Luyện theo cấu trúc Cambridge IELTS 14 · Speaking Part 1–3: Science Projects and Curiosity

1. Mostly, yes, although it really depended on the teacher. I had a chemistry teacher who turned every lesson into a bit of a show, so I looked forward to those classes, whereas physics felt like endless formulas.

2. These days I'm most curious about anything to do with the human brain, like how memory works or why we dream. I suppose it's because it's so closely connected to everyday life.

3. Quite often, actually. I follow a couple of channels that explain new discoveries in plain language, and I tend to watch them while I'm having dinner. They're short, so they don't feel like studying.

4. Yes, a few years ago I went to one in the capital with my cousins. The best part was an interactive section where you could generate electricity by pedalling a bike, and we spent far too long competing to see who could light up the most bulbs.

I'd like to describe a project I did in my second year of secondary school for our school's science fair. The question we chose was whether music affects how fast plants grow, which sounds a bit silly now, but at the time we were convinced we were about to make a major discovery.

I worked with two close friends from my class. One of them was very organised, so she took charge of the schedule, while the other was good at drawing and designed our poster. My job was mainly to collect and record the data.

We bought twelve small pots of the same kind of bean and divided them into three groups. One group was kept in silence, one listened to classical music for two hours a day, and the last one listened to loud rock music. Every morning before class, I measured the height of each plant with a ruler and wrote the figures in a notebook. After four weeks we turned the results into graphs for our display.

Honestly, the results didn't show much at all, because the differences between the groups were tiny. But I enjoyed the project for other reasons. It was the first time I had planned an experiment from start to finish, and I learned how important it is to keep everything except one factor the same. Our teacher also praised us for admitting that our results were inconclusive, which taught me that being honest about failure is part of science.

1. I think it's largely because science becomes more abstract in secondary school. Young children learn through hands-on activities, but later on lessons often turn into memorising formulas for exams, and students can't see how any of it relates to their own lives.

2. On the whole, yes. They give students a reason to investigate a question they actually care about, and presenting to judges builds confidence. The only risk is that they can become a competition between parents, especially when adults end up doing most of the work.

3. I'd argue for a better balance rather than replacing theory. Experiments make concepts memorable, but without the theory behind them, they're just a fun activity. Ideally, students should do an experiment first, notice something puzzling, and then learn the theory that explains it.

4. It's increasingly important. People are constantly asked to make decisions based on scientific information, for example about vaccines, diet or climate change. If they don't understand basic ideas like evidence and probability, they're much more likely to be misled by false claims online.

5. Ideally both. Private companies are efficient at turning discoveries into products, but they naturally focus on research that will make a profit. Governments, on the other hand, can fund long-term or basic research that might not pay off for decades but could eventually transform society.