IELTS Real Reading Test Pre 2025 - Vol 2 Test 4 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Real Reading Test Pre 2025 - Vol 2 Test 4 được lấy từ cuốn sách Real Test Pre 2025 - Vol 2 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 Pre 2025 - Vol 2 Test 4 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 4
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
1
What does the writer tell us about people with tone deafness (amusia) in the first paragraph?
A
They usually have hearing problems
B
Some can play a musical instrument very well
C
Some may be able to sing well-known melodies
D
They have several inabilities in regard to music
2
What is the writer doing in the second paragraph?
A
Outlining some of the factors that cause amusia
B
Summarising some findings about people with amusia
C
Suggesting that people with amusia are disadvantaged
D
Comparing the singing ability of amusia with their sense
3
What does the writer say about the relationship between language ability and musical ability?
A
People who are unable to speak can sometimes sing
B
People with amusia usually have language problems too
C
Speakers of tonal languages like Chinese rarely have amusia
D
People with amusia have difficulty recognizing people by their voices
4
What is the writer doing in the fourth paragraph?
A
Claiming that amusics have problems in the auditory cortex
B
Outlining progress in understanding the brains of amusics
C
Proving that amusia is located in the temporal lobes
D
Explaining why studies of hearing are difficult
Question 5 - 8
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
5
Peretz’s research suggesting that amusia is a disorder is convincing.
6
People with musical ability are happier than those without this ability.
7
It is inappropriate to consider amusia as a real disorder.
8
People with amusia often have bad handwriting
Question 9 - 13
Complete each of the following statements with the best ending A-H from the box below.
List of Endings
A
an inability to hear when spoken language rises and falls
B
considered to be desirable
C
an inability to follow the beat of music
D
not a problem
E
not yet well understood
F
a result of injury to the mother
G
more marked than with other people
H
associated with intelligence
The reason why some people are born with amusia is
9
One of the difficulties amusia experience is
10
For amusia, discrimination of meaning in speech is
11
Certain reactions in the brain of an amusia are
12
In most cultures, musical ability is
13
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 19
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
14
Firstly, Alex has grasped quite a lot of vocabulary.
15
At the beginning of the study, Alex felt frightened in the presence of humans.
16
Previously, many scientists realized that the animal possesses the ability of thinking.
17
It has taken a long time before people get to know cognition existing in animals.
18
As Alex could approximately imitate the sounds of English words, he was capable of roughly answering Irene's questions regarding the world.
19
By breaking in other parrots as well as producing the incorrect answers, he tried to be focused.
Question 20 - 23
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
After the training of Irene, Parrot Alex can use his vocal tract to pronounce more than , while other scientists believe that animals have no this advanced ability of thinking, they would rather teach . Pepperberg clarified that she wanted to conduct a study concerning but not to teach him to talk. The store's assistant picked out a bird at random for her for the sake of avoiding other scientists saying that the bird is afterwards.
Question 24 - 26
Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
24
What did Alex reply regarding the similarity of the subjects shown to him?
25
What is the problem of the young parrots except for Alex?
26
To some extent, through the way he behaved what we can call him?
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 30
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
27
There is historical scientific evidence to support stories of animals predicting earthquakes.
28
Coren's decision to investigate the possibility that dogs can anticipate an earthquake was based on some archive information.
29
Dogs may be more sensitive to changes in the Earth's electrical field than other animals.
30
Coren's findings from his original study of dogs clearly prove they can hear high frequencies which signal earthquakes.
Question 31 - 35
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
31
What is the writer's main point in paragraph 4?
A
The strength of the next earthquake along the San Andreas fault is unpredictable.
B
It is not the first time that the theory of animal prediction has been investigated.
C
Experts have never identified any reliable predictors for earthquakes.
D
The Parkfield project depended on unreliable methods for earthquake detection.
32
When Coren re-analysed his data for 27 February he found that on that day
A
dogs with either poor or good hearing were equally anxious.
B
the shape of a dog's ear seemed to correlate with its behaviour.
C
dogs with larger heads were the most sensitive to tremors.
D
the level of activity amongst dogs reduced as the earthquake occurred.
33
Seismologist Andy Michael refers to Alfred Wegener in order to
A
suggest there may be an aspect of Coren's theory which is correct.
B
dismiss the idea that dogs are capable of sensing earthquakes.
C
demonstrate how data can be falsified by subjective researchers.
D
criticise certain scientists for not being careful in their research.
34
What is the writer doing in the penultimate paragraph?
A
Explaining why western researchers do not trust animal behaviour.
B
Arguing how animal prediction is superior to science-based prediction.
C
Suggesting a more reliable animal than the dog for predictive purposes.
D
Illustrating how animal behaviour is already exploited by some researchers.
35
What point is the writer making by using the phrase 'what have we got to lose' in the final paragraph?
A
The cost of setting up a data collection centre needs to be considered.
