IELTS Real Reading Test 2026 - Q1 Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Real Reading Test 2026 - Q1 Test 3 được lấy từ cuốn sách Real Test 2026 - 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 2026 - Q1 Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 4
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
In the past, it was easier for scientists to study the Moon than the oceans.
2
Techniques for investigating the Moon are the same as techniques for researching the ocean.
3
Measuring temperature changes in the ocean using sound is more time-consuming than other methods.
4
Hydrophones can distinguish different kinds of rain.
Question 5 - 8
Reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-G
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-G
5
Examples of things that affect the distance sound can travel in water.
6
Details of the connection between ocean temperatures and climate.
7
Details of ways in which light and sound are similar.
8
Reference to a long-term study of different types of weather.
Question 9 - 13
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
9
According to the passage, who conducted research into the rate at which sound travels in water?
A
Leonardo da Vinci
B
Colladon and Sturm
C
Ewing and Worzel
D
Jeff Nystuen
10
According to the passage, who conducted research into the distances certain types of sound waves travel in water?
A
Leonardo da Vinci
B
Colladon and Sturm
C
Ewing and Worzel
D
Christopher Clark
11
SOSUS allows whale researchers to
A
follow a number of whales at the same time.
B
protect whales as they migrate.
C
imitate whale calls of different species.
D
change the whales’ direction of travel.
12
Finback whale calls change
A
when scientists track them.
B
at different times of year.
C
when whales communicate with other species.
D
when whales come to the surface.
13
SOSUS allows scientists to
A
make accurate maps of the ocean floor.
B
measure water level changes.
C
investigate ocean currents.
D
measure variations in temperature.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 18
Reading Passage has six paragraphs A-F
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F
14
Similarities between studies of mammoth remains from different parts of the world.
15
Details of the uses to which mammoth body parts were put.
16
A theory that accounts for the damage to Lyuba’s face.
17
An explanation of how an individual was able to identify a small corpse.
18
A comparison between Lyuba and other young mammoth corpses.
Question 19 - 23
Look at the following statements and the list of people below.
Match each statement with the correct person, A-G.
Write the correct letter, A-G.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
List of Findings
A
Yuri Khudi
B
Kirill Serotetto
C
Adrian Lister
D
Alexei Tikhonov
E
Dan Fisher
F
Bermard Buigues
G
Naoki Suzuki
19
The indications are that mammoths died as a result of climate change.
20
Teeth analysis is important in discovering why mammoths died out.
21
The corpse of the baby mammoth is in better condition than any other that has been discovered.
22
It would be a mistake to ignore the baby mammoth’s discovery, because of its potential importance.
23
Mammoths often died at a time of year when they should have been in good physical condition.
Question 24 - 26
Complete the form below.
Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS for each answer.
Some researchers say that a marked rise in temperature impacted on mammoths by changing the type of
24.
available.
Fisher concluded that many of the mammoth tusks he looked at displayed signs of
25.
.
Not long after Lyuba’s death, the Mammuthus primigenius group she belonged to was replaced by another group that came from
26.
.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 31
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
27
According to the writer, Ekman became interested in lying after a question from his
A
peers.
B
patients.
C
students.
D
teachers.
28
The writer refers to the 12-minute interviews in order to
A
illustrate how frequently patients lie.
B
describe the origins of Ekman’s theories.
C
compare Ekman’s research to previous studies.
D
show how patients’ behaviour is affected by filming.
29
What is the writer’s point in the third paragraph?
A
Micro-expressions are common to all people.
B
Recent research has refuted an old idea.
C
With practice we can learn to control our micro-expressions.
D
Human society is too complex to allow for generalisations.
30
What are we told about Ekman’s conclusions from his tests?
A
It’s natural for people to lie.
B
Few untrained people can detect lying.
C
Most liars suffer from periods of depression.
D
All of his subjects were trained to identify micro-expressions.
31
What point does the writer make about Ekman’s techniques in the fourth paragraph?
A
They take decades to teach.
B
They have been in great demand.
C
They have aroused the suspicions of some agencies.
D
They can be used by a limited range of occupations.
Question 32 - 36
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-I, below.
Write the correct letter, A-I, in boxes on your answer sheet.
