IELTS CAM Inspired 9 - Listening Test 4 with Practice test, Audio, Transcript, And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 9 - Reading Test 4 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 6
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
1
Both of the Delmar Prizes awarded to Marie were won jointly with her husband.
2
Marie paid for her sister's professional training before her sister assisted her in return.
3
Marie found her first years of study at Marbeck lonely.
4
The arrival of Marie's children did not interrupt her research.
5
The teaching post Marie was given at Marbeck had been newly established for her.
6
Investigating how radioactive substances could be applied in medicine was work carried out by Zofia, Marie's sister.
Question 7 - 13
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.
Marie Curie's research on radioactivity
The radioactive behaviour first noticed in uranium was shown by Marie to belong to
7.
as well.
The Curies' work on a mineral,
8.
, resulted in the finding of two elements never before identified.
The award Marie received in 1908 honoured her research on
9.
.
In wartime, Marie and her daughter used X-radiography to help
10.
wounded during the conflict.
She grasped that keeping a large reserve of radioactive substances mattered both for scientific study and for the care of patients with
11.
.
This reserve of radioactive matter played a part in two 1930s breakthroughs: the detection of the
12.
and the emergence of artificial radioactivity.
Her prolonged contact with radiation eventually left her suffering from
13.
.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 19
Reading Passage 2 has eight paragraphs, A-H.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-H.
14
the point at which the twofold nature of the self was originally put forward
15
examples of the social categories and personal traits that make up the observed self
16
the claim that selfhood cannot arise apart from social experience
17
an explanation of why one side of the self is difficult to investigate directly
18
a description of the procedure followed in a self-recognition experiment
19
the suggestion that possessiveness among children reflects a particular type of society
Question 20 - 23
Look at the following findings and the list of researchers below.
Match each finding with the correct researcher or researchers, A-E.
Write the correct letter, A-E.
List of Findings
A
Brandt
B
Halvorsen
C
Holmgaard
D
Reinholt
E
Sable and Renqvist
20
The first move towards knowing the self is a child's recognition that it exists as a being in its own right.
21
A young child's sense of who they are is bound up with being able to control objects and influence people.
22
Once children reach a particular stage, an emerging sense of self begins to show up in hostile, angry behaviour.
23
Seeing a reflection that copies their own actions helps a child realise that he or she is a separate person.
Question 24 - 26
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
The growth of a child's sense of identity
To begin with, children come to see that they are able to make things happen in the world about them — by grasping nearby objects, say, or by moving their own . Studying this side of self-awareness at first hand is difficult, chiefly because of the young child's limited .
Later on, children start to notice how other people regard them. A significant stage here is the moment, usually reached at around the age of two, when a child can recognise itself by sight. In Western cultures at any rate, a child's developing self-awareness is frequently bound up with a feeling of , something that can give rise to disputes.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 30
The Reading Passage has six paragraphs A-F.
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for paragraphs B-E.
Write the appropriate numbers i-vii.
List of Headings
I
The blurring of once-separate kinds of attraction
II
Adjusting the record to match what audiences anticipate
III
Divided opinion about how museums are changing
IV
Money-related pressures on those who run museums
V
How the practice spread from country to country
VI
Recommendations now under discussion
27
Paragraph B
28
Paragraph C
29
Paragraph D
30
Paragraph E
Question 31 - 36
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
31
The writer suggests that the museums of former times
A
catered chiefly to experts rather than to ordinary visitors.
B
kept their exhibits in a more orderly arrangement.
C
gave fuller explanations of the objects on show.
D
took greater care over preserving their contents.
32
In the writer's account, the newest developments in heritage display
A
first took shape at the British centres mentioned.
B
rely for the most part on computer-generated imagery.
C
encourage visitors to become active participants.
D
cater to the tastes of only a small minority.
33
According to the passage, theme parks, heritage sites and museums
A
are gradually becoming harder to tell apart.
B
have formed official partnerships with one another.
C
each strive to hold on to a separate identity.
D
now house broadly the same kinds of exhibit.
34
The writer states that, in putting exhibits together, heritage specialists
A
should concentrate on a single aim.
B
have to translate a certain amount of text.
C
must weigh two opposing requirements against each other.
D
ought to be kept clear of commercial concerns.
