IELTS CAM Inspired 9 - Reading Test 2 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 9 - Reading Test 2 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 6
Reading Passage 1 has nine sections, A-I.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-I.
1
an estimate of how many children are affected
2
the range of conditions that make certain pupils especially vulnerable to noise
3
a description of a condition that disrupts social understanding
4
the setting-up of an international working group
5
a call for rules to be agreed between countries
6
an outline of one government's official plan
Question 7 - 10
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
7
Over how long a period have hearing difficulties in schoolchildren been researched in Ireland?
8
Apart from the din of machinery, what is the other kind of sound that autistic children may find painful?
9
Which word is used for the undiagnosed disabilities thought to be widespread among pupils?
10
Under which numbered objective does the Framework promise disabled learners a fair chance at education?
Question 11 - 12
Choose TWO letters, A-F.
The options below are possible causes of noise in classrooms. Which TWO does the writer actually refer to?
A
current teaching methods
B
echoing corridors
C
cooling systems
D
large class sizes
E
loud-voiced teachers
F
playground games
Question 13
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
13
What is the author's chief aim in this article?
A
to weigh up rival ways of treating auditory difficulties
B
to set out fixes for classrooms that are too noisy
C
to hold Ireland up as an example for other countries to copy
D
to make more people aware of the difficulties faced by children with auditory difficulties
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 17
Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-G.
14
a claim that untrained observers once achieved greater accuracy than trained experts
15
a description of optical distortions that prevented the precise timing of the crossing
16
a reference to the way warfare between nations disrupted the observation expeditions
17
mention of a major future discovery that studying transits might make possible
Question 18 - 21
Look at the following statements and the list of people below.
Match each statement with the correct person, A-D.
Write the correct letter, A-D.
List of Findings
A
Armand Cazenave
B
Reinhard Faber
C
Anselm Kroll
D
Silas Thornbury
18
By analysing transit data, he produced a fairly accurate value for how far the Sun lies from the Earth.
19
He understood that setting one transit observation against another would reveal the Earth–Sun distance.
20
He recognised that how long a planet takes to circle the Sun is governed by its distance from it.
21
He saw a transit take place but was unable to turn it into usable measurements.
Question 22 - 26
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 it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
22
Halland's party enjoyed clear conditions for observing the 1882 transit.
23
The transit that Thornbury himself observed involved a planet other than Venus.
24
Thornbury was still alive when the transits he had predicted took place.
25
The glow seen around Venus was taken as proof that the planet had no atmosphere of its own.
26
Upcoming crossings of Venus will most likely be observed chiefly by amateur stargazers.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 31
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
27
The emerging discipline of neuroeconomics is chiefly concerned with
A
explaining why scientists once misunderstood the chemistry of the brain.
B
showing how the brain underlies success in settings that reward originality.
C
mapping the exact neuron-firing sequences across separate brain regions.
D
establishing which decisions in the brain deserve to be called good.
28
The writer considers iconoclasts exceptional chiefly because
A
their personalities set them apart from other people.
B
they find decisions unusually easy to reach.
C
they construct unusual circuits within the brain.
D
their brains simply work in a different way from everyone else's.
29
The reason the brain operates so efficiently, in the writer's account, is that
A
it makes use of earlier knowledge.
B
it processes incoming data by strict logic.
C
it produces its own supply of energy.
D
it makes rapid use of the eyes.
30
On the writer's understanding, perception is
A
something we are typically aware of as it occurs.
B
a dependable record of what the senses deliver.
C
essentially a blend of light and sound energy.
D
largely manufactured by the brain itself.
31
In the writer's view, someone who thinks like an iconoclast
A
concentrates all perceptual work in one region of the brain.
B
enjoys a wider range of chances than most people.
C
sidesteps the mental shortcuts that mislead most people.
D
is born with a brain wired to keep on learning.
Question 32 - 37
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
In following statements below, choose
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
32
The brain perceives the world more accurately when it draws on what it already knows.
33
People who regularly seek out novelty find it less unsettling as time goes on.
34
The average person tends to steer clear of what is unfamiliar.
35
Feeling anxious about the unknown is harder to conquer than the fear of being mocked in public.
36
Speaking in public is required so rarely that most people can escape it altogether.
37
The writer treats nervousness about speaking to an audience as a normal part of being human.
