IELTS Real Reading Test 2025 - Q1 Test 4 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Real Reading Test 2025 - Q1 Test 4 được lấy từ cuốn sách Real Test 2025 - Q1 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 Real Reading Test 2025 - Q1 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
Caral was built at the same time as the construction of the Egyptian pyramids.
2
The absence of pottery at the archaeological dig gave Shady a significant clue to the age of the site.
3
The stones used to build Piramide Mayor came from a location far away.
4
The huge and complicated structures of Piramide Mayor suggest that its construction required an organised team of builders.
5
Archaeological evidence shows that the residents of Caral were highly skilled musicians.
6
The remains of housing areas at Caral suggest that there were no class distinctions in residential areas.
Question 7 - 13
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
<b>CARAL AS A TRADING CENTRE</b>
Items discovered at Caral but not naturally occurring in the area
- the
7.
of a certain plant
-
8.
used to make jewellery
- the remains of certain food such as
9.
Clues to farming around Caral
-
10.
still in existence today indicate water diverted from rivers
- no evidence that
11.
was grown
Evidence of relationship with fishing communities
- the excavation findings and fishing nets found on the coast suggest Caral farmers traded
12.
- dried squash may have been used to aid
13.
of fishing nets
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 20
The Reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-G.
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
List of Headings
I
A character who provoked sympathy and amusement
II
Outdoor performances with a standard set of
III
Pantomime as a means of focusing on political issues
IV
Discovering pantomime at a young age
V
A way of dealing with a negative attitude toward pantomime
VI
An explanation of how a pantomime character appeals to modern audiences
VII
Debate about the origins of pantomime
VIII
A successful merging of artistic sources
14
Paragraph A
15
Paragraph B
16
Paragraph C
17
Paragraph D
18
Paragraph E
19
Paragraph F
20
Paragraph G
Question 21 - 23
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
21
Commedia dell’arte actors used
to disguise their real identities.
22
Harlequinades combined elements of a 16th-century art form with a
written many centuries earlier.
23
In early 19th-century pantomimes,
were often victims of the Clown’s activities.
Question 24 - 26
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
John Rich
B
David Garrick
C
Joseph Grimaldi
D
Dan Leno
24
His performances focused on the situation of the less wealthy sections of society.
25
He introduced elements of the supernatural to the pantomime genre.
26
His pantomime character was never seen to be punished for his on-stage crimes.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
27
What point is the writer making in the second paragraph?
A
Some present studies on children’s mother tongues are misleading.
B
A culturally rich education programme benefits some children more than others.
C
Bilingual children can make a valuable contribution to the wealth of a country.
D
The law on mother tongue use at school should be strengthened.
28
Why does the writer refer to something that Goethe said?
A
to lend weight to his argument
B
to contradict some research
C
to introduce a new concept
D
to update current thinking
29
The writer believes that when young children have a firm grasp of their mother tongue,
A
they can teach older family members what they learn at school.
B
they go on to do much better throughout their time at school.
C
they can read stories about their cultural background.
D
they develop stronger relationships with their family than with their peers.
30
Why are some people suspicious about mother tongue-based teaching programmes?
A
They worry that children will be slow to learn to read in either language.
B
They think that children will confuse words in the two languages.
C
They believe that the programmes will make children less interested in their lessons.
D
They fear that the programmes will use up valuable time in the school day.
Question 31 - 35
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-J, below.
Write the correct letter, A-J, in boxes on your answer sheet.
Bilingual children
It has often been noted that bilingual children acquire the to converse in the majority language remarkably quickly. The fact that the mother tongue can disappear at a similar is less well understood. This phenomenon depends to a certain extent on the proportion of people with the same linguistic background that have settled in a particular . If this is limited, children are likely to lose the active use of their mother tongue, and thus no longer employ it even with although they may still understand it. It follows that teenage children in these circumstances experience a sense of in relation to all aspects of their lives.
A
teachers
B
schools
C
dislocation
D
rate
E
time
F
family
G
communication
H
type
I
ability
J
area
Question 36 - 40
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
36
Less than half the children who attend kindergarten in Toronto have English as their mother tongue.
37
Research proves that learning the host country language at school can have an adverse effect on a child’s mother tongue.
38
The Foyer programme is to be adopted by the French education system.
