IELTS Reading made easier - sentence completion
Reading passages in the Academic IELTS test are approximately 800-1000 words and can be from a range of subjects including health, science, technology and the environment.
The title of this article is called “Is the pen still mightier than the keyboard?”. You can find the answers at the bottom of the page.
Computers may dominate our lives, but mastery of penmanship brings us important cognitive benefits, research suggests.
In the past few days you may well have scribbled out a shopping list on the back of an envelope or stuck a Post-it on your desk. Perhaps you made a few quick notes during a meeting. But when did you last draft a long text by hand? How long ago did you write a “proper” letter, using a pen and a sheet of writing paper? Are you among the increasing number of people who are switching completely from writing to typing?
According to a recent British study of 2,000 participants, one in three had not written anything by hand in the previous six months. On average they had not put pen to paper in the previous 41 days. People undoubtedly write more than they suppose, but one thing is certain: with information technology we can write so fast that handwritten copy is fast disappearing.
In the United States, where email and texting have largely replaced snail mail, and students take notes on their laptops, “cursive” writing – in which the pen is not raised between each character – has been dropped from the school curriculum. American children are required to learn how to use a keyboard and write in print. But they will no longer need to worry about the up and down strokes involved in “joined-up” writing. “Schools shouldn’t cling to cursive based on the romantic idea that it’s a tradition, an art form or a basic skill whose disappearance would be a cultural tragedy,” claimed an editorial in the Los Angeles Times.
This minor revolution is by no means the first of its kind. Ever since writing was first invented, in Mesopotamia in about 4000BC, it has been through plenty of technological upheavals. The tools and media used for writing have changed many times: from Sumerian tablets to the Phoenician alphabet of the first millennium BC; from the invention of paper in China about 1,000 years later to the first handwritten sheets bound together to make a book; from the invention of printing in the 15th century to the appearance of ballpoint pens in the 1940s.
So at first sight the battle between keyboards and pens might seem to be no more than the latest twist in a very long story. What really matters is not how we produce a text but its quality, we are often told.
But experts on writing do not agree: pens and keyboards bring into play very different cognitive processes. “Handwriting is a complex task which requires various skills – feeling the pen and paper, moving the writing implement, and directing movement by thought,” says Edouard Gentaz, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Geneva. “Children take several years to master this precise motor exercise.”
Operating a keyboard is not the same: all you have to do is press the right key. It is easy enough for children to learn very fast, but above all the movement is exactly the same whatever the letter.
An electronic text does not leave the same mark as its handwritten counterpart either. “When you draft a text on the screen, you can change it as much as you like but there is no record of your editing,” Gentaz adds. “With a pen and paper, it’s all there. Words crossed out or corrected, bits scribbled in the margin are there for good, leaving a visual and tactile record of your work and its creative stages.”
But does all this really change our relation to reading and writing? The advocates of digital documents are convinced it makes no difference. “What we want from writing – and what the Sumerians wanted – is cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts,” writes Anne Trubek, associate professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College in Ohio. “This is what typing does. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: we want more time to think.”
Some neuroscientists are not so sure. They think that giving up handwriting will affect how future generations learn to read. “Drawing each letter by hand substantially improves subsequent recognition,” Gentaz explains. In a study of children aged three to five, the group that learned to write letters by hand were better at recognising them than the group that learned to type them on a computer. This experiment was repeated on adults, teaching them Bengali or Tamil characters. The results were much the same as with the children.
Although learning to write by hand does seem to play an important part in reading, no one can say whether the tool alters the quality of the text itself. Do we express ourselves more freely and clearly with a pen than with a keyboard? Does it make any difference to the way the brain works?
Researchers observed 300 students during lectures and claimed that note-taking with a pen, rather than a laptop, gives students a better grasp of the subject. They found that those working on paper rephrased information as they took notes, which required them to carry out a process of summarising and comprehension; in contrast, those working on a keyboard tended to make a literal transcript, avoiding the cognitive process involved in using their own words.
Despite omnipresent IT, Gentaz believes handwriting will persist. “Touchscreens and styluses are taking us back to handwriting. Our love affair with keyboards may not last,” he says.
Complete the sentences. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
1. According to a British survey, ………………………… participants had not used pen and paper for half a year.
TIP: underline the key words in the question and look for paraphrasing / synonyms in the text
2. Students in the US no longer have to learn …………………….. writing.
TIP: identify what kind of word(s) are missing (noun / verb / adjective?)
3. The first modern pen appeared in ………………….
TIP: check how many words you can use in your answer
4. Sumerian tablets and computers allow people to have ………………….
TIP: underline the key words in the question and look for where they appear in the text
Note: answers usually come in order in the text for this type of question
Answers
1. one in three
2. joined-up / cursive (EITHER answer is correct. You do not need to write both.)
3. the 1940s
4. cognitive automaticity
