IELTS CAM Inspired 19 - Reading Test 2 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 19 - Reading Test 2 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 7
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Britain's Industrial Revolution
Steam power
• Fenwick's engine was used to pump water out of mines.
• In the engine built by Rennick and Harmon, the piston's to-and-fro movement was joined to a
1.
mechanism, producing rotary motion.
• Coal was valued as a comparatively inexpensive
2.
.
Textile industry
• Before the Revolution, cloth was made by hand in modest workrooms or in the workers' own
3.
.
• Across the country, mechanised
4.
opened up and met the need for cloth among customers both at home and abroad.
Iron industry
• Producing iron with coke instead of charcoal was
5.
and gave metal of better quality.
Communications
• On Britain's railways, the telegraph came to be used for
6.
, to keep fast locomotives from crashing into each other.
Urbanisation
• The crowded, fast-growing cities were troubled by
7.
and by inadequate sanitation.
Question 8 - 13
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
8
Goods were carried by steam vessels not only along Britain's canals but also on voyages overseas.
9
Women made up the greater part of the workforce in the new textile mills.
10
Coke was made by heating charcoal.
11
The first commercial telegraph patent anywhere was the one obtained by Ellis Crane in the United States.
12
The wages paid to factory workers fell steadily lower as the years went by.
13
Some of those convicted were sent overseas to a distant prison settlement.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 18
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F.
14
an athlete’s own account of what she believed had caused her difficulties
15
an explanation of the two opposing elements whose balance gives rise to stress
16
reference to specific sports in which a strong reaction to pressure has improved athletes’ results
17
a description of the many bodily symptoms that anxiety can bring about
18
examples of techniques that help competitors manage pressure
Question 19 - 22
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
19
Reaching a high level of success calls for a great deal of bodily and mental
.
20
In a challenge state, adrenaline sends extra energy to the brain and the
.
21
Through visualisation, an athlete can build a feeling of
over a demanding, pressured moment.
22
Positive stress responses can be encouraged by the
that athletes and the people around them use.
Question 23 - 24
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO facts about Nika Beran’s withdrawal from the Fairhaven Championships are mentioned in the text?
A
the specific physical symptoms she experienced while playing
B
the round of the competition she had reached when she stopped
C
features of the event that added to the pressure on her
D
steps she had previously taken to keep her stress under control
E
how the public reacted to what she shared online
Question 25 - 26
Choose TWO letters, A-E.
Which TWO facts about anxiety are mentioned in Paragraph E of the text?
A
how long its effects take to appear
B
what determines how intense it becomes
C
the harm that repeated episodes can cause
D
the symptom that athletes experience most often
E
the category of sportsperson most affected by it
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 32
Complete the summary using the list of phrases, A-K, below.
Write the correct letter, A-K, in boxes on your answer sheet.
Vesna Antic
Vesna Antic stands out as among mathematicians, being the only female ever to receive the celebrated Delphi Medal — a distinction that was still hers on the day she died. In childhood, though, mathematics offered her little , and she was a decidedly ordinary pupil in the subject until a tricky puzzle, passed on by her brother, left her . Later, working as a professional mathematician, she had an enquiring mind and showed herself to be whenever her research hit difficulties. The deepest , by her own account, came from breaking entirely new ground, and she was behind a body of remarkably mathematical work.
A
committed
B
recognition
C
matchless
D
attraction
E
outstanding
F
captivated
G
enthusiasm
H
steadfast
I
fulfilment
J
pioneering
K
convinced
Question 33 - 37
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
33
Reinholt was offered a place at the polytechnic mainly because of how well he did in the general part of its entrance test.
34
A person's intelligence is not permanently fixed, because the brain is able to form new connections.
35
Marsh takes the view that only a small number of children could ever attain the standard expected of gifted pupils.
36
Cade discovered that the parents of high achievers had been more successful in their own careers than most other parents.
37
Reinholt maintained that character counts for more than raw brainpower in reaching the top of science.
Question 38 - 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
38
According to Marsh, what do children require if they are to match the standards of the 'gifted'?
A
firm discipline enforced by their teachers
B
being encouraged to develop a questioning attitude to their studies
C
help given by their fellow students in class
D
a determination to do better than everyone around them
39
What did Falk's research lead him to conclude?
A
Inborn, natural talent is not the main thing that produces expertise.
B
Students of exceptional ability have no need to practise memory skills.
