piracy in the Mediterranean belongs to the kingdom of Amuria, in the reign of King Hadrimel (c 1400–1360 BCE), though it must surely reach back well before that kingdom rose — partly because the sea counted for so much to the surrounding peoples, partly because of the lie of the land. Much of the coast is good farmland, yet parts are broken, steep, in places mountainous, and the communities scratching a living in those harsher spots leaned heavily on whatever the sea could offer, fish and salt included. Almost all owned boats, handled them with skill, and knew the shoreline and its sea-lanes as no outsider could; small wonder that in lean times such men took to raiding. The coast favoured them, too, its many hidden inlets offering places to conceal a boat and strike without warning. No vessel of the day could yet cross open water for any distance — the nimble caravel* lay centuries in the future — so nearly every ship kept to a few familiar lanes along the shore. A slow, cargo-heavy merchantman cornered on one of them could do little but surrender, and by the time a state's warships arrived, the raiders' knowledge of the coast had let them vanish. * caravel: a small, highly manoeuvrable sailing ship, developed in Portugal in the fifteenth century
C. It should be added, too, that rulers of the first and second millennia BCE were by no means above employing pirates themselves, especially in wartime, when a rival could be met with the raiders' numbers and skill. Sent in ahead of the regular navy, a pirate squadron would open an assault and clear the way for the warships behind. And certain coastal districts earned a name for sheltering pirates — an arrangement that repaid them well, for the raiders greatly enriched the local economy.
D. It is under Hadrimel's successor, King Sethuran (c 1360–1340 BCE), that particular bands of pirates are first named, thanks to a store of clay documents called the Halmyra tablets. This correspondence, passing between the king and friendly rulers overseas, took up many pressing concerns, piracy among them. Two crews above all seem to have plagued Sethuran: the Yldari and the Kessoi. Whatever his warships tried, neither could be stopped from doing real harm to the region's trade. In one tablet the ruler of Coryth, an island kingdom, rejected Sethuran's suggestion that his people had any tie to the Yldari — whose base lay far off along the Anthemos coast — and pledged that any subject of his found raiding would be punished without mercy.
E. Piracy wore a different face for the Doran cities than it had for the kings of Amuria. Amurian power rested on the land, whereas the Dorans looked to the sea for nearly everything, trade and warfare alike. Tellingly, the early Doran poet Melanthos, in his epics the Anthedon and the Ereskeia, goes beyond excusing the pirate's life and openly praises it. Nor did later ages think otherwise: the historian Kriton of Halea wrote with plain delight of daring strikes on ships and even whole towns. For the Dorans, piracy was simply part of ordinary life, and not even the highest officers of state kept clear of it. The orator Praxandros relates that in 340 BCE envoys from the city of Thelane broke from their official errand to seize a ship returning from Amuria and keep its riches. Such tolerance was not the same as approval, but with so many pirates abroad, any attempt to rein them in came to little.
F. As Tarnis grew into the foremost power around, its Republic too had to confront the pirates. The matter was grave — and yet the Republic profited from the very thing that troubled it, for the captives the raiders seized supplied the slaves on which Tarnic farming and mining relied. That bargain could last only while the pirates left everything Tarnic untouched. The moment they began taking ships laden with the wheat that fed the Republic's people, furious voices in the Council demanded revenge on those to blame. Tarnis, though, did precisely nothing, which only emboldened the raiders. By the first century BCE they had grown brazen enough to carry off leading Tarnic notables and hold them for a heavy payment; best remembered of these prisoners was the young statesman Lucan Verr, seized in 82 BCE.
G. By now Tarnis was under no illusion: the pirates had become far more a liability than an asset, and the time for concerted action had come. A law of 71 BCE placed vast resources in the hands of Corvane Aquila for ridding the sea of its plague. Taking charge in person, Aquila split the whole Mediterranean into fifteen sectors and set a fleet and a commander over each. Once a sector was swept clear, its fleet moved on to reinforce the next, and so the campaign rolled on until nowhere at sea was left to the raiders. Thousands of pirates fell to Aquila's men, but his more lasting answer was milder: greater numbers still were resettled on fertile land well away from the coast. The menace of the sea was thus turned, by Tarnic design, into farmers who enriched the Republic further.