Question 38 - 40
Complete each of the following statements with the best ending A-E from the box below.
List of Endings
A
can leave a person exposed to disapproval and rejection.
B
calls for strengths both in perception and in dealing with people.
C
examines the way groups of people arrive at their choices.
D
proves useful across pursuits ranging from the arts to the sciences.
E
centres on how institutions handle their staff.
To think in a genuinely iconoclastic way is taxing because it
38
Research on the social brain matters to iconoclasts in that it
39
The reason iconoclasts tend to benefit an organisation is that their manner of thinking
40
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Children with auditory problems
A
A. When young children cannot hear properly, whether through hearing loss or some other breakdown in auditory function, learning to speak and communicate is often set back, and their schooling suffers for it. The damage does not stop with the child; it reaches families and, in the end, society at large. Drawing on fifteen years of investigation, Ireland's Institute for Child Development reports that between 7 and 11 per cent of the country's children live with some measure of hearing loss.
B
That noise in the classroom is a serious problem for teachers and pupils alike has now been confirmed by an initial Irish study. Several things feed it: the way the desks are grouped together, the sound that funnels in along the hard corridors outside, and, above all, the growing number of pupils crammed into a single room. A further explanation has been put forward by the education researchers Halvorsen and Kruse, who argue that it is the modern preference for large, open rooms lined with hard, sound-reflecting surfaces that has driven noise levels upwards. Whatever its origins, this din is anything but trivial for a child whose auditory function is impaired: against such a background, keeping track of what classmates say and what the teacher asks becomes only harder still.
C
Unease is mounting over the way ordinary classroom noise holds children back, and a child with an auditory deficit may be stopped from ever reaching the level he or she is capable of. Acting on guidance issued by the World Health Organization, a cross-border panel has now been convened by the International Association for Noise Abatement in Buildings, with Ireland among its members, and given the task of working out how noise and reverberation in schools might be brought under control.
D
Everyone in a noisy classroom is affected, not only children who happen to have a disability; yet where a disability disturbs the way speech and language are handled, the child can be left especially exposed. Three broad groups of auditory deficit are at issue here: hearing that is impaired, the autistic spectrum disorders (ASD), and the attention deficit disorders (ADD/ADHD).
E
A lifelong condition springing from both the brain and the genes, autism reshapes the way information is taken in and interpreted. What marks it out is a knot of interlocking difficulties across social imagination, social communication and social interaction. As Lindqvist observes, these upset a child's grasp of other people, of the events and objects in the surrounding world, and of the sensory signals coming in. A child with autism does not, in the end, learn or reason as a typically developing child does. One common upshot is real trouble in following and decoding spoken language. To many such children certain sounds, among them the roar of traffic and the din thrown off by machinery, are little short of painful. Just how far this goes is hard to pin down, since the sensitivity ranges enormously from one child to the next. What stays clear is that any sound a child finds intrusive is likely to impair how well information is absorbed.
F
Neurological and inherited too, the attention deficit disorders reveal themselves through a familiar set of struggles: attention that will not stay put, effort and persistence that fade fast, shaky organisation, and acting without restraint. Filtering out what does not matter is beyond such a child, who takes in the whole of the surroundings at once rather than fixing on one task. A wash of classroom noise behind this becomes a formidable distraction, wearing concentration down.
G
Isolating speech from a wall of background noise, and then making sense of it, can prove extraordinarily hard for a child with an auditory deficit. That background is fed from several directions at once: sound pushing in from activities beyond the walls, the comings and goings within the room, and further noise magnified wherever the space reverberates. What is needed is a set of strategies: better-built rooms, and perhaps some change to how the school day is organised. The toll such noise takes on children with an auditory deficit calls, in particular, for careful study. In all likelihood the school system holds many children whose disabilities have never been picked up, 'hidden' disabilities as one might call them, whose needs, unlike those of the already diagnosed, tend to slip by unanswered.
H
For its own part, the Irish government has drawn up a National Disability Framework and thrown it open to wide public consultation. The Framework concedes that disabled people meet real obstacles to a full and decent life, whether in the attitudes shown towards them, in education, in work, or in reaching the services they require. Objective 4 of the Framework, 'To Deliver the Best Possible Education for Disabled People', sets out to remake education so that every child, young learner and adult learner is given an equal chance to learn and grow inside the local school he or she already attends. Since so much of a sound education rests on the learning environment, whatever is done to better it promises to help all children, and those with auditory disabilities above all.
