IELTS Real Reading Test 2026 - Q2 Test 2 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Real Reading Test 2026 - Q2 Test 2 được lấy từ cuốn sách Real Test 2026 - Q2 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 - Q2 Test 2 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 6
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
Research on smell
Pierre Paul Broca
- referred to mammals for whom smell is vital as macrosmatic.
- categorised humans with other
1.
and sea mammals as having a small smell organ.
More recent studies
- Humans have about
2.
kinds of smell receptors.
- Humans process incoming smells efficiently due to the way they reach the brain.
- Studies prove that humans can detect a single
3.
of some substances in a huge quantity of liquid.
The latest research
- The effects of introducing certain aromas into a
4.
were studied.
- Certain smells altered the way Dutch party-goers felt about the
5.
.
- Unfamiliar smells created a response related to emotion and changed the way some people made decisions.
- As many as
6.
of people in research studies reacted to introduced smells.
Question 7 - 13
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
7
Human vision and hearing are designed to locate exactly where data is coming from.
8
Even when complex multiple smells are present, most humans can identify only a few individual odours.
9
Professional help is needed when a person is developing their sense of smell.
10
Smells stimulate more precise memories than sights or sounds do.
11
A pleasant smell creates the strongest memories.
12
Sensitivity to new smells declines in adulthood.
13
Smell-related memories can frequently evoke childhood experiences.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 18
The Reading Passage has five sections, A–E.
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
List of Headings
I
Historical reasons why interrupted sleep became uncommon
II
Brain structures involved in sleep patterns
III
Potential health issues related to sleep
IV
Famous cases in literature of sleep
V
An analysis of old documents to discover sleep patterns
VI
Biological and environmental factors preventing people from falling asleep again
VII
Scientific evidence that divided sleep is a natural phenomenon
14
Paragraph A
15
Paragraph B
16
Paragraph C
17
Paragraph D
18
Paragraph E
Question 19 - 23
Look at the following statements and the list of researchers below.
Match each statement with the correct researcher, A-E.
List of Findings
A
Thomas Wehr
B
Roger Ekirch
C
Craig Kloslofsky
D
Gregg Jacobs
E
Russell Foster
19
In certain historical periods, the threat of criminal danger led to segmented sleep.
20
Physicians should learn more about treating people with sleeping difficulties.
21
Historically, when people experienced interrupted sleep, they used the waking periods at night for different activities.
22
Technological changes in Europe made people more likely to sleep through the night.
23
The belief that humans should have a long continuous sleep can be psychologically harmful.
Question 24 - 26
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Historical patterns of interrupted sleep
Historical evidence seems to show that humans had common sleep patterns which were quite unlike today's eight hours of unbroken sleep each night. People habitually went to bed early, soon after , slept for a while, then woke up for a few hours of activity or perhaps to consider, for example, the meaning of their . There was little else to do at home in the dark, since what little means of lighting they had, such as using candles, was costly. In 16th-century Europe, people tended to stay at home at night because they feared on largely unlit city streets. Once urban street lighting improved, night life in cities became popular, and recreational spots like coffee houses came to be considered fashionable. Consequently sleeping patterns also began to change.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 31
Reading Passage has eight paragraphs A-H
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-H
27
a summary of Franklin's occupation in the period before his first expedition
28
a reference to a feature of Franklin's character in Nadolny's novel that has no definite basis in fact
29
a connection between the central theme of the novel and an environmental process
30
a reference to the widespread appeal of Nadolny's novel
31
a summary of events following Franklin's return from his first expedition
Question 32 - 35
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-L, below.
Write the correct letter, A-L, in boxes on your answer sheet.
John Franklin and the Quality of Slowness
Little is known from Franklin's correspondence and published writings about his . The author, Nadolny, suggests that Franklin's whole life can be explained by the quality of 'slowness'. He begins the book by showing how this affects the young Franklin's activities, and makes him become . As a child, it is the quality of that attracts Franklin to the Arctic.
A
a bully
B
discoveries
C
educational
D
family
E
isolation
F
an outsider
G
personality
H
problems
I
remoteness
J
a scholar
K
sporting
L
timelessness
Question 36 - 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
36
In paragraph E, the writer describes different types of ice in order to illustrate
A
the extreme conditions that Polar explorers have to face.
