Lê Ngọc Hoà
Trong quá trình học IELTS Reading, việc biết cách viết bài Summary là một kỹ năng cực kì quan trọng. Không chỉ với những bạn mới học IELTS mà kể cả những bạn đã học lâu. Bài tập này đòi hỏi bạn phải có vốn từ vựng khá để có thể nhận biết được các IELTS Reading synonyms được dùng trong đoạn summary.
Sau đây là các bước hướng dẫn cách viết Summary mà ieltscaptoc.com.vn muốn chia sẻ đến bạn. Cùng theo dõi bài viết nhé!
Nội dung chính
1. Summary là gì?
Một bản tóm tắt là một phiên bản đặc của một văn bản gốc, thường là một bài viết đầy đủ hoặc cuốn sách. Tóm tắt thường dài khoảng một đoạn văn, và thậm chí có thể dài một vài đoạn tùy thuộc vào độ dài của tác phẩm được cô đọng. Tóm tắt được sử dụng trong nhiều tình huống.
Ví dụ:
Bạn có thể chỉ muốn tóm tắt những điểm chính của cuộc họp với đồng nghiệp vì bạn đang đến muộn cho một cuộc họp khác hoặc bạn muốn giới thiệu một ý tưởng thiết kế phức tạp.
Bạn có thể bắt đầu bằng cách tóm tắt những gì thiết kế của bạn sẽ đạt được, để cung cấp cho những người chủ chốt cảm nhận tổng thể về kế hoạch của bạn mà không làm họ choáng ngợp.
Học sinh có thể tóm tắt một bài báo cho một lớp học, hoặc khi chuẩn bị và viết bài nghiên cứu, thư mục có chú thích và bài luận. Tóm tắt và tóm tắt pháp lý cũng là các loại tóm tắt.
2. Tại sao kỹ năng viết bài Summary lại quan trọng?
- Tóm tắt cho phép cả trẻ và cha mẹ (học sinh và giáo viên) giám sát việc đọc hiểu tài liệu.
- Tóm tắt giúp trẻ hiểu cấu trúc tổ chức của bài học hoặc văn bản.
- Kỹ năng tóm tắt là kỹ năng đọc hiểu mà phần lớn người trưởng thành đều thành thạo nếu muốn thành công.
Tóm tắt và xem xét hợp nhất và củng cố việc học những ý chính. Những thành tố cấu trúc này không chỉ hỗ trợ việc ghi nhớ thông tin mà còn cho phép lĩnh hội thông tin dưới dạng một thể thống nhất dựa trên mối quan hệ giữa các phần. (J.E. Brophy và T. L. Good, 1986).
Tổng hợp các nghiên cứu về kỹ năng Tóm tắt, Rosenshine và đồng nghiệp phát hiện ra rằng, các phương pháp nhấn mạnh khía cạnh phân tích của Tóm tắt có tác động mạnh mẽ tới việc học sinh có khả năng tóm tắt tốt đến đâu (1996).
Xem thêm: Tải Cambridge IELTS 9 full [Pdf + Audio]
3. Hướng dẫn cách viết bài Summary
Bước 1
Hãy làm câu hỏi dạng này sau cùng, câu hỏi dạng đoạn văn tóm tắt sẽ dễ hơn sau khi bạn đã làm quen với bài đọc chính thông qua các câu hỏi trước đó.
Nếu bạn dành toàn bộ thời gian để ngồi mò từng đoạn thì bạn sẽ vẫn ra được đoạn cần tìm, nhưng như vậy sẽ mất thời gian nhiều hơn và sau khi hoàn thành đoạn văn bạn lại phải ngồi đọc lại nội dung một lần nữa cho các câu hỏi còn lại trong bài.
Nên cách tối ưu nhất đó chính là làm các câu hỏi dạng khác trước và tóm tắt nội dung chính của từng đoạn văn bằng 2, 3 chữ bên ngoài lề để các bạn dễ xác định phần cần tìm khi làm đoạn văn summary.
Bước 2
Cần lưu ý rằng, đây là dạng câu hỏi dùng để phân loại điểm, nên việc dùng scan và skim sẽ chỉ làm bạn tốn thêm thời gian mà chưa chắc tìm được câu trả lời đúng.