B
It is worth setting up a call centre to record animal behaviour.
C
The pros and cons of different data collection methods must be weighed up.
D
There is a danger that existing data may be lost if not stored carefully.
Question 36 - 40
Complete each of the following statements with the best ending A-G from the box below.
List of Endings
A
is released during earthquakes.
B
showed little variation during the tsunami.
C
could be linked to their ability to detect movement.
D
would have an effect on most dogs.
E
was based on Chinese data-collection methods.
F
could be explained by extra-sensory perception.
G
dates back to before modern civilisation.
H
derived from poorly conducted research.
The belief in the ability of animals to predict earthquakes
36
Experts think it is unlikely that gas
37
Sheldrake says that an animal's ability to predict disasters
38
Coren speculated that a dog's ability to predict earthquakes
39
The behaviour of the elephant herds in Wikramanayake's
40
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
05/05/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
When people are deaf to music
A
A. Music has long been considered a uniquely human concept. In fact, most psychologists agree that music is a universal human instinct. Like any ability, however, there is great variation in people’s musical competence. For every brilliant pianist in the world, there are several people we refer to as ” tone deaf”. It is not simply that people with tone deafness (or’ amusia”) are unable to sing in tune, they are also unable to discriminate between tones or recognize familiar melodies. Such a” disorder” can occur after some sort of brain damage , but recently research has been undertaken in an attempt to discover the cause of congenital amusia (when people are born with the condition), which is not associated with any brain damage, hearing problems, or lack of exposure to music.
B
According to the research of Dr. Isabelie Peretz of the University of Montreat, amusia is more complicated than the inability to distinguish pitches. An amusia (a person who has the condition of amusia) can distinguish between two pitches that are far apart, but cannot tell the difference between intervals smaller than a half step on the Western diatonic scale, and when listening to melodies which have had a single note altered so that it is out of key with the rest of the melody, does not notice a problem, while most people can easily distinguish such differences. As would be expected, amusics perform significantly worse at singing and tapping a rhythm along with a melody than do non-amusics.
C
The most fascinating aspect of amusia is how specific to music it is. Because of music’s close ties to language, it might be expected that a musical impairment may be caused by a language impairment. Studies suggest, however, that language and music ability are independent of one another. People with brain damage in areas critical to language are often still able to sing, despite being unable to communicate through speech. Moreover, while amusics show deficiencies in their recognition of pitch differences in melodies, they show no difficulty in tonal languages, such as Chinese, and do not report having any difficulty discriminating between words that differ only in their intonation. The linguistic cues inherent in speech make discrimination of meaning much easier for amusics.
D
Amusics are also successful most of the time at detecting the mood of a melody, can identify a speaker based on his or her voice, and can discriminate and identify environmental sounds. Recent work has been focused on locating the part of the brain that is responsible for amusia. The temporal lobes of the brain, the location of the primary auditory cortex, have been considered. It has long been believed that the temporal lobes, especially the right temporal lobe, are most active when activity, so any musical disability should logically stem from here as well. Because it has been shown that there is no hearing deficit in amusia, researchers moved on to the temporal neocortex, which is where more sophisticated processing of musical cues was thought to take place. New studies, however, have suggested that the deficits in amusics are located outside the auditory cortex. Brain scans of amusics do not show any reaction at all to differences smaller than a half step, when changes in tones are large, their brains overreact, showing twice as much activity on the right side of the brain as a normal brain hearing the same thing. These differences do not occur in the auditory cortex, indicating again that the deficits of amusia lie mostly in hearing impairment, but in higher processing of melodies.
E
So what does this all mean? Looking only at the research of Peretz in the field of neuropsychology of music, it would appear that amusia is some sort of disorder. As a student of neurobiology, however, I am skeptical. Certainly the studies by Peretz that have found significant differences between the brains of so-called amusics and normal brains are legitimate. The more important question now becomes one of normality. Every trait from skin color to intelligence to mood exists on a continuum-there is a great idea of variation from one extreme to the other. Just because we recognize that basic musical ability is something that the vast majority of people have, this doesn’t mean that the lack of it is abnormal.
F
What makes an amusic worse off than a musical prodigy? Musical ability is culturally valued, and may have been a factor in survival at one point in human history, but it does not seem likely that it is being selected for on an evolutionary scale any longer. Darwin believed that music was adaptive as a way of finding a mate, but who needs to be able to sing to find a partner in an age when it is possible to express your emotions through a song on your IPod?
G
While the idea of amusia is interesting, it seems to be just one end of the continuum of innate musical ability. Comparing this ‘disorder’ to learning disorders like a specific language impairment seems to be going too far. Before, amusia can be declared a disability, further research must be done to determine whether lack of musical ability is actually detrimental in any way. If no disadvantages can be found of having amusia, then it is no more a disability than having poor fashion sense or bad handwriting.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 1
1
D
Giải thích chi tiết
☺️ Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài Multiple Choice
Step 01: Read the question to understand
Simplified: What does the writer tell us about people with tone deafness in the first paragraph ?