B
the unusual quality of the beauty of Polar regions.
C
the vital importance of preserving the Arctic environment.
D
the personal qualities required of an explorer in Arctic conditions.
37
What is said about the way Franklin communicates?
A
He expresses a very limited range of ideas.
B
He is only willing to discuss things he is familiar with.
C
He uses words and phrases that he has previously memorised.
D
He is only fluent when talking about naval matters.
38
How does the attitude of the other sailors change towards Franklin?
A
They no longer notice his slowness.
B
They start to copy his approach to work.
C
They begin to recognise his efforts to overcome his problems.
D
They eventually appreciate his good qualities.
39
The chapters of The Discovery of Slowness which describe Franklin's early years contain
A
text from a wide variety of sources.
B
short, disconnected pieces of text.
C
descriptions of the Arctic landscape.
D
information about other explorers like Franklin.
40
The Discovery of Slowness has achieved widespread popularity because
A
it reflects many people's concern about one aspect of modern life.
B
it offers achievable solutions to many of the problems of today.
C
it tells the story of someone's triumph over personal problems.
D
it shows how life in the past was less pressured than it is now.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
22/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
The unsung sense
New research reassesses the nature and importance of smell
Traditionally, smell has not been at the forefront of sensory research, pushed aside in favour of the seemingly more vital senses of vision and hearing. There has been a strong belief that people, especially compared to other mammals, are not that influenced by smells.
One of the first to assert the relative unimportance of the human sense of smell was Pierre Paul Broca, an influential 19th-century anatomist. After comparing the proportion of the brain devoted to smell in different animals, he suggested that mammals can be classed into two broad groups: macrosmatic mammals, such as dogs, have a finely tuned sense of smell which they rely on to perceive the world, while marine mammals and primates, including humans, are microsmatic – the organ with which they smell is small and functionally redundant.
That idea seemed to fit with more recent studies in genetics, which found that the majority of mammals have about one thousand different types of smell receptors. Most of these aren’t present in humans, who only possess four hundred or so different types.
Yet these findings may have been misleading. Brain scans show that more of the human brain is devoted to smell processing than Broca’s anatomical studies suggested. And although we may have fewer types of receptors than other mammals, research has shown that the human nose and brain are unusually well connected, with each group of receptors linking to many more neural regions than is the case in other animals. That should give us a good ability to process incoming scents.
Once researchers began looking, they found the nose to be far more sensitive than its reputation suggested. One study, for example, found that we can pick out a particular substance even when heavily diluted. In fact, a person can smell just one drop of a chemical in a large swimming-pool.
What’s more, with the latest findings it is becoming clear that the brain’s ‘smelling centres’ are intimately linked to its system for controlling emotion, fear and memory. That suggests a link between smell and the way we think. One Dutch academic, for example, found that when the smell of orange, seawater or peppermint was pumped through a nightclub, those inside partied harder – they danced more, laughed more, and even thought the music was better than when there was no added scent.
Other work has found that scent can influence our cognitive skills. A study found that when men were subjected to a novel smell – either good or bad – during a task used to test decision-making skills, they performed significantly worse than normal. The researchers concluded the scent stimulated brain areas connected with emotion, making their decisions emotional rather than rational.
The surprising thing about such studies is that up to 95% of subjects altered their behaviour, despite only 5% of them being aware of the introduced smells that they were facing. The question, then, is why do we pay so little conscious attention to our noses unless we smell something really strong?
One vital factor is that our noses just aren’t equipped to locate the source of an odour. This makes the sense of smell fundamentally different to vision or hearing, which are built to identify sights and sounds with precision. Apparently, we become aware of something when the brain focuses on a single location, after which it picks out the details, like a familiar face, from the scene. With smell, though, the brain does not focus in the same way, and so is not able to make us aware of the details relating to one particular area. It’s for this reason that we can only ever pick out around four smells from a complex mixture.
