IELTSwithJurabek

PASSAGE 2

Read the text and answer questions 14-26

A STUDY OF WESTERN CELEBRITY

14 In our celebrity-obsessed culture, TV shows, Internet blogs, and even newspapers are often full of the latest news, gossip and scandals about current celebrities. It seems that our current society cannot get enough information about the daily lives of celebrities. But how did celebrities become so much an important force in our culture? While people have always had shared a certain obsession for the fantastic and the famous, the notion of celebrity, as well as the types of people termed "celebrities", has evolved greatly throughout the ages. The word "celebrity" has its roots in the language of the ancient Roman civilization. The word we now know to mean "a condition of being famous" or "a famous person" is derived from the Latin word "celeber", meaning "frequented or populous".

15 The celebrities of the ancient world were the powerful and awesome deities of Greece and Rome, and the citizens of these civilizations believed in a vast number of immortals who had a direct impact on their lives. It was, therefore, important to know about these figures' personal lives. This need to know led to the creation of myths, which personalized the gods and involved them in ancient celebrity scandals that thrilled and excited the common people.

16 During ancient times, amateur and professional athletes also began to make an impact on the celebrity culture. Victors in the ancient Olympic Games were treated as heroes and were often elevated to god-like status. In the ancient Roman civilization, gladiators - the equivalent of today's professional athletes - were also revered by the common people for their heroics and seemingly superhuman strength.

17 As Europe moved into the Dark Ages and a time when athletics and the arts were largely forgotten, monarchs and rulers continued to maintain celebrity status, while religious figures took on newfound fame. The miraculous lives and fascinating deaths of spiritual figures lent excitement to the lives of common people when there was often little else to be excited about, as they faced war, disease and food shortages.

18 During the period 1300-1600 AD, or the Renaissance period as it is known, interest in ruling figures faded. As Europe emerged from its long neglect of the arts, there was greater appreciation for portraits, statues and stone carvings. This period of appreciation for the arts lent a sense of celebrity to artists who were noted for their works and their personal achievements. It was a time when artists began to surpass political and religious individuals for supreme celebrity - a trend that would continue into later centuries.

19 While the figures of the ancient and early modern civilizations were able to achieve moderate and sometimes lasting celebrity within particular cultures, the global reach of their fame was limited. It was not until the 1700s, when technological advances made publishing commercially viable, that the extent of a person's fame could spread further. The increase in the availability of the written word was accompanied by a huge rise in the number of common people who could read, allowing a mass audience to find out about celebrities for the first time. Suddenly, the lives of authors, politicians, war heroes, and other celebrities could now be read about in newspapers around the world. These gave ordinary people the opportunity to become intimately knowledgeable about the figures they most admired.

20 In the modern era, particularly as radio and film took off in the 1900s, things really began to change. First, radio began to make its way into the average home in the 1920s and 1930s. Professional athletes also began to be regarded as stars, as their games and exploits could be broadcast over the air for an entirely new audience. Then, the rise of television in the 1950s only cemented the premier level of celebrity that film stars, athletes and television actors were beginning to share. This also meant a huge increase in the individual salaries of these celebrities. Even a few animals gained fame through children's TV shows. The emergence of reality television shows in the late 1990s allowed all kinds of people with little ability to enjoy a short burst of fame on the television screen. All you needed, it seemed, was an attractive appearance. Today, reality television programmers make it possible to be famous not for doing anything in particular, but simply for being, with the audience deciding whether someone deserves to become a celebrity or not. As the meaning of celebrity continues to evolve and redefine itself in a quickly changing world, there is no telling who will become of interest next.

PASSAGE 3

Read the text and answer questions 27-40

SOME VIEWS ON THE USE OF HEADPHONES

Whether wearing headphones at work, or in other areas of everyday life, is a good thing or a bad thing has generated a lot of research and opinion

To visit a typical modern office today is to walk into a room with possibly a dozen songs playing simultaneously but to hear none of them. Up to half of younger workers listen to music on their headphones, and nearly all of them think it makes them better at their jobs. In survey after survey, people report with confidence that music makes them happier, better at concentrating, and more productive.

