Reading 2026-05 Test 47 — IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test with Answers

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Reading Passage 1: The Importance of Business Cards

The exchange of business cards is as close to a universal ritual as you can find in the business world.

The ritual may be universal, but the details of business cards and how they are swapped vary across countries. Americans throw their cards casually across a table; the Japanese make the exchange of cards a formal ceremony. While there are cards that are discreet and understated, others are crammed full of details and titles. Some businesspeople hand out 24-carat gold cards, and there are kindergarten children who have cards with not only their own contact details, but also with the job descriptions of their parents and even grandparents. This practice has become so common in parts of New York, for example, that the use of such cards is now prohibited by some of these institutions.

Cards have been around a long time in one form or another. The Chinese invented calling cards in the 15th century to give people notice that they intended to pay them a visit, but these were for social purposes only. Then, in the 17th century, European businesspeople invented a new type of card to act as miniature advertisements, signalling the advent of the business card. In today’s world, business cards can cause people to have strong emotional reactions. According to one experienced company director, very few things can provoke more heated discussion at a board meeting than the composition of the company’s business cards.

Lots of companies try to promote themselves by altering the form of the card. Employees at one famous toy company give out little plastic figures with their contact details stamped on them. One fast-food company has business cards which are shaped like a portion of French fries. A Canadian divorce lawyer once gave out cards that could be torn in two – one half for each of the spouses. For many business commentators, such gimmicky business cards prove that the use of a physical business card is nearly at an end. After all, why bother exchanging bits of thick paper at all when you can simply swap electronic versions by smartphone?

However, one can just as well argue the opposite: that business cards are here to stay, and, in a business world full of meetings and correspondence, it is more important than ever that your card is unique. Attempts to reinvent business cards for the digital age have not been successful. Even at the latest technology conferences, people still greet each other by handing out little rectangles made from paper rather than using a digital alternative.

To understand business cards, it is necessary to understand how business works. That business cards are thriving in a digital age is a forceful reminder that there is much about business that is timeless. According to Kate Jones, a business lecturer, there is one eternal and inescapable issue. Her 2006 study of more than 200 business executives in North America found that trust was the key element for running a successful business. It is vital to be able to look someone in the eye and decide what sort of person they are. In this way, you can transform acquaintanceships into relationships. A good proportion of business life will always be about building social connections – having dinner or playing sport with clients and colleagues – and while computers can deal with administrative tasks, it is still human beings that have to focus on the emotional.

The rapid advance of globalisation means that this relationship-building process is becoming ever more demanding. Managers have to put more effort in when dealing with international counterparts, especially when there is not a common language, which is so often the case these days. A recent UK survey showed that chief executives of global organisations now routinely spend three out of every four weeks on international travel. It is in these situations that business cards are doubly useful, as they are a quick way of establishing connections. Cards can also remind you that you have actually met someone in a face-to-face meeting rather than just searched for them on the Internet. Looking through piles of different cards can enhance your memory in ways that simply looking through uniform electronic lists would never do.

Janet McIntyre is a leading expert on business cards in today’s world. She maintains that as companies become more complex, cards are essential in determining the exact status of every contact you meet in multinational corporations. Janet also explains how exchanging business cards can be an effective way of initiating a conversation, because it gives people a ritual to follow when they first meet a new business contact.

The business world is obsessed with the idea of creating and inventing new things that will change the way we do everything, and this does lead to progress. But there are lots of things that do not need to be changed and, in Janet McIntyre’s view, tradition also has an equally valuable role to play. Therefore the practice of exchanging business cards is likely to continue in the business world.

1
Children’s business cards have been banned in some kindergartens.
2
It was the Chinese who first began the practice of using business cards.
3
Designing business cards can be a controversial process for some companies.
4
A famous toy company has boosted its sales by using one type of unusual business card.
5
Some business commentators predict a decline in the use of paper business cards.
6
The most important aspect of business is having ____________ in others.
7
____________ do not have the ability to establish the good relationships essential to business.
8
Managers must work harder when they don’t share the same ____________ with their contacts.
9
A UK survey indicates that ____________ takes up the largest part of business leaders’ time.
10
A business person’s ____________ of a meeting can be improved by looking at business cards.
11
Business cards clearly show the ____________ of each person in a large company.
12
The ritual of swapping business cards is a good way of starting a ____________ at the beginning of a business relationship.
13
Janet feels that in the business world, ____________ is just as important as innovation.

Reading Passage 2: The Power of Music

A Robert Matthews looks at research into the effects of music. Music is becoming ever more popular electronically. To meet our craving for music, internet sites are using increasingly sophisticated ways of putting us in touch with artists we may not even know we like. Most work by trawling our existing files or online listening habits and looking for patterns so they can recommend new artists for their subscribers to listen to. The search often turns up surprises. But is it possible to tease apart our likes and dislikes to identify precisely what it is about some music that thrills us or leaves us cold?

