Can you Do Them at the Same Time? Reading Answers

Oct 1, 2025

Can you Do Them at the Same Time? Reading Answers is an academic reading answers topic. Can you Do Them at the Same Time? Reading Answers has a total of 13 IELTS questions in total. In the question set, you have to choose which paragraph contains the given statement. In the next question set, choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. In the last question set, you have to state whether the statement is yes, no or not given according to the passage

The IELTS Reading section is an essential part of the test that evaluates a candidate's comprehension and analysis of various passage types. You will work through a number of IELTS reading practice problems in this section that resemble actual test situations. These questions are designed to help you improve your ability to recognise essential concepts, extract particular facts, and make inferences. Practising these IELTS reading problems can help you get comfortable with the structure and increase your confidence for the exam, regardless of whether you are studying for the Academic or General Training module.

Check: Get 10 Free Sample Papers
Check: Register for IELTS Coaching - Join for Free Trial Class Now

Section 1

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 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. 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 reach 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 "ban: 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 recognise a 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 to respond 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, doesn'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 used 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 peak 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 future, though. We might yet look back one day on people like Debbie and Alun as ancestors of a new breed of true multitaskers.

Questions 28-32

The Reading Passage has ten paragraphs A-J. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter A-J.

28. A theory explained delay happens when selecting one reaction

Answer: F

Supporting statement: 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.

Keywords: delay, selecting a response, response selection bottleneck

Keyword Location: Para F, Lines 3-5

Explanation: Paragraph F describes the "response selection bottleneck" theory, which states that choosing a reaction to a stimulus is a task that uses up brainpower and causes a delay in responding to a second stimulus.

29. Different age group responds to important things differently

Answer: I

Supporting statement: 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.

Keywords: young drivers, older drivers, failed to notice

Keyword Location: Para I, Lines 6-7

Explanation: Paragraph I discusses age differences in multitasking, specifically noting that older drivers struggled to notice highly relevant or more important parts of a scene compared to young drivers.

30. Conflicts happened when visual and audio element emerge simultaneously

Answer: C

Supporting statement: 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.

Keywords: image, sound, same time, one task is postponed

Keyword Location: Para C, Lines 1-3

Explanation: Paragraph C introduces the experiment where a visual task (image) and an auditory task (sound) are given simultaneously, leading to conflict and delay.

31. An experiment designed to demonstrate the critical part of the brain for multitasking

Answer: B

Supporting statement: The problem, according to René Marois, a psychologist... is that there's a sticking point in the brain. To demonstrate this, Marois devised an experiment to locate it. Volunteers watch a screen... Then they learn to listen to different recordings...

Keywords: sticking point in the brain, devised an experiment

Keyword Location: Para B, Lines 2-3

Explanation: Paragraph B introduces René Marois's goal to find the "sticking point" (bottleneck) in the brain and describes the first two parts of the experiment he designed to achieve this.

32. A viewpoint favours the optimistic side of multitasking performance

Answer: G

Supporting statement: But David Meyer... doesn'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".

Keywords: optimist, Virtually perfect time-sharing

Keyword Location: Para G, Lines 3-4

Explanation: Paragraph G introduces David Meyer, who is described as an optimist who argues against the bottleneck theory and provides evidence for virtually perfect time-sharing after practice, representing a positive view of multitasking.

Question 33

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

33. Which one is correct about the experiment conducted by René Marois?

A. participants performed poorly on the listening task solely

B. volunteers press a different key on different color

C. participants need to use different fingers on the different colored object

D. they did a better job on Mixed image and sound information

Answer: C

Supporting statement: 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.

Keywords: Different coloured, finger

Keyword Location: Para B, Lines 4-5

Explanation: The experiment stated in the text required the participants to associate a visual stimulus (colored circle) with a specific motor response (pressing a key) using a specific finger, as stated directly in the text.

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. first limitation can be avoided by certain measures

Answer: B

Supporting statement: 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.

Keywords: second one, unexpectedly, unable to act upon it

Keyword Location: Para D, Lines 4-6

Explanation: The attentional blink (the first limitation) is the delay (lag/inability to act) that occurs when attention is focused on one object and a second object appears within the concentration window.

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

Answer: A

Supporting statement: 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 used discretion: sometimes it chooses to delay one task while completing another.

Keywords: optimist, practice, execute two tasks simultaneously, central cognitive processor, used discretion

Keyword Location: Para G, Lines 3-8

Explanation: Meyer's experiments showed that people could execute dual tasks after enough practice (at least 2000 tries), not just after failing several attempts. Option A is contradicted by the strong, positive results Meyer found after extensive practice.

Questions 36-40

Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage? 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 two presenting tasks means shorter delay toward the second one.

Answer: YES

Supporting statement: The largest dual-task delays occur when the two tasks are presented simultaneously; delays progressively shorten as the interval between presenting the tasks lengthens.

Keywords: delays progressively, shorten, presenting the tasks

Keyword Location: Para C, Lines 5-6

Explanation: Lengthens means a longer gap, and delays progressively shorten, confirming a shorter delay as stated in the text.

37. Incapable of human memory cause people to sometimes miss the differences when presented two similar images.

Answer: YES

Supporting statement: 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... 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".

Keywords: short-term visual memory, capacity shortage, change blindness

Keyword Location: Para E, Lines 1-4

Explanation: The passage directly links the capacity shortage of short-term visual memory to change blindness, which is the inability to spot differences in similar images.

38. Marois has a different opinion on the claim that training removes the bottleneck effect,

Answer: NO

Supporting statement: Marois agrees that practice can sometimes erase interference effects. Where he disagrees with Meyer is in what the brain is doing to achieve this.

Keywords: Marois, erase interference effects, Meyer

Keyword Location: Para H, Lines 1-3

Explanation: Marois agrees with the general outcome that practice can remove interference (the bottleneck effect). His disagreement with Meyer is only about the mechanism (how the brain achieves it), not whether the effect is removed.

39. Art Kramer proved there is a correlation between multitasking performance and genders

Answer: NOT GIVEN

Explanation: Kramer's study focused on the differences between age groups (young and old) and did not mention or compare the performance of different genders.

40. The author doesn't believe that the effect of practice could bring any variation.

Answer: NO

Supporting statement: While it's Clear that practice can often make a difference, especially as we age, the basic facts remain sobering.

Keywords: practice, make a difference

Keyword Location: Para J, Line 5

Explanation: The author states it is clear that practice can often make a difference, directly contradicting the idea that the author doesn't believe in the variation brought by practice.

Read More IELTS Reading Related Samples