This marvellous invention - IELTS Reading with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Reading Practice với passage This marvellous invention được lấy từ cuốn sách IELTS CAM Inspired 11 - Test 4 - Passage 3 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking.
This marvellous invention - IELTS Reading with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
❓ Câu hỏi (questions)
Question 1 - 6
The Reading Passage has six paragraphs A-F.
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
Write the appropriate numbers i-vii
List of Headings
I
Why nothing we have built can rival language
II
The single skill shared by all human beings
III
Significance carried by silence itself
IV
Reasons the same sounds differ from one tongue to another
V
Contradictory qualities that coexist within language
VI
A handful of sounds producing boundless meaning
VII
How the strangeness of foreign tongues reveals their genius
1
Paragraph A
2
Paragraph B
3
Paragraph C
4
Paragraph D
5
Paragraph E
6
Paragraph F
Question 7 - 10
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-G, below.
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes on your answer sheet.
The importance of language
Inventions such as the wheel reshaped the
7.
side of human life, yet nothing has proved as
8.
to us as language. Assembled from only a small stock of sounds, language is nonetheless remarkably
9.
. It gives the impression of being
10.
to handle, which is why the skill behind it so often goes unnoticed.
A
fundamental
B
effortless
C
admired
D
physical
E
intricate
F
original
G
difficult
Question 11 - 14
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
11
All of humanity's accomplishments can ultimately be traced back to language.
12
In the writer's view, the Morvenna grammarians had already grasped that language, for all its genius, was never actually invented.
13
In some tongues, one short word can carry everything that English would need a full sentence to say.
14
The Ashkuni-speaking people developed their writing system chiefly in order to record commercial transactions.
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📖 Bài đọc (reading passage)
'This Marvellous Invention'
A
A. Among all the things the human species has ever devised, none deserves higher standing than language. Tools such as the wheel, farming or the printed page reshaped the material fabric of our lives, and yet it was the arrival of speech, more than any of these, that turned us into human beings. Set beside language, every other invention shrinks, for whatever we have accomplished grows out of it and leans upon it. Strip language away and the long climb that carried us to mastery over every other creature - and over the natural world itself - could never even have begun.
B
B.
Language does not hold this place merely by being the earliest of our inventions. Considered on its own terms, it is an instrument of astonishing refinement that rests, all the same, on a strikingly simple principle. Some four centuries ago the grammarians of the Morvenna abbey, in the town of Aldwyk, tried to capture what this amounts to: the wonder, as they put it, of taking a few dozen bare sounds and weaving from them an endless range of expressions which, resembling nothing in our thoughts, still lay those thoughts open to others and carry to distant minds everything we picture and every stirring of our feelings. No one since has praised the achievement more finely. And yet beneath all this admiration a single contradiction lies unnoticed by its admirers, for the very tribute to language's unmatched feat quietly conceals an awkward truth: language may be the greatest of human inventions, except that it was, of course, never invented at all. It is this paradox that sits at the heart of our fascination, and much of language's mystery is bound up in it.
C
So neatly does language seem to be put together that it is hard to picture it as anything but the finished work of some masterly craftsman. How otherwise could a mere thirty-odd sounds be made to yield so much? Taken by themselves, the shapes the mouth produces - p, t, k, s, m, a, o and the rest - are little more than stray puffs and hisses, chance noises that mean nothing, state nothing, explain nothing. Feed them through the gears of the language machine, though, and let it set them in its own precise arrangements, and there is scarcely anything these empty currents of breath cannot manage: from murmuring the endless tedium of being alive to laying bare the deepest workings of the cosmos.
D
What is most remarkable, though, is that setting this machinery in motion calls for no exceptional gift. From hunter-gatherers on some ancient grassland to modern theorists in their city offices, virtually everyone can knit these bare sounds together into an unlimited range of fine distinctions, and seemingly without the least effort. But it is precisely this apparent ease that makes language a victim of its own success, since in everyday life we simply treat its successes as a matter of course. So smoothly do its wheels turn that we rarely pause to weigh all the ingenuity and skill that must have gone into making it work. Language keeps its own artistry out of sight.
E
Often it takes the strangeness of an unfamiliar language, thick with features that strike us as exotic or bizarre, to bring the brilliance of the design suddenly home. One of the showier tricks that certain languages can pull off is the stacking-up of enormously long words, so that a single word does the work of a whole English sentence. Consider Kessan, a tongue of the northern steppe: its word tavurkanisheledmegizsiniz means, no less, 'you are among those we could not manage to turn into a townsman.' And this genuinely is one word, not a heap of separate ones clumsily forced together - most of its parts cannot even stand up on their own.