I
Rules of their own for holding classroom noise down are already being drafted in a number of nations, and before long Ireland is likely to do the same. What has been written so far on noise in schools tends to dwell on schoolchildren at large, on their teachers, and on those whose hearing is impaired; the pupils whose auditory deficits take some other form have drawn no more than passing notice. Should the international standards due to be issued in the years ahead prove worth having, the needs of these children cannot be allowed to fall outside the account.
When Venus passed across the Sun's face in June 2004, no living person had witnessed such a crossing — an event astronomers label a 'transit' — for more than a century. According to Marina Fosse and Elliot Rand, occurrences of this sort have done much to shape the way we understand the Universe at large.
A
A. A rare sight was shared by more than half the world's inhabitants on 8 June 2004, as Venus took over six hours to edge its way slowly across the Sun. The previous such crossing had occurred back on 6 December 1882, an event recorded by an expedition that the Swedish astronomer Professor Viggo Halland led to New Zealand. The group set up at a girls' boarding school, and there — or so the tale is told — three of the resident schoolmistresses made observations whose precision surpassed that of the trained professionals accompanying them.
B
Over the centuries, the desire to watch Venus cross the Sun has sent astronomers and explorers to the most far-flung places on Earth — and the credit for that belongs to a remarkable all-rounder, Silas Thornbury. It was a transit of Mercury, the planet nearest the Sun, that Thornbury watched in November 1677 from the bleak, isolated island of Kerguelen in the southern ocean, and from it he drew a crucial insight: viewed from different latitudes, a planet's path across the solar disc does not look quite the same. Should two teams time such a passage from places far apart, they could work out the parallax angle — that is, how much a body's apparent position shifts when the observer's own position changes. Pinning down that angle was the route to astronomy's great prize of the day: knowing how far the Earth sits from the Sun, a span now called the 'astronomical unit', or AU.
C
To Thornbury, the AU ranked among the most basic measurements astronomy could offer. Early in the seventeenth century, Anselm Kroll had demonstrated that a planet's distance from the Sun set the pace of its orbit — and those orbital speeds were straightforward to measure — yet nobody had devised a means of fixing the planets' true distances from Earth. Establish the AU, and, since the orbital speeds of the remaining planets were already known, the dimensions of the Solar System would follow. The snag Thornbury saw was that Mercury lay so distant that reading its parallax angle would be extremely awkward; Venus, being nearer, would present a wider angle, and he calculated that it could yield the Sun's distance to within one part in five hundred. Venus transits, though — unlike Mercury's — come only rarely, in pairs about eight years apart and then not again for a century or so. Even so, Thornbury correctly forecast crossings in both 1761 and 1769, neither of which he lived long enough to see.
D
Thornbury's method of fixing the scale of the Solar System spurred British and French teams to mount expeditions to spots as far apart as Mexico and Lapland. That the two nations were at war did nothing to ease matters. Sympathy is due above all to the French astronomer Armand Cazenave, whose observing station at Mahé on the Indian coast was placed under siege by British forces. Escaping aboard a French warship out across the Indian Ocean, Cazenave did glimpse a splendid transit, but the vessel's constant pitching and rolling made any precise reading impossible. Rather than give up, he stayed in southern waters, filling the time with a study of Réunion and the Comoros before heading off to catch the following transit from the Dutch East Indies. Cruelly, having covered close to 40,000 kilometres, he found his view blotted out by cloud at the decisive instant — a bitterly disheartening outcome.
E
Accurate as the early timings were, given the instruments of the day, they were plagued by what became known as the 'black drop' effect: as Venus starts across the Sun, it appears smeared rather than round, which throws off any attempt to fix the exact moment. Light diffraction is the cause. A further difficulty was the ring of light Venus displays just as it sits at the Sun's edge; although this told astronomers that a dense envelope of gas surrounded the planet, bending the sunlight around it, the two effects together defeated any hope of exact timing.