Nevertheless, we all have the capacity to train our sense of smell, but it needs to be worked at. Master perfumers, for instance, learn to recognise, name and imagine an extraordinary range of smells through years of practice. This is accompanied by a significant reorganisation of the olfactory areas in the brain that helps them to process the scents more efficiently.
Smells are also especially good memory evokers, but it’s actually a myth that odours trigger more complete memories than other stimuli. These memories are neither more accurate nor more detailed, but they are unique in that they are more emotional. This isn’t surprising when you consider that both emotion and smell are processed by the same areas of the brain, and there is a strong link between emotion and memory.
That said, not all smell memories are equal. The link between a memory and a smell is stronger if the smell is an unpleasant rather than a pleasant one, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. In addition, the very first time we associate a smell with an object, it evokes a much greater response in our brains than for any encounter with the smell or object in later life, laying down stronger foundations for the memory. That doesn’t happen with any other sense. Since most first encounters with a smell happen at a young age, this might explain why smells often carry us back to our childhood.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 1
1
primates
Giải thích chi tiết
✅ Step 1: Phân tích câu hỏi
Simplified: Pierre Paul Broca categorised humans with other ____ and sea mammals as having a small smell organ .
Ý câu hỏi: Broca xếp con người vào cùng nhóm với một nhóm động vật khác và động vật biển, vì họ đều có cơ quan ngửi nhỏ.
Dự đoán ô trống:
Loại từ: noun số nhiều, vì sau “other … and sea mammals”
Nghĩa/loại thông tin: một nhóm động vật mà con người được xếp cùng
-------
✅ Step 2: Locate bằng chứng
Dựa vào các từ khoá humans, sea mammals và small smell, ta tìm được câu bằng chứng:
“... mammals can be classed into two broad groups: macrosmatic mammals, such as dogs, have a finely tuned sense of smell ... while marine mammals and primates, including humans, are microsmatic – the organ with which they smell is small and functionally redundant.”
-------
✅ Step 3: Đọc câu bằng chứng theo Linearthinking
Simplified: he suggested that macrosmatic mammals, such as dogs have a finely tuned sense of smell , while marine mammals and primates, including humans are microsmatic – the organ with which they smell is small and functionally redundant .
Ý của câu: Broca chia động vật có vú thành 2 nhóm. Con người được xếp cùng primates và marine mammals vào nhóm có cơ quan khứu giác nhỏ.
Lưu ý từ khó:
microsmatic: có khứu giác kém / cơ quan ngửi nhỏ
-------
✅ Step 4: Compare meaning with meaning
Trong bài đọc: con người được xếp cùng nhóm với primates trong nhóm microsmatic.
Trong câu hỏi: cần điền tên nhóm động vật mà con người thuộc vào trong nghiên cứu/phân loại của Broca.
-> Thông tin trong bài đọc khớp trực tiếp với từ cần điền: primates.
We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you
A
A. We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you. Indications from both science and history suggest that the eight-hour sleep may not be a natural or inborn pattern for humans. In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted research which implies just that. Wehr kept a group of people in a darkened room for 14 hours a day for a month. It took some time for their sleep to regulate, but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. Firstly, they slept four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep. Though sleep scientists were impressed by the implications of the study, the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists amongst the general public.
B
In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech University in the US published a paper drawn from 16 years of research, revealing historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct periods of time each night. Ekirch's research found more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern – in diaries, court recorders, medical books and literature, from the ancient Greeks to tribes in Nigeria. Much like Wehr's findings, these references describe a first sleep which began not long following sunset. Then there was a waking period of one or two hours and after that a second sleep. During the waking period, people could be quite active. They sometimes got up and moved around the house, although most people stayed in bed, and perhaps read or wrote if they had enough money for candles. In many historic accounts, Ekirch found that people used the time that they were awake between periods of sleep to think about and attempt to analyse their dreams. In his book, Evening's Empire, historian Craig Koslofsky suggested an explanation for this divided sleep pattern in Europe. 'Associations with night before the 17th century were not good,' he writes. He goes on to explain that the streets of cities and towns at night were often populated by thieves or worse. The streets at night consequently scared many people. Even the wealthy, who could afford to light their way, had better things to spend their money on. There was no prestige or social value with going out or staying up late at night.