<b>The television series based on Ekman’s work</b>
A new TV series based on Ekman’s work features a hero named Lightman, who detects lies. Initially, Ekman was unenthusiastic about the TV project because he feared the possibility of encouraging viewers . For example, he was worried that one day the programme could result in not being carried out. Ultimately though, he has given the show his blessing because he is not aware of any other comparable programme based on a single person’s . The of the show’s producer have been another pleasant surprise and, considering the genre of the programme, Ekman is happy with the show’s overall .
A
consequences
B
crimes
C
false beliefs
D
motives
E
justice
F
accuracy
G
acting
H
research
I
ratings
Question 37 - 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
37
Ekman regrets the lies he told as a child.
38
People who are good at lying tend to be good at detecting lies.
39
Ekman has worked with poker players to help them lie more convincingly.
40
Ekman is more interested in the types of lies with serious consequences.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
05/05/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Listening to the ocean
The results of some recent research answer some long-standing questions
A
A. The oceans cover more than 70 per cent of the planet’s surface, yet until quite recently we knew less about their depths than about the surface of the Moon. The Moon has been far more accessible to study because astronomers have long been able to look at its surface, first with the naked eye and then with the telescope, both instruments that focus light. Until the twentieth century, however, no instruments were available for the study of Earth's oceans: light, which can travel trillions of kilometers through the vast vacuum of space, cannot penetrate very far in seawater.
B
It turns out that for penetrating water the best instrument is sound. Curious investigators have long been fascinated by sound and the way it travels in water. As early as 1490, the artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci observed: ‘If you cause your ship to stop and place the head of a long tube in the water and place the outer extremity to your ear, you will hear ships at a great distance from you.’ It was not until 1826 that two scientists, Colladon and Sturm, accurately measured the speed of sound in water. Using a long tube to listen under water (as da Vinci had suggested), they recorded how fast the sound of a submerged bell traveled across Lake Geneva in Switzerland. What these investigators demonstrated was that water is an excellent medium for sound, transmitting it almost five times faster than its speed in air.
C
A number of factors influence how far sound travels under water and how long it lasts, including particles, salinity, temperature and pressure. Particles in seawater can reflect, scatter and absorb certain frequencies of sound, just as certain wavelengths of light may be reflected, scattered and absorbed by specific types of particles in the atmosphere. In 1943, Maurice Ewing and J L Worzel conducted an experiment to test the theory that low-frequency waves, which are less vulnerable than higher frequencies to scattering and absorption, should be able to travel great distances, if the sound source is placed correctly. The researchers set off an underwater explosion and learned that it was detected easily by receivers 3,200 kilometers away. In analyzing the results of this test, they discovered a kind of sound pipeline, known as the deep sound channel. Sound introduced into this channel of water could travel thousands of kilometers with minimal loss of signal.
D
The US Navy was quick to appreciate the usefulness of low-frequency sound and the deep sound channel. They developed the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), which involved underwater microphones, called hydrophones, that were placed on the ocean bottom and connected by cables to onshore processing centers. It was Christopher Clark of Cornell University who soon realised that SOSUS could be used to listen to whales. Using a SOSUS receiver in the West Indies, he could hear whales that were 1,770 kilometers away.
E
Whales are the biggest of Earth's creatures, yet these animals are also remarkably elusive. Scientists wishing to observe blue whales must simply wait in their ships for the whales to surface. A few whales have been tracked briefly in the wild in this way but not for very great distances, and much about them remains unknown. But by using SOSUS, scientists can track the whales and position them on a map. Moreover, they can track not just one whale at a time, but many creatures simultaneously. They can also learn to distinguish whale calls; researchers have detected changes in the calls of finback whales as the seasons change, and have found that blue whales in different regions of the Pacific Ocean have different calls.
F
SOSUS has also proved instrumental in obtaining information crucial to our understanding of climate. The system has enabled researchers to begin making ocean temperature measurements on a global scale, measurements that are key to understanding the workings of heat transfer between the ocean and the atmosphere. The ocean plays an enormous role in determining air temperature - the heat capacity in only the upper few meters of ocean is thought to be equal to all of the heat in the entire atmosphere. For sound waves traveling horizontally in the ocean, speed is largely a function of temperature. Thus, the travel time of a wave of sound between two points is a sensitive indicator of the average temperature along its path. Transmitting sound in numerous directions through the deep sound channel can give scientists measurements spanning vast areas of the globe. Thousands of sound paths in the ocean can be pieced together into a map of global ocean temperatures, and by repeating measurements along the same paths over time, scientists can track changes in temperature over months or years.
