Multitasking Debate IELTS Reading Passage Answers & Explanation
The IELTS Reading section requires test-takers to read a variety of texts and answer questions based on them. One possible topic for an IELTS Reading passage is the Multitasking Debate. This topic explores the pros and cons of multitasking, and its potential effects on our productivity and mental health. In this article, we will delve into this IELTS Reading passage and provide you with the answers to its questions.
Real IELTS Exam Question, Reported On:
| India | 17th February 2022 |
| India | 25th September 2021 |
Reading Passage 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.
Multitasking Debate
Can you do them at the same time?
A. Talking on the phone while driving isn’t the only situation where we’re worse at multitasking than we might like to think we are. New studies have identified a bottleneck in our brains that some say means we are fundamentally incapable of true multitasking. If experimental findings reflect real-world performance, people who think they are multitasking, are probably just underperforming in all – or at best, all but one – of their parallel pursuits. Practice might improve your performance, but you will never be as good as when focusing on one task at a time.
B. The problem, according to Rene Marois, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is that there’s a sticking point in the brain. To demonstrate this, Marois devised an experiment to locate it. Volunteers watch a screen and when a particular image appears, a red circle, say, they have to press a key with their index finger. Different coloured circles require presses from different fingers. Typical response time is about half a second, and the volunteers quickly reached their peak performance. Then they learn to listen to different recordings and respond by making a specific sound. For instance, when they hear a bird chirp, they have to say “ba”; an electronic sound should elicit a “ko”, and so on. Again, no problem. A normal person can do that in about half a second, with almost no effort.
C. The trouble comes when Marois shows the volunteers an image, and then almost immediately plays them a sound. Now they’re flummoxed. “If you show an image and play a sound at the same time, one task is postponed,” he says. In fact, if the second task is introduced within the half-second or so it takes to process and react to the first, it will simply be delayed until the first one is done. The largest dual-task delays occur when the two tasks are presented simultaneously; delays progressively shorten as the interval between presenting the tasks lengthens.
D. There are at least three points where we seem to get stuck, says Marois. The first is in simply identifying what we’re looking at. This can take a few tenths of a second, during which time we are not able to see and recognize the second item. This limitation is known as the “attentional blink”: experiments have shown that if you’re watching out for a particular event and a second one shows up unexpectedly any time within this crucial window of concentration, it may register in your visual cortex but you will be unable to act upon it. Interestingly, if you don’t expect the first event, you have no trouble responding to the second. What exactly causes the attentional blink is still a matter for debate.
E. A second limitation is in our short-term visual memory. It’s estimated that we can keep track of about four items at a time, fewer if they are complex. This capacity shortage is thought to explain, in part, our astonishing inability to detect even huge changes in scenes that are otherwise identical, so-called “change blindness”. Show people pairs of near-identical photos – say, aircraft engines in one picture have disappeared in the other – and they will fail to spot the differences. Here again, though, there is disagreement about what the essential limiting factor really is. Does it come down to a dearth of storage capacity, or is it about how much attention a viewer is paying?
F. A third limitation is that choosing a response to a stimulus – braking when you see a child in the road, for instance, or replying when your mother tells you over the phone that she’ s thinking of leaving your dad – also takes brainpower. Selecting a response to one of these things will delay by some tenths of a second your ability to respond to the other. This is called the “response selection bottleneck” theory, first proposed in 1952.
G. But David Meyer, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, don’t buy the bottleneck idea. He thinks dual-task interference is just evidence of a strategy used by the brain to prioritise multiple activities. Meyer is known as something of an optimist by his peers. He has written papers with titles like “Virtually perfect time-sharing in dual-task performance: Uncorking the central cognitive bottleneck”. His experiments have shown that with enough practice – at least 2000 tries – some people can execute two tasks simultaneously as competently as if they were doing them one after the other. He suggests that there is a central cognitive processor that coordinates all this and, what’s more, he thinks it uses discretion sometimes it chooses to delay one task while completing another.
H. Marois agrees that practice can sometimes erase interference effects. He has found that with just 1 hour of practice each day for two weeks, volunteers show a huge improvement at managing both his tasks at once. Where he disagrees with Meyer is in what the brain is doing to achieve this. Marois speculates that practice might give us the chance to find less congested circuits to execute a task – rather like finding trusty back streets to avoid heavy traffic on main roads – effectively making our response to the task subconscious. After all, there are plenty of examples of subconscious multitasking that most of us routinely manage: walking and talking, eating and reading, watching TV and folding the laundry.