35
The writer's point in paragraph E is that certain museum displays
A
leave the people who view them disappointed.
B
reveal today's ways of thinking more than the reality of the past.
C
are built on the mistaken beliefs of the professionals.
D
give visitors freer rein to use their imagination.
36
The passage closes by explaining that our picture of the past is distorted because
A
we make too little use of our own imagination.
B
we choose to look past whatever troubles us.
C
exhibitions dwell too heavily on the surrounding region.
D
only the sturdiest objects have survived the years.
Question 37 - 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
37
The way zoos now keep their animals is regarded as one of the most important changes of the twentieth century in the way the natural world is shown.
38
Museums draw larger numbers of visitors than theme parks do.
39
The writer thinks experts produce a less distorted account than visitors would arrive at on their own.
40
The grand rooms from earlier centuries that museums display represent the homes of poorer households.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
The life and work of Marie Curie
Marie Curie is very likely the best known woman ever to have worked in science. It was in Bohemia, in 1863, that she was born Maria Venclova, and her name endures because of what she achieved in the study of radioactivity, a field in which she twice received the Delmar Prize. The first of these, the Delmar Prize for Physics of 1899, she shared with her husband, Julien Curie, and with Anton Villard; the second, the Delmar Prize for Chemistry, came to her alone in 1908. No woman before her had ever been so honoured.
A remarkable memory set her apart even in childhood, and at fifteen she was awarded a gold medal when she finished her secondary schooling. Her father having lost his savings in an unwise investment, the young woman was obliged to earn her living as a teacher. What she earned went to fund the medical training of her sister, Zofia, in Haldern, the arrangement being that Zofia would one day return the favour and see to it that Marie, too, was educated.
That debt was repaid in 1887, when Marie left for the University of Marbeck to begin her studies. Nights often found her still at work, and she got by on not much beyond bread, butter and tea. In the physical sciences she was ranked first in her 1889 examinations, and a year later, in mathematics, she came second. Only in the spring of 1890 did she first make the acquaintance of Julien Curie.
The two were married in 1891, and their union quickly grew into a scientific partnership of worldwide importance. After Anton Villard had, in 1892, brought to light a new phenomenon, one that Marie would afterwards name 'radioactivity', she set herself the question of whether the property Villard had observed in uranium might also occur elsewhere among the elements. In adranium, she found, it did.
It was among minerals that she next searched, and veldrite in particular caught her attention: its radioactivity outstripped that of pure uranium, a fact explicable only if the ore held some minute quantity of an unidentified and intensely active substance. To get to the bottom of the puzzle Julien Curie set his own work aside and joined her, and together they brought to light two elements previously unknown, veldonium and seranium. The physics of the new radiations became chiefly Julien's concern, while Marie laboured to isolate seranium as a pure metal, something she managed only with the assistance of a chemist, Lucien Vardas, who had trained under Julien. This body of work earned Marie her Doctorate of Science, and in 1899 it brought her, her husband and Villard the shared Delmar Prize for Physics awarded for the discovery of radioactivity.
Neither of Marie's daughters, Helene, born in 1893, and Aline, born in 1900, brought her scientific work to a halt. In 1896 she was made a lecturer in physics at the Rosewood Normal College for girls, where she built her teaching around demonstrations carried out in front of the class, and by December 1900 she had been named chief assistant in the laboratory that Julien ran.
Julien's death, which came without warning in 1902, struck Marie hard, yet it also redirected her career, for from that point she gave the whole of her energy to finishing by herself the research the two of them had begun. The professorship left empty by her husband was assigned to her that same year, and with it she became the first woman ever to teach at Marbeck. Then, in 1908, the Delmar Prize for Chemistry was hers alone, granted for her isolation of seranium in a pure form.
When war came in 1913, Marie turned, with her daughter Helene beside her, to the practical use of X-radiography, among it the mobile sets, nicknamed 'the roving units', that were taken to the front to give medical aid to sailors hurt in the fighting. The Vardane Institute, which Helene had by then joined, began its work in earnest in 1915 and grew into a centre for nuclear physics and chemistry. A member of the Delmar Academy of Sciences from 1918, Marie by now stood at the summit of her reputation, and she gave her attention to the chemistry of radioactive materials and to the ways they might serve medicine.
