IELTS Reading: Chiến thuật làm bài và bài luyện tập câu hỏi Yes/No/Not Given

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in the Reading Passage?

In boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

1 Participants in the Santa Cruz study were more accurate at identifying the laughs of friends than those of strangers.

2 The researchers in the San Diego study were correct in their predictions regarding the behaviour of the high-status individuals.

3 The participants in the Australian National University study were given a fixed amount of time to complete the task focusing on employee profiles.

4 Cheng and Wang’s conclusions were in line with established notions regarding task performance.

In one study conducted in 2016, samples of laughter from pairs of English-speaking students were recorded at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A team made up of more than 30 psychological scientists, anthropologists, and biologists then played these recordings to listeners from 24 diverse societies, from indigenous tribes in New Guinea to city-dwellers in India and Europe. Participants were asked whether they thought the people laughing were friends or strangers. On average, the results were remarkably consistent: worldwide, people’s guesses were correct approximately 60% of the time.

Researchers have also found that different types of laughter serve as codes to complex human social hierarchies. A team led by Christopher Oveis from the University of California, San Diego, found that high-status individuals had different laughs from low-status individuals, and that strangers’ judgements of an individual’s social status were influenced by the dominant or submissive quality of their laughter. In their study, 48 male college students were randomly assigned to groups of four, with each group composed of two low-status members, who had just joined their college fraternity group, and two high-status members, older students who had been active in the fraternity for at least two years. Laughter was recorded as each student took a turn at being teased by the others, involving the use of mildly insulting nicknames. Analysis revealed that, as expected, high-status individuals produced more dominant laughs and fewer submissive laughs relative to the low-status individuals. Meanwhile, low-status individuals were more likely to change their laughter based on their position of power; that is, the newcomers produced more dominant laughs when they were in the ‘powerful’ role of teasers. Dominant laughter was higher in pitch, louder, and more variable in tone than submissive laughter.

Another study, conducted by David Cheng and Lu Wang of Australian National University, was based on the hypothesis that humour might provide a respite from tedious situations in the workplace. This ‘mental break’ might facilitate the replenishment of mental resources. To test this theory, the researchers recruited 74 business students, ostensibly for an experiment on perception. First, the students performed a tedious task in which they had to cross out every instance of the letter ‘e’ over two pages of text. The students then were randomly assigned to watch a video clip eliciting either humour, contentment, or neutral feelings. Some watched a clip of the BBC comedy Mr. Bean, others a relaxing scene with dolphins swimming in the ocean, and others a factual video about the management profession.

The students then completed a task requiring persistence in which they were asked to guess the potential performance of employees based on provided profiles, and were told that making 10 correct assessments in a row would lead to a win. However, the software was programmed such that it was nearly impossible to achieve 10 consecutive correct answers. Participants were allowed to quit the task at any point. Students who had watched the Mr. Bean video ended up spending significantly more time working on the task, making twice as many predictions as the other two groups.

True/False/Not Given

Yes/No/Not Given

- Nhận định dựa trên thông tin được đưa ra trong bài đọc (………………………..)

- …………………………………………..

- Đánh giá dựa trên quan điểm của tác giả (…………………………………………..)

- …………………………………………..

Of all mankind’s manifold creations, language must take pride of place. Other inventions – the wheel, agriculture, sliced bread – may have transformed our material existence, but the advent of language is what made us human. Compared to language, all other inventions pale in significance, since everything we have ever achieved depends on language and originates from it. Without language, we could never have embarked on our ascent to unparalleled power over all other animals, and even over nature itself.

But language is foremost not just because it came first. In its own right it is a tool of extraordinary sophistication, yet based on an idea of ingenious simplicity: ‘this marvellous invention of composing out of twenty-five or thirty sounds that infinite variety of expressions which, whilst having in themselves no likeness to what is in our mind, allow us to disclose to others its whole secret, and to make known to those who cannot penetrate it all that we imagine, and all the various stirrings of our soul’. This was how, in 1660, the renowned French grammarians of the Port-Royal abbey near Versailles distilled the essence of language, and no one since has celebrated more eloquently the magnitude of its achievement. Even so, there is just one flaw in all these hymns of praise, for the homage to languages unique accomplishment conceals a simple yet critical incongruity. Language is mankind’s greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never invented. This apparent paradox is at the core of our fascination with language, and it holds many of its secrets.

Often, it is only the estrangement of foreign tongues, with their many exotic and outlandish features, that brings home the wonder of languages design. One of the showiest stunts that some languages can pull off is an ability to build up words of breath-breaking length, and thus express in one word what English takes a whole sentence to say. The Turkish word fehirliliftiremediklerimizdensiniz, to take one example, means nothing less than ‘you are one of those whom we can’t turn into a town-dweller’. (In case you were wondering, this monstrosity really is one word, not merely many different words squashed together – most of its components cannot even stand up on their own.)

And if that sounds like some one-off freak, then consider Sumerian, the language spoken on the banks of the Euphrates some 5,000 years ago by the people who invented writing and thus enabled the documentation of history. A Sumerian word like munintuma’a (‘when he had made it suitable for her’) might seem rather trim compared to the Turkish colossus above, what is so impressive about it, however, is not its lengthiness but rather the reverse – the thrifty compactness of its construction. The word is made up of different slots, each corresponding to a particular portion of meaning. This sleek design allows single sounds to convey useful information, and in fact even the absence of a sound has been enlisted to express something specific. If you were to ask which bit in the Sumerian word corresponds to the pronoun ‘it’ in the English translation ‘when he had made it suitable for her’, then the answer would have to be nothing. Mind you, a very particular kind of nothing: the nothing that stands in the empty slot in the middle. The technology is so fine-tuned then that even a non-sound, when carefully placed in a particular position, has been invested with a specific function. Who could possibly have come up with such a nifty contraption?

Over the course of time, members of the genus Homo have undergone a great deal of evolutionary change to morph into anatomically modern humans – members of the Homo sapiens species that have the physical features of modern humans. Today, it is commonly believed by the scientific community that earlier species of Homo sapiens evolved in eastern Africa around 200,000 years ago. In fact, the earliest anatomically modern human fossils were discovered there dating to about 195,000 years ago. Members of this species gradually migrated out of their African homeland and by 60,000 years ago one group had settled in Eurasia and the Middle East. This brought them in contact with another early human species that had previously left Africa, the Neanderthals. Some scientists believe that this interaction brought about violent clashes between the two groups, which eventually led to the extinction of the Neanderthals.

However, separate evolution is probably a more likely explanation for their disappearance. Despite their shared heritage, these two groups of early humans had evolved quite differently, both physically and intellectually. In their time in more northerly climates, the Neanderthals had become broader, stronger and more acclimated to cold than the early anatomically modern humans. In other words, they would have physically dominated the newly arrived Homo sapiens. However, the differences in brain structure seemed to have had a bigger impact on the two species. Paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer says that Homo sapiens had larger frontal lobes, the area of the brain that produces abstract, creative thoughts, than Neanderthals. This would have allowed them to develop more efficient methods of hunting and gathering, as well as food processing techniques that saved energy. These more advanced skills would have given them enough of an advantage over the Neanderthals to prevail in the long term, and that appears to be what has happened.