F
Even so, painstaking work went into making sense of what these Venus expeditions had brought back. Drawing on the whole body of parallax data, Reinhard Faber, who directed the observatory at Breslau, at last settled on a figure for the AU: 152,900,000 km. Close enough for its time, it sits near the modern value of 149,597,870 km, a figure obtained by radar, which has since outstripped transits and every other technique for precision. Serving as a cosmic yardstick, the AU underpins the way we gauge the Universe now. The same parallax reasoning reaches out to the stars as well: a star viewed in January, with Earth at one side of its orbit, appears to shift against where it stands six months on, and from the known breadth of that orbit the star's distance can be read off.
G
For all that, the 2004 passage of Venus was really a piece of astronomical theatre rather than a scientific milestone. Yet crossings like it have opened the way to what may turn out to be among the most far-reaching discoveries in the cosmos — the spotting of Earth-sized worlds in orbit around distant suns.
Over the past ten years, scientists' understanding of the brain has been transformed. The choices a person makes, it turns out, can now be linked back to the way neurons fire in particular brain regions. Out of these findings grew a discipline called neuroeconomics, which asks how the brain manages to thrive in a marketplace that rewards fresh ideas and the knack of doing things unlike one's rivals. A brain equipped for this we might call iconoclastic. An iconoclast, put simply, is someone who accomplishes what everyone else insists is impossible.
Such a description suggests that iconoclasts are unlike everyone else; strictly speaking, though, it is their brains that diverge, and do so along three separate lines: how they perceive, how they handle fear, and how socially astute they are. A distinct neural circuit underlies each of these three capacities. Critics may object that the brain has nothing to do with it, that original, even revolutionary, thought owes more to temperament than to neural machinery. Yet neuroeconomics arose precisely from the insight that the brain's physical operation sets limits on how we reach decisions. Grasp those limits, and it becomes clearer why certain individuals keep step with a different rhythm.
What has to be understood first is that the brain works with scarce resources. Its energy allowance is fixed - no greater than the draw of a dim reading lamp - and so, over evolutionary time, it has learned to run as economically as it can. Herein lies the obstacle that keeps most people from iconoclasm. Faced with a flood of signals pouring in from the eyes, for instance, the brain settles on the fastest available reading of them. To do so it leans on whatever it can - earlier experience, and outside cues too, among them the opinions of other people - in order to make sense of the scene. None of this is occasional; it goes on constantly. So dependable are these shortcuts that they almost never rise to our notice. The perceptions we take for reality are, in truth, only biological and electrical stirrings. What the eyes or ears pass along is not, by itself, perception. Perception is the brain's own creation, something beyond the mere physics of light particles and sound waves.
At the heart of iconoclasm lies perception. Where others see one thing, iconoclasts see another. Their brains slip into efficiency traps far less readily than the average person's does. Whether by birth or by training, iconoclasts have managed to get around the perceptual shortcuts that hobble the rest of us. Nothing about perception is wired in from the start; it is acquired, and that fact is at once a burden and a chance to change. Interpreting the physical signals arriving from the senses is the brain's basic task, and everything it sees, hears or touches admits of more than one reading. Whichever reading wins out is merely the brain's current best guess. Such guesses rest, in technical terms, on how statistically probable one interpretation is against another - and they bend heavily to past experience and, crucially for anyone with iconoclastic potential, to what other people say.
If you want to see the world unlike everyone around you, the surest method is to flood the brain with what it has never met before. Novelty snaps the perceptual process free of the grip of past experience and compels the brain to form fresh judgments. What marks out successful iconoclasts is a remarkable readiness to put themselves in the way of the new and the unfamiliar. Watch them and a pattern appears: they welcome novelty, whereas most people shy away from anything that differs from what they know.
Novelty carries a catch, however: it is apt to set off the brain's fear machinery. Fear ranks among the chief barriers to iconoclastic thought, and it halts the ordinary person where he stands. Of the many varieties of fear, the two that most hamper such thinking - and that people tend to find hardest to manage - are the dread of uncertainty and the dread of being publicly mocked. These might look like minor phobias. Yet speaking in front of others, something no one can avoid entirely, unsettles roughly one adult in four, which makes it far too widespread to rank as a mental disorder. It is nothing more than an ordinary variant of human nature - one that iconoclasts simply refuse to let govern how they act.