False information is nothing new, even if it feels like a defining feature of our age; whether spread deliberately or passed on by accident, it may simply be unavoidable. For roughly as long as people have been able to speak, they have almost certainly told one another untruths. Deception carries obvious rewards: it can win a strategic edge, prod others into action, or help hold a relationship together. And quite apart from deliberate lying, mistaken claims have circulated unintentionally for many thousands of years.
What has altered is the scale. Because today's technology carries information to vast audiences spread right across the globe, a false claim now threatens the kind of immediate, sweeping harm that earlier generations never had to face. And yet the cure, given time, may lie in those very same channels of mass communication that let information travel so readily.
So why should this matter so much? What chiefly troubles researchers, among them the teams led by Dahlia Merrick at the University of Ashworth and Corin Blaise at Talmadge University, is that false information can bend both what people think and how they behave, steering them toward decisions they would never have reached had the truth been clear. The worry, put another way, is that misinformation plants mistaken beliefs; and once such beliefs are shared not by a single mind but by great numbers, the damage to public health, social harmony and political life may prove severe.
Three features of the modern media environment, in particular, call for close attention, and not merely from scholars and lawmakers but from anyone who switches on a television, tunes in to the radio, or reads something on a screen. The first is that people who meet a false claim generally believe it, at least to begin with. The second is that broadcast and print outlets frequently let misinformation through before it reaches a mass audience. The third is that pushing back against a falsehood, once widely seen, can swallow up a great deal of effort and money.
Grasping what takes place at that very first moment of contact matters enormously if we are to judge the troubles that may follow. Running into something untrue is, admittedly, an ordinary event; and yet the precise manner, and the precise instant, in which the mind stamps a claim as genuine or false has long been argued over by philosophers. Two seventeenth-century thinkers, Aurelio Bettani and Jonas Verhelst, set the problem out sharply, and their rival predictions have only lately faced rigorous experimental test. For Bettani, a claim is embraced or dismissed only once its truth has been weighed; for Verhelst, by contrast, every incoming statement, misinformation and all, is swallowed whole at first, and only afterwards, by way of a separate mental step, confirmed or thrown out. Over recent decades experimental work by groups led by Ines Kovac at Rowan State University and Peder Lindqvist at Vahlen University has come down on Verhelst's side: the mind seems to log each fresh item as though it were correct, if only for a brief instant, before labelling it true or false only later. That fits the finding that the brain's machinery for doubt sits in a physically separate region from the machinery used to perceive and record.
Turn now to the second observation, that false claims frequently slip into broadcast and printed media with nothing stopping them beforehand. New Zealand's regulatory set-up illustrates the point, since the agencies there are generally geared toward catching troublesome content after it has aired rather than before. A body like the National Medicines Authority, for instance, does much monitoring and public notification, yet censoring material in advance forms no part of its role. Direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs falls within the NMA's oversight, and the authority has built tools such as its Flag-an-Ad scheme, by which the public may report advertisements that seem to breach the rules on presenting a drug's risks. Worthy though such schemes are, they do nothing to keep misleading advertising off the air in the first place. What is more, even a falsehood that has been successfully put right can go on shaping people's attitudes.
Turning to the third observation: mounting an effective correction, however persuasive its wording, calls for resources and careful planning if it is ever to achieve the reach and frequency required. A corrective message will only work where its audience can genuinely follow it, and that means either casting it in terms people find accessible or else alerting them, in advance, to the very chance of being misled. Because some audiences will not even suspect that what they read might be false, there is a strong case for teaching media literacy to children as young as primary-school age. And strikingly, even now, with reporters and academics drawing attention to fake news, readers skimming a passage still fail to tell apart stories that are plainly untrue from those that rest on fact.
Ours is an age in which misinformation is everywhere; happily, it is also one in which many people are pouring their energy into possible cures. The road ahead will certainly prove long and hard. What it demands is not only further theoretical thought but also the building and upkeep of dependable monitoring tools, together with a shared readiness, among ordinary citizens, to push back against prominent public claims resting on too little scientific consensus or social fact. Since misinformation springs from human fallibility and from our very hunger for information, no single one-off cure will ever suffice; what is called for instead is sustained, coordinated work carried on over the long term.