39
Bilingual children are taught to tell the time earlier than monolingual children.
40
Bilingual children can eventually apply reading comprehension strategies acquired in one language when reading in the other.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
05/05/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Caral: An ancient South American city
Huge earth and rock mounds rise out of the desert of the Supe Valley near the coast of Peru in South America. These immense mounds appear simply to be part of the geographical landscape in this arid region squeezed between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains. But looks deceive. These are actually human-made pyramids; strong evidence indicates they are the remains of a city known as Caral that flourished nearly 5,000 years ago. If true, it would be the oldest known urban center in America and among the most ancient in the world.
Research undertaken by Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady suggests that the 150-acre complex of pyramids, plazas and residential buildings was a thriving metropolis when Egypt’s great pyramids were still being built. Though discovered in 1905, for years Caral attracted little attention, largely because archaeologists believed the structures were rainy recently. But the monumental scale of the pyramids had long interested Shady, who began excavations at the site in 1996, about 22 kilometers from the coast and 190 kilometers north of Peru's capital city of Lima.
Shady and her crew searched for broken remains of the pots and containers that most such sites contain. Not finding any only made her more excited: it meant Caral could be what archaeologists term pre-ceramic, that is, existing before the advent in the area of pot-firing techniques. Shady’s team undertook the task of excavating Piramide Mayor, the largest of the pyramids. After carefully clearing away many hundreds of years’ worth of rubble and sand, they identified staircases, walls covered with remnants of colored plaster, and brickwork. In the foundations, they found the remains of grass-like reeds woven into bags. The original workers, she surmised, must have filled these bags with stones from a nearby quarry and laid them atop one another inside retaining walls, gradually giving rise to the pyramid’s immense structure. Shady had samples of the reeds subjected to radiocarbon dating and found that the reeds were 4,600 years old. This evidence indicated that Caral was, in fact, more than 1,000 years older than what had previously been thought to be the oldest urban center in the Americas.
What amazed archaeologists was not just the age, but the complexity and scope of Caral. Piramide Mayor alone covers an area nearly the size of four football fields and is 18 meters tall. A nine-meter-wide staircase rises from a circular plaza at the foot of the pyramid, passing over three terraced levels until it reaches the top. Thousands of manual laborers would have been needed to build such a project, not counting the many architects, craftsmen, and managers. Shady’s team found the remains of a large amphitheater, containing almost 70 musical instruments made of bird and deer bones. Clearly music plaved an important role in Caral’s society. Around the perimeter of Caral are a series of smaller mounds and various buildings. These indicate a hierarchy of living arrangements: large, well-kept rooms atop pyramids for the elite, ground-level quarters for shabbier outlying dwellings for workers.
But why had Caral been built in the first place? Her excavations convinced Shady that Caral once served as a trade center for the region, which extends from the rainforests of the Amazon to the high forests of the Andes. Shady found evidence of a rich trading environment, including seeds of the cocoa bush and necklaces of shells, neither of which was native to the immediate Caral area. This environment gave rise to people who did not take part in the production of food, allowing them to become priests and planners, builders and designers. Thus occupational specialization, elemental to an urban society, emerged.
But what sustained such a trading center and drew travelers to it? Was it food? Shady and her team found the bones of small edible fish, which must have come from the Pacific coast to the west, in the excavations. But they also found evidence of squash, sweet potatoes and beans having been grown locally. Shady theorized that Caral’s early farmers diverted the area’s rivers into canals, which still cross the Supe Valley today, to irrigate their fields. But because she found no traces of maize, which can be traded or stored and used in times of crop failure, she concluded that Caral’s trade leverage was not based on stockpiling food supplies.
It was evidence of another crop in the excavations that gave Shady the best clue to Caral’s success. In nearly every excavated building, her team discovered evidence of cotton - seeds, fibers and textiles. Her theory fell into place when a large fishing net made of those fibers, unearthed in an unrelated dig on Peru's coast, turned out to be as old as Caral. ‘The farmers of Caral grew the cotton that the fishermen needed to make their nets,' Shady speculates. 'And the fishermen gave them shellfish and dried fish in exchange for these nets.’ In essence, the people of Caral enabled fishermen to work with larger and more effective nets, which made the resources of the sea more readily available, and the fishermen probably used dried squash grown by the Caral people as flotation devices for their nets.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 1
1
False
Giải thích chi tiết
☺️ Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài True / False / Not Given
Step 01: Read the question to understand (main idea + detail)
Simplified: Caral was built at the same time as the Egyptian pyramids
-------
Step 02: Locate relevant information
🔍 Từ khóa: “Caral”, “Egypt’s pyramids”, ”built”
=> Dựa vào các từ khoá trên -> Tìm được trích dẫn ở đoạn 2 câu đầu tiên.