Ví dụ:
Nếu sử dụng scan và skim trong ví dụ ở bước 3, các bạn sẽ rất dễ bị câu mở đầu của đoạn summary và các synonyms trong đoạn summary đánh lừa. Nên để nhận biết được đúng đoạn văn nào trong bài đọc chính match với nội dung đoạn tóm tắt, hãy dành thời gian đọc thật kỹ và nắm ý chính của đoạn tóm tắt.
Bước 3
Xác định xem các từ cần điền ở dạng nào, verb, adj, noun, etc.
Bước 4
Xác định đoạn các đoạn văn có liên quan đến đoạn tóm tắt:
Complete the summary below of the first two paragraphs of the Reading Passage.
Choose ONE OR TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 30-36 on your answer sheet.
Ví dụ
From the point of view of recycling, the paper has two advantages over minerals and ………..oil……….in that firstly it comes from a resource which is ……………. and secondly, it is less threatening to our environment when we throw it away because it is ………….
Although Australia’s record in the re-use of waste paper is good, it is still necessary to use a combination of recycled fiber and …………….to make new paper. The paper industry has contributed positively and people have also been encouraged by ………………to collect their waste on a regular basis.
One major difficulty is the removal of ink from used paper but ……………… are being made in this area. However, we need to learn to accept paper which is generally of a lower ……………… than before and to sort our waste paper by removing ……………..before discarding it for collection.
Đáp án
Dành thời gian đọc qua đoạn văn trên, các bạn sẽ thấy nội dung chính của nó được bao gồm trong 2 đoạn văn sau trong bài đọc chính (Phần màu xanh dương là của đoạn đầu và phần màu cam của đoạn thứ 2):
Paper is different from other waste produce because it comes from a sustainable resource: trees. Unlike the minerals and oil used to make plastics and metals, trees are replaceable. Paper is also biodegradable, so it does not pose as much threat to the environment when it is discarded. While 45 out of every 100 tonnes of wood fibre used to make paper in Australia comes from waste paper, the rest comes directly from virgin fibre from forests and plantations. By world standards this is a good performance since the worldwide average is 33 per cent waste paper. Governments have encouraged waste paper collection and sorting schemes and at the same time, the paper industry has responded by developing new recycling technologies that have paved the way for even greater utilization of used fibre. As a result, industry’s use of recycled fibres is expected to increase at twice the rate of virgin fibre over the coming years.
Already, waste paper constitutes 70% of paper used for packaging and advances in the technology required to remove ink from the paper have allowed a higher recycled content in newsprint and writing paper. To achieve the benefits of recycling, the community must also contribute. We need to accept a change in the quality of paper products; for example stationery may be less white and of a rougher texture. There also needs to be support from the community for waste paper collection programs. Not only do we need to make the paper available to collectors but it also needs to be separated into different types and sorted from contaminants such as staples, paperclips, string, and other miscellaneous items.
Xem thêm: No pain No gain có nghĩa là gì?
Bước 5
Dò đoạn văn summary theo nội dung đoạn văn trong bài đọc chính và xác định từ cần điền. Nên nhớ, đoạn văn summary chỉ tóm tắt lại các ý chính và lượt bỏ các ý không cần thiết, nên khi dò đoạn văn để tìm từ cần điền phải dò theo nội dung và dựa vào dạng từ cần điền (đã xác định ở bước 3) đề tìm từ cần điền.
Bước 6
Kiểm tra lại đáp án. Ở bước cuối cùng này các bạn hãy xem lại xem mình đã điền đúng dạng từ chưa và các đáp án có làm thay đổi nội dung đoạn văn được tóm tắt hay không và cũng đừng quên kiểm tra chính tả nhé. Lưu ý: Tất cả đáp án của bạn nằm ngay trước mắt bạn, nên đừng tạo ra đáp án của riêng bạn nhé, vì dù bạn có dùng synonym của đáp án đi nữa, câu trả lời của bạn cũng sẽ bị gạch vì bạn đã không theo đúng yêu cầu của đề bài “Choose ONE OR TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.”
