Title Bản sao của AUTHENTIC-READING-TEST-COLLECTIONS-2015-2016.pdf ✅

www.ngocbach.com www.ngocbach.com Page 0 AUTHENTIC READING TEST COLLECTIONS IELTS NGOC BACH


www.ngocbach.com Page 3 MENTAL GYMNASTICS A. The working day has just started at the head office of Barclays Bank in London. Seventeen staff are helping themselves to a buffet breakfast as young psychologist Sebastian Bailey enters the room to begin the morning‘s training session. But this is no ordinary training session. He‘s not here to sharpen their finance or management skills. He‘s here to exercise their brains. B. Today‘s workout, organized by a company called the Mind Gym in London, entitled ―having presence‖. What follows is an intense 90-minute session in which this rather abstract concept is gradually broken down into a concrete set of feelings, mental tricks and behaviors. At one point the bankers are instructed to shut their eyes and visualize themselves filling the room and then the building. They finish up by walking around the room acting out various levels of presence, from low-key to over the top. C. It‘s easy to poke fun. Yet similar mental workouts are happening in corporate seminar rooms around the globe. The Mind Gym alone offers some 70 different sessions, including ones on mental stamina, creativity for logical thinkers and ―zoom learning‖. Other outfits draw more directly on the exercise analogy, offering ―neurotics‖ courses with names like ―brain sets‖ and ―cerebral fitness‖. Then there are books with titles like Pumping Ions, full of brainteasers that claim to ―flex your mind‖, and software packages offering memory and spatial-awareness games. D. D But whatever the style, the companies‘ sales pitch is invariably the same - follow our routines to shape and sculpt your brain or mind, just as you might tone and train your body. And, of course, they nearly all claim that their mental workouts draw on serious scientific research and thinking into how the brain works. E. One outfit, Brainergy of Cambridge, Massachusetts (motto: ―Because your grey matter matters‖) puts it like this: ―Studies have shown that mental exercise can cause changes in brain anatomy and brain chemistry which