G
Researchers are also using other acoustic techniques to monitor climate. Oceanographer Jeff Nystuen, for example, has explored the use of sound to measure rainfall over the ocean. Monitoring changing global rainfall patterns will contribute to understanding major climate change as well as the weather phenomenon known as El Nifto. Since 1985, Nystuen has used hydrophones to listen to rain over the ocean, acoustically measuring not only the rainfall rate but also the rainfall type, ranging from drizzle to thunderstorms. By using the sound of rain under water as a ‘natural’ rain gauge, the measurement of rainfall over the oceans will become available to climatologists. In this way, modern society continues to benefit from the investigations of those who, like Leonardo da Vinci, pursued the answers to some basic questions of nature.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 1
1
True
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: In the past scientists found it easier to study the Moon than the oceans
-------
Step 02: Locate relevant information
🔍 Từ khoá: “Moon”, “oceans”, “study”, “past”.
=> Dựa vào các từ khoá trên -> Tìm được trích dẫn ở đoạn A.
-------
Step 03: Read relevant information to understand (main + detail)
📌 Trích dẫn: “The Moon has been far more accessible to study because astronomers have long been able to look at its surface… Until the twentieth century, however, no instruments were available for the study of Earth’s oceans.”
Dựa vào phần Simplify& Connection trên, ta rút ra được:
-> Main idea: Mặt Trăng được nghiên cứu sớm vì ánh sáng giúp quan sát dễ dàng → đại dương thì tối và không thể quan sát bằng ánh sáng + không có công cụ.
-------
Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning
Trong bài đọc: Mặt trăng dễ nghiên cứu hơn đại dương vì quan sát được từ lâu; oceans khó nghiên cứu do thiếu công cụ.
Trong câu hỏi: Quá khứ → nghiên cứu Mặt trăng dễ hơn nghiên cứu đại dương.
⇒ Hai ý trùng khớp -> ✅ Chọn: TRUE
-------
Lưu ý:
Đáp án là FALSE nếu bài nói oceans dễ nghiên cứu hơn Moon — điều này không đúng.
Đáp án là NOT GIVEN nếu bài không so sánh mức độ dễ/khó — nhưng bài có so sánh rõ ràng.
A near-perfect frozen mammoth offers clues to a great vanished species.
A
A. On a May morning in 2007, on the Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia, a Nenets reindeer herder named Yuri Khudi stood on a sandbar on the Yuribey River, looking carefully at a diminutive corpse. Although he had never seen such an animal before, Khudi had seen many mammoth tusks, the thick corkscrew shafts that his people found each summer, and this persuaded him the corpse was a baby mammoth. It was eerily well preserved. Apart from its missing hair and toenails, it was perfectly intact. Khudi realised the find might be significant and he knew he couldn’t just return home and forget all about it. He therefore decided to travel to the small town of Yar Sale to consult an old friend named Kirill Serotetto. His friend took him to meet the director of the local museum, who persuaded the local authorities to fly Khudi and Serotetto back to the Yuribey River to collect the baby mammoth.
B
Mammoths became extinct between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago and since the extinctions coincided with the end of the most recent Ice age, many researchers believe that the primary cause of the great die-off was the sharp rise in temperature, which dramatically altered the vegetation. ‘We have strong evidence that the temperature rise played a significant part in their extinction,’ says Adrian Lister, a palaeontologist and mammoth expert at London’s Natural History Museum. ‘In Eurasia, the timing of the two events matches closely.’ The extinctions also coincided, however, with the arrival of modern humans. In addition to exploiting mammoths for food, they used their bones and tusks to make weapons, tools, and even dwellings. Some scientists believe humans were as much to blame as the temperature rise for the great die-off. Some say they caused it.
C
The body of the baby mammoth was eventually sent to the St Petersburg Zoological Museum in Russia. Alexei Tikhonov, the museum’s director, was one of the first scientists to view the baby, a female. According to Tikhonov, Khudi had rescued ‘the best preserved mammoth to come down to us from the Ice Age,’ and he gratefully named her Lyuba, after Khudi’s wife. Tikhonov knew that no-one would be more excited by the find than Dan Fisher, an American colleague at the University of Michigan who had spent 30 years researching the lives of mammoths. Tikhonov invited Fisher, along with Bernard Buigues, a French mammoth hunter, to come and view the baby mammoth. Fisher and Buigues had examined other specimens together, including infants, but these had been in a relatively poor state. Lyuba was another story entirely. Other than the missing hair and toenails, the only flaw in her pristine appearance was a curious dent above the trunk.