4. Một số tips hữu ích khi làm bài Summary Completion
Nên làm dạng bài này sau cùng
Sẽ dễ dàng hơn rất nhiều khi xác định ý chính của summary nếu trước đó bạn đã được làm các câu hỏi của bài đọc chính.
Không dành quá nhiều thời gian cho một câu hỏi
Nếu gặp câu khó chưa thể tìm được ngay đáp án, hãy chuyển sang câu khác. Quay trở lại với câu khó khi đã làm xong các câu dễ hơn.
Câu trả lời thường xuất hiện theo thứ tự của câu hỏi
Nếu bạn được cho một list các từ để chọn, sẽ có những từ mang vai trò “distractor”. Hãy loại trừ những đáp án sai ngữ pháp để không bị xao nhãng.
Loại câu hỏi này không đòi hỏi bạn phải hiểu chi tiết toàn bộ passage chính. Nhiều thí sinh thường mất thời gian để đọc toàn bài và cố gắng hiểu mọi thứ. Bạn không cần làm như vậy, hãy chỉ tập trung vào đoạn summary.
Gợi ý về vị trí xuất hiện đáp án trong bài đọc
- Dạng Summary một đoạn cụ thể trong bài đọc: tất cả các đáp án đều chỉ nằm trong đoạn này.
- Dạng Summary một phần đọc: thông tin trả lời thường nằm trong 2 hoặc 3 đoạn liên tiếp nhau về nội dung, các đáp án nằm rải rác trong mỗi đoạn.
- Dạng Summary toàn bộ đọc: thông tin trả lời sẽ được trích ra từ ý chính hoặc chi tiết quan trọng nhất của mỗi đoạn. Nhiều khả năng mỗi đoạn sẽ chứa 1 đáp án cần tìm theo thứ tự.
5. Một ví dụ trong bộ đề mẫu bài Summary
Bài tập
Bài tập 1: Designing and shipping after the restriction of hazardous substances (Rohs) directive
Almost two months after the European Union’s ban on the use of six environmentally unfriendly materials went into effect, designers have clear evidence that failure to meet the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive means lost sales. Palm Inc. recently announced that its Treo 650 smartphone is no longer being shipped to Europe since it doesn’t meet RoHS requirements. And several Apple Computer Inc. products will not be sold in Europe for the same reason.
The EU directive, which took effect on 1st July, covers lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls and polybrominated diphenyl ethers. Electronics vendors worldwide are working to eliminate those substances from nearly all new products developed for the European market, while also adapting their manufacturing processes to a lead (Pb)-free environment.
But that is only the beginning. Other countries, including China, Taiwan and South Korea, and certain U.S. states are creating their own “green” or RoHS-like legislation. That means RoHS compliance must become an integral part of a designer’s development process, with RoHS checks at each step: concept, development, prototype, first builds and volume production.
Major companies will run the gamut from finding component databases of qualified green components to taking due care to prove compliance and developing processes that allow for the higher-temperature requirements of Pb-free manufacturing. And for designers, those are just the tip of the iceberg. A host of technical and reliability issues remain to be sorted out in Pb-free board processing and soldering.
What it comes down to is what Ken Stanvick, senior vice president at Design Chain Associates, calls a lack of ‘tribal knowledge’ on design RoHS- compliant systems. ‘We had a great tribal knowledge when it came to dealing with leaded systems, but we haven’t built up that same amount of knowledge for Pb-free,’ he said. ‘Every problem will be blamed on Pb-free until it’s been worked out. We need to figure out tests that replicate more of the environment and different stresses that we’re going to see in this new system.’
Manny Marcano, president and CEO of EMA Design Automation Inc. (Rochester, N.Y.), cited the impact of parts obsolescence, including the need to redesign older products and the resultant emphasis on component engineering at the expense of conceptual design. A key challenge is identifying RoHS design specifications as early as possible in the design process, he said.
