tailieunhanh - IELTS Academic Reading Sample 100 - Finding the Lost Freedom

Nhằm giúp các bạn có thêm tài liệu tham khảo và ôn thi tiếng Anh, mời các bạn cùng tham khảo nội dung tài liệu IELTS Academic Reading Sample 100 - Finding the Lost Freedom dưới đây. Hy vọng nội dung tài liệu phục vụ hữu ích nhu cầu học tập và ôn thi. | You are advised to spend about 15 minutes on Questions 1 - 14 which refer to Reading Passage 100 below. FINDING THE LOST FREEDOM 1. The private car is assumed to have widened our horizons and increased our mobility. When we consider our children s mobility they can be driven to more places and more distant places than they could visit without access to a motor vehicle. However allowing our cities to be dominated by cars has progressively eroded children s independent mobility. Children have lost much of their freedom to explore their own neighbourhood or city without adult supervision. In recent surveys when parents in some cities were asked about their own childhood experiences the majority remembered having more or far more opportunities for going out on their own compared with their own children today. They had more freedom to explore their own environment. 2. Children s independent access to their local streets may be important for their own personal mental and psychological development. Allowing them to get to know their own neighbourhood and community gives them a sense of place . This depends on active exploration which is not provided for when children are passengers in cars. Such children may see more but they learn less. Not only is it important that children be able to get to local play areas by themselves but walking and cycling journeys to school and to other destinations provide genuine play activities in themselves. 3. There are very significant time and money costs for parents associated with transporting their children to school sport and to other locations. Research in the United Kingdom estimated that this cost in 1990 was between 10 billion and 20 billion pounds. 4. The reduction in children s freedom may also contribute to a weakening of the sense of local community. As fewer children and adults use the streets as pedestrians these streets become less sociable places. There is less opportunity for children and adults to have the spontaneous of