IELTS CAM Inspired 9 - Reading Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Online CAM Inspired 9 - Reading Test 3 được lấy từ cuốn sách IELTS CAM Inspired 9 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking, kèm answer key và list từ vựng IELTS cần học trong bài đọc.
IELTS CAM Inspired 9 - Reading Test 3 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 8
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
1
Hardly anyone believes they have the right to comment on how language is used.
2
Disputes about language can be sparked by quite trivial matters.
3
Language is largely a private activity, so unusual usages seldom attract notice.
4
People's spoken language tends to be judged more severely than their writing.
5
Supporters of prescriptivism believe that every regional variety of a language deserves equal respect.
6
One aim of the eighteenth-century grammar-writers was to establish a way of settling disagreements about what counted as acceptable language.
7
The earliest grammarians regarded it as their duty to rule on what was acceptable, rather than simply to list possible alternatives.
8
The descriptive approach is now more commonly taught in schools than the prescriptive one.
Question 9 - 12
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-I, below.
Write the correct letter, A-I, in boxes on your answer sheet.
The language debate
For those who follow , a language has just one legitimate form, and they place particular weight on the grammatical that define it. The opposing camp, the , take a grammarian's proper task to be recording language as it is actually used, rather than attempting its .
A
rules
B
popular speech
C
prescriptivists
D
language change
E
descriptivists
F
pronunciation
G
evaluation
H
formal language
I
modern linguists
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 writer's main purpose in Reading Passage 1?
A
to recommend one way of compiling dictionaries and grammar books over another
B
to explain the ways in which speech and writing differ
C
to set out two contrasting attitudes to language and show how they developed
D
to prove that the prescriptivist view has been thoroughly discredited
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 17
Reading Passage has six paragraphs, A-F.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F
NB You may use any letter more than once
14
the location of the first test site
15
a way of bringing the power produced on one site back into Britain
16
a reference to a previous attempt by Britain to find an alternative source of energy
17
mention of the possibility of applying technology from another industry
Question 18 - 22
Choose FIVE letters, A-J
Which FIVE of the following claims about tidal power are made by the writer?
A
It is a more reliable source of energy than wind power.
B
It would replace all other forms of energy in Britain.
C
Its introduction has come as a result of public pressure.
D
It would cut down on air pollution.
E
It could contribute to the closure of many existing power stations in Britain.
F
It could be a means of increasing national income.
G
It could face a lot of resistance from other fuel industries.
H
It could be sold more cheaply than any other type of fuel.
I
It could compensate for the shortage of inland sites for energy production.
J
It is best produced in the vicinity of coastlines with particular features.
Question 23 - 26
Label the diagram below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 32
Reading Passage 3 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F.
27
an explanation of how unimportant parts of a message can be left out to save space
28
a detailed description of one occasion on which information theory was put to use
29
a statement of the goal the engineer set himself at the very start
30
the elements that determine the fastest possible error-free transmission
31
an observation about the engineer's indifference to public recognition
32
an example of equipment that can make sense of imperfect input
Question 33 - 37
Complete the notes below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
The Wayfarer 2 Space Probe
The probe sent back photographs of two planets,
33.
, before it moved out of the
34.
.
Extreme cold damaged some of the probe's components.
There were fears that its
35.
would soon cease to function.
The plan was to instruct the craft to fit
36.
in place of the failing components, though the enormous gap between craft and Earth made this hard to achieve.
The message was sent at the speed of light by means of a
37.
.
Question 38 - 40
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
38
When Renquist began his work, his chief concern was to find a way of sending messages across great distances.
39
The fastest rate at which data can be sent without error is governed by how strong the signal is compared with how much noise is present.
40
The turbo codes are used more widely today than any earlier way of coding data.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Attitudes to language
Studying language in a systematic, dispassionate way is surprisingly hard. Public debate about it slides all too often into name-calling and heated rhetoric. Since a language belongs to all who use it, almost everyone assumes a right to pronounce on how it should be handled — and when such views clash, tempers flare quickly. A quarrel over a tiny point of wording can erupt as readily as one over sweeping decisions about how language is taught.