C
Building in time for physical exercise is essential to better performance.
D
Putting in 10,000 hours of demanding practice is what turns someone into a genius.
40
In the second-to-last paragraph, the writer identifies the main reason some disadvantaged children do well as
A
a steady and nutritious diet provided at home.
B
well-funded educational facilities in their neighbourhood.
C
the presence of an individual who appreciates the value of education.
D
the devoted backing of two parents.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN
It was in Britain, around the middle of the eighteenth century, that the Industrial Revolution first took hold, and over the following eighty years or so it spread far beyond, reaching much of the wider world. A country that had been largely rural and agrarian was remade, within a few generations, into a crowded, industrial and urban one. Where goods had once been shaped by hand one at a time, they now poured out in vast numbers from machinery in factories — a change made possible by the harnessing of steam and by fresh devices and methods in textile-making, iron-working and many other trades.
The groundwork had been laid decades before, in the opening years of the century, when the English inventor Josiah Fenwick built what is usually counted as the first workable steam engine. Known as the vacuum engine, this early machine did just one job: driving the pumps that cleared water from mine shafts. In the 1760s the Scottish engineer Alec Rennick reworked one of Fenwick's designs into something far more efficient. Rennick then partnered the English manufacturer Nathaniel Harmon, and the two produced an engine powered by the piston's forward and backward strokes alike; linked to a gear mechanism, this back-and-forth motion was turned into rotary movement. This breakthrough finally let steam power spread into one British industry after another.
Coal, a comparatively cheap fuel, was wanted in ever-greater quantities as the Revolution went on, for it fired not only the factories that turned out manufactured goods but the new steam transport besides. An early steam locomotive was the work of the English engineer Edmund Cawley, built in the first years of the nineteenth century; within a few decades both freight and travellers could be carried between the manufacturing towns of Halewick and Marnport. On the water, too, steam boats and ships were pressed into service, moving cargo along the country's canals and out across the ocean.
For hundreds of years Britain had made cloth from wool, linen and cotton, but before the Revolution this was a true cottage trade, with spinning, weaving and dyeing all done by hand, worker by worker, in small workshops or in people's own homes. From the middle of the eighteenth century a run of inventions — the twist-frame and the driven loom among them — made spinning thread and weaving cloth far quicker than before. Since such machines called for comparatively few hands, the mechanised mills that sprang up around the country were soon able to satisfy the demand for cloth from buyers both in Britain and overseas.
The iron trade was transformed as well. Foremost among the new methods was the smelting of iron ore with coke — a substance got by heating coal — in place of the charcoal that had always been used before. Cheaper than the older process, it also yielded metal of markedly higher quality, so that Britain's output of iron and steel could grow to meet the demand created by the Continental Wars (1802-1814) and, from the 1830s onward, by the spread of the railways.
The Revolution's later stages brought notable strides in communication, as the worth of sending messages swiftly over long distances grew ever plainer. The first commercial telegraph was patented in 1838 by the British inventors Gideon Sladen and Percival Thorne; across the very same years, Ellis Crane and others in the United States were at work on rival designs of their own. In Britain, Sladen and Thorne's telegraph was soon taken up on the railways for signalling, for as locomotives grew faster a quick and dependable way of keeping trains from colliding had become indispensable.
The mark the Revolution left on everyday life was profound. People had already been drifting from the countryside into the towns before it began, but industrialisation sent that movement racing ahead, as the rise of great factories swelled modest settlements into major cities within a few decades. Such headlong growth came at a cost: the packed, overcrowded cities were plagued by pollution and by sanitation that fell far short of what was needed.
Industrialisation lifted the nation's economic output and raised living standards for the middle and upper classes, yet for many of the poor life stayed a struggle. In the factories the hours were long, the conditions dangerous and the wages desperately low. Such hardship, and the sheer speed of the changes, stirred up resistance to the new order. Among the discontented were workers later remembered as the 'Corbinites', weavers and textile hands who opposed the growing use of mechanised looms and knitting frames. Having spent years mastering their craft, they dreaded being cast aside for untrained operators who merely tended a machine; a few desperate men forced their way into factories and wrecked the equipment. The name came from Ned Corbin, an apprentice said to have smashed a frame in 1774.