Main idea: Hỏi trong đoạn 1, tác giả nói gì về người bị amusia (tone deafness) → cần xác định đặc điểm của họ liên quan đến âm nhạc.
-------
Step 02: Locate relevant information
🔍 Từ khóa: “first paragraph”, “tone deafness (amusia)”
→ Đọc đoạn A, tìm chi tiết mô tả các đặc điểm/khó khăn của người bị amusia.
-------
Step 03: Read relevant information to understand
📌 Trích dẫn: “It is not simply that people with tone deafness (or ‘amusia’) are unable to sing in tune, they are also unable to discriminate between tones or recognize familiar melodies.”(đoạn A)
Simplified: People with amusia are unable to sing in tune + to discriminate between tones + to recognize melodies
Main idea: Người bị amusia không chỉ không hát đúng giai điệu → còn không phân biệt được cao độ và không nhận ra giai điệu quen thuộc → có nhiều bất khả năng liên quan đến âm nhạc.
-------
Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning
❌ A. They usually have hearing problems
--> Sai, đoạn nói rõ congenital amusia không liên quan đến hearing problems.
❌ B. Some can play a musical instrument very well
--> Sai, không có thông tin nào về việc họ chơi nhạc cụ giỏi.
❌ C. Some may be able to sing well-known melodies
--> Sai, ngược lại, họ không nhận ra giai điệu quen thuộc, không thể hát đúng.
✅ D. They have several inabilities in regard to music:
--> Đúng, vì họ gặp nhiều khó khăn: không hát đúng giai điệu, không phân biệt được cao độ, không nhận ra giai điệu.
A. In 1977 Irene Pepperberg, a recent graduate of Harvard University, did something very bold. At a time when animals still were considered automatons, she set out to find what was on another creature’s mind by talking to it. She brought a one-year-old African gray parrot she named Alex into her lab to teach him to reproduce the sounds of the English language. “I thought if he learned to communicate, I could ask him questions about how he sees the world.”
B
When Pepperberg began her dialogue with Alex, who died last September at the age of 31, many scientists believed animals were incapable of any thought. They were simply machines, robots programmed to react to stimuli but lacking the ability to think or feel. Any pet owner would disagree. We see the love in our dogs’ eyes and know that, of course, they has thoughts and emotions. But such claims remain highly controversial. Gut instinct is not science, and it is all too easy to project human thoughts and feelings onto another creature. How, then, does a scientist prove that an animal is capable of thinking - that it is able to acquire information about the world and act on it? “That’s why I started my studies with Alex,” Pepperberg said. They were seated—she at her desk, he on top of his cage—in her lab, a windowless room about the size of a boxcar, at Brandeis University. Newspapers lined the floor; baskets of bright toys were stacked on the shelves. They were clearly a team—and because of their work, the notion that animals can think is no longer so fanciful.
C
Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others’ motives, imitating others, and being creative. Bit by bit, in ingenious experiments, researchers have documented these talents in other species, gradually chipping away at what we thought made human beings distinctive while offering a glimpse of where our own abilities came from. Scrub jays know that other jays are thieves and that stashed food can spoil; sheep can recognize faces; chimpanzees use a variety of tools to probe termite mounds and even use weapons to hunt small mammals; dolphins can imitate human postures; the archerfish, which stuns insects with a sudden blast of water, can learn how to aim its squirt simply by watching an experienced fish perform the task. And Alex the parrot turned out to be a surprisingly good talker.
D
Thirty years after the Alex studies began; Pepperberg and a changing collection of assistants were still giving him English lessons. The humans, along with two younger parrots, also served as Alex’s flock, providing the social input all parrots crave. Like any flock, this one —as small as it was—had its share of drama. Alex dominated his fellow parrots, acted huffy at times around Pepperberg, tolerated the other female humans, and fell to pieces over a male assistant who dropped by for a visit. Pepperberg bought Alex in a Chicago pet store where she let the store’s assistant pick him out because she didn’t want other scientists saying later that she’d particularly chosen an especially smart bird for her work. Given that Alex’s brain was the size of a shelled walnut, most researchers thought Pepperberg’s interspecies communication study would be futile.
E
“Some people actually called me crazy for trying this,” she said. “Scientists thought that chimpanzees were better subjects, although, of course, chimps can’t speak.” Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas have been taught to use sign language and symbols to communicate with US, often with impressive results. The bonobo Kanzi, for instance, carries his symbol-communication board with him so he can “talk” to his human researchers, and he has invented combinations of symbols to express his thoughts. Nevertheless, this is not the same thing as having an animal look up at you, open his mouth, and speak. Under Pepperberg’s patient tutelage, Alex learned how to use his vocal tract to imitate almost one hundred English words, including the sounds for various foods, although he calls an apple a “banerry.” “Apples taste a little bit like bananas to him, and they look a little bit like cherries, so Alex made up that word for them,” Pepperberg said.