On top of this, the way we speak and write is on constant display, so any departure from expected usage is easy to spot and to condemn. Hardly any corner of social life escapes this scrutiny: the judgements we form about a person's character, cleverness, standing in society, schooling and fitness for a job are all coloured, at least partly, by the language they produce. Little wonder that a careless attack on someone's speech can wound deeply, and that those delivering it are hurt in turn.
Put broadly, prescriptivism maintains that a single form of a language is inherently worth more than any competing form, and that this superior version ought to be spread across the whole community of speakers. Grammar and vocabulary are where the case is pressed most firmly, though pronunciation attracts frequent comment too. The form picked out for approval is usually some version of the standard written language — the sort met with in literature, or in the careful spoken style that echoes it most closely. Anyone keeping to it is said to handle the language properly, while whatever strays from it earns the label 'wrong'.
Every major language has been examined through this prescriptive lens, above all in the grammars and dictionaries produced during the eighteenth century. Three ambitions lay behind the work of those early grammarians. To begin with, they set out to codify their language's underlying principles, proving that an orderly system lay concealed beneath the apparent muddle of daily usage. They also hoped to furnish a means by which arguments over acceptable usage might be resolved. Finally, they meant to flag what struck them as widespread blunders, thereby 'improving' the tongue. Nothing conveys the commanding temper of the enterprise better than its reliance on grammatical 'rules': some usages were prescribed, others proscribed. No middle ground existed — a usage was either allowable or not — and the grammarian's job was less to log the choices on offer than to pass a verdict on them.
Attitudes of this kind have by no means vanished; they still feed a broad unease that standards ought to be defended. Ranged against them, though, is a rival outlook that troubles itself far less over standards than over what speakers genuinely do. Its guiding thought is that a grammarian is there to describe rather than to prescribe — to set down the sheer diversity of language as it stands, without shouldering the hopeless labour of ranking one variant above another or of halting the shifts a language undergoes. Champions of this stance appear as early as the closing decades of the eighteenth century: the grammarian Nathaniel Merrow, for one, held in his Companion to English Speech that 'the everyday practice of ordinary speakers is the first and only true measure of any language'. Such issues, he argued, cannot be settled by logic or legislation — and it is this outlook that underpins how linguists dissect grammar today.
Today the clash between 'descriptivists' and 'prescriptivists' has often hardened into caricature, with each camp sketching a distorted portrait of its rival. Those on the descriptive wing are cast as wholly indifferent to standards, since they treat every form of usage as equally legitimate. Those on the prescriptive wing, for their part, are brushed aside as unthinking servants of an inherited tradition. The quarrel has even been dressed in the vocabulary of politics, setting a radical liberalism against an elitist conservatism.
Undersea turbines which produce electricity from the tides are set to become an important source of renewable energy for Britain. It is still too early to predict the extent of the impact they may have, but all the signs are that they will play a significant role in the future
A
A. Operating on the same principle as wind turbines, the power in sea turbines comes from tidal currents which turn blades similar to ships’ propellers, but, unlike wind, the tides are predictable and the power input is constant. The technology raises the prospect of Britain becoming self-sufficient in renewable energy and drastically reducing its carbon dioxide emissions. If tide, wind and wave power are all developed, Britain would be able to close gas, coal and nuclear power plants and export renewable power to other parts of Europe. Unlike wind power, which Britain originally developed and then abandoned for 20 years allowing the Dutch to make it a major industry, undersea turbines could become a big export earner to island nations such as Japan and New Zealand.
B
B.
Tidal sites have already been identified that will produce one sixth or more of the UK’s power - and at prices competitive with modern gas turbines and undercutting those of the already ailing nuclear industry. One site alone, the Pentland Firth, between Orkney and mainland Scotland, could produce 10% of the country’s electricity with banks of turbines under the sea, and another at Alderney in the Channel Islands three times the 1,200 megawatts of Britain’s largest and newest nuclear plant, Sizewell B, in Suffolk. Other sites identified include the Bristol Channel and the west coast of Scotland, particularly the channel between Campbeltown and Northern Ireland.
