CAN ANIMALS PREDICT EARTHQUAKES?: Đề thi thật IELTS READING (IELTS Reading Recent Actual Test)

CAN ANIMALS PREDICT EARTHQUAKES?

[A]
On the morning of 26 December 2004, villagers in Thailand noticed something strange. A herd of cows grazing on the beach lifted their heads, pricked their ears and looked out to sea, then turned and ran to the top of a nearby hill. For the puzzled villagers who chose to follow them, it was a life-saving move. Minutes later, the tsunami struck. Since then, there have been hundreds of reports of animals seemingly foretelling the catastrophe - not just minutes, but sometimes hours and even days before it occurred.

[B]
The idea that animals can predict earthquakes has ancient origins. Way back in 373 BC the Greek historian Thucydides recorded descriptions of rats, dogs and snakes deserting the city of Helice just days before a big earthquake hit. There is also no shortage of theories about what might be going on. What has been lacking, however, is any real scientific data linking strange animal behaviour with earthquakes. Now at last we have some, and from a most unusual quarter. Last November, a psychologist looking for signs of depression in dogs announced that he had stumbled upon this elusive evidence.

[C]
In 2000, Stanley Coren from the University of British Columbia started a study to find out whether dogs, like some humans, suffer from "seasonal affective disorder", commonly known as the wintertime blues. Twice a week, he would email 200 dog owners in Vancouver, asking them to rate their pets' activity and anxiety levels using a nine-point scale. The results were disappointing. In general, there was little daily variability, and Coren's initial analysis of many months' worth of information strongly refuted his suspicion that dogs can become depressed during winter. "I just assumed that the data wasn't going anywhere and put the project on the backburner," he says. So it was some time before Coren even noticed what he had unknowingly recorded.

[D]
"When I finally did go through the figures in detail a couple of years later, I noticed a strange anomaly in the data which occurred on 27 February 2001. Of the 193 dogs recorded that day, 47 per cent were well above their usual baseline for activity and 49 per cent - mostly the same dogs - were well below their usual baseline for anxiety. The likelihood of such a big difference happening by chance was less than 1 in 1000".

[E]
Four days after that severe weather, perhaps a thunderstorm, might have unsettled the dogs. Flicking through the newspaper archives provided him with no answer, he noticed the earthquake came. On 28 February a quake of magnitude 6.8 shook the area, with its epicenter at Nisqually, about 240 kilometres south of Vancouver.

[F]
One idea is that some animals detect changes in the Earth's electric field. Another theory is that animals are responding to subterranean gas escapes such as hydrogen released from rocks before a quake. It has even been suggested that some animals might have a sixth sense.>> Form đăng kí giải đề thi thật IELTS 4 kĩ năng kèm bài giải bộ đề 100 đề PART 2 IELTS SPEAKING quý đang thi (update hàng tuần) từ IELTS TUTOR

[G]
Coren's attention, however, was drawn to a more down-to-earth idea. He suspected the dogs in his study might simply be hearing vibrations. So back he went to his data to see whether there was any evidence to support this. Sure enough, he discovered that of the 14 dogs in his study that were deaf or hard of hearing, only one had shown any significant increase in anxiety that day, and it was in training as a hearing dog that had also become anxious. Encouraged by this, he began to look for factors that might explain why some dogs became agitated on 27 February and others did not. He found that dogs with floppy ears showed only half the change in activity and one-third the change in anxiety levels of dogs with pointy ears. Not only would an ear flap reduce the amount of sound reaching the inner ear, Coren also realised that it would weaken high-frequency sounds more than low-frequency ones. What's more, dogs with smaller heads were significantly more likely to behave strangely before the earthquake than those with larger heads, with the biggest increase in activity and anxiety. This was particularly interesting because dogs with smaller heads tend to be more sensitive to high frequencies than those with larger heads.

[H]
Coren suspects that the high-frequency sounds that many dogs can hear are emitted before an impending earthquake, perhaps from rocks scraping or breaking underground. Admittedly this is only one study. Even if Coren is right about dogs, it is still possible that other animals may be able to predict quakes in different ways. Still, his findings will appeal to anyone interested in putting the predictions of animals on more scientific footing.

[I]
However, Andy Michael, an American seismologist, is extremely skeptical about Coren's findings. He points out that the epicentre of the quake was around 240 kilometres south of Vancouver. "It is unlikely that seismic waves could travel that far and be above the background noise level," he says. "After all, if you are talking about a dog's ear flap, how will they get through hundreds of kilometres of solid rock?" Normally, he adds, seismic waves at such high frequencies are detected only at most a few tens of metres away from their source. "It seems to me that what we have here is just an extraordinary coincidence," he says.>> IELTS TUTOR có hướng dẫn kĩ SỬA BÀI IELTS WRITING TASK 2 ĐỀ THI THẬT NGÀY 22/8/2020 của HS IELTS TUTOR đạt 6.5 Writing

[J]
However, if animals such as dogs really are able to foretell earthquakes, does it really matter how? While western society has been reluctant to take reports of animal earthquake predictors, China has embraced the idea. At a seismological station in Nanning, staff are trained to keep a 24-hour watch on snakes in farm crates around the country. If animals in any of the farms begin making strange movements, the station broadcasts a warning. Other earthquake experts have also started taking animals more seriously. In Japan, researchers are studying catfish as earthquake predictors.

QUESTION BOOKLET
Questions 1-20 are on TEXT A "Can animals predict earthquakes?"

Questions 1-7:

The text has 10 paragraphs, marked [A] to [J].
Below are 7 headings, which could be used for 7 of these paragraphs.
For each heading, write the letter of the paragraph in the right-hand column.

THEN COPY THE LETTERS TO YOUR ANSWER SHEET.

The first has been done for you as an example.

Questions 8-14:

Decide whether these statements are TRUE (T), FALSE (F) or NOT GIVEN (NG) according to the text.
Circle T for True, F for False. If the text does not say whether the statement is true or false, circle NG (NOT GIVEN).

THEN COPY THESE ANSWERS TO YOUR ANSWER SHEET.