BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 507

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IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST 507 – PASSAGE – 2

IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST – 507

READING PASSAGE – 2

The Science of Colour

A. The body of scientific research into colour is growing, and it all points to one thing: our perception of colour really does affect our minds and our bodies. In a series of tests administered in the 1970s, it was established that red pills are more effective as stimulants than blue pills, and that blue pills appeared to be more effective in curing insomnia than orange ones.

Meanwhile, green, white or blue pills, aren’t as effective as red ones as painkillers. But in the experiments, the pills used were all placebos – in other words, fake pills – there was no painkiller, there was no stimulant. Meanwhile, in other experiments it was found that male prison inmates became physically weaker when they were housed in pink-painted cells and that football teams wearing red were statistically more likely to win than teams in other colours.

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B. And yet, while its effects on us may be profound, colour ‘doesn’t really exist in the world’, say Dr Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist at University College London. Blue isn’t a property of denim, or skies, or oceans, but of how our eyes interpret a particular set of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, which we call visible light. Red isn’t a property of blood or football shirts, but how our eyes interpret another, longer set of wavelengths.

‘Human vision is trichromatic,’ says Prof Andrew Stockman, a UCL colleague of Dr Lotto, ‘like a colour television.’ We have three different colour receptors, cones, in our eyes, each designed to pick up different wavelengths of light. These are red, green and blue. Most other mammals have two, meaning they can only detect green and blue wavelengths. If we had only one receptor, we’d see the world in something like black and white.

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C This is the product of billions of years of evolution. ‘The whole point of colour vision is not to inspire poets, but to allow contrast detection,’ says Russell Foster, professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford. ‘You’ve got a much better chance of detecting an object against a background if you have colour vision.’ The wavelength of the light around us has affected us since the dawn of life, and it still does. Foster, who researches the effect of light on sleep, says that our biological clock is profoundly affected not just by the brightness of the light we’re exposed to, but also its colour.

He was behind the discovery of a previously unknown cell in the optic nerve which acts as a sort of photon-counter, keeping track of how much light has hit it in the last few minutes. It is especially sensitive to blue light – specifically, the blue of a blue sky. If you’re exposed to light of this colour, it will make you more alert. ‘Blue light keeps us awake far more effectively than red light,’ he says. ‘There are apps on the market now, that change your lighting before you go to bed, to get you ready for sleep.’

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D But as Lotto says, context is everything; red can be friendly when it’s associated with a ketchup bottle, less so when associated with blood. Lotto spends much of his time creating optical illusions to demonstrate how humans see and perceive colour, and the impact of context upon it. ‘I can make you see blue or yellow, depending on what surrounds it,’ he says. ‘When I change your perception of it, what I’m changing is the meaning of the information, I’m not changing the physics of the information itself.’

E There’s even some indication that the words we use to describe colour affect our ability to see it. Benjamin Whorf, a linguistic theorist, claimed that our language limits our perception: if our language lacks a word for something, we find it harder to think about that thing. The Whorfian hypothesis has been largely discredited after all, if we really couldn’t think about things we didn’t have a word for, we wouldn’t need to come up with new words.

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Nevertheless, experiments have shown that societies such as the Tarahumara tribe in Northern Mexico, which lacks different words for ‘blue’ and ‘green’, find it harder to find the odd one out in a group of greenish-blue squares. Meanwhile, the fact that we distinguish indigo and violet as separate colours is largely down to the scientist Sir Isaac Newton, who named and split up the colours of the rainbow completely arbitrarily.

F The cultural contexts and meaning of colours has been picked up, of course, by marketers. Purple is status, pink is femininity, and, of course, blue suggests competence while red is exciting. Using these colours in your branding or logo, apparently, will subtly instil those messages in potential customers’ minds. In her paper on the subject, Zena O’Connor questions the validity of many of these highly specific claims, as the title ‘Colour psychology and colour therapy: Caveat emptor’ makes clear.

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As O’Connor says: ‘The information available is often presented in an authoritative manner, exhorting the reader to believe a range of claims, such as red is physically stimulating and arousing and blue is calming and healing. However, evidence is rarely cited and, when it is, it’s often in reference to findings that are outdated’. But even after the dubious claims have been weeded out, colour clearly still has a profound impact on our mental life.

Questions 14-20

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-F.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

14. The view that the ideas of one researcher are no longer taken very seriously.

15. An assertion that there may be no scientific basis for the distinctions drawn between certain colours.

16. A suggestion that the colour of their clothing may affect how well certain people perform.

17. A description of a recently introduced product that reflects research into the way colour affects human behaviour.

18. An explanation of the main reason why human beings developed the ability to perceive colour.

19. A description of how the perception of colour can be manipulated without people realising it.

20. An explanation of how human perception of colour contrasts with that of many other species.

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Questions 21 and 22

Choose TWO letters, A-E.

Which TWO of the following statements are true of the 1970s research into the colour of pills?

A. White pills worked best for people who needed relief from pain.

B. Blue pills worked best for people who were having problems sleeping.

C. Red pills generally failed to help any patients.

D. Pills in certain colours worked better with male patients.

E. None of the pills used contained any active ingredients.

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Questions 23-26

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

It is apparent from the 23…………. of Zena O’Connor’s paper on the subject that she has little faith in the claims made by 24…………. regarding the effect of colour on clients’ perceptions of products. She says that whilst such claims may appear 25…………. in the way they are put forward, they often cite research which is 26…………. or are unsupported by sufficient evidence.

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