But even before they get to that point, designers must understand whether they are designing a fully compliant product or one that’s subject to some exemptions, said Robert Chinn, director for consultant firm PRTM (Mountain View, Calif.). ‘This affects their design parameters,’ he said. ‘Previously, they looked at components based on size, performance, electrical parameters, features and functionality. Now they have to add on a new constraint, revolving around environmental compliance: Is it RoHS 6-compliant or is it RoHS 5-compliant?’ (RoHS 6 components eliminate all six of the banned substances, while RoHS 5 models, because of exemptions, still contain lead.)
If designers do not take RoHS seriously, any country that can prove a product does not comply can levy fines against the vendor. That can cost market share, Marcano said, since noncompliant companies become non¬competitive. And then, not being prepared can mean belatedly diverting resources to RoHS compliance, causing missed market opportunities.
But many industry observers believe smaller and medium-size companies will continue to be complacent about the RoHS transition until some major company is cited for non-compliance. ‘When that happens, there will be an earthquake throughout the industry, and it will wake up every design engineer,’ said Steve Schultz, director of strategic planning and communications at Avnet Logistics and program manager for the distributor’s compliance efforts for RoHS in the Americas.
‘The product developer’s RoHS concerns center on the fear of lost revenue – from a product ban, a customer who demands a RoHS-compliant product that the company doesn’t have, or competition’, said Harvey Stone, managing director for consultancy GoodBye Chain Group (Colorado Springs, Colo.). ‘With price, quality and service being relatively equal, a savvy customer is going to choose a RoHS-compliant product,’ he said.
Meanwhile, designers are looking over their shoulders at several other – and potentially stricter – environmental regulations in the pipeline. These include the EU’s Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals legislation, which could restrict the use of thousands of chemicals, and its Energy¬using Products (EuP) directive, which will initially target energy-efficiency requirements.
Write the correct letter A-P in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet
The EU has banned the use of six materials that are 1………….. to the environment. This means that if designers do not meet the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive, sales will 2………….. Similar legislation is being put together around the world, which indicates that RoHS compliance needs to become a 3…………… part of a designer’s development process.
RoHS checks at every step from concept to mass production is also a necessity. But 4………… technical and reliability problems remain to be 5…………. Previously, the performance etc. of components were 6…………….but now a new 7…………….needs to be taken into account:environmental compliance.
Xem thêm: Tải sách Cambridge IELTS 3 [Pdf+Audio]
Bài tập 2: The true cost of food
A. For more than forty years the cost of food has been rising. It has now reached a point where a growing number of people believe that it is far too high and that bringing it down will be one of the great challenges of the twenty-first century. That cost, however, is not in immediate cash. In the West at least, most food is now far cheaper to buy in relative terms than it was in 1960. The cost is in the collateral damage of the very methods of food production that have made the food cheaper: in the pollution of water, the enervation of soil, the destruction of wildlife, the harm to animal welfare, and the threat to human health caused by modern industrial agriculture.
B. First mechanisation, then mass use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, then monocultures, then battery rearing of livestock, and now genetic engineering – the onward march of intensive farming has seemed unstoppable in the last half-century, as the yields of produce have soared. But the damage it has caused has been colossal. In Britain, for example, many of our best-loved farmland birds, such as the skylark, the grey partridge, the lapwing and the corn bunting, have vanished from huge stretches of countryside, as have even more wild flowers and insects. This is a direct result of the way we have produced our food in the last four decades. Thousands of miles of hedgerows, thousands of ponds, have disappeared from the landscape. The faecal filth of salmon farming has driven wild salmon from many of the sea lochs and rivers of Scotland. Natural soil fertility is dropping in many areas because of continuous industrial fertiliser and pesticide use, while the growth of algae is increasing in lakes because of the fertiliser run-off.
C. Put it all together and it looks like a battlefield, but consumers rarely make the connection at the dinner table. That is mainly because the costs of all this damage are what economists refer to as externalities: they are outside the main transaction, which is for example producing and selling a field of wheat, and are borne directly by neither producers nor consumers. To many, the costs may not even appear to be financial at all, but merely aesthetic – a terrible shame, but nothing to do with money. And anyway they, as consumers of food, certainly aren’t paying for it, are they?
