The development of museums - IELTS Reading with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation

Luyện tập đề IELTS Reading Practice với passage The development of museums được lấy từ cuốn sách IELTS Mock Test Vol 9 - Test 4 - Passage 3 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking, kèm list từ vựng IELTS cần học trong bài đọc.

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The development of museums - IELTS Reading with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation

📖 Bài đọc (reading passage)

The Development of Museums
A
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
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
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
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
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
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.

❓ Câu hỏi (questions)

List of Headings

The blurring of once-separate kinds of attraction

Adjusting the record to match what audiences anticipate

III

Divided opinion about how museums are changing

Money-related pressures on those who run museums

How the practice spread from country to country

Recommendations now under discussion

Paragraph B

Paragraph C

Paragraph D

Paragraph E

The writer suggests that the museums of former times

catered chiefly to experts rather than to ordinary visitors.

kept their exhibits in a more orderly arrangement.

gave fuller explanations of the objects on show.

took greater care over preserving their contents.

In the writer's account, the newest developments in heritage display

first took shape at the British centres mentioned.

rely for the most part on computer-generated imagery.

encourage visitors to become active participants.

cater to the tastes of only a small minority.

According to the passage, theme parks, heritage sites and museums

are gradually becoming harder to tell apart.

have formed official partnerships with one another.

each strive to hold on to a separate identity.

now house broadly the same kinds of exhibit.

The writer states that, in putting exhibits together, heritage specialists

should concentrate on a single aim.

have to translate a certain amount of text.

must weigh two opposing requirements against each other.

ought to be kept clear of commercial concerns.

The writer's point in paragraph E is that certain museum displays

leave the people who view them disappointed.

reveal today's ways of thinking more than the reality of the past.

are built on the mistaken beliefs of the professionals.

give visitors freer rein to use their imagination.

The passage closes by explaining that our picture of the past is distorted because

we make too little use of our own imagination.

we choose to look past whatever troubles us.

exhibitions dwell too heavily on the surrounding region.

only the sturdiest objects have survived the years.

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.

Museums draw larger numbers of visitors than theme parks do.

The writer thinks experts produce a less distorted account than visitors would arrive at on their own.

The grand rooms from earlier centuries that museums display represent the homes of poorer households.

🔥 Answer key (đáp án và giải thích)

III

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