The Flavor of Pleasure – Official Cambridge Guide to IELTS Test 2 Passage 1

Bài đọc The Flavor Pleasure thuộc phần IELTS Reading dạng Academic, gồm 13 câu hỏi. Hãy xem ngay bài viết dưới đây để biết đáp án chính xác, vị trí thông tin trong bài và mẹo làm bài giúp bạn tiến gần hơn đến Band 9! Chinh phục band điểm mơ ước cùng IKES qua các khóa tieng anh IELTS online hiệu quả và bền vững.

1. The Flavor of Pleasure Reading IELTS

1.1 Reading passage

No matter how much we talk about tasting our favourite flavours, relishing them really depends on a combined input from our senses that we experience through mouth, tongue and nose. The taste, texture, and feel of food are what we tend to focus on, but most important are the slight puffs of air as we chew our food – what scientists call “retronasal smell”.

Certainly, our mouths and tongues have taste buds, which are receptors for the five basic flavours: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami, or what is more commonly referred to as savoury. But our tongues are inaccurate instruments as far as flavour is concerned. They evolved to recognise only a few basic tastes in order to quickly identify toxins, which in nature are often quite bitter or acidly sour.

All the complexity, nuance, and pleasure of flavour come from the sense of smell operating in the back of the nose. It is there that a kind of alchemy occurs when we breathe up and out the passing whiffs of our chewed food. Unlike a hound’s skull with its extra-long nose, which evolved specifically to detect external smells, our noses have evolved to detect internal scents. Primates specialise in savouring the many millions of flavour combinations that they can create for their mouths.

Taste without retronasal smell is not much help in recognising flavour. Smell has been the most poorly understood of our senses and only recently has neuroscience, led by Yale University’s Gordon Shepherd, begun to shed light on its workings. Shepherd has come up with the term ‘neurogastronomy’ to link the disciplines of food science, neurology, psychology. and anthropology with the savoury elements of eating, one of the most enjoyed of human experiences.

In many ways, he is discovering that smell is rather like face recognition. The visual system detects patterns of light and dark and, building on experience, the brain creates a spatial map. It uses this to interpret the interrelationship of the patterns and draw conclusions that allow us to identify people and places. In the same way, we use patterns and ratios to detect both new and familiar flavours. As we eat, specialised receptors in the back of the nose detect the air molecules in our meals. From signals sent by the receptors, the brain understands smells as complex spatial patterns. Using these, as well as input from the other senses, it constructs the idea of specific flavours.

This ability to appreciate specific aromas turns out to be central to the pleasure we get from food, much as our ability to recognise individuals is central to the pleasures of social life. The process is so embedded in our brains that our sense of smell is critical to our enjoyment of life at large. Recent studies show that people who lose the ability to smell become socially insecure, and their overall level of happiness plummets.

Working out the role of smell in flavor interests food scientists, psychologists, and cooks alike. The relatively new discipline of molecular gastronomy, especially, relies on understanding the mechanics of aroma to manipulate flavor for maximum impact. In this discipline, chefs use their knowledge of the chemical changes that take place during cooking to produce eating pleasures that go beyond the ‘ordinary’.

However, whereas molecular gastronomy is concerned primarily with the food or ‘smell’ molecules, neurogastronomy is more focused on the receptor molecules and the brain’s spatial images for smell. Smell stimuli form what Shepherd terms ‘odor objects’, stored as memories, and these have a direct link with our emotions. The brain creates images of unfamiliar smells by relating them to other more familiar smells. Go back in history and this was part of our survival repertoire; like most animals, we drew on our sense of smell, when visual information was scarce, to single out prey.

Thus the brain’s flavor-recognition system is a highly complex perceptual mechanism that puts all five senses to work in various combinations. Visual and sound cues contribute, such as crunching, as does touch, including the texture and feel of food on our lips and in our mouths. Then there are the taste receptors, and finally, the smell, activated when we inhale. The engagement of our emotions can be readily illustrated when we picture some of the wide- ranging facial expressions that are elicited by various foods ~ many of them hard-wired into our brains at birth. Consider the response to the sharpness of a lemon and compare that with the face that is welcoming the smooth wonder of chocolate.

The flavor-sensing system, ever receptive to new combinations, helps to keep our brains active and flexible. It also has the power to shape our desires and ultimately our bodies. On the horizon we have the positive application of neurogastronomy: manipulating flavor to curb our appetites.

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1.2 Questions

Question 1 – 5

Complete the sentences below.

Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

1. According to scientists, the term………………………….characterises the most critical factor in appreciating flavour.
2. ‘Savoury’ is a better-known word for ………………………
3. The tongue was originally developed to recognise the unpleasant taste of …………………….
4. Human nasal cavities recognize …………………………… much better than external ones.
   5. Gordon Shepherd uses the word ‘neurogastronomy’ to draw together a number of …………………………… related to the enjoyment of eating.