The earliest large-scale machine-breaking broke out in 1809 in the town of Bardwell, and from there spread quickly through the country. Bands of Corbinites set factories alight and, now and then, traded gunfire with the guards and soldiers sent against them. What the workers wanted was an end to the installing of new machinery; the government's response was to make the wrecking of machines a crime punishable by death. Things came to a head in the spring of 1810, when several Corbinites were shot dead storming a mill close to Elmsworth. Arrests followed, and dozens of men were hanged or shipped off to the far-flung penal colony of Carentia. By 1811 the movement had faded almost entirely away.
A. Life as a professional athlete is far from easy. The bodily demands alone would overwhelm most ordinary people, and on top of them competitors must withstand fierce mental pressure every time they compete. It was precisely this that the Slovenian tennis player Nika Beran described in a post she shared online after withdrawing from the 2019 Fairhaven Championships. She had been performing strongly until then, but partway through one match she found her breathing and heartbeat impossible to steady — a reaction she later put down to what she called ‘everything piling up at once, the thrill and the sheer noise of it’.
B
B.
For any competitor, a certain amount of performance stress is more or less inescapable. Precisely how a given person’s body and mind react to a stressful moment, though, is shaped by a wide array of factors. In essence, stress emerges from a kind of trade-off between two things: the demands being made and the resources available to meet them. Should the demands appear to exceed what an athlete can manage, stress is likely to follow. Among the demands are the heavy physical and mental effort that success requires, alongside the athlete’s anxieties about how testing the event will be, their prospects of winning, and any threat of harm such as injury. The resources, by contrast, amount to a person’s capacity to handle those demands — their level of confidence, the degree to which they believe the outcome is theirs to control, and whether they face the event with eagerness or with dread.
C
Every fresh demand, or shift in circumstances, helps decide whether someone reacts to stress well or badly. As a rule, the greater the resources a person believes they can bring to bear, the more favourable their stress response — a positive reaction of this sort is termed a challenge state. Where the demands instead feel overwhelming, a negative response becomes more likely, and this is known as a threat state. Studies indicate that challenge states tend to produce strong performances, whereas threat states are linked to weaker ones. For Beran, then, a far bigger crowd, loftier expectations and an opponent of greater ability may together have convinced her that the demands upon her had grown — without her having the resources to match them. The result was a threat response.
D
In effect, our challenge and threat responses shape the way the body reacts under stress, since each alters the output of two hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, commonly labelled ‘stress hormones’. Within a challenge state, adrenaline raises the volume of blood the heart pumps and widens the blood vessels, so that additional energy reaches the muscles and the brain. That combination of increased blood flow and reduced pressure in the vessels has repeatedly been tied to better sporting results — in disciplines as varied as batting at cricket, putting in golf and taking penalties at football. In a threat state, by contrast, cortisol suppresses adrenaline’s benefits, leaving the vessels narrower, blood pressure higher, mental reactions slower and the heartbeat quicker. Put simply, a threat state heightens anxiety: choices worsen and performance suffers. Among tennis players, cortisol has been connected with a greater number of failed serves and with heightened anxiety.
E
Even so, anxiety is something athletes routinely feel when the pressure is on. It can drive up the heart rate and perspiration, trigger palpitations, muscle tremors and breathlessness, and in the worst cases bring on headaches, nausea, stomach pain, weakness and an urge to flee. Anxiety can likewise blunt concentration and self-control while fuelling overthinking. How fiercely a person feels it comes down to the demands they face and the resources they hold. Depending on the stress response, moreover, the same anxiety may surface as excitement or as nervousness. Negative responses can harm body and mind alike — and bouts of anxiety, repeated and paired with such responses, can raise the likelihood of heart disease and depression.
F
There are, however, plenty of ways for athletes to make sure they respond well when the pressure mounts. The language used by the athletes themselves, and by those around them like coaches or parents, can encourage a positive response. Psychologists, too, can teach athletes to reinterpret their bodily reactions — to read a racing heart as a sign of excitement rather than of nerves. Cultivating mental skills such as visualisation likewise helps dampen the body’s threat responses. In visualisation an athlete might rebuild in the mind a moment when they competed well, or imagine themselves succeeding in some future contest; either way it fosters a sense of control over the stressful situation. Reproducing competitive pressure in training is another route: awarding athletes scores against their teammates, for instance, manufactures a feeling of rivalry, raising the demands beyond those of an ordinary session while still letting them rehearse how to cope with stress.