-------
Step 03: Read relevant information to understand (main + detail)
📌 Trích dẫn: “Research undertaken by Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady suggests that the 150-acre complex of pyramids, plazas and residential buildings was a thriving metropolis when Egypt’s great pyramids were still being built.”
Simplified: Caral was a thriving metropolis when the Egyptian pyramids were still being built
-------
Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning
Trong bài đọc: Caral đã là một đô thị hưng thịnh trước khi việc xây dựng kim tự tháp Ai Cập hoàn tất.
Trong câu hỏi: Caral được xây dựng cùng thời điểm với kim tự tháp Ai Cập.
→ Hai ýtrái ngược: bài đọc cho thấy Caral đã tồn tại và phát triển khi kim tự tháp còn đang được xây dựng, không phải xây cùng lúc.
⇒ ✅ Chọn: FALSE
-------
Lưu ý chung:
Nếu đáp án là TRUE: bài đọc phải nói rõ Caral và kim tự tháp Ai Cập được xây dựng đồng thời.
Nếu đáp án là NOT GIVEN: bài đọc sẽ không đề cập đến mốc thời gian so sánh giữa hai nền văn minh.
A. A pantomime performance is a unique blend of eccentricity and absurdity, a wild mixture of songs, jokes, outrageous costumes and slapstick physical humour. For many British children, their first family trip to see a pantomime in the Christmas holiday season is their introduction to the magic of the theatre. But what has become a quintessentially British form of entertainment is more than just simple fun. As an art form, pantomime presents a tale of good and evil, where hope finally triumphs after danger and virtual despair.
B
B.
The story of pantomime begins with the commedia dell’arte tradition in 16th- century Italy. These improvised shows took place in streets and marketplaces in Italy and eventually throughout Europe. Distinctive masks enabled audiences to recognise the people in these stories immediately; they also allowed actors to be rude or disrespectful without fear of being recognised. The key roles in the cast were invariably rich old men, usually portrayed as cowardly and disreputable; young lovers whose parents refuse to let them marry; and ingenious and quick- witted servants. Many commedia plots show the latter, whose lives are a constant struggle to find food and money, outwitting the old men or overthrowing their masters. This theme of the victory of the underdog is still an essential feature of pantomime today.
C
By the mid-18th century, many thousands of people were going to theatres across Britain every night. Among the most popular performances were harlequinades, a new kind of entertainment which interwove Ovid’s first-century Latin poem Metamorphoses with aspects of the Italian commedia. Created by actor John Rich, these early pantomimes cleverly mixed spectacle, music, ballet and myth, and were tremendously enjoyable to watch. Amazing transformations happened at the touch of a magic wand, with mechanical serpents and flying vehicles. They also showed that even early pantomime was fascinated by the crossing of boundaries: the ambiguity of men dressed as women, and the fun of animal characters played by human beings.
D
Despite their popularity, Rich’s spectacular performances attracted huge controversy. Critics bitterly attacked pantomimes, complaining that they would bring about the downfall of Shakespeare and the death of serious theatre. David Garrick, the great 18th-century actor-manager, was quick to join these criticisms, while also realising the commercial opportunities of this new art form. But how could Garrick take advantage of the craze and still maintain his position as the defender of ‘legitimate’ theatre? His tactic was to set about changing pantomime’s cultural identity, partly by confining shows to his theatre’s Christmas season. Pantomimes became associated with the frivolity of the holiday season rather than being denounced as a threat. In doing so, Garrick created a convention which has survived to this day.