C
Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th century. The pattern began to alter first among the urban upper classes, changing amongst the rest of Western society. By the 1920s, the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness. Ekirch attributes the initial shift to improvements in street and home lighting. As the night became a time for all kinds of activity, the length of time people used for rest declined. In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets, using wax candles in glass lamps. It was followed by another French city, Lille, in the same year and by Amsterdam in Holland two years later, where a much more efficient oil-powered lamp was developed. London didn't light its streets until 1684, but by the end of the 17th century, more than 50 of Europe's major towns and cities were lit at night. Coffee houses emerged as a fashionable phenomenon and many were open virtually around the clock. Going out at night became commonplace, and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time. 'People were becoming increasingly time-conscious and sensitive to efficiency, certainly before the 19th century,' says Ekirch. 'But the Industrial Revolution intensified that attitude considerably.' Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical journal from 1829 which urged parents to force their children out of the pattern of first and second sleep.
D
Today, most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body's natural preference for divided sleep, as well as in difficulties caused by extended exposure to artificial light in the modern world. This could be the cause of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep. The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th century, at the same time as accounts of interrupted sleep disappear.
E
Sleep psychologist, Gregg Jacobs, says that the idea that we must sleep for an extended period of time could be changing. If it makes people who wake up in the night anxious, as this anxiety can itself discourage sleep and is likely to affect waking life too. Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeping, when people simply rested and relaxed, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally. Russell Foster, a professor of circadian (body clock) neuroscience at Oxford University in the UK, shares this point of view. 'Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training, and there are very few countries where sleep is studied,' Foster says. He feels this needs to change.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 2
14
VII
Giải thích chi tiết
✅ Áp dụng Linearthinking để đọc đoạn văn
✅ Chọn đáp án:G. Scientific evidence that divided sleep is a natural phenomenon
Vì sao chọn đáp án này:
Đoạn này tập trung vào nghiên cứu khoa học của Thomas Wehr và kết quả nghiên cứu cho thấy con người tự ổn định thành mô hình ngủ chia 2 đợt. Đây chính là “scientific evidence” cho thấy “divided sleep” có tính “natural”.
Đối chiếu paraphrasing:
“Scientific evidence” ⇔ “psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted research” / “sleep scientists were impressed by the implications of the study”
“divided sleep” ⇔ “slept four hours, then woke ... before falling into a second four-hour sleep”
“a natural phenomenon” ⇔ “the eight-hour sleep may not be a natural or inborn pattern for humans”
❌ Những cái tên dễ chọn nhầm
Nếu skim/scan, có thể chọn E. An analysis of old documents to discover sleep patterns vì ở câu (1) có nhắc “history”.
Nhưng đoạn này không triển khai phần tài liệu lịch sử; nó chủ yếu nói về thí nghiệm khoa học hiện đại của Wehr. Phần “old documents” thuộc đoạn khác, không phải đoạn này.
Nếu skim/scan, có thể chọn C. Potential health issues related to sleep vì đoạn mở đầu nói về “worry” và chuyện thức giữa đêm.
Nhưng đoạn này không bàn về bệnh hay vấn đề sức khỏe; nó đang chứng minh rằng thức giữa đêm và ngủ chia 2 đợt có thể là tự nhiên.
Nếu skim/scan, cũng có thể bị phân tâm bởi câu cuối và nghĩ đoạn đang nói về niềm tin sai của công chúng về giấc ngủ 8 tiếng.
Nhưng đó chỉ là ý phụ ở cuối đoạn; trọng tâm chính vẫn là bằng chứng khoa học về divided sleep.
by Sten Nadolny, translated by Ralph Freedman | Canongate, 311 pp
A
A. The English explorer and writer John Franklin (1786–1847) joined the Navy at the age of 14, and fought at the battle of Trafalgar. When peace came, he turned his attention to Arctic exploration, and in particular, to solving the conundrum of the Northwest Passage, a mythical clear-water route through the ice which would, if it existed, link the Pacific Ocean on America's West Coast with the Atlantic on its East. The first expedition Franklin led to the Arctic was an arduous overland journey lasting from 1819 to 1822, in which he and his twenty-strong team covered 8,880 kilometres on foot. Their expedition was a triumph of surveying – they managed to chart hundreds of kilometres of previously unknown coastline – but food ran out on their journey back to civilisation, and the men were forced to eat their belts and their boots (which they boiled up to make leather soup).