F
It sounded a bit mad, the idea of having lessons to practice, and willingly doing it. But after listening to and observing Alex, it was difficult to argue with Pepperberg’s explanation for his behaviors. She wasn’t handing him treats for the repetitious work or rapping him on the claws to make him say the sounds. “He has to hear the words over and over before he can correctly imitate them,” Pepperberg said, after pronouncing “seven” for Alex a good dozen times in a row. “I’m not trying to see if Alex can learn a human language,” she added. “That’s never been the point. My plan always was to use his imitative skills to get a better understanding of avian cognition.”
G
In other words, because Alex was able to produce a close approximation of the sounds of some English words, Pepperberg could ask him questions about a bird’s basic understanding of the world. She couldn’t ask him what he was thinking about, but she could ask him about his knowledge of numbers, shapes, and colors. To demonstrate, Pepperberg carried Alex on her arm to a tall wooden perch in the middle of the room. She then retrieved a green key and a small green cup from a basket on a shelf. She held up the two items to Alex’s eye. “What’s same?” she asked. Without hesitation, Alex’s beak opened: “Color.” “What’s different?” Pepperberg asked. “Shape,” Alex said. His voice had the digitized sound of a cartoon character. Since parrots lack lips (another reason it was difficult for Alex to pronounce some sounds, such as ba), the words seemed to come from the air around him, as if a ventriloquist were speaking. But the words—and what can only be called the thoughts—were entirely his.
H
For the next 20 minutes, Alex ran through his tests, distinguishing colors, shapes, sizes, and materials (wool versus wood versus metal). He did some simple arithmetic, such as counting the yellow toy blocks among a pile of mixed hues. And, then, as if to offer final proof of the mind inside his bird’s brain, Alex spoke up. “Talk clearly!” he commanded, when one of the younger birds Pepperberg was also teaching talked with wrong pronunciation. “Talk clearly!” “Don’t be a smart aleck,” Pepperberg said, shaking her head at him. “He knows all this, and he gets bored, so he interrupts the others, or he gives the wrong answer just to be obstinate. At this stage, he’s like a teenager; he’s moody, and I’m never sure what he’ll do.”
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 2
14
Not Given
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: Firstly , Alex has grasped quite a lot ofvocabulary
Main idea: Lúc đầu, Alex đã nắm vững rất nhiều từ vựng.
-------
Step 02: Locate relevant information
🔍 Từ khóa: “Alex”, “vocabulary”, "has grasped", "quite a lot". → Tìm đoạn văn nói về số lượng từ vựng mà Alex học được.
→ Dựa vào các từ khoá trên → Tìm được trích dẫn ở đoạn E
-------
Step 03: Read relevant information to understand (main + detail)
📌 Trích dẫn: “Under Pepperberg’s patient tutelage, Alex learned how to use his vocal tract to imitate almost one hundred English words…”(Passage E)
Simplified: Under Pepperberg's patient tutelage , Alex learned almost one hundredEnglish words
Main idea: Dưới sự dạy dỗ kiên nhẫn của Pepperberg, Alex học được gần 100 từ tiếng Anh → sau khi Pepperberg dạy dỗ, Alex mới học được 100 từ
-------
Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning
Trong bài đọc: Sau khi Pepperberg dạy dỗ, Alex mới học được 100 từ ==> không nhắc đến lượng từ vựng mà Alex biết trước khi Pepperberg dạy.
Trong câu hỏi:Ban đầu(Firstly), Alex đã nắm vững rất nhiều từ vựng.
⇒ ✅ Chọn: NOT GIVEN
Nếu là TRUE: Bài phải nói rõ rằng ban đầu Alex thực sự có vốn từ phong phú.
Nếu là FALSE: Bài phải nói Alex chỉ học được rất ít từ, không đáng kể.
Thực tế: Bài chỉ đề cập đến đến số lượng từ vựng mà Alex biết sau khi được Pepperberg dạy, thông tin về lượng từ mà Alex đã biết được trước đó thì không được đề cập.
Surely it is too much to believe that animals can predict earthquakes when we haven't worked out how to do it ourselves?
On 26 December 2004, villagers from Bang Koey in Thailand noticed buffalo on the beach lift their heads, look out to sea, then stampede to the top of a nearby hill. Minutes later, the tsunami struck. Could these creatures have been sensing early warning signs of the earthquake that triggered the Asian tsunami? It is a strange assertion but the possibility that animals might hold the answer cannot be ignored, as a warning system could save many lives.
The idea that animals can predict earthquakes has ancient origins. From 373 BC there are stories of rats, dogs and snakes deserting the Greek city of Helice before an earthquake hit. It was the first in a long line of such anecdotes. What has been lacking is any real scientific data linking animal behaviour with earthquakes.