E
At the end of the 18th century, popular theatre saw the arrival of the white-faced Clown, in the form of actor Joseph Grimaldi. By the early 19th century, Britain was at war with France; there was intense civil unrest and violent confrontations between the government and the people. Grimaldi’s hilarious antics embodied the freedom and liberty of British culture by contrast with the country’s supposedly dull, humourless enemies. His anarchic activities included chasing and imprisoning policemen and stealing gigantic quantities of sausages. But the Clown was never caught or sent to jail. Audiences were thrilled by his mischief and his endless eating precisely because he created on stage the fantasy of a different world: a world without hunger, a world of comic revenge against a highly repressive government. Grimaldi became one of the great satirists of his age, a character who offered ludicrous commentaries on everything from the ruling classes to fashion, technology and new forms of transport.
F
By the late 19th century, photography had arrived, the telegraph had been invented and the first motor cars were starting to appear on British streets. Meanwhile, the spotlight on the comic stage shifted away from the Clown and towards an unexpected star, the pantomime ‘Dame’: a tired housewife – always played by a man – struggling to cope in an unfriendly world. Dan Leno was the celebrated performer who created and played this talkative and eccentric working-class woman, a mother facing the difficulties of poverty, which he and his audiences knew all too well. In the Dame, Leno developed a persona whose theatrical power comes from the locking together of compassion and laughter. At the same time, artists such as Leno began to infuse pantomime with the plots and dilemmas of working people’s culture.
G
Pantomimes are as popular today as they have ever been. Our delight in this form comes from a complex mixture of emotions and relationships. Pantomime offers us the anarchic excitements of a topsy-turvy world only to give up the assurance of harmony restored. The engaging character of the Dame exemplifies pantomime’s self-proclaimed absurdity. Her comical conversations with the audience cut across the boundaries between performers and spectators, drawing us into her chaotic world. While she presides over the anarchy which Grimaldi once visited on policemen, the Dame also embodies the collective ties which bind us together as families, as neighbours, and as members of society.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 2
14
IV
Giải thích chi tiết
☺️ Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài Matching Headings
✅ Paragraph A → Đáp án đúng: D. Discovering pantomime at a young age
-------
Giải thích chi tiết
Step 01: Read to understand main idea
Dựa vào Simplify & Connection ở trên:
Đoạn nhấn mạnh kịch câm (pantomime) là loại hình giải trí đặc trưng ở Anh.
Chi tiết nổi bật: “For many British children, their first family trip … is their introduction to the magic of the theatre.”
⇒ Main idea phù hợp nhất:Trẻ em thường tiếp xúc/khám phá pantomime từ nhỏ (lần đầu đi xem cùng gia đình).
-------
Step 02: Compare meaning with meaning
Đại ý của đoạn: Nhiều trẻ em Anh lần đầu biết đến “phép màu sân khấu” thông qua chuyến đi xem kịch câm (pantomime) cùng gia đình; pantomime vừa vui nhộn vừa mang ý nghĩa nghệ thuật.
So với options, chỉ D nói đúng trọng tâm “khám phá pantomime khi còn nhỏ”.
✅ Đáp án đúng: D. Discovering pantomime at a young age
The significant role of mother tongue language in education
One consequence of population mobility is an increasing diversity within schools. To illustrate, in the city of Toronto in Canada, 58% of kindergarten pupils come from homes where English is not the language of communication. Schools in Europe and North America have experienced this diversity for years, but educational policies and practices vary widely between countries and even within countries. Some political parties and groups search for ways to ‘solve the problem’ of diverse communities and their integration in schools and society. They see few positive consequences for the host society and worry that diversity threatens the identity of the host society. Consequently, they promote unfortunate educational policies that will make the ‘problem’ disappear. If students retain their culture and language, they are viewed as less capable of identifying with the mainstream culture and learning the mainstream language of the society.
The challenge for educators and policy-makers is to shape the evolution of national identity in such a way that the rights of all citizens (including school children) are respected, and the cultural, linguistic and economic resources of the nation are maximized. To waste the resources of the nation by discouraging children from developing their mother tongues is quite simply unintelligent from the point of view of national self-interest. A first step in providing an appropriate education for culturally and linguistically diverse children is to examine what the existing research says about the role of children’s mother tongues in their educational development.