C
Work on designs for the new turbine blades and sites are well advanced at the University of Southampton’s sustainable energy research group. The first station is expected to be installed off Lynmouth in Devon shortly to test the technology in a venture jointly funded by the department of Trade and Industry and the European Union. AbuBakr Bahaj, in charge of the Southampton research, said: The prospects for energy from tidal currents are far better than from wind because the flows of water are predictable and constant. The technology for dealing with the hostile saline environment under the sea has been developed in the North Sea oil industry and much is already known about turbine blade design, because of wind power and ship propellers. There are a few technical difficulties, but I believe in the next five to ten years we will be installing commercial marine turbine farms.’ Southampton has been awarded £215,000 over three years to develop the turbines and is working with Marine Current Turbines, a subsidiary of IT power, on the Lynmouth project. EU research has now identified 106 potential sites for tidal power, 80% round the coasts of Britain. The best sites are between islands or around heavily indented coasts where there are strong tidal currents.
D
A marine turbine blade needs to be only one third of the size of a wind generator to produce three times as much power. The blades will be about 20 metres in diameter, so around 30 metres of water is required. Unlike wind power, there are unlikely to be environmental objections. Fish and other creatures are thought unlikely to be at risk from the relatively slow-turning blades. Each turbine will be mounted on a tower which will connect to the national power supply grid via underwater cables. The towers will stick out of the water and be lit, to warn shipping, and also be designed to be lifted out of the water for maintenance and to clean seaweed from the blades.
E
Dr Bahaj has done most work on the Alderney site, where there are powerful currents. The single undersea turbine farm would produce far more power than needed for the Channel Islands and most would be fed into the French Grid and be re-imported into Britain via the cable under the Channel.
F
One technical difficulty is cavitation, where low pressure behind a turning blade causes air bubbles. These can cause vibration and damage the blades of the turbines. Dr Bahaj said: ‘We have to test a number of blade types to avoid this happening or at least make sure it does not damage the turbines or reduce performance. Another slight concern is submerged debris floating into the blades. So far we do not know how much of a problem it might be. We will have to make the turbines robust because the sea is a hostile environment, but all the signs that we can do it are good.’
23
24
25
26
Whole tower can be raised for
23
and the extraction of seaweed from the blades.
Sea life not in danger due to the fact that blades are comparatively
24
.
Air bubbles result from the
25
behind blades. This is known as
26
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 2
14
C
Giải thích chi tiết
Với Linearthinking
Tip: Đối với dạng Matching Information, nên làm cuối cùng sau khi đã làm các dạng câu hỏi khác, vì lúc này bạn đã phần nào nắm được bố cục bài đọc => có thể tìm info nhanh hơn.
Step 1: Đọc hiểu câu hỏi & imagine paraphrase
Imagine: location - phải có tên riêng của địa điểm đó. Đặc điểm nhận dạng: tên có viết hoa
Step 2: Tìm thứ imagine
Location: Lynmouth in Devon
=> Đáp án: Paragraph C
Để hiểu rõ hơn ta đọc theo DOL’s Linearthinking để nắm main idea:
The first station is expected to be installed off Lynmouth in Devon shortly to test the technology in a venture
→ first station được dự đoán installed off Lynmouth in Devon → để test technology
From the DVD player and the DNA that carries the genetic code to the deepest workings of the physical universe, information theory underlies it all. Because it made possible the modern science of communication – the electronic transmission of data – it has reshaped the way we live.
A
A. One striking illustration of what information theory can do occurred in March 2004. Wayfarer 2, a space probe that had left Earth in 1979, transmitted breathtaking images of Uranus and Neptune before drifting out of the Solar System, bound for the stars with no prospect of return. A quarter of a century in the bitter cold of deep space, however, had taken its toll. When engineers at the Meridian Space Agency saw that the craft's detectors and relays were close to giving out, they knew that inaction would mean losing the probe for good. What they decided to do was radio the craft and order it to swap in its backups for the parts that were failing. That was no simple matter, for by then Wayfarer 2 lay some 13 billion kilometres away. The instruction was beamed into deep space through a ground dish belonging to the agency's Deep-Space Relay Network, and even at the speed of light the message needed more than twelve hours to arrive at the probe, which by now lay well beyond the outermost planets. Astonishingly, the distant craft caught the faint summons from the world that had built it and carried out the switch.