Scientists do not share this belief. They maintain that listening to music hurts people's ability to recall other things they should be doing, and any pop song, loud or soft, reduces overall performance for both extroverts and introverts. A Taiwanese study linked music that has lyrics to lower marks on concentration tests for college students, and other research has shown music with lyrics scrambles our brains' verbal-processing skills. "As silence has the best overall performance, it would still be advisable that people work in silence," another reporter dryly concluded.

The question is therefore: if headphones are so bad for productivity, why do so many people at work have them? One factor to consider is that countries like the USA have moved from a farming and manufacturing economy to a service economy, with an emphasis on jobs in offices that require higher levels of concentration, reflection and creativity. As an estimated 70 percent of office workers work in open-plan office spaces, it is more important to create one's own enclosing bubble of sound. Lending strength to the argument for headphones at work is evidence that music relaxes our muscles, improves our mood, and may even moderately reduce blood pressure, heart rate and anxiety.

The story of headphones began in 1910, when the US Navy received an odd letter written in purple ink on blue-and-pink paper. The letter writer, an eccentric inventor and repairman named Nathaniel Baldwin, from the US state of Utah, made what at the time was an astonishing claim: he had built, in his kitchen, a new kind of headset that could amplify sound. This was an opportune invention for the Navy, who asked for a sound test and then enthusiastically adopted the headsets, later called headphones, and used them in World War I for naval radio communication.

The purpose of headphones is to concentrate a quiet and private sound in the ear of the listener, which is a radical departure from music's social purpose in history. "Music, together with dance, co-evolved biologically and culturally to serve as a technology of social bonding," Nills L Wallin and Bjorn Merker wrote in The Origins of Music. Songs don't leave behind fossils, but evidence of musical notation dates back to Sumeria, 35,000 years ago, and in 1995 archeologists discovered a bone flute in southern Europe estimated to be 44,000 years old. If music evolved as a social glue for the species, as a way to make groups and keep them together, headphones have done what writing and literacy did for language - they made music private.

Author and columnist Stephen Marche wrote that separation from other people is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. It is "a by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence," he said. Americans are not alone in their desire for personal independence and privacy. Marche is right; wealth can buy - and modern technology can deliver - personal independence, and it is this that people have always sought.

Dr Michael Bull, an expert on personal music devices from the University of Sussex in the UK, has repeatedly made the larger point that personal music devices change how we relate to public spaces. Controlling our public spaces is more important now that more people are moving from the edges of cities to live in urban centers. "With the urban space, the more it's inhabited, the safer you feel," Bull says. "You feel safe if you can feel people there, but you don't want to interact with them." Headphones create shields for wearers, separating them from other people and their surroundings. Headphones have their own rules of good manners; they are like wearing a "Do not disturb" sign. We assume that people wearing them are busy and we should respect their privacy, so now people wear them to appear busy. In fact, it is now becoming quite common for people not to listen to anything at all, but just to wear headphones.

However, as pointed out at the beginning of this piece, although scientists have stated that headphones are bad for productivity, people still wear them at work. It is not just that headphones create privacy out of public areas, but also that music causes people to relax and reflect and pause. The outcome of relaxation, reflection and pausing at work won't be captured in minute-to-minute productivity metrics. What must be considered is that in moments of extreme focus, our attention radiates outward, toward the problem, rather than inward, on how to solve the problem. However, with music "When our minds are at ease, we're more likely to direct the spotlight of attention inward," Jonah Lehrer wrote in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. "The answers have been there all along. We just weren't listening." In a crowded world, real estate is the ultimate scarce resource, and a headphone is a small invisible fence around our minds - making space, creating separation, and helping us listen to ourselves.