IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 439

Travellers have praised the scenery around Guilin, a city in the Guangxi region of southern China, for at least a thousand years. The landscape consists of hundreds of steep, rounded limestone hills rising from a flat plain beside the Li River, many pierced by caves and draped in vegetation. A Chinese saying, attributed to a Song dynasty official, declares that Guilin's scenery is the finest under heaven. What visitors seldom realise is that these strange hills are the eroded remains of a process that began long before any human being existed.

Geologists describe such country as karst, a term borrowed from the Kras, a stony plateau of limestone that stretches across the border between Slovenia and Italy. Karst landscapes develop wherever soluble rock — limestone, dolomite or gypsum — is exposed to water, and they are thought to cover a substantial share of the world's ice-free land. Their characteristic features are not mountains in the ordinary sense but the hollows between them: sinkholes, gorges, caverns and rivers that vanish underground. The word has since been adopted by geologists in every country, and the features it describes are found on every continent except Antarctica.

The rock itself is the key. During the Devonian period, several hundred million years ago, much of what is now southern China lay beneath a warm, shallow sea. Reefs and shell banks flourished in it, and the accumulated remains of corals, molluscs and microscopic organisms were compressed over millions of years into beds of calcium carbonate hundreds of metres thick. Geologists can still read that ancient sea floor in the stone: cross-sections of fossil shells, ripple marks left by currents and layers laid down in calm water.

The sea eventually withdrew, and movements of the Earth's crust that later raised the Himalayas lifted the region as well, exposing the limestone to the atmosphere. Uplift alone, however, would have produced an ordinary plateau. Two further conditions made the hills possible. The first was a climate with abundant monsoon rain. The second was the fracturing of the rock, which tectonic stresses had broken into a network of vertical joints, so that water could penetrate far below the surface rather than running off it.

Rain is naturally slightly acidic. As it falls it absorbs carbon dioxide from the air, and as it passes through soil, where decaying plants release the same gas, it takes up more, forming dilute carbonic acid. This solution attacks calcium carbonate and carries it away in dissolved form. The reaction is slow — in a laboratory it would barely be noticed — but over hundreds of thousands of years it removes an extraordinary volume of rock. Each litre of rainwater carries away only a tiny amount, yet rainfall here exceeds a metre a year and the process has continued for millions of years. Insoluble impurities are left behind as a thin red soil.

Underground, the widening joints became cave systems, some of which are now open to visitors; the Reed Flute Cave near Guilin, with its stalactites and stalagmites, is the best known. At the surface, the collapse of cave roofs produced sinkholes, and the landscape came to be divided into two related forms that Chinese geologists distinguish by name. In fengcong, meaning peak cluster, the hills remain joined at their bases and rise from a common mass of rock. In fenglin, meaning peak forest, they stand isolated on a flat plain, and it is this second form that makes the view from Guilin so distinctive.

Several explanations have been proposed for why the towers survive while the rock between them has gone. Most researchers emphasise the river and the plain around it. As the Li River shifts across its valley and deposits sediment, it clears away the weathered debris at the foot of the hills. The slopes then retreat, and the less fractured masses are left standing. Another factor is a harder cap of rock on some summits, which shields the hill beneath from rain and slows the process of dissolution. The towers are therefore not permanent features, merely one stage in a landscape's long decline.

For centuries the hills have attracted painters, poets and officials. Their shapes suggest animals and objects — an elephant drinking, a folded screen, a solitary brush — and many were given names accordingly. Visitors carved inscriptions into the walls of the caves, and a few of these records are still legible. In the twentieth century the hills became a favourite subject for Chinese painters, who often showed them rising out of mist. The city's own name reflects a different aspect of the place: Guilin means 'forest of osmanthus', after the fragrant trees that grow on the surrounding slopes.

Guilin's scenery is now a national asset and an industry. Millions of tourists arrive each year, and most of them take a boat journey of some eighty kilometres down the Li River to Yangshuo. One celebrated view of the hills there has appeared on the back of a Chinese banknote. The pressure on the landscape is considerable.