In fact, the research is very clear. When children continue to develop their abilities in two or more languages throughout primary school, they gain a deeper understanding of language and how to use it effectively. They have more practice in processing language, especially when they develop literacy in both. More than 150 research studies conducted during the past 35 years strongly support what Goethe, the famous eighteenth-century German philosopher, once said: that the person who knows only one language does not truly know that language. Research suggests that bilingual children may also develop more flexibility in their thinking as a result of processing information through two different languages.
Children who come to school with a solid foundation in their mother tongue develop stronger literacy abilities in the school language. When parents and other caregivers (e.g. grandparents) are able to spend time with their children and tell stories or discuss issues with them in a way that develops their mother tongue, children come to school well-prepared to learn the school language and succeed educationally. Children’s knowledge and skills transfer across languages from the mother tongue to the school language. Transfer across languages can be two-way: both languages nurture each other when the educational environment permits children access to both languages.
Some educators and parents are suspicious of mother tongue-based teaching programs because they worry that they take time away from the majority language. For example, in a bilingual program where 50% of the time is spent teaching through children’s home language and 50% through the majority language, surely children won’t progress as far in the latter? One of the most strongly established findings of educational research, however, is that well-implemented bilingual programs can promote literacy and subject-matter knowledge in a minority language without any negative effects on children’s development in the majority language. Within Europe, the Foyer program in Belgium, which develops children’s speaking and literacy abilities in three languages (their mother tongue, Dutch and French), most clearly illustrates the benefits of bilingual and trilingual education (see Cummins, 2000).
It is easy to understand how this happens. When children are learning through a minority language, they are learning concepts and intellectual skills too. Pupils who know how to tell the time in their mother tongue understand the concept of telling time. In order to tell time in the majority language they do not need to re-learn the concept. Similarly, at more advanced stages, there is transfer across languages in other skills, such as knowing how to distinguish the main idea from the supporting details of a written passage or story, and distinguishing fact from opinion. Studies of secondary school pupils are providing interesting findings in this area, and it would be worth extending this research.
Many people marvel at how quickly bilingual children seem to ‘pick up’ conversational skills in the majority language at school (although it takes much longer for them to catch up with native speakers in academic language skills). However, educators are often much less aware of how quickly children can lose their ability to use their mother tongue, even in the home context. The extent and rapidity of language loss will vary according to the concentration of families from a particular linguistic group in the neighborhood. Where the mother tongue is used extensively in the community, then language loss among young children will be less. However, where language communities are not concentrated in particular neighborhoods, children can lose their ability to communicate in their mother tongue within two to three years of starting school. They may retain receptive skills in the language but they will use the majority language in speaking with their peers and siblings and in responding to their parents. By the time children become adolescents, the linguistic division between parents and children has become an emotional chasm. Pupils frequently become alienated from the cultures of both home and school, with predictable results.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 3
27
C
Giải thích chi tiết
Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài Multiple Choice
Step 01: Read the question to understand
Read Structure: What point is the writer making in the second paragraph?
-------
Step 02: Locate relevant information
🔍 Từ khoá (không thể paraphrase): second paragraph
-> Tiến hành Simplify & Read connection ở đoạn 2 để thấy được ý chính của tác giả.
-------
Step 03: Read relevant information to understand
📌 Trích dẫn: "The challenge for educators and policy-makers is to..."
Dựa vào phần Simplify & Connection ở trên, ta suy ra được:
→ Main idea: Tiếng mẹ đẻ/nguồn lực ngôn ngữ của trẻ là tài sản quốc gia (cultural–linguistic–economic). Ngăn trẻ phát triển tiếng mẹ đẻ = lãng phí nguồn lực và đi ngược lợi ích quốc gia.
-------
Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning
❌ A. Some present studies on children’s mother tongues are misleading.
Sai vì đoạn không nói nghiên cứu “misleading”; ngược lại chỉ nói cần “examine what the existing research says” (xem nghiên cứu nói gì), không hề phê phán nghiên cứu → "examine what the existing research says".
❌ B. A culturally rich education programme benefits some children more than others.
Sai vì đoạn nhấn vào lợi ích/quyền lợi và nguồn lực của quốc gia, không phải so sánh “ai được lợi hơn ai” → "resources of the nation ... maximized".
✅ C. Bilingual children can make a valuable contribution to the wealth of a country.