D. But the costs to society can actually be quantified and, when added up, can amount to staggering sums. A remarkable exercise in doing this has been carried out by one of the world’s leading thinkers on the future of agriculture, Professor Jules Pretty, Director of the Centre for Environment and Society at the University of Essex. Professor Pretty and his colleagues calculated the externalities of British agriculture for one particular year. They added up the costs of repairing the damage it caused, and came up with a total figure of £2,343m. This is equivalent to £208 for every hectare of arable land and permanent pasture, almost as much again as the total government and EU spend on British farming in that year. And according to Professor Pretty, it was a conservative estimate.
E. The costs included: £120m for removal of pesticides; £16m for removal of nitrates; £55m for removal of phosphates and soil; £23m for the removal of the bug Cryptosporidium from drinking water by water companies; £125m for damage to wildlife habitats, hedgerows and dry stone walls; £1,113m from emissions of gases likely to contribute to climate change; £106m from soil erosion and organic carbon losses; £169m from food poisoning; and £607m from cattle disease. Professor Pretty draws a simple but memorable conclusion from all this: our food bills are actually threefold. We are paying for our supposedly cheaper food in three separate ways: once over the counter, secondly through our taxes, which provide the enormous subsidies propping up modern intensive farming, and thirdly to clean up the mess that modern farming leaves behind.
F. So can the true cost of food be brought down? Breaking away from industrial agriculture as the solution to hunger may be very hard for some countries, but in Britain, where the immediate need to supply food is less urgent, and the costs and the damage of intensive farming have been clearly seen, it may be more feasible. The government needs to create sustainable, competitive and diverse farming and food sectors, which will contribute to a thriving and sustainable rural economy, and advance environmental, economic, health, and animal welfare goals.
G. But if industrial agriculture is to be replaced, what is a viable alternative? Professor Pretty feels that organic farming would be too big a jump in thinking and in practices for many farmers. Furthermore, the price premium would put the produce out of reach of many poorer consumers. He is recommending the immediate introduction of a’Greener Food Standard’, which would push the market towards more sustainable environmental practices than the current norm, while not requiring the full commitment to organic production. Such a standard would comprise agreed practices for different kinds of farming, covering agrochemical use, soil health, land management, water and energy use, food safety and animal health. It could go a long way, he says, to shifting consumers as well as farmers towards a more sustainable system of agriculture.
Xem thêm: Despite, In spite of, Although, Though, Even though
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.
Professor Pretty concludes that our 1………………are higher than most people realise, because we make three different types of payment. He feels it is realistic to suggest that Britain should reduce its reliance on 2…………….
Although most farmers would be unable to adapt to 3……………… Professor Pretty wants the government to initiate change by establishing what he refers to as a 4……………. He feels this would help to change the attitudes of both 5………………. and………………..
Bài tập 3: Ant intelligence
When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence.
However, in ants there is no cultural transmission – everything must be encoded in the genes – whereas in humans the opposite is true. Only basic instincts are carried in the genes of a newborn baby, other skills being learned from others in the community as the child
Among these, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the idea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by those involved in these investigations.
Ants store food, repel attackers and use chemical signals to contact one another in case of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared to the human use of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising images and jingles, political slogans and martial music) to arouse and propagate moods and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote, ‘Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies to war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.’ grows up. It may seem that this cultural continuity gives US a huge advantage over ants. They have never mastered fire nor progressed. Their fungus farming and aphid herding crafts are sophisticated when compared to the agricultural skills of humans five thousand years ago but have been totally overtaken by modem human agribusiness.
Or have they? The farming methods of ants are at least sustainable. They do not ruin environments or use enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the crop farming of ants may be more sophisticated and adaptable than was thought.
Ants were farmers fifty million years before humans were. Ants can’t digest the cellulose in leaves – but some fungi can. The ants therefore cultivate these fungi in their nests, bringing them leaves to feed on, and then
use them as a source of food. Fanner ants secrete antibiotics to control other fungi that might act as ‘weeds’, and spread waste to fertilise the crop.
It was once thought that the fungus that ants cultivate was a single type that they had propagated, essentially unchanged from the distant past. Not so. Ulrich Mueller of Maryland and his colleagues genetically screened 862 different types of fungi taken from ants’ nests. These turned out to be highly diverse: it seems that ants are continually domesticating new species. Even more impressively, DNA analysis of the fungi suggests that the ants improve or modify the fungi by regularly swapping and sharing strains with neighbouring ant colonies.
