The Power of Nothing Reading Answers

Dec 3, 2022

The power of nothing reading answers contains 14 questions that need to be answered in 20 minutes. The IELTS reading passage consists of the following types of questions including matching questions, multiple choice questions, and information identification questions. Candidates need to match the listed statements with questions from A-H and 1-6 respectively. Candidates are required to choose the correct option from multiple-choice questions. They need to state whether the given statement is true or false. If the information is not given, candidates can choose the third option- not given. Candidates must read the passage, identify keywords, and recognize synonyms to answer the question. In the IELTS Reading Section, the candidates are presented with different question styles with specific instructions. It is important that candidates abide by the word limit as well as answer accurately for what is asked.

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Section 1

Read the Passage to Answer the Following Questions

The Power of Nothing IELTS Reading Sample

Section 2

Solution and Explanation

Type 1. Matching (Questions 1 to 6):

Listed Statements marked from A to H, which have to be matched with the questions:

Should easily be understood.
Should improve by itself.
Should not involve any mysticism.
Ought to last a minimum length of time.
Needs to be treated at the right time.
Should give more recognition.
Can earn valuable money.
Do not rely on any specific treatment

Questions:

Appointments with an alternative practitioner.
An alternative practitioner's description of the treatment.
An alternative practitioner who has faith in what he does.
The illness of patients convinced of alternative practice.
Improvements of patients receiving alternative practice.
Conventional medical doctors (who are aware of placebo).

Answers:

Question 1:

Answer: D
Supporting Statement: Your treatment should involve physical contact, and each session with your patients should last at least half an hour.
Keywords: last at least
Keyword location: Paragraph A, 3rd line.
Explanation: To ensure a successful placebo effect in the patients, a practitioner needs to ensure a few points. Those points are enthusiasm, sympathy, reassurance, physical contact, and efficient time to the patients.

Question 2:

Answer: A
Supporting Statement: Describe your treatment in familiar words, but embroidered with a hint of mysticism: energy fields, energy flows, energy blocks, meridians, forces, auras, rhythms, and the like. Refer to the knowledge of an earlier age: wisdom carelessly swept aside by the rise and rise of blind, mechanistic science.
Keywords: describe, familiar words
Keyword location: Paragraph A, 8th line.
Explanation: To carry out a placebo effect, the patient undergoing it must understand its concept clearly. Hence, it is encouraged that the practitioners explain the concept to the people clearly. And in terms of familiar words to make them comfortable and easy to understand the concept.

Question 3:

Answer: G
Supporting Statement: Well yes, it could – and often well enough to earn you a living. A good living if you are sufficiently convincing, or better still, really believe in your therapy.
Keywords: earn, good living, believe, therapy
Keyword location: Paragraph B, the first line.
Explanation:A practitioner needs to have full faith in their therapies for them to work. If they lack faith in their work, they won’t be able to explain and convince their patients to undergo the therapy. This affects their living.

Question 4:

Answer: B
Supporting Statement: Your healing power would be the outcome of a paradoxical force that conventional medicine recognizes but remains oddly ambivalent about: the placebo effect.
Keywords: healing power, conventional medicine
Keyword location: Paragraph B, last line
Explanation: As our body has the power of self healing, hence placebo effect is used for confidence.

Question 5:

Answer: H
Supporting Statement: Many of the ingredients of that opening recipe — the physical contact, the generous swathes of time, the strong hints of supernormal healing power are just the kind of thing likely to impress patients. It’s hardly surprising, then, that complementary practitioners are generally best at mobilizing the placebo effect, says Arthur Kleinman, professor of social anthropology at Harvard University.
Keywords: physical contact, the generous swathes of time, supernormal healing power
Keyword location: Paragraph J, 1st line
Explanation: There are quite a few methods for self-healing such as physical contact, the generous swathes of time, the strong hints of supernormal healing power and more.

Question 6:

Answer: F
Supporting Statement: One of the great strengths of CAM may be its practitioners’ skill in deploying the placebo effect to accomplish real healing. “Complementary practitioners are miles better at producing non-specific effects and good therapeutic relationships,” says Edzard Ernst, professor of CAM at Exeter University.
Keywords: good therapeutic, real healing
Keyword location: Paragraph D, 1^st line
Explanation: Doctors believe in placebo methods as it helps to accomplish real healing. Also, complementary practitioners are miles better at producing non-specific effects and good therapeutic relationships.

Type 2: Multiple choice questions (Questions 7 to 9)

In the fifth paragraph, the writer uses the example of anger and sadness to illustrate that:

People’s feeling could affect their physical behavior
Scientists don’t understand how the mind influences the body.
Research on the placebo effect is very limited
How the placebo achieves its effect is yet to be understood.

