Buổi 57: Thi thử cuối khóa – Listening (40 câu) + Reading (40 câu, 60 phút)

Fixing things together

(Bài đọc tự viết; nội dung ở mức phổ thông.)

A On a Saturday morning in a community hall, a retired electrician is helping a teenager open up a broken toaster, while at the next table a volunteer is sewing a torn jacket. This is a repair café: a free event at which people bring damaged household items and fix them with the help of volunteers. The idea began in a small number of towns and has since spread to many countries.

B The organisers’ aims are partly environmental. Many products are thrown away because of minor faults, and repairing them avoids both the waste and the resources needed to make replacements. But most repair cafés also stress the social side. Visitors are expected to take part in the repair rather than simply hand over their item, so that they learn something and, ideally, feel more confident about fixing things themselves in future.

C Not every item can be saved. Some products are glued together in ways that make them almost impossible to open without damage, and spare parts for others are unavailable or expensive. Volunteers often keep records of what they could not repair and why, and some groups share this information with manufacturers or campaigners who argue that products should be designed to be repaired.

D Repair cafés face practical challenges of their own. They depend on a small number of skilled volunteers, many of them older, and finding people to replace them is not always easy. There are also questions of safety and responsibility, particularly when electrical items are involved, so most groups require visitors to accept that repairs are carried out at their own risk.

E Whether repair cafés make a significant difference to the total amount of waste is doubtful; the number of items they handle is small compared with what is thrown away. Their value may lie elsewhere – in changing attitudes, and in reminding people that the objects around them can be understood, maintained and kept.

Sleep and the remembering brain

(Bài đọc tự viết; nội dung khoa học ở mức phổ thông, có rào đón.)

A Most people know from experience that a poor night’s sleep makes it harder to concentrate. Less obvious is the possibility that sleep plays an active part in memory – that some of the work of remembering is done while we are unaware of it.

B A widely held view among researchers is that sleep helps to consolidate memories: to strengthen and stabilise information learnt during the day. Studies in which people learn material and are then tested after either a night’s sleep or an equivalent period awake have often, though not always, found better recall after sleep.

C Different stages of sleep may contribute in different ways. Some researchers have linked deep sleep to the strengthening of facts and events, and lighter stages to skills and to emotional memories. These links, however, are still debated, and the stages interact in complex ways that are not fully understood.

D Sleep may also help the brain to select. Not everything we experience is worth keeping, and one hypothesis suggests that sleep helps to weaken less important connections while preserving more important ones. This could explain why we sometimes see a problem more clearly after “sleeping on it”.

E Such findings have obvious practical implications, particularly for students. Staying up all night before an examination may be counterproductive if it reduces the time available for consolidation. Spreading study over several days, with sleep in between, appears to be a more effective strategy than cramming.

F Caution is nevertheless needed. Much of the research involves small numbers of participants in laboratory conditions, and the tasks used – learning lists of word pairs, for instance – are very different from learning in everyday life. The broad message that sleep matters for memory is well supported; claims that particular sleep techniques can dramatically improve learning are not.

Putting a price on nature

(Bài đọc tự viết; quan điểm là của tác giả bài viết, nội dung ở mức phổ thông.)

A When a government decides whether to build a road through a forest, the costs of construction appear in the budget, and so do the expected benefits of shorter journeys. The forest itself, however, often appears nowhere – not because it has no value, but because its value is not expressed in money. In recent decades, economists have tried to correct this by estimating the monetary value of what nature provides.

B These services are many. Wetlands can reduce flooding downstream; forests store carbon and protect soil; insects pollinate crops; parks offer recreation and may improve mental health. Some of these benefits can be estimated relatively directly, for example by calculating what it would cost to build flood defences that do the same job. Others, such as the pleasure people take in a landscape, are far harder to measure.

C Supporters argue that putting a price on nature makes it visible in decisions dominated by financial figures. A minister who is told that a wetland saves a city a substantial sum each year in flood damage is more likely to protect it than one who hears only that it is “important”. In this sense, valuation is a translation into the language that decision-makers already speak.

D Critics raise two kinds of objection. The first is practical: estimates vary widely depending on the method used, and false precision can lend a misleading authority to numbers that are, at best, rough. The second is more fundamental. Some argue that expressing nature in money implies that it can be traded for money – that a wetland is acceptable to destroy as long as something of greater monetary value is gained.

E I find the practical objection the more persuasive of the two. The fundamental objection, though serious, misunderstands what valuation is usually for. Few economists believe that a price captures everything that matters about a forest; they argue only that a partial, cautious estimate is better than an implicit value of zero. The real danger lies in presenting such estimates with more confidence than they deserve.

F The sensible course, then, is to use monetary valuation as one input among several, alongside legal protections, scientific assessments and the views of the communities affected. Numbers can help nature to be seen. They should not be allowed to decide on their own whether it survives.