ĐỀ THI CHỌN ĐỘI TUYỂN DỰ THI HSG QUỐC GIA THPT NĂM 2020 Môn thi Tiếng Anh – TỈNH NGHỆ AN CÓ ĐÁP ÁN

Questions 64 – 68 

Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in the above passage? YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer. 

NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer. 

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this. 

64. We cannot explain all romantic decisions on the basis of chemical processes.  

65. Knowing about brain chemistry can actually harm our happiness.  

66. Long-term relationship commitments should be made after attraction has faded.  

67. Relationship insecurities fade away once the attachment phase begins. 

68. Growing resistance to PEA transmission is experienced as mental anguish.  

Your answers: 

Part 3: You are going to read an extract from a magazine article. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the extract. Choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap . There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use. 

Blind to change 

How much of the world around you do you really see? You only take in tiny pieces of information at a time and that can have unnerving consequences, says Laura Spinney. 

Imagine you’re walking across a college campus when an unknown man asks you for directions. While you’re talking, two men pass between you carrying a door. After an irritating minute of interruption you carry on describing the route. When you’ve finished you are informed that you’ve just taken part in a psychology experiment, and asked if you noticed any changes after the two men passed with the door. ‘No,’ you reply uneasily. The unknown man then explains that the man who approached you initially walked off behind the door, leaving this man in his place. You are stunned; the two men are dressed differently and have different voices and haircuts. 

Rather than logging every detail of the visual scene, we are actually highly selective about what we take in. Our impression of seeing everything is just that - an impression. In fact we extract a few details and rely on memory, or perhaps even our imagination, for the rest.  

Yet in 1991, the controversial claim was made that our brains hold only a few salient details about the world - and that this is the reason we are able to function at all. We don’t store elaborate pictures in short-term memory, because it isn’t necessary and would take up valuable computing power. 

Just a year later, at a conference on perception in Vancouver, it was reported that people shown computer-generated pictures of natural scenes were blind to changes that were made during an eye movement. In a typical laboratory demonstration of this you might be shown a picture on a computer screen of, say, a couple dining on a terrace. 

It’s an unnerving experience. But to some extent, such ‘change blindness’ is artificial because the change is masked in some way. In real life, there tends to be a visible movement that signals the change. But not always. For instance, we have all had the experience of not noticing a traffic signal change because we had briefly looked away. 

For instance, an experiment was done at Harvard in which people were shown a videotape of a basketball game and asked to count the passes made by one or other team. After about 45 seconds a man dressed in a gorilla suit walked slowly across the scene, passing between the players. Although he was visible for five seconds, an amazing 40 per cent of the viewers failed to notice him. 

Page 6 of 17 pages

Such lapses raise important questions about vision. For instance, how can we reconcile these gross lapses with our subjective experience of having continuous access to a rich visual scene? One researcher has actually shown that imagining a scene activates parts of the visual cortex in the same way as seeing it. He says that this supports the idea that we take in just what information we consider important at the time, and fill in the gaps where the details are less important. The illusion that we see ‘everything’ is partly a result of filling in the gaps using memory. Such memories can be created based on beliefs and expectations. 

This particular idea has not been generally accepted. Yet most researchers in the field do agree that of all the myriad visual details of any scene that we could record, we take only what is relevant to us at the time. This leads us to the uncomfortable realisation that, for all our subjective experience of a rich visual world, it may, in fact, be impossible to tell what is real and what is imagined. 

A Now imagine that the task absorbing their attention had been driving a car, and the distraction had been a pedestrian crossing their path. According to some estimates, nearly half of all motor-vehicle accidents in the US can be attributed to driver error, including momentary loss of attention. It is more than just academic interest that has made both forms of cognitive error hot research topics. 

B The image would disappear, to be replaced for a fraction of a second by a blank screen, before reappearing significantly altered - by the raising of a railing in the background, perhaps. Many people search the screen for up to a minute before they see the change. A few never spot it. 

C In contrast, other researchers argue that we can get the impression of visual richness without holding any of that richness in our heads. For instance, the ‘grand illusion’ theory argues that we hold no picture of the visual world in our brains at all. Instead, we refer back to the external visual world as different aspects become important. The ‘usion arises from the fact that as soon as you ask yourself ‘am I seeing this or that?’ you turn your attention to it and see it. 

D It sounds impossible, but when this test was earned out, a full 50 per cent of those who took cart failed to notice the substitution. The subjects had succumbed to what is called change blindness. Taken with a glut of recent experimental results, this phenomenon suggests we see far less than we think we do. 

E The relationships between attention, awareness and vision have yet to be clarified. Because we have a less than complete picture of the world at any one time, there is the potential for distortion and error. How that complete picture could be objectively established is controversial, but there is one obvious way forward. 

F This flies in the face of what vision researchers have long believed: that seeing really means making pictures in the brain. According to this theory, by building detailed internal representations of the world, and comparing them over time, we would be able to pick out anything that changed. 

G And there’s a related phenomenon called inattentional blindness, that doesn’t need any experimental visual trick at all: if you are not paying attention to some feature of a scene, you won’t see it. 

H Rather, we log what has changed and assume the rest has stayed the same. Of course, this is bound to mean that we miss a few details. Experimenters had already shown that we may ignore items in the visual field if they appear not to be significant - a repeated word or line on a page of text for instance. But nobody realised quite how little we really do ‘see’.