B
There followed a career as a travel writer and public speaker ('the man who ate his boots' was Franklin's tag-line). Then in 1845, Franklin set off back to the Arctic with two ships – the Erebus and the Terror – and 129 men. Nothing was heard of them for 14 years, although more than 30 expeditions were dispatched in search of them. Eventually it was discovered that Franklin and all his team had perished after their ships were trapped in the ice.
C
In his personal correspondence and published memoirs, Franklin comes across as a man dedicated to the external duties of war and exploration, who kept introspection and self-analysis to a minimum. His blandness makes him an amenably malleable subject for a novelist, and Sten Nadolny has taken full advantage of this in his book. Most important, Nadolny has endowed John Franklin with a defining trait for which there is no historical evidence: Langsamkeit ('slowness', or 'calmness').
D
Slowness influences not only Franklin's behaviour, but also his vision, his thought and his speech. The opening scene of The Discovery of Slowness depicts Franklin as a young boy, failing to catch a ball because his reaction time is too slow. Despite the bullying of his peers, Franklin resolves not to fall into step with 'their way of doing things'. For Nadolny, Franklin's fascination with the Arctic stems from his desire to find an environment suited to his peculiar slowness. He describes Franklin as a boy dreaming of the 'time without hours and days' which exists in the far north, a place 'where nobody would find him too slow'.
E
Ice is a slow mover. The compressed blue ice inside an Alpine crevasse will have fallen as snow several decades earlier. Polar pack ice takes at least two years to form. The film of crystals which first appears on the surface of the sea thickens into a silkily pliant layer called nilas; this in turn consolidates into young ice, which then deepens during several seasons to become pack. Ice demands a corresponding patience from those who venture onto it. The explorers who have thrived at high latitudes and at high altitudes haven't usually been men of great speed. They have tended instead to demonstrate unusual self-possession, a considerable capacity for boredom, and a talent for the uncomplaining endurance of suffering.
F
These were all qualities which the historical Franklin possessed in abundance, and so Nadolny's exaggeration of them isn't unreasonable. Even as an adult, Franklin's slowness of thought means that he is unable to speak fluently, so he learns by heart 'entire fleets of words and batteries of responses', and speaks a languid, bric-à-brac language. In the Navy, his method of thinking first and acting later initially provokes mockery from his fellow sailors. But Franklin persists in doing things his way, and gradually earns the respect of those around him. To a commodore who tells him to speed up his report of an engagement, he replies: 'When I tell something, sir, I use my own rhythm.' A lieutenant says approvingly of him: 'Because Franklin is so slow, he never loses time.'
G
Nadolny also brings his central metaphor of slowness to bear on the novel's language. The chapters describing Franklin's early years are a medley of separate fragments, rhetorical questions, associative jumps and exclamation marks. In the later sections recounting Franklin's first Arctic expedition, Nadolny brilliantly sets the narrative pace to the rhythms of the frozen landscape, and to the 'slowness which is bred by hunger'.
H
Since it was first published in Germany in 1983, The Discovery of Slowness has sold more than a million copies and been translated into 15 languages. It has been adopted as a manual and manifesto by European pressure groups and institutions representing causes as diverse as sustainable development, management science and motoring policy, even becoming involved in the debate about speed limits on German roads. The various groups that have taken the novel up have one thing in common: a dislike of the high-speed culture of Post-modernity. Nadolny's Franklin appeals to them because he is immune to 'the compulsion to be constantly occupied', and to the idea that 'someone was better if he could do the same thing fast'. It's easy to see where the attraction lies for those in management. The novel is crammed with quotations about time-efficiency, punctualiousness and profitability: 'What did "too late" mean? They hadn't waited for it long enough, that's what it meant.'
