Nhằm giúp các bạn có thêm tài liệu ôn tập kiến thức, kĩ năng cơ bản, và biết cách vận dụng giải các bài tập một cách nhanh nhất và chính xác. Hãy tham khảo IELTS Academic Reading Sample 116 - The Nature of Genius để tích lũy kinh nghiệm giải đề các bạn nhé! | You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 116 below. The Nature of Genius There has always been an interest in geniuses and prodigies. The word genius from the Latin gens family and the term genius meaning begetter comes from the early Roman cult of a divinity as the head of the family. In its earliest form genius was concerned with the ability of the head of the family the paterfamilias to perpetuate himself. Gradually genius came to represent a person s characteristics and thence an individual s highest attributes derived from his genius or guiding spirit. Today people still look to stars or genes astrology or genetics in the hope of finding the source of exceptional abilities or personal characteristics. The concept of genius and of gifts has become part of our folk culture and attitudes are ambivalent towards them. We envy the gifted and mistrust them. In the mythology of giftedness it is popularly believed that if people are talented in one area they must be defective in another that intellectuals are impractical that prodigies burn too brightly too soon and burn out that gifted people are eccentric that they are physical weaklings that there s a thin line between genius and madness that genius runs in families that the gifted are so clever they don t need special help that giftedness is the same as having a high 10 that some races are more intelligent or musical or mathematical than others that genius goes unrecognised and unrewarded that adversity makes men wise or that people with gifts have a responsibility to use them. Language has been enriched with such terms as highbrow egghead blue-stocking wiseacre know-all boffin and for many intellectual is a term of denigration. The nineteenth century saw considerable interest in the nature of genius and produced not a few studies of famous prodigies. Perhaps for us today two of the most significant aspects of most of these studies of genius are the frequency with .