B
No repair had ever spanned a greater distance, and for the Meridian engineers it was a real triumph. Yet the episode also revealed the remarkable reach of methods first worked out by Emil Renquist, a communications engineer who had died only the year before. Born in the small Minnesota town of Kelby in 1919, Renquist was drawn as a boy to both mathematics and the building of gadgets, and while still a student had already advanced several ideas underpinning the modern computer. It was at Corren Laboratories that he built information theory, yet the recognition it won him he largely shunned. Working almost single-handedly in the 1940s, he founded an entire science of communication, one that has since spread into a huge range of uses – satellite links, bar codes, DVDs, anywhere data must move fast without being corrupted.
C
All of this lies far from the modest, practical purposes Renquist first had in mind, back when he was a 22-year-old graduate student of engineering at the distinguished Alderton Institute of Technology in 1941. His starting point looked deceptively straightforward – he wanted to fix exactly what the word 'information' should mean. At its simplest, he maintained, information comes down to whether a thing is true or not, a distinction the binary digit, or 'bit', records as a 1 or a 0. Once this basic unit was in hand, he turned to giving precise form to the hazy notions surrounding information and its movement from one place to another. Along the way came an unexpected finding: information can always be made to survive random interference – 'noise' – completely intact.
D
Ordinarily, noise refers to the intrusive sounds that get in the way of the information we actually want. What information theory does is generalise that everyday notion, using theorems that pin down the effects of noise mathematically. Renquist demonstrated, in particular, that there is a ceiling – set by noise – on how fast information can travel down a channel and still arrive without errors. Where that ceiling sits depends on how strong the signal is relative to the noise accompanying it along the channel, and on the channel's capacity, known as its 'bandwidth'. Expressed in bits per second, the figure represents the highest possible rate of faultless communication for a given signal strength and noise level. The knack, as he showed, lies in 'coding' – wrapping up the information so that it can withstand whatever noise throws at it, all while keeping within the carrying capacity, or 'bandwidth', of the system in use.
E
Down the years researchers have come up with a great many such coding schemes, and these have underpinned one technological achievement after another. Wayfarer 2 sent its data back in a code that attached one additional bit to every bit of real information, so that only about one bit in eight thousand came through wrong – hence those remarkably sharp planetary photographs. Some codes are now woven into daily routine: the bar code printed on grocery items, for instance, relies on a straightforward error-detecting scheme that lets a checkout scanner still read the price off a crumpled packet of crisps. More recently, a significant leap came with the so-called turbo codes, which approach Renquist's ultimate limit on how reliably data can be pushed through a channel, and which have proved central to the rise of the mobile videophone.
F
Renquist also worked out the groundwork for storing information more economically, by throwing away the surplus – 'redundant' – bits that add little of genuine value to a message. A text such as 'I CN C U' makes the point neatly: a great deal can be dropped before the meaning starts to slip. Yet here too, as with the correcting of errors, a boundary exists past which what remains grows too ambiguous to read. By showing how that boundary could be calculated, he cleared the path for the compression techniques that now pack the greatest amount of information into the least possible space.
Studying language in a systematic, dispassionate way is surprisingly hard. Public debate about it slides all too often into name-calling and heated rhetoric. Since a language belongs to all who use it, almost everyone assumes a right to pronounce on how it should be handled — and when such views clash, tempers flare quickly. A quarrel over a tiny point of wording can erupt as readily as one over sweeping decisions about how language is taught.
On top of this, the way we speak and write is on constant display, so any departure from expected usage is easy to spot and to condemn. Hardly any corner of social life escapes this scrutiny: the judgements we form about a person's character, cleverness, standing in society, schooling and fitness for a job are all coloured, at least partly, by the language they produce. Little wonder that a careless attack on someone's speech can wound deeply, and that those delivering it are hurt in turn.
Put broadly, prescriptivism maintains that a single form of a language is inherently worth more than any competing form, and that this superior version ought to be spread across the whole community of speakers. Grammar and vocabulary are where the case is pressed most firmly, though pronunciation attracts frequent comment too. The form picked out for approval is usually some version of the standard written language — the sort met with in literature, or in the careful spoken style that echoes it most closely. Anyone keeping to it is said to handle the language properly, while whatever strays from it earns the label 'wrong'.
Every major language has been examined through this prescriptive lens, above all in the grammars and dictionaries produced during the eighteenth century. Three ambitions lay behind the work of those early grammarians. To begin with, they set out to codify their language's underlying principles, proving that an orderly system lay concealed beneath the apparent muddle of daily usage. They also hoped to furnish a means by which arguments over acceptable usage might be resolved. Finally, they meant to flag what struck them as widespread blunders, thereby 'improving' the tongue. Nothing conveys the commanding temper of the enterprise better than its reliance on grammatical 'rules': some usages were prescribed, others proscribed. No middle ground existed — a usage was either allowable or not — and the grammarian's job was less to log the choices on offer than to pass a verdict on them.
Attitudes of this kind have by no means vanished; they still feed a broad unease that standards ought to be defended. Ranged against them, though, is a rival outlook that troubles itself far less over standards than over what speakers genuinely do. Its guiding thought is that a grammarian is there to describe rather than to prescribe — to set down the sheer diversity of language as it stands, without shouldering the hopeless labour of ranking one variant above another or of halting the shifts a language undergoes. Champions of this stance appear as early as the closing decades of the eighteenth century: the grammarian Nathaniel Merrow, for one, held in his Companion to English Speech that 'the everyday practice of ordinary speakers is the first and only true measure of any language'. Such issues, he argued, cannot be settled by logic or legislation — and it is this outlook that underpins how linguists dissect grammar today.
Today the clash between 'descriptivists' and 'prescriptivists' has often hardened into caricature, with each camp sketching a distorted portrait of its rival. Those on the descriptive wing are cast as wholly indifferent to standards, since they treat every form of usage as equally legitimate. Those on the prescriptive wing, for their part, are brushed aside as unthinking servants of an inherited tradition. The quarrel has even been dressed in the vocabulary of politics, setting a radical liberalism against an elitist conservatism.
Tidal sites have already been identified that will produce one sixth or more of the UK’s power - and at prices competitive with modern gas turbines and undercutting those of the already ailing nuclear industry. One site alone, the Pentland Firth, between Orkney and mainland Scotland, could produce 10% of the country’s electricity with banks of turbines under the sea, and another at Alderney in the Channel Islands three times the 1,200 megawatts of Britain’s largest and newest nuclear plant, Sizewell B, in Suffolk. Other sites identified include the Bristol Channel and the west coast of Scotland, particularly the channel between Campbeltown and Northern Ireland.
C. Work on designs for the new turbine blades and sites are well advanced at the University of Southampton’s sustainable energy research group. The first station is expected to be installed off Lynmouth in Devon shortly to test the technology in a venture jointly funded by the department of Trade and Industry and the European Union. AbuBakr Bahaj, in charge of the Southampton research, said: The prospects for energy from tidal currents are far better than from wind because the flows of water are predictable and constant. The technology for dealing with the hostile saline environment under the sea has been developed in the North Sea oil industry and much is already known about turbine blade design, because of wind power and ship propellers. There are a few technical difficulties, but I believe in the next five to ten years we will be installing commercial marine turbine farms.’ Southampton has been awarded £215,000 over three years to develop the turbines and is working with Marine Current Turbines, a subsidiary of IT power, on the Lynmouth project. EU research has now identified 106 potential sites for tidal power, 80% round the coasts of Britain. The best sites are between islands or around heavily indented coasts where there are strong tidal currents.
