IELTS Research Reports

An empirical investigation of the process of writing Academic Readingtest items for the International English Language Testing SystemF If the central problem of the artist was in fact one of adjustment to the realities of society,one can see the possibilities for identification between the artist and the consciousnessof the child, whose difficulty and chief source of pain often lie in adjustment andaccommodation to his or her environment. In childhood lay the perfect image ofinsecurity and isolation, of fear and bewilderment, of vulnerability and potential violation.Some authors took the identification to an extreme, turning to this image as a means ofescape, a way of withdrawal from spiritual and emotional confusion in a tired culture.They could be said to have taken refuge in a world of fantasy and nostalgia for childhood.G The nineteenth century saw the deterioration of the concept of the child as a symbol ofinnocence. The symbol which had such strength and richness in the poetry of Blake andWordsworth and some later novels became in time the static and sentimentalised childfigureof the popular nineteenth-century imagination; only a residue of a literary theme,retaining little or nothing of the significance it had earlier borne. It was against thisconventionally innocent child that a revolution was effected at the turn of the nineteenthcentury. Just as the eighteenth century had turned from the Christian doctrine of originalsin to the cult of original virtue in the child, so the nineteenth century turned from theassumption of original innocence to the scientific investigation of the infant and childconsciousness and its importance to the development of the adult mind.H A distinction can be made between those late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authorswho went to the child to express their involvement with life, and those who approachedthe symbol as a retreat from ‘life’s decay’. In writing of childhood, we find that in avery exact and significant sense the modern author is writing of life. In the literature ofthe child in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we have a reflection of the situationof certain artists in modern times; their response, at a deep and significant level, tothe condition in which they found themselves; and, if their feelings could achieve theprojection, the condition in which they found humanity. Considering the nature of thatcondition, it is perhaps not remarkable that through writing of childhood there should bethose who wanted to go back to the beginning to begin again, and others who wanted justto go back.Experienced Group: WilliamItemsQuestions 1–6Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 0?In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, writeTRUEFALSEif the statement agrees with the informationif the statement contradicts the informationNOT GIVEN if there is no information on thisIELTS Research Reports Volume 11365