Đúng vì trong ngữ cảnh bài đã thiết lập ở đoạn 1, trẻ song ngữ (bilingual children) - nói tiếng Anh + tiếng mẹ đẻ - bị buộc từ bỏ tiếng mẹ đẻ. Do đó, ở đoạn này tác giả phản biện tiếng mẹ đẻ là cultural, linguistic and economic resources của quốc gia; cản phát triển tiếng mẹ đẻ là “waste the resources of the nation” → tức là việc trẻ nói cả 2 ngôn ngữ có thể đóng góp giá trị (kể cả kinh tế) cho đất nước.
❌ D. The law on mother tongue use at school should be strengthened.
Sai vì đoạn không đề cập “law” hay việc “strengthened”; tác giả nói chung về policy/practice và lợi ích quốc gia, không phải kêu gọi sửa luật cụ thể.
Huge earth and rock mounds rise out of the desert of the Supe Valley near the coast of Peru in South America. These immense mounds appear simply to be part of the geographical landscape in this arid region squeezed between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains. But looks deceive. These are actually human-made pyramids; strong evidence indicates they are the remains of a city known as Caral that flourished nearly 5,000 years ago. If true, it would be the oldest known urban center in America and among the most ancient in the world.
Research undertaken by Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady suggests that the 150-acre complex of pyramids, plazas and residential buildings was a thriving metropolis when Egypt’s great pyramids were still being built. Though discovered in 1905, for years Caral attracted little attention, largely because archaeologists believed the structures were rainy recently. But the monumental scale of the pyramids had long interested Shady, who began excavations at the site in 1996, about 22 kilometers from the coast and 190 kilometers north of Peru's capital city of Lima.
Shady and her crew searched for broken remains of the pots and containers that most such sites contain. Not finding any only made her more excited: it meant Caral could be what archaeologists term pre-ceramic, that is, existing before the advent in the area of pot-firing techniques. Shady’s team undertook the task of excavating Piramide Mayor, the largest of the pyramids. After carefully clearing away many hundreds of years’ worth of rubble and sand, they identified staircases, walls covered with remnants of colored plaster, and brickwork. In the foundations, they found the remains of grass-like reeds woven into bags. The original workers, she surmised, must have filled these bags with stones from a nearby quarry and laid them atop one another inside retaining walls, gradually giving rise to the pyramid’s immense structure. Shady had samples of the reeds subjected to radiocarbon dating and found that the reeds were 4,600 years old. This evidence indicated that Caral was, in fact, more than 1,000 years older than what had previously been thought to be the oldest urban center in the Americas.
What amazed archaeologists was not just the age, but the complexity and scope of Caral. Piramide Mayor alone covers an area nearly the size of four football fields and is 18 meters tall. A nine-meter-wide staircase rises from a circular plaza at the foot of the pyramid, passing over three terraced levels until it reaches the top. Thousands of manual laborers would have been needed to build such a project, not counting the many architects, craftsmen, and managers. Shady’s team found the remains of a large amphitheater, containing almost 70 musical instruments made of bird and deer bones. Clearly music plaved an important role in Caral’s society. Around the perimeter of Caral are a series of smaller mounds and various buildings. These indicate a hierarchy of living arrangements: large, well-kept rooms atop pyramids for the elite, ground-level quarters for shabbier outlying dwellings for workers.
But why had Caral been built in the first place? Her excavations convinced Shady that Caral once served as a trade center for the region, which extends from the rainforests of the Amazon to the high forests of the Andes. Shady found evidence of a rich trading environment, including seeds of the cocoa bush and necklaces of shells, neither of which was native to the immediate Caral area. This environment gave rise to people who did not take part in the production of food, allowing them to become priests and planners, builders and designers. Thus occupational specialization, elemental to an urban society, emerged.
But what sustained such a trading center and drew travelers to it? Was it food? Shady and her team found the bones of small edible fish, which must have come from the Pacific coast to the west, in the excavations. But they also found evidence of squash, sweet potatoes and beans having been grown locally. Shady theorized that Caral’s early farmers diverted the area’s rivers into canals, which still cross the Supe Valley today, to irrigate their fields. But because she found no traces of maize, which can be traded or stored and used in times of crop failure, she concluded that Caral’s trade leverage was not based on stockpiling food supplies.
