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IELTS Reading full test 1 – Passage 3

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Bài thi IELTS Reading là bài kiểm tra khả năng ĐỌC hiểu của người dự thi, thông qua 3 đoạn văn và 40 câu hỏi diễn ra trong vòng 60 phút.

Các hoạt động:

  • Đọc hiểu tổng quát, hiểu được nội dung chung của một đoạn văn bản hay không?
  • Đọc ý chính, đọc chi tiết bài đọc không?
  • Hiểu suy luận, hàm ý mà bài đọc đưa ra không?
  • Công nhận ý kiến, thái độ của tác giả hay có những nhận định khác như thế nào?

Nhưng, dù bài thì có rõ ràng thì để vượt qua IELTS Reading cũng không phải dễ. Vậy làm thế nào để học hiệu quả?

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Reading full test 1 – Passage 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27- 40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

 

TELEPATHY

 

Can human beings communicate by thought alone? For more than a century the issue of  telepathy has divided the scientific community, and even today it still sparks controversy among top academics.

Since the 1970s, parapsychologists at leading universities and research institutes around the world have risked the decision of skeptical colleagues by putting the various claims for telepathy to the test in dozens of rigorous scientific studies. The results and their implications are dividing even the researchers who uncovered them.

 

Some researchers say the results constitute compelling evidence that telepathy is genuine. Other parapsychologists believe the field is on the brink of collapse, having tried to produce definitive scientific proof and failed. Sceptics and advocates alike do concur on one issue, however: that the most impressive evidence so far has come from the so-called ‘ganzfeld’ experiments, a German term that means ‘whole field’. Reports of telepathic experiences had by people during meditation led parapsychologists to suspect that telepathy might involve ‘signals’ passing between people that were so faint that they were usually swamped by normal brain activity. In this case, such signals might be more easily detected by those experiencing meditation-like tranquility in a relaxing ‘whole field’ of light, sound and warmth.

 

The ganzfeld experiment tries to recreate these conditions with participants sitting in soft reclining chairs in a sealed room, listening to relaxing sounds while their eyes are  covered with special filters in only soft pink light. In early ganzfeld experiments, the telepathy test involved identification of a picture chosen from a radom selection of four taken from a large image bank. The idea was that a person acting as a ‘sender’ would attempt to began the image over to the ‘receiver’ relaxing in the sealed room. Once the session was over, this person was asked to identify which of the four images had been used. Random guessing would give a hit-rate of 25 per cent; if telepathy is real, however, the hit- rate would be higher. In 1982, the results from the first ganzfeld studies were analysed by one of its pioneers, the American parapsychologists Charles Honorton. They pointed to typical hit-rates of better than  30 per cents – a small effect, but one which statistical test suggest could not be put down to chance.

 

The implication was that the ganzfeld method  had  revealed real evidence for telepathy. But there was a crucial flaw in this argument – one routinely overlooked in more conventional areas of science. Just because chance had been ruled out as an explanation did not prove telepathy must exist; there were many other ways of getting positive  results. These ranged from ‘ sensory leakage’ – were clues about the pictures accidentally reach the receiver – to outright fraud. In response, the researchers issued a review of all the ganzfeld studies done up to 1985 to show  that 80 per cents had found statistically significant evidence. However, they also agreed that there were still too many problems in the experiments which could lead to positive results, and they drew up a list demanding new standards for future research.

 

After this, many researchers switched to autoganzfeld tests – an automated variant of the technique which used computers to perform many of  the key tasks such as the random selection of images. By minimising human involvement, the idea was to minimise the risk of  flawed results. In 1987s, results from hundreds of autoganzfeld tests were studied by Honorton in a ‘meta-analysis’, a statistical technique for finding the overall results from a set of studies. Though less compelling than before, the outcome was still impressive.

 

Yet some parapsychologists remain disturbed by the lack of consistency between individual ganzfeld studies. Defenders of telepathy points out that demanding impressive evidence from every study ignores one basic statistical fact: it takes large samples to detect small effects. If, as current results suggest, telepathy produces hit-rates only marginally above the 25 per cent expected by chance, it’s unlikely to be detected by a typical ganzfeld study involving around 40 people: the group is just not big enough. Only when many studies are combined in a metal-analysis will the faint signal of telepathy really become apparent. And that is what researchers do seem to be finding.

 

What they are certainly not finding, however, is any change in attitude of mainstream scientists: most still totally reject the very idea of telepathy. The problem stems at least in part from the lack of any plausible mechanism for telepathy.

 

Various theories have been put forward, many focusing on esoteric ideas from theoretical physics. They include’ quantum entanglement’, in which events affecting one group of atoms instantly affect another group, no matter how far apart they may be. While physicists have demonstrated entanglement with specially prepared atoms, no-one knows if it also exists between atoms making up human minds. Answering such questions would transform parapsychology. This has prompted some researchers to argue that the future lies not in collecting more evidence for telepathy, but in probing possible  mechanism . Some work has begun already, which researchers trying to identify people who are particularly successful in autoganzfeld trails. Early results show that creative and artistic people do much better than average: in one study at the University of Edinburgh, musicians achieved a hit-rate of 56 per cent. Perhaps more tests like these will eventually give the researchers the evidence they are seeking and strengthen the case for the existence of telepathy.

1 / 14

27. Researchers with differing attitudes towards telepathy agree on

2 / 14

28. Reports of experiences during meditation indicated

3 / 14

29. Attitudes to parapsychology would alter drastically with

4 / 14

30. Recent auto ganzfeld trials suggest that success rates will improve with

Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 31- 40 on you answer sheet.
Telepathy Experiments
Name/DateDescriptionResultFlaw
Ganzfeld studies

1982

Involved a person acting as a 31………………………, who picked out one 32 ………………………from

a random selection of four, and a 33 ………………………, who then tried to identify it.

Hit-rates were higher than with random guessing.Positive results could be produced by factors such as 34 ………………………or 35 ………………………
Autoganzfeld studies

1987

36 ………………………Were used for the key tasks to limit the amount of  37 ………………………in carrying out the tests.The results were then subjected to a 38 ………………………The 39 ………………………between different test results was put down to the fact that sample groups were not 40 ………………………(as with

most ganzfeld studies).

5 / 14

31

6 / 14

32

7 / 14

33

8 / 14

34

9 / 14

35

10 / 14

36

11 / 14

37

12 / 14

38

13 / 14

39

14 / 14

40

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