D
Fisher was particularly excited about one specific part of Lyuba’s anatomy: her milk tusks. Through his career, Fisher has taken hundreds of tusk samples. Most of these came from the Great Lakes region of North America, and his research showed that these animals continued to thrive, despite the late Pleistocene* temperature change. On the other hand, to Fisher the tusks often revealed telltale evidence of human hunting. His samples frequently came from animals that had died in the autumn, when they should have been at their peak after summer grazing, and less likely to die of natural causes, but also when humans would have been most eager to stockpile meat for the coming winter. He has done limited work in Siberia, but his analysis of tusks from Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia, suggests the same conclusion.
E
In December 2007, Buigues arranged for the specimen to be transported to Japan to undergo a CT scan by Naoki Suzuki of the Jikei University School of Medicine. The test confirmed her skeleton was undamaged, and her internal organs seemed largely intact. It also showed that the end of her trunk, and her throat, mouth, and windpipe were filled with dense sediment. Six months later, in a laboratory in St Petersburg, Fisher, Buigues, Suzuki, Tikhonov and other colleagues began a three-day series of tests on Lyuba. During these, Fisher noted a dense mix of clay and sand in her trunk, mouth and throat, which had been indicated earlier by the scan. In fact, the sediment in Lyuba’s trunk was packed so tightly that Fisher saw it as a possible explanation for the dent above her trunk. If she was frantically fighting for breath and inhaled convulsively, perhaps a partial vacuum was created in the base of her trunk, which would have flattened surrounding soft tissue. To Fisher, the circumstances of Lyuba’s death were clear: she had asphyxiated. Suzuki, however, proposed a different interpretation, seeing more evidence for drowning than asphyxiation.
F
Studies are ongoing, but Lyuba has begun to shed the secrets of her short life and some clues to the fate of her kind. Her good general health was shown in the record of her dental development, a confirmation for Fisher that dental research is useful for evaluating health and thus key to investigating the causes of mammoth extinction. Analysis of her well-preserved DNA has revealed that she belonged to a distinct population of Mammuthus primigenius and that, soon after her time, another population migrating to Siberia from North America would take their place. Finally, Lyuba’s premolars and tusks revealed that she had been born in late spring and was only a month old when she died.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Pleistocene era*: the time between roughly 2.6 million years ago and 10,000 years ago.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 2
14
D
Giải thích chi tiết
☺️ Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài Matching Information
📌 Dạng Matching Information chúng ta nên làm cuối cùng, sau khi đã làm các dạng câu hỏi khác nhé DOLBIES, bởi vì lúc này mình đã đọc và hiểu nội dung của bài rồi, cộng thêm nghệ thuật Specify của Linearthinking → sẽ nhanh chóng tìm được vị trí đáp án hơn!!
-------
Step 01: Read the question to predict
Hiểu câu hỏi: Similarities between studies of mammoth remains from different parts of the world
Specify & Predict: Câu hỏi yêu cầu tìm đoạn nói về kết luận giống nhau rút ra từ các nghiên cứu ở những địa điểm khác nhau, ví dụ: cùng một mô hình chết, cùng nguyên nhân, cùng kết luận khoa học.
-------
Step 02: Khoanh vùng đoạn văn
🔍 Từ khóa: “studies”, “analysis”, “similarities”, “same“
→ Dựa vào các từ khoá trên, có thể khoanh vùng được đoạn D vì có xuất hiện các cụm như:
“animals that had died in the autumn”(động vật đã chết vào mùa thu), "should have been at their peak after summer grazing"(đáng lẽ phải ở đỉnh cao sau khi chăn thả vào mùa hè), và “suggests the same conclusion” (cùng một kết luận) -> cho thấy các điểm tương đồng.
"Siberia" và "Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia"(Đảo Wrangel, ngoài khơi Siberia) -> các địa điểm khác nhau trên thế giới.
Do tiny changes of facial expression show whether someone is telling lies?
Forty years ago, the research psychologist Dr Paul Ekman was addressing a group of young psychiatrists in training when he was asked a question, the answer to which has kept him busy ever since. Suppose the group wanted to know, a particular patient swears they are telling the truth. They look and sound since. So here is the question: is there any way you can be sure they are telling the truth? Ekman did not know the answer then, but wanted to find out.