B For centuries composers have sought to create unforgettable music using accepted notions about the emotional appeal of certain combinations of sounds, yet only now are scientists starting to uncover what it is about these combinations that can have such a dramatic effect on our minds. Given that archaeologists have found musical instruments played by Neanderthals at least 50,000 years ago, why have scientists taken so long to investigate such a source of pleasure?

C ‘For psychologists, who are always desperate to show that their work is rigorous, there’s an image problem in tackling the emotionality of music,’ says Professor Norman Cook of Kansai University in Osaka, Japan, one of the pioneers of the new science of music. ‘Emotion is such a slippery topic.’ The other problem, says Cook, is the long-standing principle among psychologists that our response to music is an acquired one, rather than something that is stimulated by the effect of sound on our brain cells. Yet one of the first insights to emerge from this new branch of psychology is that music affects our brains at a very basic level.

D Together with his colleague, Professor Takefumi Hayashi, Cook has been investigating one of the best-known examples of the emotional impact of music: the difference between major and minor chords. For centuries, composers have known that notes arranged to form major chords sound happy and upbeat, while those in minor chords sound mournful. In tests, even three-year-olds have been shown to link music in a major mode to happy faces and minor modes to sad faces.

E According to Cook, analysis of how people respond to notes suggests a link with how our brains interpret certain sounds in everyday life. He points out that sad-sounding minor chords can be formed by raising the pitch of any of a set of notes, while dropping the pitch produces a major chord. The same change in pitch works as an emotional telltale in communication between some mammals, where rising pitch is used to communicate weakness or defeat, while falling pitch signals social dominance. It’s also present in our speech. ‘A rising inflection is used to denote questions, politeness or deference, whereas a falling inflection signals dominance,’ says Cook.

F This suggests that music in major and minor modes taps into some very basic features of how we relate to the world and each other – perhaps dating back millions of years. Could music in general be doing something similar? Quite possibly, according to research into how music triggers certain types of brain activity. At McGill University in Canada, Professor Robert Zatorre and his colleagues have carried out studies in which volunteers listen to different types of music while their brain activity is monitored. The biggest surprise was the evidence that pleasurable music activates brain circuitry which has been in existence in the human brain for thousands of years, says Zatorre. ‘We share it with rats and other distant relatives on the evolutionary tree – and it’s typically associated with biological rewards, like food, for example.’

G At the University of Oxford, Dr Joyce Chen has been looking into another celebrated feature of music – the irresistibility of rhythm. Her interest was sparked by studies involving patients with movement difficulties. If music that had a strong rhythm – say, a marching band – was played to these patients, they were able to improve their walking ability, says Chen. In an attempt to find out why the simple act of listening to music might help disabled patients, Dr Chen and colleagues from the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research in Montreal carried out brain scans on volunteers who were listening to rhythmic sounds. The criteria for selecting these volunteers were that they should be in first-rate physical health but musically untrained. The results have been another revelation. Chen and her colleagues found the rhythms triggered activity in parts of the brain linked to hearing, but something even more surprising was that the rhythms also triggered activity in the motor regions of the brain, linked to active movement.

H ‘Somehow, the mere act of just listening triggers motor-neural activity. Maybe this is one reason why we often tap our feet, move or dance when hearing music,’ says Chen. She believes the discovery of this deep connection between music and movement may cast light on why disabled patients can benefit from listening to music – and could also prove useful with other impairments such as those involved in sound production. ‘It’s been shown that people who talk with a stutter might have problems in this auditory-motor loop.’

I For researchers working in this new area of science, these early discoveries hold the promise of much more to come. Zatorre and his colleagues are investigating whether some people have more musical brains than others. ‘We can see certain subtle brain features that can tell us how well somebody can do things like identify a slight change in a melody,’ explains Zatorre. ‘This ability could be enhanced by training – just like someone born with a predisposition to building strong muscles can enhance them by taking up weightlifting.’

14
a reference to studies involving children
15
a mention of the discovery of significant artefacts
16
reasons why a particular aspect of music has not been researched
17
a mention of an unexpected discovery involving two different areas of the brain
18
a comparison of tone variations produced by certain animals and humans
19
The participants in this study led by Dr Chen were chosen because they were not musicians, and they demonstrated a good state of _______.
20
The participants were given _______ while music with a very noticeable rhythm was being played.
21
Previous research had indicated that listening to this type of music seemed to be of assistance to some _______ people.
22
By listening to it, their _______ ability had definitely got better.
23
Research into the brain activity set off by music may help people with speech defects.
- A. Professor Norman Cook
- B. Professor Robert Zatorre
- C. Dr Joyce Chen
24
It may be possible in time to improve a person’s ability to recognise certain musical characteristics.
25
The way listeners react to certain musical combinations may be similar to the way they react to other noises.
26
When a person reacts positively to music, the same parts of the brain are stimulated as when certain animals react to a positive outcome.