Whereas prehistoric man had no exposure to urban lifestyles – the forcing house of intelligence – the evidence suggests that ants have lived in urban settings for close on a hundred million years, developing and maintaining underground cities of specialised chambers and tunnels.
When we survey Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles, we are amazed at what has been accomplished by humans. Yet Hoelldobler and Wilson’s magnificent work for ant lovers, The Ants, describes a supercolony of the ant Formica yessensis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. This ’megalopolis’ was reported to be composed of 360 million workers and a million queens living in 4,500 interconnected nests across a territory of 2.7 square kilometres.
Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in southern France and elsewhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in something like their present form more than seventy million years ago. Beside this, prehistoric man looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence, albeit of a different kind?
Research conducted at Oxford, Sussex and Zurich Universities has shown that when desert ants return from a foraging trip, they navigate by integrating bearings and distances, which they continuously update in their heads. They combine the evidence of visual landmarks with a mental library of local directions, all within a framework which is consulted and updated. So ants can learn too.
And in a twelve-year programme of work, Ryabko and Reznikova have found evidence that ants can transmit very complex messages. Scouts who had located food in a maze returned to mobilise their foraging teams. They engaged in contact sessions, at the end of which the scout was removed in order to observe what her team might do. Often the foragers proceeded to the exact spot in the maze where the food had been. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent the foraging team using odour clues. Discussion now centres on whether the route through the maze is communicated as a ‘left¬right’ sequence of turns or as a ‘compass bearing and distance’ message.
During the course of this exhaustive study, Reznikova has grown so attached to her laboratory ants that she feels she knows them as individuals – even without the paint spots used to mark them. It’s no surprise that Edward Wilson, in his essay, ‘In the company of ants’, advises readers who ask what to do with the ants in their kitchen to: ‘Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives.
Write the correct letter, A-O, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.
Ants have sophisticated methods of farming, including herding livestock and growing crops, which are in many ways similar to those used in human agriculture. The ants cultivate a large number of different species of edible fungi which convert 1………… into a form which they can digest. They use their own natural 2……….as weed-killers and also use unwanted materials as 3………..
Genetic analysis shows they constantly upgrade these fungi by developing new species and by 4…………. Species with neighbouring ant colonies. In fact, the farming methods of ants could be said to be more advanced than human agribusiness, since they use 5………. methods, they do not affect the 6………….. and do not waste 7……………
Xem thêm: DOWNLOAD trọn bộ Diary of a Wimpy Kid
Bài tập 4: Pulling strings to build pyamids
No one knows exactly how the pyramids were built. Marcus Chown reckons the answer could be ‘hanging in the air’.
The pyramids of Egypt were built more than three thousand years ago, and no one knows how. The conventional picture is that tens of thousands of slaves dragged stones on sledges. But there is no evidence to the monuments of Egypt, she noticed a hieroglyph that showed a row of men standing in odd postures. They were holding what looked like ropes that led, via some kinD of mechanical system, to a giant bird in the sky. she wondered if perhaps the bird was actually a giant kite, and the men were using it to lift a heavy object.
Intrigued, Clemmons contacted Morteza Gharib, an aeronautics professor at the California Institute of Technology. He was fascinated by the idea. ‘Coming from Iran, I have a keen interest in Middle Eastern science/ he says. He too was puzzled by the picture that had sparked Clemmons’s interest. The object in the sky apparently had wings far too short and wide for a bird. ‘The possibility certainly existed that it was a kite,’ he says. And since he needed a summer project for his student Emilio Graff, investigating the possibility of using kites as heavy lifters seemed like a good idea. Gharib and Graff set themselves the task of raising a 4.5-metre stone column from horizontal to vertical, using no source of energy except the wind. Their initial calculations and scale-model wind-tunnel experiments convinced them they wouldn’t need a strong wind to lift the 33.5-tonne column. Even a modest force, if sustained over a long time, would do. The key was to use a pulley system that would magnify the applied force. So they rigged up a tent-shaped scaffold directly above the tip of the horizontal column, with pulleys suspended from the scaffold’s apex. The idea was that as one end of the column rose, the base would roll across the ground on a trolley.