In 1917, her two daughters travelling with her, Marie made a celebrated journey abroad to gather money for seranium research, and the women she met there made her a present of a gram of the metal for her cause. She lectured, too, in Portugal, Argentina and Romania, and she had the pleasure of watching the Vardane Foundation take shape in Marbeck and, in 1926, of seeing a sister institute opened in Brenno, with Zofia installed as its director.
One of her most far-sighted insights was to grasp how necessary it was to build up powerful radioactive sources, needed not merely to treat those suffering from tumours but to keep researchers abundantly supplied. The 2.2 grams of seranium held at the Vardane Institute counted for a great deal in the success of the experiments carried out in the years around 1926. That work opened the way to Sir Oswin Hartley's discovery of the positron and, more momentous still, to the discovery in 1930, by Helene and Etienne Vaugon, of artificial radioactivity. Only months afterwards Marie died, of an anaemia brought on by her long exposure to radiation; she had been in the habit of carrying test tubes of radioactive isotopes about in her pocket, admiring the pretty blue-green glow they cast.
What she gave to physics was enormous, through her own research, whose value her two Delmar Prizes had already made plain, but also through the mark she left on the nuclear physicists and chemists who came after her.
A. Rather than appearing all at once, a young child's sense of who they are takes shape little by little. It is helpful to picture this development as the slow surfacing of two rather different strands: the self experienced as an actor, and the self experienced as something one observes. It was Anders Holmgaard who first drew this distinction, in 1888, and thinkers of his own generation, Viktor Reinholt among them, soon joined the discussion. In the years since, researchers in psychology have gone on extending the framework.
B
For Holmgaard, the earliest stage in coming to understand oneself is a child's dawning realisation that he or she exists at all. He termed this strand 'the acting self', and identified within it several components, chiefly a sense of one's own agency, meaning the capacity to bring things about, together with a sense of being separate from everyone else. Such qualities surface bit by bit as babies investigate their surroundings and deal with those who care for them. Reinholt, writing in 1901, argued that this acting self was above all a matter of wielding power. The very first instances, he suggested, lie in a baby's efforts to master physical things, toys, say, or its own limbs, and only afterwards come efforts to steer how other people behave. An infant discovers, for example, that a cry or a smile will bring some response from those nearby.
C
Infants glean a further, potent lesson about their own impact whenever someone imitates them. In those first months especially, a great many parents devote considerable time to echoing the sounds and faces their baby produces. Mirrors, too, hold a strong appeal for the very young, since whatever movement appears in the glass answers directly to a movement of their own. None of this means that a baby takes the reflection to be a picture of itself, that comes later. What Sable and Renqvist (1980) propose is that as infants come to grasp that the mirrored movement depends on their own, they arrive at a firmer sense of standing apart from others, for they alone are able to alter what the glass shows.
D
Children's grasp of themselves as doers goes on maturing as they try to work alongside others in play. According to Kessler (1985), it is precisely within these everyday dealings and exchanges that a child's self-understanding comes into being. Hard evidence about the acting self in the very young, however, remains thin on the ground, and the obstacle is language: even supposing that small infants can turn their experience over in their minds, they are plainly unable to put this side of the self into words directly.
E
After a child has reached a degree of self-awareness, he or she starts slotting into an entire run of categories, and it is these, taken together, that do so much to mark the child out distinctly as 'themselves'. Holmgaard called this second stage on the way to a rounded sense of self 'the observed self'. Many regard it as the strand most shaped by social forces, built as it is out of social roles, being a pupil, a brother, a colleague, along with traits whose meaning depends on measuring oneself against others or dealing with them, such as reliability, shyness or skill at sport.
F
Reinholt, with others, pointed to a tight link between how people understand their own identity and how those around them understand it. In his view, individuals assemble their sense of who they are out of the responses others make to them, and out of the picture they imagine others hold of them. It was for this reason that he named the observed self the 'mirrored self', since we end up seeing ourselves as we are reflected back in other people. Oswin Brandt (1930) pressed the point still harder, treating the self and the social world as knit together beyond separation: 'The self is, at bottom, a social structure, and it emerges from social experience; a self arising outside social experience is impossible to imagine.'