Consider a mathematician often called a modern genius, Vesna Antic, whose life ended when she was only 41. She remains the sole woman ever awarded the Delphi Medal, a prize regarded as mathematics' counterpart to the Nobel. One might assume a figure of her stature must have belonged among the 'gifted' - the few children with remarkable ability in one field of knowledge. Yet a closer look tells another tale. Antic grew up in Belgrade, and although she attended a fiercely competitive girls' school, it was books, not numbers, that absorbed her; she devoured whatever novels she could find. Mathematics, by contrast, largely defeated her in her first year or two at middle school, and her marks stayed below the class average. Things changed when her older brother came home talking about a celebrated problem from a science magazine; the puzzle gripped her, and she was hooked.
By her professional years she was plainly inquisitive, energised by her work and unwilling to give up whenever she met an obstacle. A remark of hers captures this: 'The sweetest part, naturally, is the flash of insight - the thrill of discovery, the pleasure of grasping something new. But for most of the working day, doing mathematics feels to me like a long trek across country with no path marked and no destination in view.' It was that trackless trek which carried her to the summit of original mathematical research.
Was her upbringing out of the ordinary? It seems not. The childhoods of most people who go on to take the top prizes were, on the whole, unremarkable. Take Tomas Reinholt: as an infant he was slow to begin speaking, and years later he was turned down on the general section of the entrance examination for a leading polytechnic, winning a place only because his marks in physics and mathematics were so high. Nor did his first years in work go smoothly, yet he kept at it, and in time he swept away the classical laws of motion physicists had leaned on for centuries, putting in their place a bold new theory of space, time and gravity.
Over the past hundred years, a great deal of study into exceptional achievement has indicated that it rests on far more than measured intelligence. The evidence also leaves little doubt that the brain is adaptable, that fresh neural connections can form, and that a person's IQ is not set in stone. Being able, at five, to read storybooks running to hundreds of pages is no guarantee that you will still be outpacing your peers as a teenager.
Whether or not giftedness is something people are born with - and whether other influences are what truly count - remains an open question. What is beyond doubt, though, is that the patterns of behaviour that go hand in hand with top-level performance can be reproduced, and that most of them, curiosity included, are open to being taught.
My colleague Professor Helena Marsh, with whom I wrote the book Ordinary Minds, Remarkable Results, points out that recent neuroscience and psychology implies most people can reach the sort of performance schools label 'gifted and talented'. The condition, she stresses, is that learners be shown the right frames of mind and ways of working, and build the qualities top performers share - among them curiosity, perseverance and sheer effort. Marsh gives this method a name: 'high-attainment learning'. Just as crucial, encouragement to cultivate such habits must come from home as much as from the classroom.
Professor Reuben Falk, a distinguished educational psychologist at Carrowmore University, co-wrote Summit: Inside the New Science of Expertise. Having examined achievements as varied as music, memory and sport in work stretching back to 1980, he rejects the notion that rare, inborn gifts lie behind exceptional performance. What delivers results, to his mind, is deliberate practice - the kind that pushes you at every stage - amounting to something like 10,000 hours. That figure is not magical; those at the very top go well past it. His memory work is especially striking: ordinary students coached in such techniques for the experiment outdid people credited with naturally superior recall - the very individuals you might call gifted.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking findings belong to Marlon Cade, another eminent American educationist active in the 1980s. The team he led examined exceptionally accomplished individuals drawn from fields as different as ballet, swimming, piano, tennis, mathematics, sculpture and neurology. Across every one Cade detected the same thread: parents who backed and encouraged their children, frequently in pursuits the parents themselves loved. Each had fastened onto something at an early age and laboured at it long and steadily, and in each case the parents proved to have powerful work ethics of their own.
Marsh maintains that we now understand how high performers learn, and on that basis has built her high-attainment approach, trialled with schools in Britain and elsewhere. One offshoot study is particularly telling. Of the 3,000 youngsters under investigation, researchers looked closely at 24 who were thriving in spite of hard circumstances. Roughly half received free school meals on account of poverty, over half lived with just one parent, and four out of every five came from deprived neighbourhoods. When interviewed, these children pointed repeatedly to at least one adult - in the close or extended family, or the surrounding community - who prized education and stood behind it. They spoke of buckling down at school, paying attention in lessons and never giving up.