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 3
27
A
Giải thích chi tiết
✅ Step 1: Phân tích câu hỏi (Matching Information)
a summary of Franklin’s occupation in the period before his first expedition .
Dự đoán thông tin cần tìm (SPECIFY):
Đoạn đúng cần có đủ 2 mảnh:
Có thông tin về nghề nghiệp / vai trò của Franklin trước đó
Có mốc trước chuyến expedition đầu tiên
-------
✅ Step 2: Locate bằng chứng
Đoạn A là đoạn nổi bật nhất vì nó đi theo đúng trình tự thời gian:
trước hết nói Franklin joined the Navy at the age of 14
rồi fought at the battle of Trafalgar
sau đó turned his attention to Arctic exploration
cuối cùng mới nhắc đến The first expedition Franklin led to the Arctic
=> Nghĩa là đoạn này đang tóm tắt sự nghiệp/hoạt động của Franklin trước khi chuyến expedition đầu tiên bắt đầu.
-------
✅ Step 3: Đối chiếu paraphrasing
a summary ⇔ đoạn A liệt kê ngắn gọn theo timeline: vào Hải quân, tham chiến, rồi chuyển sang thám hiểm Bắc Cực
Franklin’s occupation ⇔ “joined the Navy”, “fought at the battle of Trafalgar”, “turned his attention to Arctic exploration”
in the period before his first expedition ⇔ các chi tiết này xuất hiện trước câu “The first expedition Franklin led to the Arctic…”
⇒ Vậy đoạn A match chính xác với câu hỏi.
-------
❌ Những đáp án “bẫy” dễ chọn nhầm
Bẫy đoạn B: Nếu skim/scan, học sinh có thể thấy đoạn B cũng nói về các chuyến đi của Franklin nên tưởng đúng. Nhưng đoạn B nói về giai đoạn sau này, đặc biệt là chuyến đi năm 1845 và việc đoàn thám hiểm mất tích, không phải giai đoạn trước chuyến expedition đầu tiên.
Bẫy đoạn C: Đoạn C có nhắc đến Franklin, nhưng trọng tâm là cách Franklin hiện lên trong thư từ/hồi ký và cách nhà văn Nadolny xây dựng nhân vật. Đây là nhận xét văn học, không phải tóm tắt nghề nghiệp hay hoạt động của Franklin trước chuyến đi đầu tiên.
Traditionally, smell has not been at the forefront of sensory research, pushed aside in favour of the seemingly more vital senses of vision and hearing. There has been a strong belief that people, especially compared to other mammals, are not that influenced by smells.
One of the first to assert the relative unimportance of the human sense of smell was Pierre Paul Broca, an influential 19th-century anatomist. After comparing the proportion of the brain devoted to smell in different animals, he suggested that mammals can be classed into two broad groups: macrosmatic mammals, such as dogs, have a finely tuned sense of smell which they rely on to perceive the world, while marine mammals and primates, including humans, are microsmatic – the organ with which they smell is small and functionally redundant.
That idea seemed to fit with more recent studies in genetics, which found that the majority of mammals have about one thousand different types of smell receptors. Most of these aren’t present in humans, who only possess four hundred or so different types.
Yet these findings may have been misleading. Brain scans show that more of the human brain is devoted to smell processing than Broca’s anatomical studies suggested. And although we may have fewer types of receptors than other mammals, research has shown that the human nose and brain are unusually well connected, with each group of receptors linking to many more neural regions than is the case in other animals. That should give us a good ability to process incoming scents.
Once researchers began looking, they found the nose to be far more sensitive than its reputation suggested. One study, for example, found that we can pick out a particular substance even when heavily diluted. In fact, a person can smell just one drop of a chemical in a large swimming-pool.
What’s more, with the latest findings it is becoming clear that the brain’s ‘smelling centres’ are intimately linked to its system for controlling emotion, fear and memory. That suggests a link between smell and the way we think. One Dutch academic, for example, found that when the smell of orange, seawater or peppermint was pumped through a nightclub, those inside partied harder – they danced more, laughed more, and even thought the music was better than when there was no added scent.