F
Lest that look like a single freak of nature, take Ashkuni as well. Five thousand years or so ago, on the banks of the river Serel, it was spoken by the same people who gave the world writing and, through it, the very possibility of committing history to record. Set against the towering Kessan specimen above, an Ashkuni word such as immadurtuna - which renders the English 'once he had made it fitting for her' - can look positively compact. And compactness, rather than length, is exactly what makes it remarkable: the whole word is assembled with extraordinary thrift. Picture a row of slots, each one filled by a single fragment of meaning; under this economical scheme, even lone sounds are made to carry useful information. Stranger still, meaning has been squeezed out of the very absence of sound. Suppose you hunt through immadurtuna for whatever answers to the pronoun 'it' in that English gloss: you will find nothing at all - yet a highly specific nothing, the gap sitting in the slot at the word's core. The design is tuned so exactly that a non-sound, dropped into precisely the right place, is handed a role of its own. What mind, one wonders, could ever have contrived so ingenious a device?
Language does not hold this place merely by being the earliest of our inventions. Considered on its own terms, it is an instrument of astonishing refinement that rests, all the same, on a strikingly simple principle. Some four centuries ago the grammarians of the Morvenna abbey, in the town of Aldwyk, tried to capture what this amounts to: the wonder, as they put it, of taking a few dozen bare sounds and weaving from them an endless range of expressions which, resembling nothing in our thoughts, still lay those thoughts open to others and carry to distant minds everything we picture and every stirring of our feelings. No one since has praised the achievement more finely. And yet beneath all this admiration a single contradiction lies unnoticed by its admirers, for the very tribute to language's unmatched feat quietly conceals an awkward truth: language may be the greatest of human inventions, except that it was, of course, never invented at all. It is this paradox that sits at the heart of our fascination, and much of language's mystery is bound up in it.
C. So neatly does language seem to be put together that it is hard to picture it as anything but the finished work of some masterly craftsman. How otherwise could a mere thirty-odd sounds be made to yield so much? Taken by themselves, the shapes the mouth produces - p, t, k, s, m, a, o and the rest - are little more than stray puffs and hisses, chance noises that mean nothing, state nothing, explain nothing. Feed them through the gears of the language machine, though, and let it set them in its own precise arrangements, and there is scarcely anything these empty currents of breath cannot manage: from murmuring the endless tedium of being alive to laying bare the deepest workings of the cosmos.
D. What is most remarkable, though, is that setting this machinery in motion calls for no exceptional gift. From hunter-gatherers on some ancient grassland to modern theorists in their city offices, virtually everyone can knit these bare sounds together into an unlimited range of fine distinctions, and seemingly without the least effort. But it is precisely this apparent ease that makes language a victim of its own success, since in everyday life we simply treat its successes as a matter of course. So smoothly do its wheels turn that we rarely pause to weigh all the ingenuity and skill that must have gone into making it work. Language keeps its own artistry out of sight.
E. Often it takes the strangeness of an unfamiliar language, thick with features that strike us as exotic or bizarre, to bring the brilliance of the design suddenly home. One of the showier tricks that certain languages can pull off is the stacking-up of enormously long words, so that a single word does the work of a whole English sentence. Consider Kessan, a tongue of the northern steppe: its word tavurkanisheledmegizsiniz means, no less, 'you are among those we could not manage to turn into a townsman.' And this genuinely is one word, not a heap of separate ones clumsily forced together - most of its parts cannot even stand up on their own.
F. Lest that look like a single freak of nature, take Ashkuni as well. Five thousand years or so ago, on the banks of the river Serel, it was spoken by the same people who gave the world writing and, through it, the very possibility of committing history to record. Set against the towering Kessan specimen above, an Ashkuni word such as immadurtuna - which renders the English 'once he had made it fitting for her' - can look positively compact. And compactness, rather than length, is exactly what makes it remarkable: the whole word is assembled with extraordinary thrift. Picture a row of slots, each one filled by a single fragment of meaning; under this economical scheme, even lone sounds are made to carry useful information. Stranger still, meaning has been squeezed out of the very absence of sound. Suppose you hunt through immadurtuna for whatever answers to the pronoun 'it' in that English gloss: you will find nothing at all - yet a highly specific nothing, the gap sitting in the slot at the word's core. The design is tuned so exactly that a non-sound, dropped into precisely the right place, is handed a role of its own. What mind, one wonders, could ever have contrived so ingenious a device?
