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CAM 19 - TEST 2 - READING PASSAGE 3

  An inquiry into the existence of the gifted child Let us start by looking at a modern ‘genius’, Maryam Mirzakhani, who died at the early age of 40. She was the only woman to win the Fields Medal – the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel prize. It would be easy to assume that someone as special as Mirzakhani must have been one of those ‘gifted’ children, those who have an extraordinary ability in a specific sphere of activity or knowledge. But look closer and a different story emerges. Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran. She went to a highly selective girls’ school but maths wasn’t her interest – reading was. She loved novels and would read anything she could lay her hands on. As for maths, she did rather poorly at it for the first couple of years in her middle school, but became interested when her elder brother told her about what he’d learned. He shared a famous maths problem from a magazine that fascinated her – and she was hooked. In adult life it is clear that she was curiou...
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CAM 19 - TEST 2 - READING PASSAGE 2

  Athletes and stress A It isn’t easy being a professional athlete. Not only are the physical demands greater than most people could handle, athletes also face intense psychological pressure during competition. This is something that British tennis player Emma Raducanu wrote about on social media following her withdrawal from the 2021 Wimbledon tournament. Though the young player had been doing well in the tournament, she began having difficulty regulating her breathing and heart rate during a match, which she later attributed to ‘the accumulation of the excitement and the buzz’. B For athletes, some level of performance stress is almost unavoidable. But there are many different factors that dictate just how people’s minds and bodies respond to stressful events. Typically, stress is the result of an exchange between two factors: demands and resources. An athlete may feel stressed about an event if they feel the demands on them are greater than they can handle. These demands include...
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CAM 19 - TEST 2 - READING 1

  The Industrial Revolution in Britain The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the mid-1700s and by the 1830s and 1840s has spread to many other parts of the world, including the United States. In Britain, it was a period when a largely rural, agrarian* society was transformed into an industrialised, urban one. Goods that had once been crafted by hand started to be produced in mass quantities by machines in factories, thanks to the invention of steam power and the introduction of new machines and manufacturing techniques in textiles, iron-making and other industries. The foundations of the Industrial Revolution date back to the early 1700s, when the English inventor Thomas Newcomen designed the first modern steam engine. Called the ‘atmospheric steam engine’, Newcomen’s invention was originally used to power machines that pumped water out of mines. In the 1760s, the Scottish engineer James Watt started to adapt one of Newcomen’s models, and succeeded in making it far more eff...
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CAM 19 - TEST 1 - READING 3

  The persistence and peril of misinformation Brian Southwell looks at how human brains verify information and discusses some of the challenges of battling widespread falsehoods Misinformation – both deliberately promoted and accidentally shared – is perhaps an inevitable part of the world in which we live, but it is not a new problem. People likely have lied to one another for roughly as long as verbal communication has existed. Deceiving others can offer an apparent opportunity to gain strategic advantage, to motivate others to action, or even to protect interpersonal bonds. Moreover, people inadvertently have been sharing inaccurate information with one another for thousands of years. However, we currently live in an era in which technology enables information to reach large audiences distributed across the globe, and thus the potential for immediate and widespread effects from misinformation now looms larger than in the past. Yet the means to correct misinformation might, over ...
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CAM 19 - TEST 1 - READING 2

  The pirates of the ancient Mediterranean In the first and second millennia BCE, pirates sailed around the Mediterranean, attacking ships and avoiding pursuers A When one mentions pirates, an image springs to most people’s minds of a crew of misfits, daredevils and adventurers in command of a tall sailing ship in the Caribbean Sea. Yet from the first to the third millennium BCE, thousands of years before these swashbucklers began spreading fear across the Caribbean, pirates prowled the Mediterranean, raiding merchant ships and threatening vital trade routes. However, despite all efforts and the might of various ancient states, piracy could not be stopped. The situation remained unchanged for thousands of years. Only when the pirates directly threatened the interests of ancient Rome did the Roman Republic organise a massive fleet to eliminate piracy. Under the command of the Roman general Pompey, Rome eradicated piracy, transforming the Mediterranean into ‘ Mare Nostrum ’ (Our Sea)...
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CAM 19 - TEST 1 - READING 1

  How tennis rackets have changed In 2016, the British professional tennis player Andy Murray was ranked as the world’s number one. It was an incredible achievement by any standard – made even more remarkable by the fact that he did this during a period considered to be one of the strongest in the sport’s history, competing against the likes of Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, to name just a few. Yet five years previously, he had been regarded as a talented outsider who entered but never won the major tournaments. Of the changes that account for this transformation, one was visible and widely publicised: in 2011, Murray invited former number one player Ivan Lendl onto his coaching team – a valuable addition that had a visible impact on the player’s playing style. Another change was so subtle as to pass more or less unnoticed. Like many players, Murray has long preferred a racket that consists of two types of string: one for the mains (verticals) and another for the c...
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Road to Ielts - Test 2 - reading 3

  Love Stories  A “Love stories” are often associated — at least in the popular imagination — with fairy tales, adolescent day dreams, Disney movies and other frivolous pastimes. For psychologists developing taxonomies of affection and attachment, however, this is an area of rigorous academic pursuit. Beginning in the early 1970s with the groundbreaking contributions of John Alan Lee, researchers have developed classifications that they believe better characterise our romantic predispositions. B This involves examining not a single, universal, emotional expression (“love”), but rather a series of divergent behaviours and narratives that each has an individualised purpose, desired outcome and state of mind. Lee’s gritty methodology painstakingly involved participants matching 170 typical romantic encounters (e.g., “The night after I met X..”) with nearly 1500 possible reactions (“I could hardly get to sleep” or “I wrote X a letter”). The patterns unknowingly expressed by respon...
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