Other work has found that scent can influence our cognitive skills. A study found that when men were subjected to a novel smell – either good or bad – during a task used to test decision-making skills, they performed significantly worse than normal. The researchers concluded the scent stimulated brain areas connected with emotion, making their decisions emotional rather than rational.
The surprising thing about such studies is that up to 95% of subjects altered their behaviour, despite only 5% of them being aware of the introduced smells that they were facing. The question, then, is why do we pay so little conscious attention to our noses unless we smell something really strong?
One vital factor is that our noses just aren’t equipped to locate the source of an odour. This makes the sense of smell fundamentally different to vision or hearing, which are built to identify sights and sounds with precision. Apparently, we become aware of something when the brain focuses on a single location, after which it picks out the details, like a familiar face, from the scene. With smell, though, the brain does not focus in the same way, and so is not able to make us aware of the details relating to one particular area. It’s for this reason that we can only ever pick out around four smells from a complex mixture.
Nevertheless, we all have the capacity to train our sense of smell, but it needs to be worked at. Master perfumers, for instance, learn to recognise, name and imagine an extraordinary range of smells through years of practice. This is accompanied by a significant reorganisation of the olfactory areas in the brain that helps them to process the scents more efficiently.
Smells are also especially good memory evokers, but it’s actually a myth that odours trigger more complete memories than other stimuli. These memories are neither more accurate nor more detailed, but they are unique in that they are more emotional. This isn’t surprising when you consider that both emotion and smell are processed by the same areas of the brain, and there is a strong link between emotion and memory.
That said, not all smell memories are equal. The link between a memory and a smell is stronger if the smell is an unpleasant rather than a pleasant one, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. In addition, the very first time we associate a smell with an object, it evokes a much greater response in our brains than for any encounter with the smell or object in later life, laying down stronger foundations for the memory. That doesn’t happen with any other sense. Since most first encounters with a smell happen at a young age, this might explain why smells often carry us back to our childhood.
while
marine mammals and primates, including humans
are microsmatic
the organ with which they smell is small and functionally redundant
B. In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech University in the US published a paper drawn from 16 years of research, revealing historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct periods of time each night. Ekirch's research found more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern – in diaries, court recorders, medical books and literature, from the ancient Greeks to tribes in Nigeria. Much like Wehr's findings, these references describe a first sleep which began not long following sunset. Then there was a waking period of one or two hours and after that a second sleep. During the waking period, people could be quite active. They sometimes got up and moved around the house, although most people stayed in bed, and perhaps read or wrote if they had enough money for candles. In many historic accounts, Ekirch found that people used the time that they were awake between periods of sleep to think about and attempt to analyse their dreams. In his book, Evening's Empire, historian Craig Koslofsky suggested an explanation for this divided sleep pattern in Europe. 'Associations with night before the 17th century were not good,' he writes. He goes on to explain that the streets of cities and towns at night were often populated by thieves or worse. The streets at night consequently scared many people. Even the wealthy, who could afford to light their way, had better things to spend their money on. There was no prestige or social value with going out or staying up late at night.
C. Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th century. The pattern began to alter first among the urban upper classes, changing amongst the rest of Western society. By the 1920s, the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness. Ekirch attributes the initial shift to improvements in street and home lighting. As the night became a time for all kinds of activity, the length of time people used for rest declined. In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets, using wax candles in glass lamps. It was followed by another French city, Lille, in the same year and by Amsterdam in Holland two years later, where a much more efficient oil-powered lamp was developed. London didn't light its streets until 1684, but by the end of the 17th century, more than 50 of Europe's major towns and cities were lit at night. Coffee houses emerged as a fashionable phenomenon and many were open virtually around the clock. Going out at night became commonplace, and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time. 'People were becoming increasingly time-conscious and sensitive to efficiency, certainly before the 19th century,' says Ekirch. 'But the Industrial Revolution intensified that attitude considerably.' Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical journal from 1829 which urged parents to force their children out of the pattern of first and second sleep.
D. Today, most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body's natural preference for divided sleep, as well as in difficulties caused by extended exposure to artificial light in the modern world. This could be the cause of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep. The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th century, at the same time as accounts of interrupted sleep disappear.