It was evidence of another crop in the excavations that gave Shady the best clue to Caral’s success. In nearly every excavated building, her team discovered evidence of cotton - seeds, fibers and textiles. Her theory fell into place when a large fishing net made of those fibers, unearthed in an unrelated dig on Peru's coast, turned out to be as old as Caral. ‘The farmers of Caral grew the cotton that the fishermen needed to make their nets,' Shady speculates. 'And the fishermen gave them shellfish and dried fish in exchange for these nets.’ In essence, the people of Caral enabled fishermen to work with larger and more effective nets, which made the resources of the sea more readily available, and the fishermen probably used dried squash grown by the Caral people as flotation devices for their nets.
The story of pantomime begins with the commedia dell’arte tradition in 16th- century Italy. These improvised shows took place in streets and marketplaces in Italy and eventually throughout Europe. Distinctive masks enabled audiences to recognise the people in these stories immediately; they also allowed actors to be rude or disrespectful without fear of being recognised. The key roles in the cast were invariably rich old men, usually portrayed as cowardly and disreputable; young lovers whose parents refuse to let them marry; and ingenious and quick- witted servants. Many commedia plots show the latter, whose lives are a constant struggle to find food and money, outwitting the old men or overthrowing their masters. This theme of the victory of the underdog is still an essential feature of pantomime today.
C. By the mid-18th century, many thousands of people were going to theatres across Britain every night. Among the most popular performances were harlequinades, a new kind of entertainment which interwove Ovid’s first-century Latin poem Metamorphoses with aspects of the Italian commedia. Created by actor John Rich, these early pantomimes cleverly mixed spectacle, music, ballet and myth, and were tremendously enjoyable to watch. Amazing transformations happened at the touch of a magic wand, with mechanical serpents and flying vehicles. They also showed that even early pantomime was fascinated by the crossing of boundaries: the ambiguity of men dressed as women, and the fun of animal characters played by human beings.
D. Despite their popularity, Rich’s spectacular performances attracted huge controversy. Critics bitterly attacked pantomimes, complaining that they would bring about the downfall of Shakespeare and the death of serious theatre. David Garrick, the great 18th-century actor-manager, was quick to join these criticisms, while also realising the commercial opportunities of this new art form. But how could Garrick take advantage of the craze and still maintain his position as the defender of ‘legitimate’ theatre? His tactic was to set about changing pantomime’s cultural identity, partly by confining shows to his theatre’s Christmas season. Pantomimes became associated with the frivolity of the holiday season rather than being denounced as a threat. In doing so, Garrick created a convention which has survived to this day.
E. At the end of the 18th century, popular theatre saw the arrival of the white-faced Clown, in the form of actor Joseph Grimaldi. By the early 19th century, Britain was at war with France; there was intense civil unrest and violent confrontations between the government and the people. Grimaldi’s hilarious antics embodied the freedom and liberty of British culture by contrast with the country’s supposedly dull, humourless enemies. His anarchic activities included chasing and imprisoning policemen and stealing gigantic quantities of sausages. But the Clown was never caught or sent to jail. Audiences were thrilled by his mischief and his endless eating precisely because he created on stage the fantasy of a different world: a world without hunger, a world of comic revenge against a highly repressive government. Grimaldi became one of the great satirists of his age, a character who offered ludicrous commentaries on everything from the ruling classes to fashion, technology and new forms of transport.
F. By the late 19th century, photography had arrived, the telegraph had been invented and the first motor cars were starting to appear on British streets. Meanwhile, the spotlight on the comic stage shifted away from the Clown and towards an unexpected star, the pantomime ‘Dame’: a tired housewife – always played by a man – struggling to cope in an unfriendly world. Dan Leno was the celebrated performer who created and played this talkative and eccentric working-class woman, a mother facing the difficulties of poverty, which he and his audiences knew all too well. In the Dame, Leno developed a persona whose theatrical power comes from the locking together of compassion and laughter. At the same time, artists such as Leno began to infuse pantomime with the plots and dilemmas of working people’s culture.
G. Pantomimes are as popular today as they have ever been. Our delight in this form comes from a complex mixture of emotions and relationships. Pantomime offers us the anarchic excitements of a topsy-turvy world only to give up the assurance of harmony restored. The engaging character of the Dame exemplifies pantomime’s self-proclaimed absurdity. Her comical conversations with the audience cut across the boundaries between performers and spectators, drawing us into her chaotic world. While she presides over the anarchy which Grimaldi once visited on policemen, the Dame also embodies the collective ties which bind us together as families, as neighbours, and as members of society.