As part of his research, he had already filmed a series of 12-minute interviews with psychiatric patients. In a subsequent conversation, one of the patients sold him that she had lied to him. So, Ekman sat and looked at the film but saw nothing noteworthy. Then he slowed it down and looked again. Then he slowed it even further. And suddenly, there, across just two frames of the film, he saw it: an intense expression of extreme anguish. It lasted less than a 15th of a second, but once he had spotted the first expression, he soon found three more examples in that same interview. He termed his discovery micro-expression: very rapid intense demonstrations of emotion that the subject intended to be concealed.
Over the course of the next four decades, Ekman successfully demonstrated a proposition first suggested by Charles Darwin: that the ways in which we express rage, disgust, contempt, fear, surprise, happiness and sadness are universal. The facial muscles triggered by those seven basic emotions are, he has shown, essentially standard, regardless of language and culture, from the US to Japan and Brazil to Papua New Guinea. What is more, expressions of emotion are impossible to suppress and, particularly when we are lying, micro-expressions of powerfully felt emotions will inevitably flit across our face before we get the chance to stop them.
Fortunately for liars, most people will fail to spot these fleeting signals of inner torment. Of the 15000 Ekman has tested, only 50 people, whom he calls ‘naturals’, have been able to do it. But given a little more training. Ekman says, almost anyone can develop the skill. He should know, since these tests were completed in the mid-1980s and the first publication of his research, he has been called in by the FBI and CIA (among countless more law-enforcement and other agencies around the world), not just to solve cases, but to teach them how to use his technique for themselves. He has held workshops for defense and prosecution lawyers, health professionals, even jealous spouses, all of them wanting to know exactly when someone is not being 100 per cent candid.
Most recently, Ekman’s research has resulted in a new television series about the exploits of the fictional Dr Cal Lightman, a scientist who studies involuntary body language to discover not only if you are lying. But why you might have been motivated to do so. According to the publicity blurb, Lightman is a human lie detector, even more accurate than a polygraph test. Ekman concedes has was skeptical when the producer first approached him with the idea of turning his life’s work into a TV series, and initially would have stopped the project if he could. In particular, he was fearful that the show would exaggerate the effectiveness of his techniques and create the quite inaccurate impression among audiences that criminals could no longer hope to get away with lying. In the worst-case scenario, he was concerned about unfair convictions, that one day someone not properly trained in his techniques might be sitting on a jury and wrongly find someone guilty of a crime simply on the basis of a television programme.
In the end though, he was won over because the series is unusual in several respects. It is the first time, as far as Ekman is aware, that a commercial TV drama has been based on the work of just one scientist. That scientist is also deeply involved in the project, talking through plot ideas and checking five successive drafts of each script to ensure details are correct. He was also impressed with the producer’s manifestly serious and well-intentioned reasons for making the programme. Now that the first series has been completed, he believes probably 80-90 per cent of the show is based on fact and that’s good enough for what is. After all, a drama, not a documentary.
Ekman, incidentally, professes to have been a terrible liar ever since he was a small boy and observes that the ability to detect a lie and the ability to lie successfully are completely unrelated. He has been asked by people running for high office if he could teach them to become more credible with the public but has always refused to use his skills in that way on ethical grounds. He also insists that there are various kinds of lies. A ‘true’ lie can be identified by having two essential characteristics: there must be a deliberate intent to mislead and there must be no notification that this is what is occurring. This means that an actor or a poker player isn’t a true liar. They’re supposed to deceive you, it’s part of the game, and the same is true of flattery. He prefers to focus on the kinds of lies where the liar would be in grave trouble if they were found out, and where the target would feel properly aggrieved if they knew.
🔥 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
Simplified: Ekman became interested in lying after a question from ______
Main idea: Câu hỏi yêu cầu xác định ai là người đã đặt câu hỏi khiến Ekman bắt đầu quan tâm đến việc nghiên cứu nói dối.
-------
Step 02: Locate relevant information
🔍 Từ khóa: Ekman, question, lying
=> Dựa vào các từ khoá trên -> Tìm được trích dẫn ở đoạn 1.
-------
Step 03: Read relevant information to understand
📌 Trích dẫn:“Forty years ago, the research psychologist Dr Paul Ekman was addressing a group of young psychiatrists in training when he was asked a question, the answer to which has kept him busy ever since.So here is the question: is there any way you can be sure they are telling the truth?Ekman did not know the answer then, but wanted to find out.”