Earlier this year, the team put Clemmons’s unlikely theory to the test, using a 40-square- metre rectangular nylon sail. The kite lifted the column clean off the ground. We were absolutely stunned,’ Gharib says. ‘The instant the sail opened into the wind, a huge force was generated and the column was raised to the vertical in a mere 40 seconds.’
The wind was blowing at a gentle 16 to 20 kilometres an hour, little more than half what they thought would be needed, what they had failed to reckon with was what happened when the kite was opened. There was a huge initial force – five times larger than the steady state force,’ Gharib says. This jerk meant that kites could lift huge weights, Gharib realised. Even a 300-tonne column could have been lifted to the vertical with 40 or so men and four or five sails. So Clemmons was right: the pyramid, builders could have used kites to lift massive stones into place, whether they actually did is another matter,’ Gharib says. There are no pictures showing the construction of the pyramids, so there is no way to tell what really happened. The evidence for using kites to move large stones is no better or worse than the evidence for the brute force method,’ Gharib says.
Indeed, the experiments have left many specialists unconvinced. The evidence for kite¬lifting is non-existent,’ says Willeke Wendrich, an associate professor of Egyptology at the University of California, Los Àngeles.
Others feel there is more of a case for the theory. Harnessing the wind would not have been a problem for accomplished sailors like the Egyptians. And they are known to have used wooden pulleys, which could have been made strong enough to bear the weight of massive blocks of stone. In addition, there is some physical evidence that the ancient Egyptians were interested in flight. A wooden artefact found on the step pyramid at Saqqara looks uncannily like a modem glider. Although it dates from several hundred years after the building of the pyramids, its sophistication suggests that the Egyptians might have been developing ideas of flight for a long time. And other ancient civilisations certainly knew about kites; as early as 1250 BC, the Chinese were using them to deliver messages and dump flaming debris on their foes.
The experiments might even have practical uses nowadays. There are plenty of places around the globe where people have no access to heavy machinery but do know how to deal with wind, sailing, and basic mechanical principles. Gharib has already been contacted by a civil engineer in Nicaragua, who wants to put up buildings with adobe roofs supported by concrete arches on a site that heavy equipment can’t reach. His idea is to build the arenes horizontally, then lift them into place using kites. We’ve given him some design hints,’ says Gharib. We’re just waiting for him to report back.’ So whether they were actually used to build the pyramids or not, it seems that kites may make sensible construction tools in the 21 st century AD.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.
ADDITIONAL EVIDENCE FOR THEORY OFF KITE-LIFTING
The Egyptians had 1……………….. which could lift large pieces of 2……………….., and they knew how to use the energy of the wind from their skill as 3…………………
The discovery on one pyramid of an object which resembled a 4………………….. suggests they may have experimented with 5…………………… In addition, over two thousand years ago kites were used in China as weapons, as well as for sending 6…………………….
Đáp án
Bài tập 1
| 1. C | 2. J | 3. F | 4. H | 5. K | 6. L | 7. A |
Bài tập 2
- food bills/ costs
- (modern) intensive farming
- (modern) intensive farming
- organic farming
- organic farming
- farmers (and) consumers (in any order; both are required to get one mark)
Bài tập 3
| 1. C | 2. M | 3. F | 4. D | 5. N | 6. O | 7. E |
Bài tập 4
| 1. (wooden) pulleys | 2. stone | 3. (accomplished) sailors |
| 4. (modern) glider | 5. flight | 6. messages |
Về cơ bản, Summary Completion là dạng bài tương đối khó. Vì vậy bạn cần tập trung nhiều thời gian cũng như vận dụng các kỹ năng làm bài một cách nhuần nhuyễn. Hãy áp dụng những cách viết bài summary trong bài viết này để luyện tập thật nhiều trước khi bước vào kì thi thật nhé. Ieltscaptoc.com.vn chúc các bạn đạt được kết quả tốt nhất trong kỳ thi IELTS sắp tới!