D. A marine turbine blade needs to be only one third of the size of a wind generator to produce three times as much power. The blades will be about 20 metres in diameter, so around 30 metres of water is required. Unlike wind power, there are unlikely to be environmental objections. Fish and other creatures are thought unlikely to be at risk from the relatively slow-turning blades. Each turbine will be mounted on a tower which will connect to the national power supply grid via underwater cables. The towers will stick out of the water and be lit, to warn shipping, and also be designed to be lifted out of the water for maintenance and to clean seaweed from the blades.
E. Dr Bahaj has done most work on the Alderney site, where there are powerful currents. The single undersea turbine farm would produce far more power than needed for the Channel Islands and most would be fed into the French Grid and be re-imported into Britain via the cable under the Channel.
F. One technical difficulty is cavitation, where low pressure behind a turning blade causes air bubbles. These can cause vibration and damage the blades of the turbines. Dr Bahaj said: ‘We have to test a number of blade types to avoid this happening or at least make sure it does not damage the turbines or reduce performance. Another slight concern is submerged debris floating into the blades. So far we do not know how much of a problem it might be. We will have to make the turbines robust because the sea is a hostile environment, but all the signs that we can do it are good.’
in a venture
B. No repair had ever spanned a greater distance, and for the Meridian engineers it was a real triumph. Yet the episode also revealed the remarkable reach of methods first worked out by Emil Renquist, a communications engineer who had died only the year before. Born in the small Minnesota town of Kelby in 1919, Renquist was drawn as a boy to both mathematics and the building of gadgets, and while still a student had already advanced several ideas underpinning the modern computer. It was at Corren Laboratories that he built information theory, yet the recognition it won him he largely shunned. Working almost single-handedly in the 1940s, he founded an entire science of communication, one that has since spread into a huge range of uses – satellite links, bar codes, DVDs, anywhere data must move fast without being corrupted.
C. All of this lies far from the modest, practical purposes Renquist first had in mind, back when he was a 22-year-old graduate student of engineering at the distinguished Alderton Institute of Technology in 1941. His starting point looked deceptively straightforward – he wanted to fix exactly what the word 'information' should mean. At its simplest, he maintained, information comes down to whether a thing is true or not, a distinction the binary digit, or 'bit', records as a 1 or a 0. Once this basic unit was in hand, he turned to giving precise form to the hazy notions surrounding information and its movement from one place to another. Along the way came an unexpected finding: information can always be made to survive random interference – 'noise' – completely intact.
D. Ordinarily, noise refers to the intrusive sounds that get in the way of the information we actually want. What information theory does is generalise that everyday notion, using theorems that pin down the effects of noise mathematically. Renquist demonstrated, in particular, that there is a ceiling – set by noise – on how fast information can travel down a channel and still arrive without errors. Where that ceiling sits depends on how strong the signal is relative to the noise accompanying it along the channel, and on the channel's capacity, known as its 'bandwidth'. Expressed in bits per second, the figure represents the highest possible rate of faultless communication for a given signal strength and noise level. The knack, as he showed, lies in 'coding' – wrapping up the information so that it can withstand whatever noise throws at it, all while keeping within the carrying capacity, or 'bandwidth', of the system in use.
E. Down the years researchers have come up with a great many such coding schemes, and these have underpinned one technological achievement after another. Wayfarer 2 sent its data back in a code that attached one additional bit to every bit of real information, so that only about one bit in eight thousand came through wrong – hence those remarkably sharp planetary photographs. Some codes are now woven into daily routine: the bar code printed on grocery items, for instance, relies on a straightforward error-detecting scheme that lets a checkout scanner still read the price off a crumpled packet of crisps. More recently, a significant leap came with the so-called turbo codes, which approach Renquist's ultimate limit on how reliably data can be pushed through a channel, and which have proved central to the rise of the mobile videophone.
F. Renquist also worked out the groundwork for storing information more economically, by throwing away the surplus – 'redundant' – bits that add little of genuine value to a message. A text such as 'I CN C U' makes the point neatly: a great deal can be dropped before the meaning starts to slip. Yet here too, as with the correcting of errors, a boundary exists past which what remains grows too ambiguous to read. By showing how that boundary could be calculated, he cleared the path for the compression techniques that now pack the greatest amount of information into the least possible space.