Simplified: Ekman was addressing a group of young psychiatrists in training
→ they asked him a question about detecting truth
Main idea:Ekman đang nói chuyện với nhóm sinh viên thực tập bác sĩ tâm thần thì nhận được câu hỏi khiến ông bắt đầu nghiên cứu chủ đề nói dối.
-------
Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning
❌ A. peers. → Sai, vì họ là người đang học, không phải đồng nghiệp.
❌ B. patients. → Sai, không phải bệnh nhân.
✅ C. students.→ Đúng, vì “young psychiatrists in training” = nhóm học viên, tức sinh viên.
❌ D. teachers. → Sai, không nói đến giáo viên.
B. It turns out that for penetrating water the best instrument is sound. Curious investigators have long been fascinated by sound and the way it travels in water. As early as 1490, the artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci observed: ‘If you cause your ship to stop and place the head of a long tube in the water and place the outer extremity to your ear, you will hear ships at a great distance from you.’ It was not until 1826 that two scientists, Colladon and Sturm, accurately measured the speed of sound in water. Using a long tube to listen under water (as da Vinci had suggested), they recorded how fast the sound of a submerged bell traveled across Lake Geneva in Switzerland. What these investigators demonstrated was that water is an excellent medium for sound, transmitting it almost five times faster than its speed in air.
C. A number of factors influence how far sound travels under water and how long it lasts, including particles, salinity, temperature and pressure. Particles in seawater can reflect, scatter and absorb certain frequencies of sound, just as certain wavelengths of light may be reflected, scattered and absorbed by specific types of particles in the atmosphere. In 1943, Maurice Ewing and J L Worzel conducted an experiment to test the theory that low-frequency waves, which are less vulnerable than higher frequencies to scattering and absorption, should be able to travel great distances, if the sound source is placed correctly. The researchers set off an underwater explosion and learned that it was detected easily by receivers 3,200 kilometers away. In analyzing the results of this test, they discovered a kind of sound pipeline, known as the deep sound channel. Sound introduced into this channel of water could travel thousands of kilometers with minimal loss of signal.
D. The US Navy was quick to appreciate the usefulness of low-frequency sound and the deep sound channel. They developed the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), which involved underwater microphones, called hydrophones, that were placed on the ocean bottom and connected by cables to onshore processing centers. It was Christopher Clark of Cornell University who soon realised that SOSUS could be used to listen to whales. Using a SOSUS receiver in the West Indies, he could hear whales that were 1,770 kilometers away.
E. Whales are the biggest of Earth's creatures, yet these animals are also remarkably elusive. Scientists wishing to observe blue whales must simply wait in their ships for the whales to surface. A few whales have been tracked briefly in the wild in this way but not for very great distances, and much about them remains unknown. But by using SOSUS, scientists can track the whales and position them on a map. Moreover, they can track not just one whale at a time, but many creatures simultaneously. They can also learn to distinguish whale calls; researchers have detected changes in the calls of finback whales as the seasons change, and have found that blue whales in different regions of the Pacific Ocean have different calls.
F. SOSUS has also proved instrumental in obtaining information crucial to our understanding of climate. The system has enabled researchers to begin making ocean temperature measurements on a global scale, measurements that are key to understanding the workings of heat transfer between the ocean and the atmosphere. The ocean plays an enormous role in determining air temperature - the heat capacity in only the upper few meters of ocean is thought to be equal to all of the heat in the entire atmosphere. For sound waves traveling horizontally in the ocean, speed is largely a function of temperature. Thus, the travel time of a wave of sound between two points is a sensitive indicator of the average temperature along its path. Transmitting sound in numerous directions through the deep sound channel can give scientists measurements spanning vast areas of the globe. Thousands of sound paths in the ocean can be pieced together into a map of global ocean temperatures, and by repeating measurements along the same paths over time, scientists can track changes in temperature over months or years.
G. Researchers are also using other acoustic techniques to monitor climate. Oceanographer Jeff Nystuen, for example, has explored the use of sound to measure rainfall over the ocean. Monitoring changing global rainfall patterns will contribute to understanding major climate change as well as the weather phenomenon known as El Nifto. Since 1985, Nystuen has used hydrophones to listen to rain over the ocean, acoustically measuring not only the rainfall rate but also the rainfall type, ranging from drizzle to thunderstorms. By using the sound of rain under water as a ‘natural’ rain gauge, the measurement of rainfall over the oceans will become available to climatologists. In this way, modern society continues to benefit from the investigations of those who, like Leonardo da Vinci, pursued the answers to some basic questions of nature.