I. It probably comes as no surprise that, generally speaking, we get worse at multitasking as we age. According to Art Kramer at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, who studies how ageing affects our cognitive abilities, we speak in our 20s. Though the decline is slow through our 30s and on into our 50s, it is there; and after 55, it becomes more precipitous. In one study, he and his colleagues had both young and old participants do a simulated driving task while carrying on a conversation. He found that while young drivers tended to miss background changes, older drivers failed to notice things that were highly relevant. Likewise, older subjects had more trouble paying attention to the more important parts of a scene than young drivers.
J. It’s not all bad news for over- 55s, though. Kramer also found that older people can benefit from the practice. Not only did they learn to perform better, but brain scans also showed that underlying that improvement was a change in the way their brains become active. While it’s clear that practice can often make a difference, especially as we age, the basic facts remain sobering. “We have this impression of an almighty complex brain,” says Marois, “and yet we have very humbling and crippling limits.” For most of our history, we probably never needed to do more than one thing at a time, he says, and so we haven’t evolved to be able to. Perhaps we will in the future, though. We might yet look back one day on people like Debbie and Alun as ancestors of a new breed of a true multitasker.
Questions 28-32
The reading Passage has ten paragraphs A-J.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter in boxes 28-32 on your answer sheet.
28. A theory explained delay happens when selecting one reaction
29. Different age group responds to important things differently
30. Conflicts happened when visual and audio element emerge simultaneously
31. An experiment designed to demonstrates the critical part of the brain for multitasking
32. A viewpoint favours the optimistic side of multitasking performance
Questions 33-35
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in boxes 33-35 on your answer sheet.
33. Which one is correct about the experiment conducted by Ren6 Marois?
A. participants performed poorly on the listening task solely
B. volunteers press a different key on different colour
C. participants need to use different fingers on the different coloured object
D. they did a better job on Mixed image and sound information
34. Which statement is correct about the first limitation of Marois’s experiment?
A. “attentional blink” takes about ten seconds
B. lag occurs if we concentrate on one object while the second one appears
C. we always have trouble in reaching the second one
D. the first limitation can be avoided by certain measures
35. Which one is NOT correct about Meyer’s experiments and statements?
A. just after failure in several attempts can people execute dual-task
B. Practice can overcome dual-task interference
C. Meyer holds a different opinion on Marois’s theory
D. an existing processor decides whether to delay another task or not
Questions 36-40
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet, write
YES, if the statement is true
NO, if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN, if the information is not given in the passage
36. The longer gap between the two presenting tasks means a shorter delay toward the second one.
37. Incapable human memory cause people to sometimes miss the differences when presented with two similar images.
38. Marois has a different opinion on the claim that training removes the bottleneck effect.
39. Art Kramer proved there is a correlation between multitasking performance and genders.
40. The author doesn’t believe that the effect of practice could bring any variation.
Multitasking Debate IELTS Reading Answers
28. F
29. I
30. C
31. B
32. G
33. C
34. B
35. A
36. YES
37. YES
38. NO
39. NOT GIVEN
40. NO
Multitasking Debate IELTS Reading Answers with Explanation
28. F
Answer: F
Supporting sentence: A third limitation is that choosing a response to a stimulus – braking when you see a child in the road, for instance, or replying when your mother tells you over the phone that she’s thinking of leaving your dad – also takes brainpower.
Keywords: reaction, stimulus, response, brainpower, delay
Key Location: Section F, 1st line
Explanation: This is the correct answer because Section F focuses on the third limitation which states that choosing a response to a stimulus uses brainpower, thus takes time, which will delay the response of other stimulus by some one-tenth of a second.
29. I
Answer: I
Supporting sentence: older subjects had more trouble paying attention to the more important parts of a scene than young drivers.
Keyword: ageing, paying attention, important parts, respond
Key Location: Section I, last line.
Explanation: Section I talks about Art Kramer study which shows how ageing affects our cognitive abilities and in turn multitasking abilities as well. He gives the instance where older people fail to notice important things and younger groups miss background changes. The statement is in sync with the information given in this section.
30. C
Answer: C
Supporting sentence:The trouble comes when Marois shows the volunteers an image, and then almost immediately plays them a sound. Now they’re flummoxed.
Keyword: visual, audio, simultaneously.
Key Location: Section C, 1st line
Explanation: This is the correct answer because section C talks about the dual task delay where if the second element is presented immediately after the first, then there will be a delay until the first one is completed. Marois carried out an experiment where when you showed an image to the volunteers, right after a sound, they were baffled because of the dual task delay.