Reading Passage 3: The hazards of multitasking

Doing more than one thing at once – is it always a good idea?

You arrive at the office, review your to-do list and start to feel a headache coming on. You resolve to tackle the items as quickly as possible. While you return calls, you sort e-mail and other letters. You begin keying in slides for tomorrow’s presentation. Then your manager comes in wanting an immediate update on sales figures. You have just opened the spreadsheet when a very important customer calls. With the receiver held between your shoulder and your ear, you continue adding up the sales totals until, 15 minutes later, you finally manage, politely, to get rid of the client. You’ve been multitasking again.

You may believe that anyone who wants to get ahead today should master the art of multitasking. However, a recent study by the Families and Work Institute in New York City has found that 45 per cent of US workers believe that they are asked or expected to work on too many tasks at once. Managers may be surprised to learn that they are actually wasting their workers’ time. As it turns out, the human brain cannot really master the computer’s art of crunching data in the background while moving between process windows. Instead, a growing number of studies show that trying to juggle jobs rather than completing them sequentially can take longer and leave workers with a reduced ability to perform each task. In addition, the stress associated with multitasking may contribute to short-term memory difficulties. The combination results in inefficiency, careless thinking and mistakes – not to mention the possible dangers of divided attention for drivers, air-traffic controllers and others who handle machinery.

How can a time-management strategy that has become part of the common wisdom actually be so wrong? Exploring that question requires a closer look at an area of consciousness research that examines how the brain focuses attention. One of the modern foundations of current knowledge of multitasking was laid in 1935, when the American psychologist John Ridley Stroop reported that processing information from one task could cause interference with another. Stroop noticed that when study participants were asked to name the colour of a word – such as ‘green’ – printed in a different colour – red, for example – they experienced difficulty saying the name of the colour. This phenomenon is thought to occur when two tasks get tangled: the brain must suppress one that has been learned so well that it has become automatic (reading) to attend to a second task that requires concentration (naming the colour).

During the past couple of decades, psychologists have probed more deeply into the nature and limitations of multitasking. Psychologist and brain-researcher Ernst Pöppel, of the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, believes that it is impossible to carry out two or three different tasks simultaneously with the same degree of concentration. He says that seemingly simultaneous awareness and processing of information actually take place in ‘three-second windows’.

In these three-second segments, the brain takes in, as a block, all the data about the environment streaming in from the sensory systems; subsequent events are processed in the next window. So a person can concentrate on a conversation for three seconds, then for three seconds on a crying child, and three seconds on a computer screen. While one subject at a time occupies the foreground of consciousness, the others stay in the background until they, in turn, are given access to the central processor.

Another experiment by psychologist David E. Meyer, of the University of Michigan, quantified just how much time we can lose when we shuttle between tasks. The researchers asked test participants to write a report and check their e-mail at the same time. Those individuals who constantly jumped back and forth between the two tasks took about one and a half times as long to finish as those who completed one job before turning to the other. Each switchover from one task to another meant re-thinking and thus involved additional neural resources. In effect, the brain needs time to shut off the rules for one task and to turn on the rules for another. ‘Multitasking saves time only when it is a matter of relaxed, routine tasks,’ Meyer says. It also takes the brain longer to adapt when switching rapidly back to an interrupted task rather than waiting longer before switching back.

By its nature multitasking is stressful, and the area in the brain most involved with multitasking is also most affected by the resulting stress. Located behind the forehead, the prefrontal cortex – which neuroscientists call the ‘executive’ part of the brain – helps us to assess tasks, prioritise them and assign mental resources. It also ‘marks’ the spot at which a task has been interrupted, so that we can return to it later. This stress can also affect brain cells in another region, the hippocampus, which is important for forming new memories; damage in that area also makes it difficult for a person to acquire new skills. Psychiatrists Edward Hallowell and John Ratey, of Harvard University, say that multitasking can bring about a brain condition that causes sufferers to constantly seek new information while having difficulties concentrating on its content. All in all, it may be wise to let the e-mail wait while you work on your presentation. You will save time and perform each task better.