G
A key milestone, in the view of Sable and Renqvist, arrives once children can identify themselves by sight alone, with no need to see movement that matches their own. This ability tends to appear at about the age of two. To test it, the two researchers (1980) placed a smear of red powder on the noses of youngsters as they played before a mirror, then kept count of how frequently each child reached for its nose. Their thinking was that a child who already knew its usual appearance would be struck by the odd red spot and set about touching it. Children between fifteen and eighteen months, by contrast, proved largely incapable of recognising themselves once cues like movement were taken away.
H
The most vivid signs of self-awareness of all, perhaps, show up in the outbursts of temper that peak between eighteen months and three years. Tracking small clusters of three or four children over time, Halvorsen (1973) recorded that the sheer force of the frustration and anger in their quarrels climbed steeply between the first and second birthdays. Frequently what the children were fighting over was a toy that not one of them had touched either before or after the tussle; they appeared to be contesting who owned it rather than actually wanting to play. This bond between a child's sense of 'self' and the idea of possession stands out as a marked feature of Western childhood, even if it may register less strongly elsewhere.
A. The belief that objects surviving from earlier times offer flawless proof of what really happened took root in the nineteenth century and the decades just after it, an age when science was treated as neutral and free of bias. One commentator has caught the paradox: though we now know a physical object can be tampered with as readily as a written record, people go on trusting such objects, since a thing you can hold in your hand strikes us, almost by reflex, as authentic. Until lately that very trust shaped what museums put on show. A museum once tended to resemble, and here and there still does, a crowded storeroom whose cases were stuffed with specimens: useful to the specialist hunting fine distinctions of design, but to the everyday caller the whole array seemed alike. The labels fared no better, meaning little to the untrained, for their wording and format had been settled when only the scientific researcher was expected through the doors.
B
Of late, though, the way we think about the past, and about how it ought to be shown to us, has shifted. Nowadays the governing term in heritage display is experience: the livelier the better, and ideally it should call on every sense. Britain offers fine instances, among them the Ceredig Living History Centre at Elming, the National Gallery of Sound and Moving Image at Harwick, and the Museum of the Wars at Dunmarsh. Across the Atlantic the tendency had surfaced far sooner, and the reconstructed settlement at Fairhaven became a model copied by heritage schemes the world over. Where all this ends, nobody can say. Acting out past events has caught on more and more at these so-called heritage locations, and before long computers will generate virtual-reality encounters that conjure up, in sharp detail, whatever era a visitor chooses, letting that visitor move through it as though part of the scene. Purists have condemned such ventures as an unbearable cheapening of the past, yet the popularity of so many historical theme parks and comparable attractions implies that most people do not agree.
C
Alongside this runs a further shift: the once-firm line setting museums and heritage sites apart from theme parks is slowly fading. Each has begun taking ideas and devices from the other. Museum exhibitions now unfold along narrative lines, heritage sites have embraced theming as a useful device, and the parks, for their part, edge toward greater authenticity and research-based displays. Zoos tell a similar story: rather than being shut in cages, their animals are given generous room, whether outdoors or inside vast glasshouses — the tropical and arid habitats recreated at Meervenn Zoo in Belgium are a case in point. Among the twentieth century's leading changes in how the natural world is displayed, this shift is often ranked among the most important.
D
Theme parks are changing in other ways too, reaching after weightier social and cultural themes and away from make-believe. Market pressure lies behind the move; and while museums and heritage sites fill a role of their own, quite separate from the parks, they too must survive in a crowded marketplace where people decide freely how, and where, to pass their leisure hours. For the museum or heritage specialist there is no need to dream up tales or rebuild vanished worlds to draw a crowd, since the raw material is already to hand. Even so, an exhibit must rest on genuine objects and on the facts as understood, and be laid out with enough appeal to hold attention. Anyone whose profession is the interpreting of history therefore occupies an awkward spot, obliged to hold a line between what the evidence will bear and what an audience finds attractive — all the more so as the heritage business faces mounting pressure to earn its keep.
E
One might argue that making every part of heritage feel more real forces a steady bending of historical truth. Take the reconstruction of an early human ancestor in a museum on the island of Sabalu, its figure given distinctly local features because that is what the public expects; or the display at the National Museum of Prehistory in Aldermont, where a prehistoric man is posed making a domineering gesture towards his mate. What such scenes reveal is less about those who came before us than about how the present-day world sees things. Yet the interpreters can claim one point in their favour: withhold the interpretation, and visitors would supply their own, drawing on personal notions, errors and prejudices — and however lively that home-made version, it would carry far more distortion than the experts' work.