Let us close, as we opened, with a genius - Reinholt, the very picture of one. Curiosity, character and dogged resolve were all his. Rejection shadowed his early life, and yet none of it put him off. Did he see himself as gifted, or as a genius at all? He once put it this way: 'I am not especially clever; I simply refuse to abandon a problem before others would. People suppose that a fine mind is what makes a great scientist. That is a mistake - what really counts is character.'
It was in Britain, around the middle of the eighteenth century, that the Industrial Revolution first took hold, and over the following eighty years or so it spread far beyond, reaching much of the wider world. A country that had been largely rural and agrarian was remade, within a few generations, into a crowded, industrial and urban one. Where goods had once been shaped by hand one at a time, they now poured out in vast numbers from machinery in factories — a change made possible by the harnessing of steam and by fresh devices and methods in textile-making, iron-working and many other trades.
The groundwork had been laid decades before, in the opening years of the century, when the English inventor Josiah Fenwick built what is usually counted as the first workable steam engine. Known as the vacuum engine, this early machine did just one job: driving the pumps that cleared water from mine shafts. In the 1760s the Scottish engineer Alec Rennick reworked one of Fenwick's designs into something far more efficient. Rennick then partnered the English manufacturer Nathaniel Harmon, and the two produced an engine powered by the piston's forward and backward strokes alike; linked to a gear mechanism, this back-and-forth motion was turned into rotary movement. This breakthrough finally let steam power spread into one British industry after another.
Coal, a comparatively cheap fuel, was wanted in ever-greater quantities as the Revolution went on, for it fired not only the factories that turned out manufactured goods but the new steam transport besides. An early steam locomotive was the work of the English engineer Edmund Cawley, built in the first years of the nineteenth century; within a few decades both freight and travellers could be carried between the manufacturing towns of Halewick and Marnport. On the water, too, steam boats and ships were pressed into service, moving cargo along the country's canals and out across the ocean.
For hundreds of years Britain had made cloth from wool, linen and cotton, but before the Revolution this was a true cottage trade, with spinning, weaving and dyeing all done by hand, worker by worker, in small workshops or in people's own homes. From the middle of the eighteenth century a run of inventions — the twist-frame and the driven loom among them — made spinning thread and weaving cloth far quicker than before. Since such machines called for comparatively few hands, the mechanised mills that sprang up around the country were soon able to satisfy the demand for cloth from buyers both in Britain and overseas.
The iron trade was transformed as well. Foremost among the new methods was the smelting of iron ore with coke — a substance got by heating coal — in place of the charcoal that had always been used before. Cheaper than the older process, it also yielded metal of markedly higher quality, so that Britain's output of iron and steel could grow to meet the demand created by the Continental Wars (1802-1814) and, from the 1830s onward, by the spread of the railways.
The Revolution's later stages brought notable strides in communication, as the worth of sending messages swiftly over long distances grew ever plainer. The first commercial telegraph was patented in 1838 by the British inventors Gideon Sladen and Percival Thorne; across the very same years, Ellis Crane and others in the United States were at work on rival designs of their own. In Britain, Sladen and Thorne's telegraph was soon taken up on the railways for signalling, for as locomotives grew faster a quick and dependable way of keeping trains from colliding had become indispensable.
The mark the Revolution left on everyday life was profound. People had already been drifting from the countryside into the towns before it began, but industrialisation sent that movement racing ahead, as the rise of great factories swelled modest settlements into major cities within a few decades. Such headlong growth came at a cost: the packed, overcrowded cities were plagued by pollution and by sanitation that fell far short of what was needed.
Industrialisation lifted the nation's economic output and raised living standards for the middle and upper classes, yet for many of the poor life stayed a struggle. In the factories the hours were long, the conditions dangerous and the wages desperately low. Such hardship, and the sheer speed of the changes, stirred up resistance to the new order. Among the discontented were workers later remembered as the 'Corbinites', weavers and textile hands who opposed the growing use of mechanised looms and knitting frames. Having spent years mastering their craft, they dreaded being cast aside for untrained operators who merely tended a machine; a few desperate men forced their way into factories and wrecked the equipment. The name came from Ned Corbin, an apprentice said to have smashed a frame in 1774.