27
Less attention will be paid to each task when more than one task is attempted at the same time.
- A. John Ridley Stroop
- B. Ernst Pöppel
- C. David E. Meyer
- D. Edward Hallowell & John Ratey
28
Repeated changes of task mean that the brain will take a while to adjust.
29
Using the skills required for one task may make performing another one more difficult.
30
When multitasking, the brain can only focus on single tasks for very short periods.
31
Multitasking can lead to a medical problem.
32
What is suggested about the worker in the opening paragraph?
- A. Anxiety deprived him of sleep the previous night.
- B. He feels overwhelmed by his workload.
- C. His manager has expressed disapproval.
- D. He finds his work dull and uninteresting.
33
Drivers and air-traffic controllers are mentioned in the passage because they
- A. need to perform several tasks at once.
- B. are unable to maintain concentration.
- C. use their time efficiently.
- D. cannot afford to make mistakes.
34
In John Ridley Stroop’s experiment, participants found it difficult to
- A. tell one colour from another.
- B. match up pairs of similar colours.
- C. read out the name of one colour printed in another colour.
- D. decide what colour looks appropriate for a particular word.
35
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. The stressful nature of multitasking has been shown to affect parts of the brain. The area most affected is the prefrontal cortex, which is found to the rear of the ________. It is the part of the brain which judges tasks, then puts them in order of importance and allocates ________; it also enables a worker to resume a task which has been put to one side. A second area, the hippocampus, may also be affected by the stress of multitasking. If any ________ in the hippocampus are affected, people may have problems with storing ________, as well as learning ________.
36
40 The main aim of this passage is to
- A. describe areas where multitasking is useful.
- B. challenge widely held opinions on multitasking.
- C. show the physical damage that multitasking can cause.
- D. call for better psychological experiments on multitasking.

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Hiện đáp án

1. TRUE
The passage says that some kindergartens have banned children’s business cards, so the answer is TRUE.
2. FALSE
The passage explains that business cards were first used in Europe, not China, so the answer is FALSE.
3. TRUE
The passage mentions that designing business cards can be controversial for some companies, so the answer is TRUE.
4. NOT GIVEN
There is no information in the passage about a famous toy company increasing sales with unusual business cards, so the answer is NOT GIVEN.
5. TRUE
The passage states that some business commentators predict paper business cards will be used less in the future, so the answer is TRUE.
6. trust
The passage says the most important aspect of business is having trust in others.
7. computers
The passage states that computers do not have the ability to build the good relationships needed in business.
8. language
The passage says managers must work harder when they don’t share the same language with their contacts.
9. travel
A UK survey in the passage shows that travel takes up the largest part of business leaders’ time.
10. memory
The passage says looking at business cards can help a business person remember a meeting better.
11. status
The passage explains that business cards clearly show the status of each person in a large company.
12. conversation
The passage says swapping business cards is a good way to start a conversation at the beginning of a business relationship.
13. tradition
Janet feels that tradition is just as important as innovation in the business world, according to the passage.
14. D
Section D refers to studies involving children.
15. B
Section B mentions the discovery of significant artefacts.
16. C
Section C gives reasons why a particular aspect of music has not been researched.
17. G
Section G mentions an unexpected discovery involving two different areas of the brain.
18. E
Section E compares tone variations produced by certain animals and humans.
19. physical health
The passage says Dr Chen’s study chose participants who were not musicians and were in good physical health.
20. brain scans
The passage says participants were given brain scans while music with a strong rhythm was played.
21. disabled
Previous research showed that listening to this type of music helped some disabled people.
22. walking
The passage says their walking ability improved by listening to the music.
23. C
Dr Joyce Chen’s research may help people with speech defects, as stated in the passage.
24. B
Professor Robert Zatorre suggests it may be possible to improve a person’s ability to recognise musical characteristics.
25. A
Professor Norman Cook says listeners’ reactions to musical combinations may be similar to their reactions to other noises.
26. B
Professor Robert Zatorre explains that the same brain parts are stimulated in people and animals when they react positively to music or a positive outcome.
27. B
Ernst Pöppel says less attention is paid to each task when more than one is attempted at the same time. The tempting wrong answer, C, is about the brain adjusting, not attention.
28. C
David E. Meyer states that repeated changes of task mean the brain takes time to adjust.
29. A
John Ridley Stroop’s experiment showed that using skills for one task can make another task harder, such as reading a word in a different colour.
30. B
Ernst Pöppel says the brain can only focus on single tasks for very short periods when multitasking.
31. D
Edward Hallowell & John Ratey mention that multitasking can lead to a medical problem.
32. B
The worker in the opening paragraph feels overwhelmed by his workload, as described in the passage. The tempting wrong answer, A, is not supported because there is no mention of sleep.
33. D
Drivers and air-traffic controllers are mentioned because they cannot afford to make mistakes. Option A is tempting, but the focus is on the importance of not making errors.
34. C
In Stroop’s experiment, participants found it hard to read out the name of one colour printed in another colour.
35. forehead / mental resources / cells / new memories / new skills
The prefrontal cortex is found to the rear of the forehead and allocates mental resources. If cells in the hippocampus are affected, people may have problems with storing new memories and learning new skills.
36. B
The main aim of the passage is to challenge widely held opinions on multitasking, not just describe, show damage, or call for experiments.

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Reading Passage 1: The Importance of Business Cards

Reading Passage 2: The Power of Music

Reading Passage 3: The hazards of multitasking

Phiếu trả lời

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