E. Sleep psychologist, Gregg Jacobs, says that the idea that we must sleep for an extended period of time could be changing. If it makes people who wake up in the night anxious, as this anxiety can itself discourage sleep and is likely to affect waking life too. Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeping, when people simply rested and relaxed, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally. Russell Foster, a professor of circadian (body clock) neuroscience at Oxford University in the UK, shares this point of view. 'Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training, and there are very few countries where sleep is studied,' Foster says. He feels this needs to change.
B. There followed a career as a travel writer and public speaker ('the man who ate his boots' was Franklin's tag-line). Then in 1845, Franklin set off back to the Arctic with two ships – the Erebus and the Terror – and 129 men. Nothing was heard of them for 14 years, although more than 30 expeditions were dispatched in search of them. Eventually it was discovered that Franklin and all his team had perished after their ships were trapped in the ice.
C. In his personal correspondence and published memoirs, Franklin comes across as a man dedicated to the external duties of war and exploration, who kept introspection and self-analysis to a minimum. His blandness makes him an amenably malleable subject for a novelist, and Sten Nadolny has taken full advantage of this in his book. Most important, Nadolny has endowed John Franklin with a defining trait for which there is no historical evidence: Langsamkeit ('slowness', or 'calmness').
D. Slowness influences not only Franklin's behaviour, but also his vision, his thought and his speech. The opening scene of The Discovery of Slowness depicts Franklin as a young boy, failing to catch a ball because his reaction time is too slow. Despite the bullying of his peers, Franklin resolves not to fall into step with 'their way of doing things'. For Nadolny, Franklin's fascination with the Arctic stems from his desire to find an environment suited to his peculiar slowness. He describes Franklin as a boy dreaming of the 'time without hours and days' which exists in the far north, a place 'where nobody would find him too slow'.
E. Ice is a slow mover. The compressed blue ice inside an Alpine crevasse will have fallen as snow several decades earlier. Polar pack ice takes at least two years to form. The film of crystals which first appears on the surface of the sea thickens into a silkily pliant layer called nilas; this in turn consolidates into young ice, which then deepens during several seasons to become pack. Ice demands a corresponding patience from those who venture onto it. The explorers who have thrived at high latitudes and at high altitudes haven't usually been men of great speed. They have tended instead to demonstrate unusual self-possession, a considerable capacity for boredom, and a talent for the uncomplaining endurance of suffering.
F. These were all qualities which the historical Franklin possessed in abundance, and so Nadolny's exaggeration of them isn't unreasonable. Even as an adult, Franklin's slowness of thought means that he is unable to speak fluently, so he learns by heart 'entire fleets of words and batteries of responses', and speaks a languid, bric-à-brac language. In the Navy, his method of thinking first and acting later initially provokes mockery from his fellow sailors. But Franklin persists in doing things his way, and gradually earns the respect of those around him. To a commodore who tells him to speed up his report of an engagement, he replies: 'When I tell something, sir, I use my own rhythm.' A lieutenant says approvingly of him: 'Because Franklin is so slow, he never loses time.'
G. Nadolny also brings his central metaphor of slowness to bear on the novel's language. The chapters describing Franklin's early years are a medley of separate fragments, rhetorical questions, associative jumps and exclamation marks. In the later sections recounting Franklin's first Arctic expedition, Nadolny brilliantly sets the narrative pace to the rhythms of the frozen landscape, and to the 'slowness which is bred by hunger'.
H. Since it was first published in Germany in 1983, The Discovery of Slowness has sold more than a million copies and been translated into 15 languages. It has been adopted as a manual and manifesto by European pressure groups and institutions representing causes as diverse as sustainable development, management science and motoring policy, even becoming involved in the debate about speed limits on German roads. The various groups that have taken the novel up have one thing in common: a dislike of the high-speed culture of Post-modernity. Nadolny's Franklin appeals to them because he is immune to 'the compulsion to be constantly occupied', and to the idea that 'someone was better if he could do the same thing fast'. It's easy to see where the attraction lies for those in management. The novel is crammed with quotations about time-efficiency, punctualiousness and profitability: 'What did "too late" mean? They hadn't waited for it long enough, that's what it meant.'