Research on pain control attracts most of the attention because

Scientists have discovered that endorphins can help to reduce pain.
Only a limited number of researchers gain relevant experience
Pain-reducing agents might also be involved in the placebo effect.
Patients often experience pain and like to complain about it

Fabrizio Benedetti’s research on endorphins indicates that

They are widely used to regulate pain.
They can be produced by will full thoughts
They can be neutralized by introducing naloxone.
Their pain-relieving effects do not last long enough.

Answers

Question 7:

Answer: A
Supporting Statement: At one level, it should come as no surprise that our state of mind can influence our physiology: anger opens the superficial blood vessels of the face; sadness pumps the tear glands.

Keywords: state of mind, anger, sadness
Keyword location: paragraph E, the first statement
Explanation: Feelings are a result of our hormones biologically or any psychological reasons too. E.g. Excess cortisol may make an individual sad, moreover, failure or loss of something may result in sadness too. All these feelings affect how an individual behaves physically, e.g., anger causes flushing of the face, and sadness may result in tears.

Question 8:

Answer: D
Supporting Statement: Most of the scant research done so far has focused on the control of pain because it’s one of the commonest complaints and lends itself to experimental study. Here, attention has turned to the endorphins, morphine-like neurochemicals known to help control pain.
Keywords: pain, scant search
Keyword location: Paragraph E, the last statement
Explanation: Pain is the most common associated symptom with any disorder, hence, most of the research is done on pain management.

Question 9:

Answer: C
Supporting Statement: “But endorphins are still out in front.” That case has been strengthened by the recent work of Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin, who showed that the placebo effect can be abolished by a drug, naloxone, which blocks the effects of endorphins.
Keywords: Fabrizio Benedetti, endorphins
Keyword location: Paragraph G
Explanation: Fabrizio Benedetti did a study on human volunteers suffering from pain induced by a blood pressure cuff. He used to relieve the pain using morphine initially, and on a sudden day he decided to replace morphine with saline. The saline solution also relieved the pain, which was a placebo effect. But when he added naloxone to the saline solution, the relief stopped and pain reappeared.

Type 3: Information identification type: True, False, Information is Not given (Questions 10 to 14)

There is enough information for scientists to fully understand the placebo effect.
A London-based researcher discovered that red pills should be taken off the market.
People’s preferences for brands would also have an effect on their healing.
Medical doctors have a range of views of the newly introduced drug of chlorpromazine.
Alternative practitioners are seldom known for applying the placebo effect.

Answers:

Question 10:

Answer: False
Supporting Statement:

Your healing power would be the outcome of a paradoxical force that conventional medicine recognizes but remains oddly ambivalent about: the placebo effect.
Though scientists don’t know exactly how placebos work, they have accumulated a fair bit of knowledge about how to trigger the effect.

Keywords: ambivalent (having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas), don’t know
Keyword location: Paragraph B, last line
Explanation:The statement indicates that the treatment of a disease is because of the conventional medicine taken in. Whereas, the biological action of the placebo effect is oddly ambivalent. It has mixed feelings and contradictory ideas associated with it in the minds of medicinal professionals. The ambivalent nature is because of the absence of enough scientific evidence.

Question 11:

Answer: Not given
Supporting Statement: A London rheumatologist found, for example, that red dummy capsules made more effective painkillers than blue, green, or yellow ones.
Keywords: London, red pills
Keyword location: Paragraph H, 8th line.
Explanation: The question indicates the withdrawal of the red pill from the market. But the supporting statement states that red dummy pills proved to be more effective. And there is no statement indicating its removal.

Question 12:

Answer: True
Supporting Statement: Even branding can make a difference: if Aspirin or Tylenol is what you like to take for a headache, their chemically identical generic equivalents may be less effective.
Keywords: Branding, difference
Keyword location: Paragraph H, last statement.
Explanation: People often have their faith in one brand, the one they have used regularly for ages. Once they have their full faith in a brand, changing their brands disrupts their belief and makes them doubtful. As we have gained from the passage that healing requires the will of the mind too, a doubtful mind affects the healing process itself.

Question 13:

Answer: True
Supporting Statement: Decades ago, when the major tranquilizer chlorpromazine was being introduced, a doctor in Kansas categorized his colleagues according to whether they were keen on it, openly skeptical of its benefits or took a “let’s try and see，’ attitude.
Keywords: doctor in Kansas , tranquilizer chlorpromazine
Keyword location: Paragraph I, 1st statement.
Explanation: Doctors believed in treatment with tranquilizer chlorpromazine, when it was being introduced

Question 14:

Answer: False
Supporting Statement: And this year Ernst surveyed, published studies that compared doctors’ bedside manners. The studies turned up one consistent finding: “Physicians who adopt a warm, friendly and reassuring manner,” he reported, “are more effective than those whose consultations are formal and do not offer reassurance”.
Keywords: Ernst surveyed, compared, more effective
Keyword location: Paragraph I, last statement.
Explanation: Doctors compared alternative practitioners as they were not that aware for applying the placebo effect.