The earliest large-scale machine-breaking broke out in 1809 in the town of Bardwell, and from there spread quickly through the country. Bands of Corbinites set factories alight and, now and then, traded gunfire with the guards and soldiers sent against them. What the workers wanted was an end to the installing of new machinery; the government's response was to make the wrecking of machines a crime punishable by death. Things came to a head in the spring of 1810, when several Corbinites were shot dead storming a mill close to Elmsworth. Arrests followed, and dozens of men were hanged or shipped off to the far-flung penal colony of Carentia. By 1811 the movement had faded almost entirely away.
For any competitor, a certain amount of performance stress is more or less inescapable. Precisely how a given person’s body and mind react to a stressful moment, though, is shaped by a wide array of factors. In essence, stress emerges from a kind of trade-off between two things: the demands being made and the resources available to meet them. Should the demands appear to exceed what an athlete can manage, stress is likely to follow. Among the demands are the heavy physical and mental effort that success requires, alongside the athlete’s anxieties about how testing the event will be, their prospects of winning, and any threat of harm such as injury. The resources, by contrast, amount to a person’s capacity to handle those demands — their level of confidence, the degree to which they believe the outcome is theirs to control, and whether they face the event with eagerness or with dread.
C. Every fresh demand, or shift in circumstances, helps decide whether someone reacts to stress well or badly. As a rule, the greater the resources a person believes they can bring to bear, the more favourable their stress response — a positive reaction of this sort is termed a challenge state. Where the demands instead feel overwhelming, a negative response becomes more likely, and this is known as a threat state. Studies indicate that challenge states tend to produce strong performances, whereas threat states are linked to weaker ones. For Beran, then, a far bigger crowd, loftier expectations and an opponent of greater ability may together have convinced her that the demands upon her had grown — without her having the resources to match them. The result was a threat response.
D. In effect, our challenge and threat responses shape the way the body reacts under stress, since each alters the output of two hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, commonly labelled ‘stress hormones’. Within a challenge state, adrenaline raises the volume of blood the heart pumps and widens the blood vessels, so that additional energy reaches the muscles and the brain. That combination of increased blood flow and reduced pressure in the vessels has repeatedly been tied to better sporting results — in disciplines as varied as batting at cricket, putting in golf and taking penalties at football. In a threat state, by contrast, cortisol suppresses adrenaline’s benefits, leaving the vessels narrower, blood pressure higher, mental reactions slower and the heartbeat quicker. Put simply, a threat state heightens anxiety: choices worsen and performance suffers. Among tennis players, cortisol has been connected with a greater number of failed serves and with heightened anxiety.
E. Even so, anxiety is something athletes routinely feel when the pressure is on. It can drive up the heart rate and perspiration, trigger palpitations, muscle tremors and breathlessness, and in the worst cases bring on headaches, nausea, stomach pain, weakness and an urge to flee. Anxiety can likewise blunt concentration and self-control while fuelling overthinking. How fiercely a person feels it comes down to the demands they face and the resources they hold. Depending on the stress response, moreover, the same anxiety may surface as excitement or as nervousness. Negative responses can harm body and mind alike — and bouts of anxiety, repeated and paired with such responses, can raise the likelihood of heart disease and depression.
F. There are, however, plenty of ways for athletes to make sure they respond well when the pressure mounts. The language used by the athletes themselves, and by those around them like coaches or parents, can encourage a positive response. Psychologists, too, can teach athletes to reinterpret their bodily reactions — to read a racing heart as a sign of excitement rather than of nerves. Cultivating mental skills such as visualisation likewise helps dampen the body’s threat responses. In visualisation an athlete might rebuild in the mind a moment when they competed well, or imagine themselves succeeding in some future contest; either way it fosters a sense of control over the stressful situation. Reproducing competitive pressure in training is another route: awarding athletes scores against their teammates, for instance, manufactures a feeling of rivalry, raising the demands beyond those of an ordinary session while still letting them rehearse how to cope with stress.
Consider a mathematician often called a modern genius, Vesna Antic, whose life ended when she was only 41. She remains the sole woman ever awarded the Delphi Medal, a prize regarded as mathematics' counterpart to the Nobel. One might assume a figure of her stature must have belonged among the 'gifted' - the few children with remarkable ability in one field of knowledge. Yet a closer look tells another tale. Antic grew up in Belgrade, and although she attended a fiercely competitive girls' school, it was books, not numbers, that absorbed her; she devoured whatever novels she could find. Mathematics, by contrast, largely defeated her in her first year or two at middle school, and her marks stayed below the class average. Things changed when her older brother came home talking about a celebrated problem from a science magazine; the puzzle gripped her, and she was hooked.