Limestone has been quarried on the edges of the city to make cement, and although many quarries have been closed and the sites replanted, bare scars remain. Water quality in the river has suffered from sewage and from farming, and the spread of the city has consumed farmland in the valley. The wider region, known as the South China Karst, is a UNESCO World Heritage property, which brings both protection and further visitors.

A job interview, a first meeting with a future in-law, a new teacher walking into a classroom: in each case a judgement has formed before any words of substance have been exchanged. Most people recognise the experience, and many distrust it, yet they continue to act on it. Employers often say that they sense within minutes whether a candidate will fit. What follows examines how such impressions are produced, how far they can be trusted and what research has still not settled.

The process is startlingly quick. In a series of experiments in the United States, volunteers were shown a photograph of an unfamiliar face for a tenth of a second and asked to judge how trustworthy, competent or likeable the person seemed. When the same faces were shown for a full second, the ratings barely changed, which suggests that the first glance had already done most of the work. Brain imaging tells a similar story. A structure deep in the brain, the amygdala, responds to a new face within a fraction of a second. It appears to answer two questions at once: whether the person is a threat and whether they can be approached.

Impressions are also built from very short samples of behaviour. In one much-cited study, students watched silent video clips of teachers they had never met and rated them; their ratings closely matched those given by pupils who had spent a whole term in the classroom. Comparable results have been reported for job interviews and for negotiations, and the phenomenon has been given a name: thin slicing. The lesson is that people are remarkably willing to generalise from a fragment, and that the generalisation is not random. It draws on a lifetime of experience, most of it unconscious, of how confidence, hesitation and enthusiasm are expressed in posture, pace and tone of voice.

Physical appearance carries particular weight. Attractive people are consistently rated as more competent, more honest and more likely to succeed, an effect so reliable that psychologists refer to it as the halo effect. The good looks seem to spread across every other quality the observer is asked about. The shape of a face matters in a different way. Adults with round faces, large eyes and small noses — features typical of children — are judged to be warmer but less competent than adults with angular faces. Age, too, is read from the face, and judgements about it are made as quickly as any other.

First impressions are not formed from the face alone. Voices carry information that observers use with confidence: several studies have found that lower-pitched voices are judged to be more dominant, and that a speaker's accent shifts the listener's estimate of their education and background. Clothing, grooming and the way a person walks across a room are read in the same way. Because these signals arrive together, researchers describe first impressions as multimodal: no single channel is decisive, and the various cues are weighed against each other in a process that is fast, automatic and largely hidden from the person doing the judging.

Impressions do not merely record; they act. Because people tend to behave towards others in ways that elicit the responses they are expecting, an expectation can end up producing the very behaviour that appears to confirm it. In a much-cited telephone experiment from the 1970s, men were shown a photograph of an unfamiliar woman before a conversation and told that they would be speaking to her. The men who had seen an attractive photograph spoke more warmly. The women, hearing this, replied in a more confident and animated way, although the photograph had nothing to do with the person at the other end of the line. The effect has been described as a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it is one reason why many employers now use structured interviews, in which every candidate answers the same questions and is assessed against fixed criteria.

How accurate are these judgements? Reviews of the evidence suggest that predictions from brief exposure are better than chance but far from perfect. One consistent finding is that some traits are easier to read than others: qualities that show themselves in behaviour, such as talkativeness or energy, are judged with reasonable agreement, whereas qualities that are largely internal, such as anxiety or honesty, are not. A further complication is that agreement among observers is often mistaken for accuracy. If ten people form the same impression, the impression feels reliable, yet all ten may be drawing on the same stereotype. Consensus, in other words, is evidence about the observers rather than about the person observed.

The settings in which impressions are now formed have changed. A profile photograph, a video call and a recorded interview present a narrower range of signals than a meeting in the same room, and it is not yet clear how far the older findings apply to them. What is clear is that people can be helped to correct for their biases. Giving interviewers a fixed set of questions and a written scale on which to score each answer reduces the influence of an early impression. The practical lesson of the research is neither to trust first impressions nor to ignore them, but to treat them as hypotheses that further evidence may overturn.