Lastly, no iconoclast succeeds without persuading others to take up his ideas, and here social intelligence enters the picture. By social intelligence is meant the capacity to read and handle people within a working environment. The past decade has seen a surge of discovery about the so-called social brain and about what happens inside it when a group sets about deciding together. Which neural circuits govern such matters as gauging another's thoughts, empathy, fairness and social identity, neuroscience has begun to map, and these same regions weigh heavily on whether one person wins others over. Perception, again, has its part in social thinking: how enthusiastic or how reputable someone seems can settle the fate of an agreement. Once you see how tightly perception and social decision-making intertwine, the rarity of the successful iconoclast makes sense.
From the arts through technology to commerce, iconoclasts open up fresh possibilities in every domain. The creativity and innovation they bring are of a sort committees rarely manage. Rules hold little sway over them. Alienation and failure are hazards they face, yet they may equally prove a considerable asset to any organisation. Whatever the field, understanding how the iconoclastic mind operates is vital to success.
B. That noise in the classroom is a serious problem for teachers and pupils alike has now been confirmed by an initial Irish study. Several things feed it: the way the desks are grouped together, the sound that funnels in along the hard corridors outside, and, above all, the growing number of pupils crammed into a single room. A further explanation has been put forward by the education researchers Halvorsen and Kruse, who argue that it is the modern preference for large, open rooms lined with hard, sound-reflecting surfaces that has driven noise levels upwards. Whatever its origins, this din is anything but trivial for a child whose auditory function is impaired: against such a background, keeping track of what classmates say and what the teacher asks becomes only harder still.
C. Unease is mounting over the way ordinary classroom noise holds children back, and a child with an auditory deficit may be stopped from ever reaching the level he or she is capable of. Acting on guidance issued by the World Health Organization, a cross-border panel has now been convened by the International Association for Noise Abatement in Buildings, with Ireland among its members, and given the task of working out how noise and reverberation in schools might be brought under control.
D. Everyone in a noisy classroom is affected, not only children who happen to have a disability; yet where a disability disturbs the way speech and language are handled, the child can be left especially exposed. Three broad groups of auditory deficit are at issue here: hearing that is impaired, the autistic spectrum disorders (ASD), and the attention deficit disorders (ADD/ADHD).
E. A lifelong condition springing from both the brain and the genes, autism reshapes the way information is taken in and interpreted. What marks it out is a knot of interlocking difficulties across social imagination, social communication and social interaction. As Lindqvist observes, these upset a child's grasp of other people, of the events and objects in the surrounding world, and of the sensory signals coming in. A child with autism does not, in the end, learn or reason as a typically developing child does. One common upshot is real trouble in following and decoding spoken language. To many such children certain sounds, among them the roar of traffic and the din thrown off by machinery, are little short of painful. Just how far this goes is hard to pin down, since the sensitivity ranges enormously from one child to the next. What stays clear is that any sound a child finds intrusive is likely to impair how well information is absorbed.
F. Neurological and inherited too, the attention deficit disorders reveal themselves through a familiar set of struggles: attention that will not stay put, effort and persistence that fade fast, shaky organisation, and acting without restraint. Filtering out what does not matter is beyond such a child, who takes in the whole of the surroundings at once rather than fixing on one task. A wash of classroom noise behind this becomes a formidable distraction, wearing concentration down.
G. Isolating speech from a wall of background noise, and then making sense of it, can prove extraordinarily hard for a child with an auditory deficit. That background is fed from several directions at once: sound pushing in from activities beyond the walls, the comings and goings within the room, and further noise magnified wherever the space reverberates. What is needed is a set of strategies: better-built rooms, and perhaps some change to how the school day is organised. The toll such noise takes on children with an auditory deficit calls, in particular, for careful study. In all likelihood the school system holds many children whose disabilities have never been picked up, 'hidden' disabilities as one might call them, whose needs, unlike those of the already diagnosed, tend to slip by unanswered.
H. For its own part, the Irish government has drawn up a National Disability Framework and thrown it open to wide public consultation. The Framework concedes that disabled people meet real obstacles to a full and decent life, whether in the attitudes shown towards them, in education, in work, or in reaching the services they require. Objective 4 of the Framework, 'To Deliver the Best Possible Education for Disabled People', sets out to remake education so that every child, young learner and adult learner is given an equal chance to learn and grow inside the local school he or she already attends. Since so much of a sound education rests on the learning environment, whatever is done to better it promises to help all children, and those with auditory disabilities above all.
