Để đạt thành tích cao trong kì thi sắp tới, các bạn có thể tham khảo IELTS Academic Reading Sample 160 - Effect of Noise sau đây, nhằm rèn luyện và nâng cao kĩ năng giải đề thi IELTS, nâng cao kiến thức cho bản thân. | You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40. which are based on Reading Passage 3 below. EFFECTS of Noise In general it is plausible to suppose that we should prefer peace and quiet to noise. And yet most of us have had the experience of having to adjust to sleeping in the mountains or the countryside because it was initially too quiet. Van experience that suggests that humans are capable of adapting to a wide range-of noise levels. Research supports this view. For example Glass and Singer 1972 exposed people to short bursts of very loud noise and then measured their ability to work out problems and their physiological reactions to the noise. The noise was quite disruptive at first but after about four minutes the subjects were doing just as well on their tasks as control subjects who were not exposed to noise. Their physiological arousal also declined quickly to the same levels as those of the control subjects. But there are limits to adaptation and loud noise becomes more troublesome if-the person is required to concentrate on more than one task. For example high noise levels interfered with the performance of subjects who were required to monitor three dials at a time a task not unlike that of an aero plane pilot or an air-traffic controller Broadbent 1957 . Similarly noise did not affect a subject s ability to track a moving line with a steering wheel but it did interfere with the subject s ability to repeat numbers while tracking Finke man and Glass 1970 . Probably the most significant finding from research on noise is that its predictability is more important than how loud it is. We are much more able to tune out chronic background noise even if it is quite loud than to work under circumstances with unexpected intrusions of noise. In the Glass and Singer study in which subjects were exposed to bursts of noise as they worked on a task some subjects heard loud bursts-and others heard soft bursts. For some subjects the bursts were spaced exactly one .