B. Mammoths became extinct between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago and since the extinctions coincided with the end of the most recent Ice age, many researchers believe that the primary cause of the great die-off was the sharp rise in temperature, which dramatically altered the vegetation. ‘We have strong evidence that the temperature rise played a significant part in their extinction,’ says Adrian Lister, a palaeontologist and mammoth expert at London’s Natural History Museum. ‘In Eurasia, the timing of the two events matches closely.’ The extinctions also coincided, however, with the arrival of modern humans. In addition to exploiting mammoths for food, they used their bones and tusks to make weapons, tools, and even dwellings. Some scientists believe humans were as much to blame as the temperature rise for the great die-off. Some say they caused it.
C. The body of the baby mammoth was eventually sent to the St Petersburg Zoological Museum in Russia. Alexei Tikhonov, the museum’s director, was one of the first scientists to view the baby, a female. According to Tikhonov, Khudi had rescued ‘the best preserved mammoth to come down to us from the Ice Age,’ and he gratefully named her Lyuba, after Khudi’s wife. Tikhonov knew that no-one would be more excited by the find than Dan Fisher, an American colleague at the University of Michigan who had spent 30 years researching the lives of mammoths. Tikhonov invited Fisher, along with Bernard Buigues, a French mammoth hunter, to come and view the baby mammoth. Fisher and Buigues had examined other specimens together, including infants, but these had been in a relatively poor state. Lyuba was another story entirely. Other than the missing hair and toenails, the only flaw in her pristine appearance was a curious dent above the trunk.
D. Fisher was particularly excited about one specific part of Lyuba’s anatomy: her milk tusks. Through his career, Fisher has taken hundreds of tusk samples. Most of these came from the Great Lakes region of North America, and his research showed that these animals continued to thrive, despite the late Pleistocene* temperature change. On the other hand, to Fisher the tusks often revealed telltale evidence of human hunting. His samples frequently came from animals that had died in the autumn, when they should have been at their peak after summer grazing, and less likely to die of natural causes, but also when humans would have been most eager to stockpile meat for the coming winter. He has done limited work in Siberia, but his analysis of tusks from Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia, suggests the same conclusion.
E. In December 2007, Buigues arranged for the specimen to be transported to Japan to undergo a CT scan by Naoki Suzuki of the Jikei University School of Medicine. The test confirmed her skeleton was undamaged, and her internal organs seemed largely intact. It also showed that the end of her trunk, and her throat, mouth, and windpipe were filled with dense sediment. Six months later, in a laboratory in St Petersburg, Fisher, Buigues, Suzuki, Tikhonov and other colleagues began a three-day series of tests on Lyuba. During these, Fisher noted a dense mix of clay and sand in her trunk, mouth and throat, which had been indicated earlier by the scan. In fact, the sediment in Lyuba’s trunk was packed so tightly that Fisher saw it as a possible explanation for the dent above her trunk. If she was frantically fighting for breath and inhaled convulsively, perhaps a partial vacuum was created in the base of her trunk, which would have flattened surrounding soft tissue. To Fisher, the circumstances of Lyuba’s death were clear: she had asphyxiated. Suzuki, however, proposed a different interpretation, seeing more evidence for drowning than asphyxiation.
F. Studies are ongoing, but Lyuba has begun to shed the secrets of her short life and some clues to the fate of her kind. Her good general health was shown in the record of her dental development, a confirmation for Fisher that dental research is useful for evaluating health and thus key to investigating the causes of mammoth extinction. Analysis of her well-preserved DNA has revealed that she belonged to a distinct population of Mammuthus primigenius and that, soon after her time, another population migrating to Siberia from North America would take their place. Finally, Lyuba’s premolars and tusks revealed that she had been born in late spring and was only a month old when she died.
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Pleistocene era*: the time between roughly 2.6 million years ago and 10,000 years ago.
“animals that had died in the autumn”(động vật đã chết vào mùa thu), "should have been at their peak after summer grazing"(đáng lẽ phải ở đỉnh cao sau khi chăn thả vào mùa hè), và “suggests the same conclusion” (cùng một kết luận) -> cho thấy các điểm tương đồng.