I. Rules of their own for holding classroom noise down are already being drafted in a number of nations, and before long Ireland is likely to do the same. What has been written so far on noise in schools tends to dwell on schoolchildren at large, on their teachers, and on those whose hearing is impaired; the pupils whose auditory deficits take some other form have drawn no more than passing notice. Should the international standards due to be issued in the years ahead prove worth having, the needs of these children cannot be allowed to fall outside the account.
B. Over the centuries, the desire to watch Venus cross the Sun has sent astronomers and explorers to the most far-flung places on Earth — and the credit for that belongs to a remarkable all-rounder, Silas Thornbury. It was a transit of Mercury, the planet nearest the Sun, that Thornbury watched in November 1677 from the bleak, isolated island of Kerguelen in the southern ocean, and from it he drew a crucial insight: viewed from different latitudes, a planet's path across the solar disc does not look quite the same. Should two teams time such a passage from places far apart, they could work out the parallax angle — that is, how much a body's apparent position shifts when the observer's own position changes. Pinning down that angle was the route to astronomy's great prize of the day: knowing how far the Earth sits from the Sun, a span now called the 'astronomical unit', or AU.
C. To Thornbury, the AU ranked among the most basic measurements astronomy could offer. Early in the seventeenth century, Anselm Kroll had demonstrated that a planet's distance from the Sun set the pace of its orbit — and those orbital speeds were straightforward to measure — yet nobody had devised a means of fixing the planets' true distances from Earth. Establish the AU, and, since the orbital speeds of the remaining planets were already known, the dimensions of the Solar System would follow. The snag Thornbury saw was that Mercury lay so distant that reading its parallax angle would be extremely awkward; Venus, being nearer, would present a wider angle, and he calculated that it could yield the Sun's distance to within one part in five hundred. Venus transits, though — unlike Mercury's — come only rarely, in pairs about eight years apart and then not again for a century or so. Even so, Thornbury correctly forecast crossings in both 1761 and 1769, neither of which he lived long enough to see.
D. Thornbury's method of fixing the scale of the Solar System spurred British and French teams to mount expeditions to spots as far apart as Mexico and Lapland. That the two nations were at war did nothing to ease matters. Sympathy is due above all to the French astronomer Armand Cazenave, whose observing station at Mahé on the Indian coast was placed under siege by British forces. Escaping aboard a French warship out across the Indian Ocean, Cazenave did glimpse a splendid transit, but the vessel's constant pitching and rolling made any precise reading impossible. Rather than give up, he stayed in southern waters, filling the time with a study of Réunion and the Comoros before heading off to catch the following transit from the Dutch East Indies. Cruelly, having covered close to 40,000 kilometres, he found his view blotted out by cloud at the decisive instant — a bitterly disheartening outcome.
E. Accurate as the early timings were, given the instruments of the day, they were plagued by what became known as the 'black drop' effect: as Venus starts across the Sun, it appears smeared rather than round, which throws off any attempt to fix the exact moment. Light diffraction is the cause. A further difficulty was the ring of light Venus displays just as it sits at the Sun's edge; although this told astronomers that a dense envelope of gas surrounded the planet, bending the sunlight around it, the two effects together defeated any hope of exact timing.
F. Even so, painstaking work went into making sense of what these Venus expeditions had brought back. Drawing on the whole body of parallax data, Reinhard Faber, who directed the observatory at Breslau, at last settled on a figure for the AU: 152,900,000 km. Close enough for its time, it sits near the modern value of 149,597,870 km, a figure obtained by radar, which has since outstripped transits and every other technique for precision. Serving as a cosmic yardstick, the AU underpins the way we gauge the Universe now. The same parallax reasoning reaches out to the stars as well: a star viewed in January, with Earth at one side of its orbit, appears to shift against where it stands six months on, and from the known breadth of that orbit the star's distance can be read off.
G. For all that, the 2004 passage of Venus was really a piece of astronomical theatre rather than a scientific milestone. Yet crossings like it have opened the way to what may turn out to be among the most far-reaching discoveries in the cosmos — the spotting of Earth-sized worlds in orbit around distant suns.