In late 2000, however, Stanley Coren from the University of British Columbia started a study to discover whether dogs suffer from seasonal affective disorder. Twice weekly, he emailed 200 dog owners in Vancouver, asking them to rate their pets' activity and anxiety levels using a nine-point scale. In general there was little daily variability; Coren's initial analysis of many months' worth of information strongly refuted his suspicion that dogs become depressed during winter, and he abandoned the project. When he finally went through the figures in detail several years later however, he noticed that on 27 February 2001, nearly 50 per cent were well above their usual baseline for activity and anxiety. The likelihood of such a difference was remote and Coren searched through the newspaper archives for a cause. He found that on 28 February a quake of magnitude 6.8 shook the Pacific northwest, with an epicentre at Nisqually about 240 kilometres south of Vancouver. Coren wondered what the dogs could have sensed. There was little to guide him. Even the most comprehensive earthquake research project in the world, the Parkfield experiment in California, couldn't help. Since 1985, researchers from the US Geological Survey (USGS) have monitored a section of the San Andreas fault near the town of Parkfield. They have analysed every tremor, and measured tiny movements of the fault at 10-minute intervals, but to date the project has revealed nothing that would reliably indicate that an earthquake is imminent.
There is still much speculation about animals predicting earthquakes. For example, one idea is that some animals detect changes in the Earth's electrical field. Another theory is that animals are responding to gas such as radon released from rocks before a quake, despite the fact that few experts accept such gas is produced. Rupert Sheldrake, a British researcher, suggests that 'people notice unusual animal behaviour before disasters. I think animals are picking up on something that we can't, perhaps by using a sixth sense.'
Coren, however, had read about rescue dogs hearing avalanche victims under the snow, and suspected the dogs in his study might also be hearing vibrations. So he returned to his data to shown any significant increase in anxiety on 27 February, and it was living with a hearing dog that had become anxious. Dogs with floppy ears showed only half the change in activity and one-third the change in anxiety level of dogs with pricked ears. Not only would an ear flap reduce the amount of sound reaching the inner ear; Coren also realised that it would weaken high frequency sounds more than low frequency ones. Further, dogs with smaller heads were significantly more likely to behave strangely than those with larger heads, which was interesting, given that smaller-headed dogs are more sensitive to higher frequencies.
Taken together, Coren's results present an alluring hypothesis. He suggests that the kind of high frequency sounds that many dogs can hear are emitted before an earthquake, perhaps from rocks scraping underground. Admittedly this is only one study. Even if Coren is right, is it still possible that other animals could predict quakes in different ways? Eric Wikramanayake, a conservation scientist who used radio collars and happened to be studying elephants in Sri Lanka when the tsunami struck, is entirely sceptical.
What he found was precisely nothing. One herd was only 100 metres away from the beach when the tsunami arrived and they just took cover behind a large sand dune when the wave came in sight. The other herd was safely located about 5 kilometres inland and did not show any unusual movements. Even if some quakes are preceded by high-frequency vibrations, is it feasible that dogs in Vancouver could detect sounds emitted near Nisqually? USGS seismologist Andy Michael points out that the epicentre was over 240 kilometres south of Vancouver. 'It is physically implausible for seismic waves in the kilohertz range to travel that far,' he says. Although unconvinced by Coren's ideas, Michael adds a cautionary tale. "When Alfred Wegener presented his theory of continental drift, his core ideas about tectonics were right but nobody listened because the mechanisms were wrong."
So if animals are able to foretell earthquakes, does it matter how? In fact, while western society has been reluctant to use animals as earthquake predictors, China has already embraced the idea. Experts there use a video link to keep a 24-hour watch on snakes in farms nationwide. If they try to escape from their enclosure, observers raise a warning.
Other governments may not be willing to go that far just yet, but Coren believes that a centre that people could call when they see unusual things would be useful. "We would be able to collect much more data and give warnings when we get hundreds of calls from a single area," he says. It could cost little more than the price of setting up a phone line. Put that way, what have we got to lose?
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 3
27
No
Giải thích chi tiết
☺️ Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài Yes / No / Not Given
Step 01: Read the question to understand (main idea + detail)
Simplified: There is historical scientific evidence to support stories of animals predicting earthquakes .
------------------
Step 02: Locate relevant information
🔍 Từ khóa: “historical scientific evidence”, “support stories”, “predicting earthquakes”
-> Dựa vào các từ khoá trên, có thể tìm được trích dẫn ở đoạn 2.
-------
Step 03: Read relevant information to understand (main + detail)
📌 Trích dẫn: “The idea that animals can predict earthquakes has ancient origins. From 373 BC there are stories of rats, dogs and snakes deserting the Greek city of Helice before an earthquake hit. ... What has been lacking is any real scientific data linking animal behaviour with earthquakes.” (Đoạn 2)
Simplified: The idea has ancientorigins.