Question 6 – 9

Complete the table below.

Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

Question 10 – 13

Answer the questions below.

Choose NO MORE THAN ONE WORD from the text for each answer.

10. In what form does the brain store ‘odor objects’?
11. When seeing was difficult, what did we use our sense of smell to find?
12. Which food item illustrates how flavour and positive emotion are linked?
13. What could be controlled in the future through flavour manipulation?

2. The Flavor of Pleasure Answers

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3. The Flavor of Pleasure Explanation

Questions 1-5

1. According to scientists, the term ……………………… characterises the most critical factor in appreciating flavour.
   → Dù chúng ta thường chú trọng vào (the taste, texture, and feel of food), nhưng thứ thực sự đóng vai trò (the most critical factor) lại là luồng khí nhẹ thoát ra khi nhai – thứ mà các nhà khoa học gọi là “retronasal smell”.
   Đáp án: retronasal smell
2. ‘Savoury’ is a better-known word for ………………………
   → Từ “umami” thường được nhắc đến với tên gọi phổ biến hơn là (savoury), tức là (a better known word for) hương vị đậm đà, dễ chịu.
   Đáp án: umami
3. The tongue was originally developed to recognise the unpleasant taste of ………………………
   → Lưỡi con người ban đầu (developed to recognise) một vài vị cơ bản nhằm nhanh chóng phát hiện ra các chất có vị khó chịu (unpleasant taste), chẳng hạn như những chất độc thường có vị đắng hoặc chua trong tự nhiên.
   Đáp án: toxins
4. Human nasal cavities recognize ……………………… much better than external ones.
   → Không giống như khứu giác của loài chó chuyên biệt để phát hiện (external smells), hệ thống mũi ở con người (human nasal cavities) đã tiến hoá để dễ dàng nhận biết các mùi bên trong, tức là (internal scents).
   Đáp án: internal scents
5. Gordon Shepherd uses the word ‘neurogastronomy’ to draw together a number of ……………………… related to the enjoyment of eating.
   → Từ “neurogastronomy” được Shepherd đưa ra nhằm (draw together) nhiều lĩnh vực nghiên cứu như khoa học thực phẩm, thần kinh học, tâm lý học và nhân học – tất cả đều (related to the enjoyment of eating).
   Đáp án: disciplines

Questions 6–9

6. Patterns of dark and light are used to put together a ………………………
   → Hệ thống thị giác nhận ra các (patterns of dark and light) và từ đó tạo ra (put together) một dạng bản đồ trong không gian mà ta gọi là spatial map.
   Đáp án: spatial map
7. Facial recognition is key to our enjoyment of ………………………
   → Khả năng nhận diện khuôn mặt (facial recognition) chính là yếu tố quan trọng (key to our enjoyment of) các mối quan hệ xã hội, nơi con người tìm thấy sự gắn kết.
   Đáp án: social life
8. Receptors recognise the ……………………… in food.
   → Khi ăn, các thụ thể đặc biệt sẽ (recognise) những (air molecules) có trong thức ăn – đây là yếu tố tạo nên cảm nhận mùi.
   Đáp án: air molecules
9. The brain identifies certain ………………………
   → Dựa vào tín hiệu từ thụ thể, não bộ (identifies) những (flavours) cụ thể bằng cách phân tích các mô hình không gian mùi phức tạp.
   Đáp án: flavours

Questions 10–13

10. In what form does the brain store ‘odour objects’?
    → Những kích thích khứu giác tạo ra các “odour objects”, sau đó được não (stored) dưới dạng (memories).
    Đáp án: memories
11. When seeing was difficult, what did we use our sense of smell to find?
    → Trong hoàn cảnh thiếu ánh sáng hoặc không thể quan sát, con người đã dùng khứu giác để (find) con mồi – hay còn gọi là (prey).
    Đáp án: prey
12. Which food item illustrates how flavour and positive emotion are linked?
    → Món ăn tiêu biểu thể hiện mối liên hệ giữa hương vị và cảm xúc tích cực là chocolate, vì trong khi chanh tạo phản ứng tiêu cực (sharpness of lemon), thì chocolate lại mang lại cảm giác (positive emotion).
    Đáp án: chocolate
13. What could be controlled in the future through flavour manipulation?
    → Một ứng dụng tiềm năng của (flavour manipulation) trong tương lai là việc kiểm soát (controlled) sự thèm ăn, hay còn gọi là (appetites).
    Đáp án: appetites

Trên đây là toàn bộ đáp án bài The Flavor of Pleasure. Để chuẩn bị tốt cho bài thi IELTS, bạn có thể tham khảo dịch vụ IELTS online của IKES, nơi cung cấp tài liệu học tập chất lượng, giúp bạn nắm vững kiến thức và cải thiện kỹ năng nhanh chóng. IKES sẽ là người bạn đồng hành đáng tin cậy trên hành trình chinh phục mục tiêu IELTS của bạn.

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