One consequence of population mobility is an increasing diversity within schools. To illustrate, in the city of Toronto in Canada, 58% of kindergarten pupils come from homes where English is not the language of communication. Schools in Europe and North America have experienced this diversity for years, but educational policies and practices vary widely between countries and even within countries. Some political parties and groups search for ways to ‘solve the problem’ of diverse communities and their integration in schools and society. They see few positive consequences for the host society and worry that diversity threatens the identity of the host society. Consequently, they promote unfortunate educational policies that will make the ‘problem’ disappear. If students retain their culture and language, they are viewed as less capable of identifying with the mainstream culture and learning the mainstream language of the society.
The challenge for educators and policy-makers is to shape the evolution of national identity in such a way that the rights of all citizens (including school children) are respected, and the cultural, linguistic and economic resources of the nation are maximized. To waste the resources of the nation by discouraging children from developing their mother tongues is quite simply unintelligent from the point of view of national self-interest. A first step in providing an appropriate education for culturally and linguistically diverse children is to examine what the existing research says about the role of children’s mother tongues in their educational development.
In fact, the research is very clear. When children continue to develop their abilities in two or more languages throughout primary school, they gain a deeper understanding of language and how to use it effectively. They have more practice in processing language, especially when they develop literacy in both. More than 150 research studies conducted during the past 35 years strongly support what Goethe, the famous eighteenth-century German philosopher, once said: that the person who knows only one language does not truly know that language. Research suggests that bilingual children may also develop more flexibility in their thinking as a result of processing information through two different languages.
Children who come to school with a solid foundation in their mother tongue develop stronger literacy abilities in the school language. When parents and other caregivers (e.g. grandparents) are able to spend time with their children and tell stories or discuss issues with them in a way that develops their mother tongue, children come to school well-prepared to learn the school language and succeed educationally. Children’s knowledge and skills transfer across languages from the mother tongue to the school language. Transfer across languages can be two-way: both languages nurture each other when the educational environment permits children access to both languages.
Some educators and parents are suspicious of mother tongue-based teaching programs because they worry that they take time away from the majority language. For example, in a bilingual program where 50% of the time is spent teaching through children’s home language and 50% through the majority language, surely children won’t progress as far in the latter? One of the most strongly established findings of educational research, however, is that well-implemented bilingual programs can promote literacy and subject-matter knowledge in a minority language without any negative effects on children’s development in the majority language. Within Europe, the Foyer program in Belgium, which develops children’s speaking and literacy abilities in three languages (their mother tongue, Dutch and French), most clearly illustrates the benefits of bilingual and trilingual education (see Cummins, 2000).
It is easy to understand how this happens. When children are learning through a minority language, they are learning concepts and intellectual skills too. Pupils who know how to tell the time in their mother tongue understand the concept of telling time. In order to tell time in the majority language they do not need to re-learn the concept. Similarly, at more advanced stages, there is transfer across languages in other skills, such as knowing how to distinguish the main idea from the supporting details of a written passage or story, and distinguishing fact from opinion. Studies of secondary school pupils are providing interesting findings in this area, and it would be worth extending this research.
Many people marvel at how quickly bilingual children seem to ‘pick up’ conversational skills in the majority language at school (although it takes much longer for them to catch up with native speakers in academic language skills). However, educators are often much less aware of how quickly children can lose their ability to use their mother tongue, even in the home context. The extent and rapidity of language loss will vary according to the concentration of families from a particular linguistic group in the neighborhood. Where the mother tongue is used extensively in the community, then language loss among young children will be less. However, where language communities are not concentrated in particular neighborhoods, children can lose their ability to communicate in their mother tongue within two to three years of starting school. They may retain receptive skills in the language but they will use the majority language in speaking with their peers and siblings and in responding to their parents. By the time children become adolescents, the linguistic division between parents and children has become an emotional chasm. Pupils frequently become alienated from the cultures of both home and school, with predictable results.
Dựa vào phần Simplify & Connection ở trên, ta suy ra được:
