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IELTS READING – The Development of Museums S48AT3

IELTS Reading The Development of Museums reading practice test has 10 questions belongs to Culture & Museum Studies subject..

A. The conviction that historical relics provide infallible testimony about the past is rooted in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when science was regarded as objective and value free. As one writer observes: ‘Although it is now evident that artifacts are as easily altered as chronicles, public faith in their veracity endures: a tangible relic seems ipso facto real! Such conviction was, until recently, reflected in museum displays. Q31 Museums used to look — and some still do — much like storage rooms of objects packed together in showcases: good for scholars who wanted to study the subtle differences in design, but not for the ordinary visitor. to whom It all looked alike. Similarly, the information accompanying the objects often made little sense to the lay visitor. The content and format of explanations dated back to a time when the museum was the exclusive domain of the scientific researcher.

 

B. Recently, however, attitudes towards history and the way It should be presented have altered. Q32 The key word in heritage display is now ‘experience the more exciting the better and, if possible, involving all the senses. Good examples of this approach In the UK are the Jorvik Centre in York; the National Museum of Photography, Elm ¬¬and Television in Bradford; and the imperial War Museum in London. In the US the trend emerged much earlier. Williamsburg has been a prototype for many heritage developments in other parts of the world. No one can predict where the process will end. On so-called heritage sites, the re-enactment of historical events is increasingly popular, and computers will soon provide virtual reality experiences, which will present visitors with a vivid image of the period of their choice, in which they themselves can act as if part of the historical environment. Q27 Such developments have been criticised as an intolerable vulgarisation. but the success of many historical theme parks and similar locations suggests that the majority of the public does not share this opinion.

C. Q28&33 In a related development, the sharp distinction between museum and heritage sites on the one hand, and theme parks on the other. is gradually evaporating. They already borrow ideas and concepts from one another. For example, museums have adopted story lines for exhibitions, sites have accepted ‘theming’ as a relevant tool, and theme parks are moving towards more authenticity and research-based presentations in zoos, animals are no longer kept in cages, but in great spaces, either In the open air or in enormous greenhouses, such as the jungle and desert environments .In Burgers’ Zoo In Holland. This particular trend is regarded as one of the major developments in the presentation of natural history in the twentieth century.

D. Q37 Theme parks are undergoing other changes, too, as they try to present more serious social and cultural issues, and move away from fantasy. This development is a response to market forces and, although museums and heritage sites have a special. rather distinct, role to fulfill, Q29 they are also operating in a very competitive environment, where visitors make choices on how and where to spend their free time. Heritage and museum experts do not have to invent stories and recreate historical environments to attract their visitors: their assets are already in place. However, exhibits must be both based on artefacts and facts as we know them, and attractively presented. Those who are professionally engaged in the art of interpreting history are thus In a difficult position, as they must Q34 steer a narrow course between the demands of ‘evidence’ and ‘attractiveness especially given the increasing need in the heritage industry for income generating activities.

E. Q30 It could be claimed that in order to make everything in heritage Q40 more `real` historical accuracy must be increasingly altered. For example, Pithecanthropus erectus is depicted in an Indonesian museum with Malay facial features, because this corresponds to public perceptions. Similarly, in the Museum of Natural History in Washington, Neanderthal man is shown making a dominant gesture to his wife. Q35 Such presentations tell us more about contemporary perceptions of the world than about our ancestors. There is one compensation, however, for the professionals who make these interpretations: If they did not provide the interpretation, visitors would do it for themselves. based on their own ideas. misconceptions and prejudices. And no matter how exciting the result, it would contain a lot more bias than the presentations provided by experts.

F. Q36 Human bias is inevitable, but another source of bias in the representation of history has to do with the transitory nature of the materials themselves. The simple fact is that not everything from history survives the historical process. Castles, palaces and cathedrals have a longer lifespan than the dwellings of ordinary people. The same applies to the famishing and other contents of the premises. Q39 In a town like Leyden in Holland, which in the seventeenth century was occupied by approximately the same number of inhabitants as today, people lived within the walled town, an area more than five times smaller than modern Leyden. In most of the houses, several families lived together in circumstances beyond our imagination. Yet In museums, line period rooms give only an image of the lifestyle of the upper class of that era. No wonder that people who stroll around exhibitions are filled with nostalgia; the evidence in museums indicates that life was so much better in the past. This notion is induced by the bias in its representation in museums and heritage centers.

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IELTS READING – Young Children’s Sense of Identity S48AT2

IELTS Reading Young Children’s Sense of Identity reading practice test has 10 questions belongs to Psychology & Child Development subject..

A. A sense of ‘self’ develops in young children by degrees. The process can usefully be thought of in terms of the gradual emergence of two somewhat separate features: the self as a subject, and the self as an object. William James introduced the distinction in 1892, and contemporaries of his, such as Charles Cooley, added to the developing debate. Ever since then psychologists have continued building on the theory.

 

B. According to James, a child’s first step on the road to self-understanding can be seen as the recognition that he or she exists. This is an aspect of the self that he labeled ‘self-as-subject’, and he gave it various elements. These included an awareness of one’s own agency (i.e. one’s power to act) and an awareness of one’s distinctiveness from other people. These features gradually emerge as infants explore their world and interact with caregivers. Cooley (1902) suggested that Q21 a sense of the self-as-subject was primarily concerned with being able to exercise power. He proposed that the earliest examples of this are an infants attempts to control physical objects, such as toys or his or her own limbs. This is followed by attempts to affect the behavior of other people. For example, infants learn that when they cry or smile someone responds to them.

C. Q15 Another powerful source of information for infants about the effects they can have on the world around them is provided when others mimic them. Many parents spend a lot of time, particularly in the early months, copying their infant’s vocalizations and expressions in addition, young children enjoy looking in mirrors, where the movements they can see are dependent upon their own movements. This is not to say that infants recognize the reflection as their own image (a later development). However, Lewis and Brooks-Gunn (1979) suggest that Q23 infants’ developing understanding that the movements they see in the mirror are contingent on their own, leads to a growing awareness that they are distinct from other people. This is because they, and only they can change the reflection in the Q24 mirror.

D. This understanding that children gain of themselves as active agents continue to develop in their attempts to co-operate with others in play. Drum (1988) points out that it is in such day-to-day relationships and interactions that the child’s understanding of his· or herself emerges. Q17 Empirical investigations of the self-as- subject in young children are, however, rather scarce because of difficulties of Q25 communication: even if young infants can reflect on their experience, they certainly cannot express this aspect of the self directly.

E. Once Children have acquired a certain level of self-awareness, they begin to place themselves in a whole series of categories, which together play such an important part in defining them uniquely as ‘themselves’. This second step in the development of a full sense of self is what lames called the ‘self-as-object’. Q19 This has been seen by many to be the aspect of the self which is most influenced by social elements, since it is made up of social roles (such as student, brother; colleague) and characteristics which derive their meaning from comparison or interaction with other people (such as trustworthiness, shyness, sporting ability).

F. Cooley and other researchers suggested a close connection between a person’s own understanding of their identity and other people’s understanding of it. Cooley believed that people build up their sense of identity from the reactions of others to them, and from the view, they believe others have of them He called the self- as-object the ‘looking-glass self’, since people come to see themselves as they are reflected in others. Mead (1934) went even further, and saw the self and the social world as inextricably bound together. The self is essentially a social structure, and ¬it arises in social experience. Q20 It is impossible to conceive of a self-arising outside of social experience.’

G. Lewis and Brooks-Gunn argued that an important developmental milestone is reached when children become able to recognize themselves visually without the support of seeing contingent movement. This recognition occurs around their second birthday. Q14 In one experiment, Lewis and Brooks-Gunn (1979) dabbed some red powder on the noses of children who were playing in front of a mirror, and then observed how often they touched their noses. The psychologists reasoned that if the children knew what they usually looked like, they would be surprised by the unusual red mark and would start touching it. On the other hand, they found that Q16 children of 15 to 18 months are generally not able to recognize themselves unless other cues such as movement are present.

H. Finally perhaps the most graphic expressions of self-awareness, in general, can be seen in the displays of rage which are most common from 18 months to 3 years of age. In a longitudinal study of groups of three or four children, Bronson (1975) found that Q22 the intensity of the frustration and anger in their disagreements increased sharply between the ages of 1 and 2 years. Often, the children’s disagreements involved a struggle over a toy that none of them had played with before or after the tug-of-war: the children seemed to be disputing Q26 ownership rather than wanting to play with it. Q18 Although it may be less marked in other societies, the link between the sense of ‘self’ and of ‘ownership’ is a notable feature of childhood in Western societies.

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IELTS READING – The life and work of Marie Curie S48AT1

IELTS Reading The life and work of Marie Curie reading practice test has 10 questions belongs to Science & Biography  subject..

Marie Curie is probably the most famous woman scientist who has ever lived. Born Maria Sklodowska in Poland in 1867, she is famous for her work on radioactivity, and was twice a winner of the Nobel Prize. With her husband, Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel, Q1 she was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics and was then sole winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.

 

From childhood, Marie was remarkable for her prodigious memory, and at the age of 16 won a gold medal on completion of her secondary education. Because her father lost his savings through bad investment, she then had to take work as a teacher. From her earnings she was able to finance her sister Bronia’s medical studies in Paris, on the understanding that Bronia would, in turn, later help her to get an education.

Q3 In 1891 this promise was fulfilled and Marie went to Paris and began to study at the Sorbonne (the University of Paris). She often worked far into the night and lived on little more than bread and butter and tea. She came first in the examination in the physical sciences in 1893, and in 1894 was placed second in the examination in mathematical sciences. It was not until the spring of that year that she was introduced to Pierre Curie.

Their marriage in 1895 marked the start of a partnership that was soon to achieve results of world significance. Following Henri Becquerel’s discovery in 1896 of a new phenomenon, which Marie later called ‘radioactivity’, Marie Curie decided to find out if the radioactivity discovered in uranium was to be found in other elements. She discovered that this was true for Q7 thorium.

Turning her attention to minerals, she found her interest drawn to Q8 pitchblende, a mineral whose radioactivity, superior to that of pure uranium, could be explained only by the presence in the ore of small quantities of an unknown substance of very high activity. Pierre Curie joined her in the work that she had undertaken to resolve this problem, and that led to the discovery of the new elements, polonium, and radium. While Pierre Curie devoted himself chiefly to the physical study of the new radiations, Marie Curie struggled to obtain pure radium in the metallic state. This was achieved with the help of the chemist Andre-Louis Debierne, one of Pierre Curie’s pupils. Based on the results of this research, Marie Curie received her Doctorate of Science, and in 1903 Marie and Pierre shared with Becquerel the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of radioactivity.

Q4 The births of Marie’s two daughters, Irene and Eve, in 1897 and 1904 failed to interrupt her scientific work. She was appointed lecturer in physics at the Ecole Normale Superieure for girls in Sevres, France (1900), and introduced a method of teaching based on experimental demonstrations. In December 1904 she was appointed chief assistant in the laboratory directed by Pierre Curie.

The sudden death of her husband in 1906 was a bitter blow to Marie Curie, but was also a turning point in her career: henceforth she was to devote all her energy to completing alone the scientific work that they had undertaken. On May 13, 1906, Q5 she was appointed to the professorship that had been left vacant on her husband’s death, becoming the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. In 1911 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the isolation of a pure form of Q9 radium.

During World War I, Marie Curie, with the help of her daughter Irene, devoted herself to the development of the use of X-radiography, including the mobile units which came to be known as ‘Little Curies’, used for the treatment of wounded Q10 soldiers. In 1918 the Radium Institute, whose staff Irene had joined, began to operate in earnest, and became a centre for nuclear physics and chemistry. Marie Curie, now at the highest point of her fame and, from 1922, a member of the Academy of Medicine, researched the chemistry of radioactive substances and their medical applications.

In 1921, accompanied by her two daughters, Marie Curie made a triumphant journey to the United States to raise funds for research on radium. Women there presented her with a gram of radium for her campaign. Marie also gave lectures in Belgium, Brazil, Spain, and Czechoslovakia and, in addition, had the satisfaction of seeing the development of the Curie Foundation in Paris, and the inauguration in 1932 in Warsaw of the Radium Institute, where her sister Bronia became director.

One of Marie Curie’s outstanding achievements was to have understood the need to accumulate intense radioactive sources, not only to treat Q11 illness but also to maintain an abundant supply for research. The existence in Paris at the Radium Institute of a stock of 1.5 grams of radium made a decisive contribution to the success of the experiments undertaken in the years around 1930. This work prepared the way for the discovery of the Q12 neutron by Sir James Chadwick and, above all, for the discovery in 1934 by Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie of artificial radioactivity. A few months after this discovery, Marie Curie died as a result of Q13 leukaemia caused by exposure to radiation. She had often carried test tubes containing radioactive isotopes in her pocket, remarking on the pretty blue-green light they gave off.

Her contribution to physics had been immense, not only in her own work, the importance of which had been demonstrated by her two Nobel Prizes, but because of her influence on subsequent generations of nuclear physicists and chemists.

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IELTS READING – Information Theory the big idea S47AT3

 IELTS Reading Information Theory – the big idea reading practice test has 10 questions belongs to Computer Science & Communication Technology subject..

Information theory lies at the heart of everything – from DVD players and the genetic code of DNA to the physics of the universe at its most fundamental. it has been central to the development of the science of communication, which enables data to be sent electronically and has therefore had a major impact on our lives.

A. Q31 In April 2002 an event took place which demonstrated one of the many applications of information theory. The space probe, Voyager I, launched in 1977, had sent back spectacular images of Q33 Jupiter and Saturn and then soared out of the Q34 Solar System on a one-way mission to the stars. After 25 years of exposure to the freezing temperatures of deep space, the probe was beginning to show its age, Q35 Sensors and circuits were on the brink of failing and NASA experts realized that they had to do something or lose contact with their probe forever. The solution was to get a message to Voyager I to instruct it to use Q36 spares to change the failing parts. With the probe 12 billion kilometers from Earth, this was not an easy task. By means of a Q37 radio dish belonging to NASA’s Deep Space Network, the message was sent out into the depths of space. Even travelling at the speed of light, it took over II hours to reach its target, far beyond the orbit of Pluto. Yet, incredibly, the little probe managed to hear the faint call from its home planet, and successfully made the switchover.

 

B. It was the Ingest·distance repair job in history, and a triumph for the NASA engineers. But it also highlighted the astonishing power of the techniques developed by American communications engineer Claude Shannon, who had died just a year earlier. Born in 1916 in Petoskey, Michigan. Shannon showed an early talent for maths and for building gadgets, and made breakthroughs in the foundations of computer technology when still a student. While at Bell laboratories, Shannon developed information theory, but Q29 shunned the resulting acclaim. In the 1940s. he single-handedly created an entire science of communication which has since inveigled its way into a host of applications, from DVDs to satellite communication to bar codes – any area, in short, where data has to be conveyed rapidly yet accurately.

C. This all seems light years away from the down-to-earth uses Shannon originally had for his work, which began when he was a 22-year—old graduate engineering student at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1939. Q32 He set out with an apparently simple aim: to pin down the precise meaning of the concept of ‘information’. The most basic form of information, Shannon argued, is whether something is true or false – which can be captured in the binary unit, or ‘bit’, of the form 1 or 0. Q38 Having identified this fundamental unit, Shannon set about defining otherwise vague ideas about information and how to transmit it from place to place. ln the process he discovered something surprising: it is always possible to guarantee information will gel through random interference – ‘noise’ — intact.

D. Noise usually means unwanted sounds which interfere with genuine information. information theory generalizes this idea via theorems that capture the effects of noise with mathematical precision. In particular, Shannon showed that Q27 noise sets a limit on the rate at which information can pass along communication channels while remaining error-free. Q39 This rate depends on the relative strengths of the signal and noise travelling down the communication channel, and on its capacity (its’ bandwidth’). The resulting limit, given in units of bits per second, is the absolute maximum rate of error-free communication given signal strength and noise level. The trick, Shannon showed, is to find ways of packaging up – ‘coding’ – information to cope with the ravages of noise, while staying within the information carrying capacity ‘bandwidth’ – of the communication system being used.

E. Over the years scientists have devised many such coding methods, and they have proved crucial in many technological feats. The Voyager spacecraft transmitted data using codes which added one extra bit for every single bit of information; the result was an error rate of just one bit in 10,000 — and stunningly clear pictures of the planets. Other codes have become parts of everyday life – such as the Universal Product Code, or bar code, which Q30 uses a simple error-detecting system that ensures supermarket check-out lasers can read the price even on. say, a crumpled bag of crisps. Q40 As recently as 1993, engineers made a major breakthrough by discovering so-called turbo codes – which come very close to Shannon’s ultimate limit for the maximum rate that data can be transmitted reliably, and now play a key role in the mobile videophone revolution.

F. Shannon also laid the foundations of more efficient ways of storing information, Q28 by stripping out superfluous (‘redundant’) bits from data which contributed little real information. As mobile phone text messages like ‘l CN C U’ show, it is often possible to leave out a lot of data without losing much meaning, As with error correction, however, there’s a limit beyond which messages become too ambiguous. Shannon showed how to calculate this limit, opening the way to the design of compression methods that cram maximum information into the minimum space.

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