Few phrases are used more often in discussions of schooling than critical thinking, and few are defined more loosely. In its narrowest sense the term refers to the disciplined evaluation of arguments: separating a claim from the evidence offered for it, noticing what has been assumed, and recognising when a conclusion does not follow. In its widest sense it covers scepticism, open-mindedness and a general habit of asking why. Because the phrase can mean so many things, arguments about it often pass each other by: one writer recommends what another would not recognise as the same activity. The question of whether it should be timetabled as a subject in its own right makes the confusion plainer still.

The case for a separate subject rests on the claim that reasoning is a general skill. The American philosopher Matthew Lipman, who developed a programme known as Philosophy for Children in the 1970s, argued that quite young pupils could learn to examine arguments if given time and a teacher who questioned rather than instructed. In such lessons children discuss stories and puzzles, and the teacher's role is to press them to give reasons. Supporters point out that when thinking is left to the individual subject, it is rarely taught explicitly at all. History teachers teach history, and the habits of argument are absorbed, if at all, by accident. A dedicated course, they maintain, gives those habits a name, a place on the timetable and a teacher responsible for them.

The opposing case rests on evidence about how knowledge is organised in the mind. The psychologist Daniel Willingham has argued that thinking skills are bound up with knowledge of a particular field, so that a pupil who reasons well about a historical source may reason poorly about a statistical claim. What counts as evidence differs from one field to another: a historian weighs a diary against a tax record, a scientist weighs a controlled trial against an anecdote. Neither would accept the other's methods as conclusive. On this account facts are not the enemy of thinking but its precondition, and a general course can do little more than teach students to name fallacies they cannot detect in practice.

Evaluations of separate courses have been less encouraging than their advocates hoped. Reviews of the evidence have generally found modest improvements on tests of reasoning, and these are often confined to the particular test that the programme's designers chose. Many studies are small, last only a few weeks and lack a comparison group, which makes it hard to tell whether the course or the enthusiasm of its teacher produced the gain. A further difficulty is that of transfer: students who have been taught to spot a flaw in a written argument do not reliably spot the same flaw in a newspaper editorial.

In practice most education systems have chosen neither pure option. Australia's national curriculum lists critical and creative thinking as one of seven general capabilities to be developed across all subjects. England took a different route: a standalone Critical Thinking qualification was offered to sixth-form students for a period, but it attracted only a small minority and never became part of the mainstream. The result of such arrangements is that critical thinking is everyone's responsibility and, frequently, nobody's. A requirement that appears in every syllabus is easily assumed to be met somewhere else.

Teachers are the weak point in most schemes. Many say that their own education never taught them to analyse an argument, and they become uneasy when a discussion moves into territory where they are not sure of the answer. Assessment is a second obstacle. A written examination made up of factual questions can be marked quickly and consistently, whereas an essay in which a student weighs conflicting evidence has to be judged by impression, and two examiners may reach different conclusions. The consequence is predictable. What is not examined is not taught, and what is taught in a hurry is taught as content: lists of named fallacies, techniques for scoring well.

In my view the question is badly framed. I would not create a new subject called critical thinking, for the reasons the sceptics give: reasoning is not a single skill that can be lifted out of the material it is applied to. But neither would I leave matters as they are. Teachers of history, science and literature should make explicit the standards of evidence their subjects use, and show pupils what a good reason looks like. Schools should also protect a regular slot for discussion in which pupils examine genuinely contested questions together and are asked to defend a position against their classmates. None of this is realistic without better training for teachers, and unless public examinations give credit for reasoning, schools will go on teaching what is easiest to measure.

The debate, then, is not really about whether schools should teach thinking. Every subject worthy of the name does so. It is about whether thinking is made visible, practised and assessed, or left to be absorbed by those pupils who happen to notice. A separate course offers visibility, and that is its attraction, but it carries the risk that reasoning becomes one more body of content to be memorised for an examination. The more promising reform is less dramatic: fewer topics, taught more slowly, with the reasons for every conclusion laid out and argued over, in every classroom, by every teacher.