From 373 BC there are stories of rats, dogs ... deserting the Greek city... before an earthquake
What has been lacking is any real scientific data linking animal behaviour with earthquakes .
-------
Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning
Trong bài đọc: Có các câu chuyện lịch sử/cổ xưa → Nhưng còn thiếu dữ liệu khoa học.
Trong câu hỏi: Khẳng định có bằng chứng khoa học lịch sử.
⇒ ✅ Chọn: NO
-------
Lưu ý chung:
Nếu đáp án là YES: Bài đọc sẽ phải nói là có bằng chứng xác nhận, ví dụ:"The historical stories of animal prediction are strongly supported by scientific evidence." Tuy nhiên bài đang nói ngược lại.
Nếu đáp án là NOT GIVEN: Bài đọc sẽ phải nói là không có thông tin về sự tồn tại hay thiếu vắng của bằng chứng khoa học.
B. According to the research of Dr. Isabelie Peretz of the University of Montreat, amusia is more complicated than the inability to distinguish pitches. An amusia (a person who has the condition of amusia) can distinguish between two pitches that are far apart, but cannot tell the difference between intervals smaller than a half step on the Western diatonic scale, and when listening to melodies which have had a single note altered so that it is out of key with the rest of the melody, does not notice a problem, while most people can easily distinguish such differences. As would be expected, amusics perform significantly worse at singing and tapping a rhythm along with a melody than do non-amusics.
C. The most fascinating aspect of amusia is how specific to music it is. Because of music’s close ties to language, it might be expected that a musical impairment may be caused by a language impairment. Studies suggest, however, that language and music ability are independent of one another. People with brain damage in areas critical to language are often still able to sing, despite being unable to communicate through speech. Moreover, while amusics show deficiencies in their recognition of pitch differences in melodies, they show no difficulty in tonal languages, such as Chinese, and do not report having any difficulty discriminating between words that differ only in their intonation. The linguistic cues inherent in speech make discrimination of meaning much easier for amusics.
D. Amusics are also successful most of the time at detecting the mood of a melody, can identify a speaker based on his or her voice, and can discriminate and identify environmental sounds. Recent work has been focused on locating the part of the brain that is responsible for amusia. The temporal lobes of the brain, the location of the primary auditory cortex, have been considered. It has long been believed that the temporal lobes, especially the right temporal lobe, are most active when activity, so any musical disability should logically stem from here as well. Because it has been shown that there is no hearing deficit in amusia, researchers moved on to the temporal neocortex, which is where more sophisticated processing of musical cues was thought to take place. New studies, however, have suggested that the deficits in amusics are located outside the auditory cortex. Brain scans of amusics do not show any reaction at all to differences smaller than a half step, when changes in tones are large, their brains overreact, showing twice as much activity on the right side of the brain as a normal brain hearing the same thing. These differences do not occur in the auditory cortex, indicating again that the deficits of amusia lie mostly in hearing impairment, but in higher processing of melodies.
E. So what does this all mean? Looking only at the research of Peretz in the field of neuropsychology of music, it would appear that amusia is some sort of disorder. As a student of neurobiology, however, I am skeptical. Certainly the studies by Peretz that have found significant differences between the brains of so-called amusics and normal brains are legitimate. The more important question now becomes one of normality. Every trait from skin color to intelligence to mood exists on a continuum-there is a great idea of variation from one extreme to the other. Just because we recognize that basic musical ability is something that the vast majority of people have, this doesn’t mean that the lack of it is abnormal.
F. What makes an amusic worse off than a musical prodigy? Musical ability is culturally valued, and may have been a factor in survival at one point in human history, but it does not seem likely that it is being selected for on an evolutionary scale any longer. Darwin believed that music was adaptive as a way of finding a mate, but who needs to be able to sing to find a partner in an age when it is possible to express your emotions through a song on your IPod?
G. While the idea of amusia is interesting, it seems to be just one end of the continuum of innate musical ability. Comparing this ‘disorder’ to learning disorders like a specific language impairment seems to be going too far. Before, amusia can be declared a disability, further research must be done to determine whether lack of musical ability is actually detrimental in any way. If no disadvantages can be found of having amusia, then it is no more a disability than having poor fashion sense or bad handwriting.
to recognize melodies
B. When Pepperberg began her dialogue with Alex, who died last September at the age of 31, many scientists believed animals were incapable of any thought. They were simply machines, robots programmed to react to stimuli but lacking the ability to think or feel. Any pet owner would disagree. We see the love in our dogs’ eyes and know that, of course, they has thoughts and emotions. But such claims remain highly controversial. Gut instinct is not science, and it is all too easy to project human thoughts and feelings onto another creature. How, then, does a scientist prove that an animal is capable of thinking - that it is able to acquire information about the world and act on it? “That’s why I started my studies with Alex,” Pepperberg said. They were seated—she at her desk, he on top of his cage—in her lab, a windowless room about the size of a boxcar, at Brandeis University. Newspapers lined the floor; baskets of bright toys were stacked on the shelves. They were clearly a team—and because of their work, the notion that animals can think is no longer so fanciful.
C. Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others’ motives, imitating others, and being creative. Bit by bit, in ingenious experiments, researchers have documented these talents in other species, gradually chipping away at what we thought made human beings distinctive while offering a glimpse of where our own abilities came from. Scrub jays know that other jays are thieves and that stashed food can spoil; sheep can recognize faces; chimpanzees use a variety of tools to probe termite mounds and even use weapons to hunt small mammals; dolphins can imitate human postures; the archerfish, which stuns insects with a sudden blast of water, can learn how to aim its squirt simply by watching an experienced fish perform the task. And Alex the parrot turned out to be a surprisingly good talker.
D. Thirty years after the Alex studies began; Pepperberg and a changing collection of assistants were still giving him English lessons. The humans, along with two younger parrots, also served as Alex’s flock, providing the social input all parrots crave. Like any flock, this one —as small as it was—had its share of drama. Alex dominated his fellow parrots, acted huffy at times around Pepperberg, tolerated the other female humans, and fell to pieces over a male assistant who dropped by for a visit. Pepperberg bought Alex in a Chicago pet store where she let the store’s assistant pick him out because she didn’t want other scientists saying later that she’d particularly chosen an especially smart bird for her work. Given that Alex’s brain was the size of a shelled walnut, most researchers thought Pepperberg’s interspecies communication study would be futile.
E. “Some people actually called me crazy for trying this,” she said. “Scientists thought that chimpanzees were better subjects, although, of course, chimps can’t speak.” Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas have been taught to use sign language and symbols to communicate with US, often with impressive results. The bonobo Kanzi, for instance, carries his symbol-communication board with him so he can “talk” to his human researchers, and he has invented combinations of symbols to express his thoughts. Nevertheless, this is not the same thing as having an animal look up at you, open his mouth, and speak. Under Pepperberg’s patient tutelage, Alex learned how to use his vocal tract to imitate almost one hundred English words, including the sounds for various foods, although he calls an apple a “banerry.” “Apples taste a little bit like bananas to him, and they look a little bit like cherries, so Alex made up that word for them,” Pepperberg said.
F. It sounded a bit mad, the idea of having lessons to practice, and willingly doing it. But after listening to and observing Alex, it was difficult to argue with Pepperberg’s explanation for his behaviors. She wasn’t handing him treats for the repetitious work or rapping him on the claws to make him say the sounds. “He has to hear the words over and over before he can correctly imitate them,” Pepperberg said, after pronouncing “seven” for Alex a good dozen times in a row. “I’m not trying to see if Alex can learn a human language,” she added. “That’s never been the point. My plan always was to use his imitative skills to get a better understanding of avian cognition.”
G. In other words, because Alex was able to produce a close approximation of the sounds of some English words, Pepperberg could ask him questions about a bird’s basic understanding of the world. She couldn’t ask him what he was thinking about, but she could ask him about his knowledge of numbers, shapes, and colors. To demonstrate, Pepperberg carried Alex on her arm to a tall wooden perch in the middle of the room. She then retrieved a green key and a small green cup from a basket on a shelf. She held up the two items to Alex’s eye. “What’s same?” she asked. Without hesitation, Alex’s beak opened: “Color.” “What’s different?” Pepperberg asked. “Shape,” Alex said. His voice had the digitized sound of a cartoon character. Since parrots lack lips (another reason it was difficult for Alex to pronounce some sounds, such as ba), the words seemed to come from the air around him, as if a ventriloquist were speaking. But the words—and what can only be called the thoughts—were entirely his.
H. For the next 20 minutes, Alex ran through his tests, distinguishing colors, shapes, sizes, and materials (wool versus wood versus metal). He did some simple arithmetic, such as counting the yellow toy blocks among a pile of mixed hues. And, then, as if to offer final proof of the mind inside his bird’s brain, Alex spoke up. “Talk clearly!” he commanded, when one of the younger birds Pepperberg was also teaching talked with wrong pronunciation. “Talk clearly!” “Don’t be a smart aleck,” Pepperberg said, shaking her head at him. “He knows all this, and he gets bored, so he interrupts the others, or he gives the wrong answer just to be obstinate. At this stage, he’s like a teenager; he’s moody, and I’m never sure what he’ll do.”