Forty years ago, the research psychologist Dr Paul Ekman was addressing a group of young psychiatrists in training when he was asked a question, the answer to which has kept him busy ever since. Suppose the group wanted to know, a particular patient swears they are telling the truth. They look and sound since. So here is the question: is there any way you can be sure they are telling the truth? Ekman did not know the answer then, but wanted to find out.
As part of his research, he had already filmed a series of 12-minute interviews with psychiatric patients. In a subsequent conversation, one of the patients sold him that she had lied to him. So, Ekman sat and looked at the film but saw nothing noteworthy. Then he slowed it down and looked again. Then he slowed it even further. And suddenly, there, across just two frames of the film, he saw it: an intense expression of extreme anguish. It lasted less than a 15th of a second, but once he had spotted the first expression, he soon found three more examples in that same interview. He termed his discovery micro-expression: very rapid intense demonstrations of emotion that the subject intended to be concealed.
Over the course of the next four decades, Ekman successfully demonstrated a proposition first suggested by Charles Darwin: that the ways in which we express rage, disgust, contempt, fear, surprise, happiness and sadness are universal. The facial muscles triggered by those seven basic emotions are, he has shown, essentially standard, regardless of language and culture, from the US to Japan and Brazil to Papua New Guinea. What is more, expressions of emotion are impossible to suppress and, particularly when we are lying, micro-expressions of powerfully felt emotions will inevitably flit across our face before we get the chance to stop them.
Fortunately for liars, most people will fail to spot these fleeting signals of inner torment. Of the 15000 Ekman has tested, only 50 people, whom he calls ‘naturals’, have been able to do it. But given a little more training. Ekman says, almost anyone can develop the skill. He should know, since these tests were completed in the mid-1980s and the first publication of his research, he has been called in by the FBI and CIA (among countless more law-enforcement and other agencies around the world), not just to solve cases, but to teach them how to use his technique for themselves. He has held workshops for defense and prosecution lawyers, health professionals, even jealous spouses, all of them wanting to know exactly when someone is not being 100 per cent candid.
Most recently, Ekman’s research has resulted in a new television series about the exploits of the fictional Dr Cal Lightman, a scientist who studies involuntary body language to discover not only if you are lying. But why you might have been motivated to do so. According to the publicity blurb, Lightman is a human lie detector, even more accurate than a polygraph test. Ekman concedes has was skeptical when the producer first approached him with the idea of turning his life’s work into a TV series, and initially would have stopped the project if he could. In particular, he was fearful that the show would exaggerate the effectiveness of his techniques and create the quite inaccurate impression among audiences that criminals could no longer hope to get away with lying. In the worst-case scenario, he was concerned about unfair convictions, that one day someone not properly trained in his techniques might be sitting on a jury and wrongly find someone guilty of a crime simply on the basis of a television programme.
In the end though, he was won over because the series is unusual in several respects. It is the first time, as far as Ekman is aware, that a commercial TV drama has been based on the work of just one scientist. That scientist is also deeply involved in the project, talking through plot ideas and checking five successive drafts of each script to ensure details are correct. He was also impressed with the producer’s manifestly serious and well-intentioned reasons for making the programme. Now that the first series has been completed, he believes probably 80-90 per cent of the show is based on fact and that’s good enough for what is. After all, a drama, not a documentary.
Ekman, incidentally, professes to have been a terrible liar ever since he was a small boy and observes that the ability to detect a lie and the ability to lie successfully are completely unrelated. He has been asked by people running for high office if he could teach them to become more credible with the public but has always refused to use his skills in that way on ethical grounds. He also insists that there are various kinds of lies. A ‘true’ lie can be identified by having two essential characteristics: there must be a deliberate intent to mislead and there must be no notification that this is what is occurring. This means that an actor or a poker player isn’t a true liar. They’re supposed to deceive you, it’s part of the game, and the same is true of flattery. He prefers to focus on the kinds of lies where the liar would be in grave trouble if they were found out, and where the target would feel properly aggrieved if they knew.
Simplified: Ekman was addressing a group of young psychiatrists in training
→ they asked him a question about detecting truth
Main idea:Ekman đang nói chuyện với nhóm sinh viên thực tập bác sĩ tâm thần thì nhận được câu hỏi khiến ông bắt đầu nghiên cứu chủ đề nói dối.