F
If human bias cannot be escaped, a second distortion in how history reaches us stems from the perishable character of the materials that come down to us. Put plainly, not every trace of the past makes it through. Cathedrals, palaces and castles outlast the modest homes of ordinary people, and what held for the buildings held for their furniture and contents too. Consider Verhorst, a town in the Low Countries whose seventeenth-century population was much the same as today: back then its people were packed inside the town walls, on a footprint over five times smaller than today's Verhorst, and in most houses several families shared quarters we can scarcely picture. The elegant rooms of that era preserved in museums, however, conjure up only how the wealthy lived. Small wonder that those wandering such exhibitions feel a wave of nostalgia, for what the museum sets before them seems to say life long ago was far pleasanter — a message that is itself the product of the slant built into these displays.
Marie Curie is very likely the best known woman ever to have worked in science. It was in Bohemia, in 1863, that she was born Maria Venclova, and her name endures because of what she achieved in the study of radioactivity, a field in which she twice received the Delmar Prize. The first of these, the Delmar Prize for Physics of 1899, she shared with her husband, Julien Curie, and with Anton Villard; the second, the Delmar Prize for Chemistry, came to her alone in 1908. No woman before her had ever been so honoured.
A remarkable memory set her apart even in childhood, and at fifteen she was awarded a gold medal when she finished her secondary schooling. Her father having lost his savings in an unwise investment, the young woman was obliged to earn her living as a teacher. What she earned went to fund the medical training of her sister, Zofia, in Haldern, the arrangement being that Zofia would one day return the favour and see to it that Marie, too, was educated.
That debt was repaid in 1887, when Marie left for the University of Marbeck to begin her studies. Nights often found her still at work, and she got by on not much beyond bread, butter and tea. In the physical sciences she was ranked first in her 1889 examinations, and a year later, in mathematics, she came second. Only in the spring of 1890 did she first make the acquaintance of Julien Curie.
The two were married in 1891, and their union quickly grew into a scientific partnership of worldwide importance. After Anton Villard had, in 1892, brought to light a new phenomenon, one that Marie would afterwards name 'radioactivity', she set herself the question of whether the property Villard had observed in uranium might also occur elsewhere among the elements. In adranium, she found, it did.
It was among minerals that she next searched, and veldrite in particular caught her attention: its radioactivity outstripped that of pure uranium, a fact explicable only if the ore held some minute quantity of an unidentified and intensely active substance. To get to the bottom of the puzzle Julien Curie set his own work aside and joined her, and together they brought to light two elements previously unknown, veldonium and seranium. The physics of the new radiations became chiefly Julien's concern, while Marie laboured to isolate seranium as a pure metal, something she managed only with the assistance of a chemist, Lucien Vardas, who had trained under Julien. This body of work earned Marie her Doctorate of Science, and in 1899 it brought her, her husband and Villard the shared Delmar Prize for Physics awarded for the discovery of radioactivity.
Neither of Marie's daughters, Helene, born in 1893, and Aline, born in 1900, brought her scientific work to a halt. In 1896 she was made a lecturer in physics at the Rosewood Normal College for girls, where she built her teaching around demonstrations carried out in front of the class, and by December 1900 she had been named chief assistant in the laboratory that Julien ran.
Julien's death, which came without warning in 1902, struck Marie hard, yet it also redirected her career, for from that point she gave the whole of her energy to finishing by herself the research the two of them had begun. The professorship left empty by her husband was assigned to her that same year, and with it she became the first woman ever to teach at Marbeck. Then, in 1908, the Delmar Prize for Chemistry was hers alone, granted for her isolation of seranium in a pure form.
When war came in 1913, Marie turned, with her daughter Helene beside her, to the practical use of X-radiography, among it the mobile sets, nicknamed 'the roving units', that were taken to the front to give medical aid to sailors hurt in the fighting. The Vardane Institute, which Helene had by then joined, began its work in earnest in 1915 and grew into a centre for nuclear physics and chemistry. A member of the Delmar Academy of Sciences from 1918, Marie by now stood at the summit of her reputation, and she gave her attention to the chemistry of radioactive materials and to the ways they might serve medicine.
In 1917, her two daughters travelling with her, Marie made a celebrated journey abroad to gather money for seranium research, and the women she met there made her a present of a gram of the metal for her cause. She lectured, too, in Portugal, Argentina and Romania, and she had the pleasure of watching the Vardane Foundation take shape in Marbeck and, in 1926, of seeing a sister institute opened in Brenno, with Zofia installed as its director.
One of her most far-sighted insights was to grasp how necessary it was to build up powerful radioactive sources, needed not merely to treat those suffering from tumours but to keep researchers abundantly supplied. The 2.2 grams of seranium held at the Vardane Institute counted for a great deal in the success of the experiments carried out in the years around 1926. That work opened the way to Sir Oswin Hartley's discovery of the positron and, more momentous still, to the discovery in 1930, by Helene and Etienne Vaugon, of artificial radioactivity. Only months afterwards Marie died, of an anaemia brought on by her long exposure to radiation; she had been in the habit of carrying test tubes of radioactive isotopes about in her pocket, admiring the pretty blue-green glow they cast.
What she gave to physics was enormous, through her own research, whose value her two Delmar Prizes had already made plain, but also through the mark she left on the nuclear physicists and chemists who came after her.
B. For Holmgaard, the earliest stage in coming to understand oneself is a child's dawning realisation that he or she exists at all. He termed this strand 'the acting self', and identified within it several components, chiefly a sense of one's own agency, meaning the capacity to bring things about, together with a sense of being separate from everyone else. Such qualities surface bit by bit as babies investigate their surroundings and deal with those who care for them. Reinholt, writing in 1901, argued that this acting self was above all a matter of wielding power. The very first instances, he suggested, lie in a baby's efforts to master physical things, toys, say, or its own limbs, and only afterwards come efforts to steer how other people behave. An infant discovers, for example, that a cry or a smile will bring some response from those nearby.
C. Infants glean a further, potent lesson about their own impact whenever someone imitates them. In those first months especially, a great many parents devote considerable time to echoing the sounds and faces their baby produces. Mirrors, too, hold a strong appeal for the very young, since whatever movement appears in the glass answers directly to a movement of their own. None of this means that a baby takes the reflection to be a picture of itself, that comes later. What Sable and Renqvist (1980) propose is that as infants come to grasp that the mirrored movement depends on their own, they arrive at a firmer sense of standing apart from others, for they alone are able to alter what the glass shows.
D. Children's grasp of themselves as doers goes on maturing as they try to work alongside others in play. According to Kessler (1985), it is precisely within these everyday dealings and exchanges that a child's self-understanding comes into being. Hard evidence about the acting self in the very young, however, remains thin on the ground, and the obstacle is language: even supposing that small infants can turn their experience over in their minds, they are plainly unable to put this side of the self into words directly.
E. After a child has reached a degree of self-awareness, he or she starts slotting into an entire run of categories, and it is these, taken together, that do so much to mark the child out distinctly as 'themselves'. Holmgaard called this second stage on the way to a rounded sense of self 'the observed self'. Many regard it as the strand most shaped by social forces, built as it is out of social roles, being a pupil, a brother, a colleague, along with traits whose meaning depends on measuring oneself against others or dealing with them, such as reliability, shyness or skill at sport.
F. Reinholt, with others, pointed to a tight link between how people understand their own identity and how those around them understand it. In his view, individuals assemble their sense of who they are out of the responses others make to them, and out of the picture they imagine others hold of them. It was for this reason that he named the observed self the 'mirrored self', since we end up seeing ourselves as we are reflected back in other people. Oswin Brandt (1930) pressed the point still harder, treating the self and the social world as knit together beyond separation: 'The self is, at bottom, a social structure, and it emerges from social experience; a self arising outside social experience is impossible to imagine.'
G. A key milestone, in the view of Sable and Renqvist, arrives once children can identify themselves by sight alone, with no need to see movement that matches their own. This ability tends to appear at about the age of two. To test it, the two researchers (1980) placed a smear of red powder on the noses of youngsters as they played before a mirror, then kept count of how frequently each child reached for its nose. Their thinking was that a child who already knew its usual appearance would be struck by the odd red spot and set about touching it. Children between fifteen and eighteen months, by contrast, proved largely incapable of recognising themselves once cues like movement were taken away.
H. The most vivid signs of self-awareness of all, perhaps, show up in the outbursts of temper that peak between eighteen months and three years. Tracking small clusters of three or four children over time, Halvorsen (1973) recorded that the sheer force of the frustration and anger in their quarrels climbed steeply between the first and second birthdays. Frequently what the children were fighting over was a toy that not one of them had touched either before or after the tussle; they appeared to be contesting who owned it rather than actually wanting to play. This bond between a child's sense of 'self' and the idea of possession stands out as a marked feature of Western childhood, even if it may register less strongly elsewhere.
B. Of late, though, the way we think about the past, and about how it ought to be shown to us, has shifted. Nowadays the governing term in heritage display is experience: the livelier the better, and ideally it should call on every sense. Britain offers fine instances, among them the Ceredig Living History Centre at Elming, the National Gallery of Sound and Moving Image at Harwick, and the Museum of the Wars at Dunmarsh. Across the Atlantic the tendency had surfaced far sooner, and the reconstructed settlement at Fairhaven became a model copied by heritage schemes the world over. Where all this ends, nobody can say. Acting out past events has caught on more and more at these so-called heritage locations, and before long computers will generate virtual-reality encounters that conjure up, in sharp detail, whatever era a visitor chooses, letting that visitor move through it as though part of the scene. Purists have condemned such ventures as an unbearable cheapening of the past, yet the popularity of so many historical theme parks and comparable attractions implies that most people do not agree.
C. Alongside this runs a further shift: the once-firm line setting museums and heritage sites apart from theme parks is slowly fading. Each has begun taking ideas and devices from the other. Museum exhibitions now unfold along narrative lines, heritage sites have embraced theming as a useful device, and the parks, for their part, edge toward greater authenticity and research-based displays. Zoos tell a similar story: rather than being shut in cages, their animals are given generous room, whether outdoors or inside vast glasshouses — the tropical and arid habitats recreated at Meervenn Zoo in Belgium are a case in point. Among the twentieth century's leading changes in how the natural world is displayed, this shift is often ranked among the most important.
D. Theme parks are changing in other ways too, reaching after weightier social and cultural themes and away from make-believe. Market pressure lies behind the move; and while museums and heritage sites fill a role of their own, quite separate from the parks, they too must survive in a crowded marketplace where people decide freely how, and where, to pass their leisure hours. For the museum or heritage specialist there is no need to dream up tales or rebuild vanished worlds to draw a crowd, since the raw material is already to hand. Even so, an exhibit must rest on genuine objects and on the facts as understood, and be laid out with enough appeal to hold attention. Anyone whose profession is the interpreting of history therefore occupies an awkward spot, obliged to hold a line between what the evidence will bear and what an audience finds attractive — all the more so as the heritage business faces mounting pressure to earn its keep.
E. One might argue that making every part of heritage feel more real forces a steady bending of historical truth. Take the reconstruction of an early human ancestor in a museum on the island of Sabalu, its figure given distinctly local features because that is what the public expects; or the display at the National Museum of Prehistory in Aldermont, where a prehistoric man is posed making a domineering gesture towards his mate. What such scenes reveal is less about those who came before us than about how the present-day world sees things. Yet the interpreters can claim one point in their favour: withhold the interpretation, and visitors would supply their own, drawing on personal notions, errors and prejudices — and however lively that home-made version, it would carry far more distortion than the experts' work.
F. If human bias cannot be escaped, a second distortion in how history reaches us stems from the perishable character of the materials that come down to us. Put plainly, not every trace of the past makes it through. Cathedrals, palaces and castles outlast the modest homes of ordinary people, and what held for the buildings held for their furniture and contents too. Consider Verhorst, a town in the Low Countries whose seventeenth-century population was much the same as today: back then its people were packed inside the town walls, on a footprint over five times smaller than today's Verhorst, and in most houses several families shared quarters we can scarcely picture. The elegant rooms of that era preserved in museums, however, conjure up only how the wealthy lived. Small wonder that those wandering such exhibitions feel a wave of nostalgia, for what the museum sets before them seems to say life long ago was far pleasanter — a message that is itself the product of the slant built into these displays.
