Pinball IELTS — Bài kiểm tra đầu vào

A

It is extremely common for people to turn to the internet to learn about what is happening in the world. This is increasingly true of teenagers, who may well go on to use online information (along with more traditional sources such as textbooks) for their studies when they later enter college. Information literacy – the ability to understand whether a text, article or news story is composed of reliable facts – is very important at university level. However, according to some research, there is worrying evidence that many of us often accept the information we read at face value. In other words, we often seem to trust what we are reading without really asking questions about who wrote it and why.

B

In 1998, a writer going by the name of Lyle Zapato set up a detailed and quite sophisticated website which seemed to give information about the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. According to the website (which still exists), this apparently shy animal can only be found in the vast forests of the north-western USA. Reaching a size of 33 centimetres, it is as happy jumping from branch to branch as it is in the normal octopus home of water. However, because of the Tree Octopus's natural habitats being cut down, and other threats such as eagles and cats, their numbers are low, and they are at risk of dying out completely. The website suggests that people help protect the octopus by writing to celebrities to take action, or even by going on Tree Octopus awareness marches.

C

The Tree Octopus has never existed, of course, and the website contains nothing more than fake information. It has, however, been used in a number of interesting experiments. In 2007 and 2017, two separate ones were done on school pupils aged 11-13 in the US and the Netherlands. They were either asked to summarize the most important information from the website in a few sentences or were asked questions to test whether they understood the information about the Tree Octopus. After further questions, it was found in the American study that only 11% thought the website was in any way suspicious. In the Dutch study, a similarly low number (7%) thought the same. It is possible that the rather emotional topic of the website (an animal in danger) could have made it appear more reliable than it really was.

D

These results may not be too surprising. It could be argued that as long ago as 2007 – or even 2017 – the idea of 'fake news' was much less widely known about than it is now. Even today, we should probably not be astonished if 11-year-olds have little awareness of unreliable information online compared to older teenagers who have started university and have more experience of the internet. For that reason, many of us might not be too worried about children being deceived by what they see on the internet. It could even be argued that no one as young as 11 should even be spending much time online.

E

In 2020, however, a new experiment was carried out on a group of first-year university students in the US studying biology – the type of people who would be expected to have developed the intelligence to know what is objective information and what is not. In one task, the students were asked to visit the website of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus as part of a project on 'interesting organisms'. As part of a first task, they were asked to use the website to find out the scientific name of the octopus, where it lived and why this species was at risk. Interestingly, at this point, 90% of students failed to recognize that the octopus – and the whole website – was a carefully crafted joke. In a follow-up task, the students were shown a video which made it clear that the octopus was a comedy invention and were then asked what they thought about the initial task. The vast majority now saw the website for what it was, making such comments as, 'I answered the questions without giving them much thought,' or 'I didn't think it was necessary to find any extra evidence about this animal.'

F

As studies like these suggest, even science students can be influenced by fake news, and could benefit from developing their critical-thinking skills. Given this, it is probably sensible to start teaching young teenagers about the nature of online information as soon as they are allowed to access it. They should – at the very least – know that there is much that is inaccurate, if not deliberately designed to make us believe something which is untrue. But perhaps more importantly, they should be encouraged to continually ask themselves questions about what they find online. Rather than learning to rely on a single source of information, we should all be taught to read up on important subjects and check for additional evidence, if necessary, rather than simply accepting something as soon as we see it.

Are you having trouble getting the seven to nine hours' sleep each night that many experts insist on? More and more commonly, the blame for this is placed firmly on modern technology. It is often pointed out that too many of us are taking our phones (or even laptops) to bed with us (even if we've spent much of our working day looking at them), spending extra time scrolling up and down, catching up with an endless stream of news or gossip instead of focusing on falling asleep. Solutions to tackle the problem of a lack of quality sleep are often technological, too. Phone screens or monitors might come with an optional 'night mode', with less of the blue light that is said to keep our brains active. Or you might invest in devices that play the gentle noise of rain falling or waves hitting a shore. There are even 'anti-anxiety' apps that choose relaxing stories for you to listen to at bedtime.

Despite all this, it is possible that even if we lived with a complete absence of modern technology, including electricity, the result would probably not be that we slept longer throughout the night. In fact, the idea that we all need to get the amount of uninterrupted sleep that some experts advise us to have seems in itself to be a modern invention, and one that perhaps ought to be challenged.

Jerome Siegel, a neurobiologist at the University of California, has studied three groups of people separated by thousands of miles across Africa and South America. One was the Tsimane, a hunter-gatherer tribe (meaning that they only eat whatever they are able to catch or find in the wild) of between 20 and 30 families living in the Amazon rainforests of Bolivia. Also studied were the Hazda people of Tanzania, and the San people of Namibia. Like the Tsimane, neither of these African tribes make use of electricity, let alone artificial lighting.

On Siegel's request, members of each tribe put small gadgets on their wrists which recorded every small movement they made. Among all the people studied, it was noticed that on average, people fell asleep (and stopped moving so much) several hours after sunset. People from the Tsimane and Hazda tribes tended to wake an hour before sunrise. San tribe-members woke up some time after the sun had risen.

For all the people studied, the hours after sunset are a valuable time for catching up with each other's news after a meal around a fire, sharing stories and other information, and planning ahead for the future. During the day, they are likely to work hard in finding or preparing food, but the night is the time when tribe-members reconnect and chat. Perhaps this happens in much the same way that any of us feel the need to look at social media or news sites at the end of a day.

This period of activity after dark helped researchers to notice that sunlight was not the most important thing for tribe members when it came to going to sleep and waking up again. Instead of aiming for bed as soon as the sun goes down, tribe members seem to naturally go to sleep when temperatures drop to a certain point, waking up when the air becomes warmer again. The San tribe of Namibia notably tend to get up an hour after the sun has risen, probably due to the fact that the area where they live experiences colder temperatures in the morning. On average, members of all three tribes have between five and seven hours of sleep each day. Moreover, they do not seem to suffer from any of the symptoms of lack of sleep. They do not take naps, and two of the tribes have no understanding of – let alone a word for – the concept of insomnia (the condition of not being able to sleep).

This research suggests that it is not true that if we had less technology surrounding us, we would definitely sleep more. In fact, the opposite could be true. In future, perhaps we will see more in the way of innovative gadgets that control the temperature of our bedrooms, closely monitored in order for us to get a perfect night's sleep. Until then, perhaps a useful course of action would be to spend our evenings after dark relaxing as much as we possibly can, rather than worrying about how much sleep we ought to get.