Over the past ten years, scientists' understanding of the brain has been transformed. The choices a person makes, it turns out, can now be linked back to the way neurons fire in particular brain regions. Out of these findings grew a discipline called neuroeconomics, which asks how the brain manages to thrive in a marketplace that rewards fresh ideas and the knack of doing things unlike one's rivals. A brain equipped for this we might call iconoclastic. An iconoclast, put simply, is someone who accomplishes what everyone else insists is impossible.
Such a description suggests that iconoclasts are unlike everyone else; strictly speaking, though, it is their brains that diverge, and do so along three separate lines: how they perceive, how they handle fear, and how socially astute they are. A distinct neural circuit underlies each of these three capacities. Critics may object that the brain has nothing to do with it, that original, even revolutionary, thought owes more to temperament than to neural machinery. Yet neuroeconomics arose precisely from the insight that the brain's physical operation sets limits on how we reach decisions. Grasp those limits, and it becomes clearer why certain individuals keep step with a different rhythm.
What has to be understood first is that the brain works with scarce resources. Its energy allowance is fixed - no greater than the draw of a dim reading lamp - and so, over evolutionary time, it has learned to run as economically as it can. Herein lies the obstacle that keeps most people from iconoclasm. Faced with a flood of signals pouring in from the eyes, for instance, the brain settles on the fastest available reading of them. To do so it leans on whatever it can - earlier experience, and outside cues too, among them the opinions of other people - in order to make sense of the scene. None of this is occasional; it goes on constantly. So dependable are these shortcuts that they almost never rise to our notice. The perceptions we take for reality are, in truth, only biological and electrical stirrings. What the eyes or ears pass along is not, by itself, perception. Perception is the brain's own creation, something beyond the mere physics of light particles and sound waves.
At the heart of iconoclasm lies perception. Where others see one thing, iconoclasts see another. Their brains slip into efficiency traps far less readily than the average person's does. Whether by birth or by training, iconoclasts have managed to get around the perceptual shortcuts that hobble the rest of us. Nothing about perception is wired in from the start; it is acquired, and that fact is at once a burden and a chance to change. Interpreting the physical signals arriving from the senses is the brain's basic task, and everything it sees, hears or touches admits of more than one reading. Whichever reading wins out is merely the brain's current best guess. Such guesses rest, in technical terms, on how statistically probable one interpretation is against another - and they bend heavily to past experience and, crucially for anyone with iconoclastic potential, to what other people say.
If you want to see the world unlike everyone around you, the surest method is to flood the brain with what it has never met before. Novelty snaps the perceptual process free of the grip of past experience and compels the brain to form fresh judgments. What marks out successful iconoclasts is a remarkable readiness to put themselves in the way of the new and the unfamiliar. Watch them and a pattern appears: they welcome novelty, whereas most people shy away from anything that differs from what they know.
Novelty carries a catch, however: it is apt to set off the brain's fear machinery. Fear ranks among the chief barriers to iconoclastic thought, and it halts the ordinary person where he stands. Of the many varieties of fear, the two that most hamper such thinking - and that people tend to find hardest to manage - are the dread of uncertainty and the dread of being publicly mocked. These might look like minor phobias. Yet speaking in front of others, something no one can avoid entirely, unsettles roughly one adult in four, which makes it far too widespread to rank as a mental disorder. It is nothing more than an ordinary variant of human nature - one that iconoclasts simply refuse to let govern how they act.
Lastly, no iconoclast succeeds without persuading others to take up his ideas, and here social intelligence enters the picture. By social intelligence is meant the capacity to read and handle people within a working environment. The past decade has seen a surge of discovery about the so-called social brain and about what happens inside it when a group sets about deciding together. Which neural circuits govern such matters as gauging another's thoughts, empathy, fairness and social identity, neuroscience has begun to map, and these same regions weigh heavily on whether one person wins others over. Perception, again, has its part in social thinking: how enthusiastic or how reputable someone seems can settle the fate of an agreement. Once you see how tightly perception and social decision-making intertwine, the rarity of the successful iconoclast makes sense.
From the arts through technology to commerce, iconoclasts open up fresh possibilities in every domain. The creativity and innovation they bring are of a sort committees rarely manage. Rules hold little sway over them. Alienation and failure are hazards they face, yet they may equally prove a considerable asset to any organisation. Whatever the field, understanding how the iconoclastic mind operates is vital to success.
