Does IQ Test Prove Creativity – IELTS Reading Answers

The IELTS Reading Module offers a fantastic chance to achieve excellent scores. It assesses a candidate’s reading comprehension skills in English. You must comprehend the various question types in order to perform at your best in this area. Ideally, you should not spend more than 20 minutes on a passage.

The Academic passage, Does IQ Test Prove Creativity, is a reading passage that appeared in an IELTS Test. Try to find the answers to get an idea of the difficulty level of the passages in the actual reading test. If you want more passages to solve, try taking one of our IELTS reading practice tests.

So, let’s see how easy this passage is for you and if you’re able to make it in 20 minutes.

The question types found in this passage are:

• True/False/Not Given (Q. 1-4)
• Matching Features (Q. 5-9)
• Summary Completion (Q. 10-13)

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Reading Passage

Does IQ Test Prove Creativity? 

A Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development of humans, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it? What is going on in our brains when ideas form? Does it feel the same for artists and scientists? We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars, and Al gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process -and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.

B In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general, beyond a certain level IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative.

C Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the “creative personality” tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. “Creatives” have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.

D But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead.

E Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high 1Q with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so maybe open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confusing thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.

F But what of the creative act itself? One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. “It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear” says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. “Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively”. Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain is also important.

G Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right-hand side. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be.

H And creativity need not always be a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes, on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity” internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work.

I Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.

Questions 1-4

1. High IQ guarantees more ability to create in one person than one with an average score.
2. For a competitive society, individuals’ language proficiency is more important than other abilities.
3. A wider range of resources and knowledge can be integrated into bringing about creative approaches.
4. A creative person does not necessarily suffer more mental illness.

Questions 5-9

A Jamison

B Jordan Peterson

C Guy Claxton

D Howard-Jone

E Teresa Amabile

F Vera John-Steiner

5 Instead of producing a negative mood, a shift of mood state might be the one important factor in inducing creative thinking.

6 Where the more positive moods individuals achieve, there is higher creativity in organizations.

7 Good interpersonal relationships and trust contribute to a person with more creativity.

8 Creativity demands different kinds of thinking that can be easily changed back and forth.

9 A certain creative mind can be upgraded if we are put into more practice in assessing and processing ideas.

Questions 10-13

But what of the creative act itself? In 1978, Colin Martindale made records of the

pattern of brain waves as people made up stories by applying a system constituted of many 10…………………. Two phrases of mind-state such as 11…………….. are found. While people were still planning their stories, their brains showed little active sign and the mental activity was showing a very relaxed state as the same sort of brain activity as in sleep, dreaming or relaxing. However, the experiment proved the signal of 12……………. went down and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal when these people who are in a laid-back state were required to produce their stories. Strikingly, it was found that the people who were perceived to have the greatest 13………………….. in brain activity between two stages, produced storylines with the highest level of creativity.

Does IQ Test Prove Creativity Reading Answers and Explanations 

1 Answer: False

Question type: True/False/Not Given

Answer location: Paragraph A, line 4

Answer explanation: In the concluding line of Paragraph A, it is mentioned that “While it depends on the discipline, in general, beyond a certain level IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative.”. It proves that the level of IQ is not related to the creativity of a person. So, it is not true that a person with a high IQ will create more than a person with less IQ. As the statement is false, the answer is False.

2 Answer: Not Given

Question type: True/False/Not Given

Answer location: N.A.

Answer explanation: As there is no reference to whether language proficiency of an individual is more important than other abilities in the competitive society, the answer is Not Given.

Tips for Answering the Question Types in the Does IQ Test Prove Creativity Reading Answers

Let us check out some quick tips to answer the types of questions in the ‘Does IQ Test Prove Creativity?’ Reading Answers passage.

True/False/Not Given:

In IELTS Reading, ‘True, False, Not Given’ questions are based on facts. Several factual statements will be provided to you, and it is up to you to determine whether or not they are accurate by reading the text.

To answer this type of question, you can use the following strategies:

• Read the question and identify the keywords – Before reading the material, have a look at your list of True, False, and Not Given questions.
• Scan the passage for synonyms or paraphrased words of the keywords – When you have highlighted the keywords, swiftly read the text to look for paraphrases or synonyms.
• Match the highlighted words in the questions with their synonyms in the text – Once you find both sets of keywords, cross-check them to find the answer.
• Identify the answer – If the facts match, the answer is TRUE, and in case it doesn’t match, it is FALSE. If you are unable to find the answer or unsure of it, mark it NOT GIVEN.

Matching Features:

In this type of question, you will have to match a list of options with the relevant set of statements. Some tips to answer matching features questions and obtain a high band in the IELTS examination are given below:

• Read questions and underline or circle keywords. This will help you find out where you would have to read and find later. Also, focus on how often every detail or name is appearing in the passage.
• Scan the passage and look for information given in the features and questions.
• Skim through the areas that are surrounded by keywords and features in the passage.
• Don’t get confused in case the text has synonyms of the information that is originally present in the question.
• Keep in mind that answers will not be in an order as questions.

Summary Completion: 

Summary Completion is a type of IELTS reading question that requires you to fill in a gap in a paragraph with a word or phrase from the passage.

To answer summary completion questions, you can use the following strategies:

• Read the sentences carefully: This will give you an idea of the type of word or phrase that is missing.
• Scan the passage for the keywords: The keywords in the sentence can help you to identify the correct word or phrase.
• Read the sentence with the missing word or phrase: This will help you to see how the word or phrase fits into the sentence.
• Check your answer: Once you have filled in the gap, make sure that your answer makes sense in the context of the sentence.

Also, check: 

• IELTS Reading
• IELTS Reading tips
• IELTS Reading Practice Test
• True False Not Given IELTS Reading
• IELTS Reading recent actual test
• IELTS past paper pdf