By her professional years she was plainly inquisitive, energised by her work and unwilling to give up whenever she met an obstacle. A remark of hers captures this: 'The sweetest part, naturally, is the flash of insight - the thrill of discovery, the pleasure of grasping something new. But for most of the working day, doing mathematics feels to me like a long trek across country with no path marked and no destination in view.' It was that trackless trek which carried her to the summit of original mathematical research.
Was her upbringing out of the ordinary? It seems not. The childhoods of most people who go on to take the top prizes were, on the whole, unremarkable. Take Tomas Reinholt: as an infant he was slow to begin speaking, and years later he was turned down on the general section of the entrance examination for a leading polytechnic, winning a place only because his marks in physics and mathematics were so high. Nor did his first years in work go smoothly, yet he kept at it, and in time he swept away the classical laws of motion physicists had leaned on for centuries, putting in their place a bold new theory of space, time and gravity.
Over the past hundred years, a great deal of study into exceptional achievement has indicated that it rests on far more than measured intelligence. The evidence also leaves little doubt that the brain is adaptable, that fresh neural connections can form, and that a person's IQ is not set in stone. Being able, at five, to read storybooks running to hundreds of pages is no guarantee that you will still be outpacing your peers as a teenager.
Whether or not giftedness is something people are born with - and whether other influences are what truly count - remains an open question. What is beyond doubt, though, is that the patterns of behaviour that go hand in hand with top-level performance can be reproduced, and that most of them, curiosity included, are open to being taught.
My colleague Professor Helena Marsh, with whom I wrote the book Ordinary Minds, Remarkable Results, points out that recent neuroscience and psychology implies most people can reach the sort of performance schools label 'gifted and talented'. The condition, she stresses, is that learners be shown the right frames of mind and ways of working, and build the qualities top performers share - among them curiosity, perseverance and sheer effort. Marsh gives this method a name: 'high-attainment learning'. Just as crucial, encouragement to cultivate such habits must come from home as much as from the classroom.
Professor Reuben Falk, a distinguished educational psychologist at Carrowmore University, co-wrote Summit: Inside the New Science of Expertise. Having examined achievements as varied as music, memory and sport in work stretching back to 1980, he rejects the notion that rare, inborn gifts lie behind exceptional performance. What delivers results, to his mind, is deliberate practice - the kind that pushes you at every stage - amounting to something like 10,000 hours. That figure is not magical; those at the very top go well past it. His memory work is especially striking: ordinary students coached in such techniques for the experiment outdid people credited with naturally superior recall - the very individuals you might call gifted.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking findings belong to Marlon Cade, another eminent American educationist active in the 1980s. The team he led examined exceptionally accomplished individuals drawn from fields as different as ballet, swimming, piano, tennis, mathematics, sculpture and neurology. Across every one Cade detected the same thread: parents who backed and encouraged their children, frequently in pursuits the parents themselves loved. Each had fastened onto something at an early age and laboured at it long and steadily, and in each case the parents proved to have powerful work ethics of their own.
Marsh maintains that we now understand how high performers learn, and on that basis has built her high-attainment approach, trialled with schools in Britain and elsewhere. One offshoot study is particularly telling. Of the 3,000 youngsters under investigation, researchers looked closely at 24 who were thriving in spite of hard circumstances. Roughly half received free school meals on account of poverty, over half lived with just one parent, and four out of every five came from deprived neighbourhoods. When interviewed, these children pointed repeatedly to at least one adult - in the close or extended family, or the surrounding community - who prized education and stood behind it. They spoke of buckling down at school, paying attention in lessons and never giving up.
Let us close, as we opened, with a genius - Reinholt, the very picture of one. Curiosity, character and dogged resolve were all his. Rejection shadowed his early life, and yet none of it put him off. Did he see himself as gifted, or as a genius at all? He once put it this way: 'I am not especially clever; I simply refuse to abandon a problem before others would. People suppose that a fine mind is what makes a great scientist. That is a mistake - what really counts is character.'