Simplified: Under Pepperberg's patient tutelage , Alex learned almost one hundredEnglish words
Main idea: Dưới sự dạy dỗ kiên nhẫn của Pepperberg, Alex học được gần 100 từ tiếng Anh → sau khi Pepperberg dạy dỗ, Alex mới học được 100 từ
On 26 December 2004, villagers from Bang Koey in Thailand noticed buffalo on the beach lift their heads, look out to sea, then stampede to the top of a nearby hill. Minutes later, the tsunami struck. Could these creatures have been sensing early warning signs of the earthquake that triggered the Asian tsunami? It is a strange assertion but the possibility that animals might hold the answer cannot be ignored, as a warning system could save many lives.
The idea that animals can predict earthquakes has ancient origins. From 373 BC there are stories of rats, dogs and snakes deserting the Greek city of Helice before an earthquake hit. It was the first in a long line of such anecdotes. What has been lacking is any real scientific data linking animal behaviour with earthquakes.
In late 2000, however, Stanley Coren from the University of British Columbia started a study to discover whether dogs suffer from seasonal affective disorder. Twice weekly, he emailed 200 dog owners in Vancouver, asking them to rate their pets' activity and anxiety levels using a nine-point scale. In general there was little daily variability; Coren's initial analysis of many months' worth of information strongly refuted his suspicion that dogs become depressed during winter, and he abandoned the project. When he finally went through the figures in detail several years later however, he noticed that on 27 February 2001, nearly 50 per cent were well above their usual baseline for activity and anxiety. The likelihood of such a difference was remote and Coren searched through the newspaper archives for a cause. He found that on 28 February a quake of magnitude 6.8 shook the Pacific northwest, with an epicentre at Nisqually about 240 kilometres south of Vancouver. Coren wondered what the dogs could have sensed. There was little to guide him. Even the most comprehensive earthquake research project in the world, the Parkfield experiment in California, couldn't help. Since 1985, researchers from the US Geological Survey (USGS) have monitored a section of the San Andreas fault near the town of Parkfield. They have analysed every tremor, and measured tiny movements of the fault at 10-minute intervals, but to date the project has revealed nothing that would reliably indicate that an earthquake is imminent.
There is still much speculation about animals predicting earthquakes. For example, one idea is that some animals detect changes in the Earth's electrical field. Another theory is that animals are responding to gas such as radon released from rocks before a quake, despite the fact that few experts accept such gas is produced. Rupert Sheldrake, a British researcher, suggests that 'people notice unusual animal behaviour before disasters. I think animals are picking up on something that we can't, perhaps by using a sixth sense.'
Coren, however, had read about rescue dogs hearing avalanche victims under the snow, and suspected the dogs in his study might also be hearing vibrations. So he returned to his data to shown any significant increase in anxiety on 27 February, and it was living with a hearing dog that had become anxious. Dogs with floppy ears showed only half the change in activity and one-third the change in anxiety level of dogs with pricked ears. Not only would an ear flap reduce the amount of sound reaching the inner ear; Coren also realised that it would weaken high frequency sounds more than low frequency ones. Further, dogs with smaller heads were significantly more likely to behave strangely than those with larger heads, which was interesting, given that smaller-headed dogs are more sensitive to higher frequencies.
Taken together, Coren's results present an alluring hypothesis. He suggests that the kind of high frequency sounds that many dogs can hear are emitted before an earthquake, perhaps from rocks scraping underground. Admittedly this is only one study. Even if Coren is right, is it still possible that other animals could predict quakes in different ways? Eric Wikramanayake, a conservation scientist who used radio collars and happened to be studying elephants in Sri Lanka when the tsunami struck, is entirely sceptical.
What he found was precisely nothing. One herd was only 100 metres away from the beach when the tsunami arrived and they just took cover behind a large sand dune when the wave came in sight. The other herd was safely located about 5 kilometres inland and did not show any unusual movements. Even if some quakes are preceded by high-frequency vibrations, is it feasible that dogs in Vancouver could detect sounds emitted near Nisqually? USGS seismologist Andy Michael points out that the epicentre was over 240 kilometres south of Vancouver. 'It is physically implausible for seismic waves in the kilohertz range to travel that far,' he says. Although unconvinced by Coren's ideas, Michael adds a cautionary tale. "When Alfred Wegener presented his theory of continental drift, his core ideas about tectonics were right but nobody listened because the mechanisms were wrong."
So if animals are able to foretell earthquakes, does it matter how? In fact, while western society has been reluctant to use animals as earthquake predictors, China has already embraced the idea. Experts there use a video link to keep a 24-hour watch on snakes in farms nationwide. If they try to escape from their enclosure, observers raise a warning.
Other governments may not be willing to go that far just yet, but Coren believes that a centre that people could call when they see unusual things would be useful. "We would be able to collect much more data and give warnings when we get hundreds of calls from a single area," he says. It could cost little more than the price of setting up a phone line. Put that way, what have we got to lose?
stories of animals predicting earthquakes
Simplified: The idea has ancientorigins.
From 373 BC
there are
stories of rats, dogs ... deserting the Greek city... before an earthquake