31. B
Answer: B
Supporting sentence: The problem, according to René Marois, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is that there’s a sticking point in the brain. To demonstrate this, Marois devised an experiment to locate it.
Keyword: experiment, critical, brain, multitasking
Key Location: Section B, 1st line
Explanation: This is the correct answer because section B mentions about Rene Marois who devised an experiment to demonstrate the sticking point in the brain which causes problems while multitasking.
32. G
Answer: G
Supporting sentence: He thinks dual-task interference is just evidence of a strategy used by the brain to prioritise multiple activities. Meyer is known as something of an optimist by his peers.
Keyword: optimistic, multitasking, performance
Key Location: Section G, 2nd line
Explanation: This is the correct answer because in Section G, there is mention of Myere’s study who is optimistic about the dual-task interference and according to him with enough practice, the dual-task ability considerably improves and one can perform two tasks simultaneously with equal competence. This is a favourable viewpoint.
33. D
Answer: C
Supporting sentence: Different coloured circles require presses from different fingers.
Keyword: experiment, Rene Marois, participants
Key Location: Section B,4th line
Explanation: This is the correct option because the experiment which was conducted by Marois required the volunteers to press a key with a different finger for different coloured objects. For instance when a red circle appears on the screen, the volunteers are required to press the key with their index finger.
34. B
Supporting sentence: experiments have shown that if you’re watching out for a particular event and a second one shows up unexpectedly any time within this crucial window of concentration, it may register in your visual cortex but you will be unable to act upon it.
Keyword: limitation, experiment, concentration window, lag
Key Location: Section D, 4th line
Explanation: This is the correct option because the first limitation is if while watching one event another shows up, then one is unable to act on it as the focus is still on the first one. Therefore lag occurs.
35. A
Answer: A
Supporting sentence: His experiments have shown that with enough practice – at least 2000 tries – some people can execute two tasks simultaneously as competently as if they were doing them one after the other.
Keyword: meyer’s experiment, attempts/practice, dual task
Key Location: Section G, 4th line
Explanation: Meyer believes that with at least 2000 tries which with this much practice an individual can execute 2 tasks simultaneously with equal competence. 2000 attempts are not a few attempts but quite a figure.Hence this statement is not correct about Meyer’s experiments.
36. YES
Answer: Yes
Supporting sentence: delays progressively shortens as the interval between presenting the tasks lengthens.
Keyword: gap, tasks, delay, second task
Key Location:Section C, last line
Explanation: This is the correct answer because it takes time to process and react to one task, so if the second task is given almost immediately then it will be delayed until the first one is processed. Therefore if presented simultaneously, the delay longest, but bigger the gap between 2 tasks, lesser the delay.
37. YES
Answer: Yes
Supporting sentence: our astonishing inability to detect even huge changes in scenes that are otherwise identical, so-called “change blindness”.
Keyword: human memory, detect, differences, inability
Key Location:Section E, 3rd line
Explanation: This is the correct answer because it is clearly mentioned we have short-term visual memory and cannot keep track of too many items at one go therefore when identical images are presented even with a huge change in one, it goes unnoticed.
38. NO
Answer: No
Supporting sentence: Marois agrees that practice can sometimes erase interference effects.
Keyword: bottleneck, training, practice, remove
Key Location: Section H, 1st line
Explanation: The statement contradicts the information given in the passage because Marois is of the opinion that practice or training can remove the interference effect, which is also known as the “bottleneck” effect and he doesn’t have a different opinion on the claim.
39. NOT GIVEN
Answer: Not Given
Supporting sentence: According to Art Kramer at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, who studies how ageing affects our cognitive abilities, we peak in our 20s.
Keyword: multitasking, correlation, gender, Art Kramer
Key Location: Section I, 2nd line
Explanation: This is the correct answer because there is no information about any gender-based study made by Kramer. The study of his which is mentioned in the passage shows how ageing affects our cognitive abilities and in turn our multitasking abilities.
40. NO
Answer: No
Supporting sentence: While it’s clear that practice can often make a difference, especially as we age, the basic facts remain sobering.
Keyword: practice, variation, author
Key Location: Section J, 4th line
Explanation: This is the correct answer because after the multitasking debate, the author does come to believe that practice can reduce the interference effect and can make an individual better at multitasking though he never took any side. Hence the claim contradicts the information given.
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