Consider a mathematician often called a modern genius, Vesna Antic, whose life ended when she was only 41. She remains the sole woman ever awarded the Delphi Medal, a prize regarded as mathematics' counterpart to the Nobel. One might assume a figure of her stature must have belonged among the 'gifted' - the few children with remarkable ability in one field of knowledge. Yet a closer look tells another tale. Antic grew up in Belgrade, and although she attended a fiercely competitive girls' school, it was books, not numbers, that absorbed her; she devoured whatever novels she could find. Mathematics, by contrast, largely defeated her in her first year or two at middle school, and her marks stayed below the class average. Things changed when her older brother came home talking about a celebrated problem from a science magazine; the puzzle gripped her, and she was hooked.
By her professional years she was plainly inquisitive, energised by her work and unwilling to give up whenever she met an obstacle. A remark of hers captures this: 'The sweetest part, naturally, is the flash of insight - the thrill of discovery, the pleasure of grasping something new. But for most of the working day, doing mathematics feels to me like a long trek across country with no path marked and no destination in view.' It was that trackless trek which carried her to the summit of original mathematical research.
Was her upbringing out of the ordinary? It seems not. The childhoods of most people who go on to take the top prizes were, on the whole, unremarkable. Take Tomas Reinholt: as an infant he was slow to begin speaking, and years later he was turned down on the general section of the entrance examination for a leading polytechnic, winning a place only because his marks in physics and mathematics were so high. Nor did his first years in work go smoothly, yet he kept at it, and in time he swept away the classical laws of motion physicists had leaned on for centuries, putting in their place a bold new theory of space, time and gravity.
Over the past hundred years, a great deal of study into exceptional achievement has indicated that it rests on far more than measured intelligence. The evidence also leaves little doubt that the brain is adaptable, that fresh neural connections can form, and that a person's IQ is not set in stone. Being able, at five, to read storybooks running to hundreds of pages is no guarantee that you will still be outpacing your peers as a teenager.
Whether or not giftedness is something people are born with - and whether other influences are what truly count - remains an open question. What is beyond doubt, though, is that the patterns of behaviour that go hand in hand with top-level performance can be reproduced, and that most of them, curiosity included, are open to being taught.
My colleague Professor Helena Marsh, with whom I wrote the book Ordinary Minds, Remarkable Results, points out that recent neuroscience and psychology implies most people can reach the sort of performance schools label 'gifted and talented'. The condition, she stresses, is that learners be shown the right frames of mind and ways of working, and build the qualities top performers share - among them curiosity, perseverance and sheer effort. Marsh gives this method a name: 'high-attainment learning'. Just as crucial, encouragement to cultivate such habits must come from home as much as from the classroom.
Professor Reuben Falk, a distinguished educational psychologist at Carrowmore University, co-wrote Summit: Inside the New Science of Expertise. Having examined achievements as varied as music, memory and sport in work stretching back to 1980, he rejects the notion that rare, inborn gifts lie behind exceptional performance. What delivers results, to his mind, is deliberate practice - the kind that pushes you at every stage - amounting to something like 10,000 hours. That figure is not magical; those at the very top go well past it. His memory work is especially striking: ordinary students coached in such techniques for the experiment outdid people credited with naturally superior recall - the very individuals you might call gifted.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking findings belong to Marlon Cade, another eminent American educationist active in the 1980s. The team he led examined exceptionally accomplished individuals drawn from fields as different as ballet, swimming, piano, tennis, mathematics, sculpture and neurology. Across every one Cade detected the same thread: parents who backed and encouraged their children, frequently in pursuits the parents themselves loved. Each had fastened onto something at an early age and laboured at it long and steadily, and in each case the parents proved to have powerful work ethics of their own.
Marsh maintains that we now understand how high performers learn, and on that basis has built her high-attainment approach, trialled with schools in Britain and elsewhere. One offshoot study is particularly telling. Of the 3,000 youngsters under investigation, researchers looked closely at 24 who were thriving in spite of hard circumstances. Roughly half received free school meals on account of poverty, over half lived with just one parent, and four out of every five came from deprived neighbourhoods. When interviewed, these children pointed repeatedly to at least one adult - in the close or extended family, or the surrounding community - who prized education and stood behind it. They spoke of buckling down at school, paying attention in lessons and never giving up.
Let us close, as we opened, with a genius - Reinholt, the very picture of one. Curiosity, character and dogged resolve were all his. Rejection shadowed his early life, and yet none of it put him off. Did he see himself as gifted, or as a genius at all? He once put it this way: 'I am not especially clever; I simply refuse to abandon a problem before others would. People suppose that a fine mind is what makes a great scientist. That is a mistake - what really counts is character.'
