IELTS Reading 21-08-2019: Reading Passage 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-25, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

Making sense of scent

With every whiff you take as you walk by a bakery, a cloud of chemicals comes swirling up your nose. Identifying the smell as freshly baked bread is a complicated process. But, compared to the other senses, the sense of smell is often underappreciated.
  In a survey of 7,000 young people around the world, about half of those between the age of 16 and 30 said that they would rather lose their sense of smell than give up access to technology like laptops or cell phones.
  We're not that acutely aware of our use of olfaction in daily living. In fact, mammals have about a thousand genes that code for odor reception. And even though humans have far fewer active odor receptor genes, 5 percent of our DNA is devoted to olfaction, a fact that emphasizes how important our sense of smell is.
 Smell begins at the back of nose, where millions of sensory neurons lie in a strip of tissue called the olfactory epithelium. Molecules of odorants pass through the superior nasal concha of the nasal passages and come down on the epithelium. The tips of the epithelium cells contain proteins called receptors that bind odor molecules. The receptors are like locks and the keys to open these locks are the odor molecules that float past, explains Leslie Vosshall, a scientist who studies olfaction.
  People have about 450 different types of olfactory receptors. (For comparison, dogs have about two times as many.) Each receptor can be activated by many different odor molecules, and each odor molecule can activate several different types of receptors. However, the forces that bind receptors and odor molecules can vary greatly in strength, so that some interactions are better “fits” than others.
  The complexity of receptors and their interactions with odor molecules are what allow us to detect a wide variety of smells. And what we think of as a single smell is actually a combination of many odor molecules acting on a variety of receptors, creating an intricate neural code that we can identify as the scent of a rose or freshly-cut grass.
 This neural code begins with the nose’s sensory neurons. Once an odor molecule binds to a receptor, it initiates an electrical signal that travels from the sensory neurons to the olfactory bulb, a structure at the base of the forebrain that relays the signal to other brain areas for additional processing.
  One of these areas is the piriform cortex, a collection of neurons located just behind the olfactory bulb that works to identify the smell. Smell information also goes to the thalamus, a structure that serves as a relay station for all of the sensory information coming into the brain. The thalamus transmits some of this smell information to the orbitofrontal cortex, where it can then be integrated with taste information. What we often attribute to the sense of taste is actually the result of this sensory integration.
  "The olfactory system is critical when we're appreciating the foods and beverages we consume," says Monell Chemical Senses Center scientist Charles Wysocki. This coupling of smell and taste explains why foods seem lackluster with a head cold.
  You’ve probably experienced that a scent can also conjure up emotions and even specific memories, like when a whiff of cologne at a department store reminds you of your favorite uncle who wears the same scent. This happens because the thalamus sends smell information to the hippocampus and amygdala, key brain regions involved in learning and memory.
  Although scientists used to think that the human nose could identify about 10,000 different smells, Vosshall and her colleagues have recently shown that people can identify far more scents. Starting with 128 different odor molecules, they made random mixtures of 10, 20, and 30 odor molecules, so many that the smell produced was unrecognizable to participants. The researchers then presented people with three vials, two of which contained identical mixtures while the third contained a different concoction, and asked them to pick out the smell that didn’t belong.
  Predictably, the more overlap there was between two types of mixtures, the harder they were to tell apart. After calculating how many of the mixtures the majority of people could tell apart, the researchers were able to predict how people would fare if presented with every possible mixture that could be created from the 128 different odor molecules. They used this data to estimate that the average person can detect at least one trillion different smells, a far cry from the previous estimate of 10,000.
  This number is probably an underestimation of the true number of smells we can detect, said Vosshall, because there are far more than 128 different types of odor molecules in the world. And our olfaction is quite powerful comparing to other mammals. For example, marine animals can detect only water-soluble odorants.
  No longer should humans be considered poor smellers. “It’s time to give our sense of smell the recognition it deserves,” said Vosshall.

Questions 14-19
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

14. In general, olfaction and sense of taste are considered equally important.                TRUE               FALSE               NOT GIVEN          
15. About 7,000 young people around the world would prefer losing their sense of smell than access to laptops.               TRUE               FALSE               NOT GIVEN          
16. Odor reception is an integral function of all mammals.                TRUE               FALSE               NOT GIVEN          
17. Superior nasal concha is compared to a lock and odor molecules are like keys that are used to open it.                TRUE               FALSE               NOT GIVEN          
18. Cats have two times as many olfactory receptors as humans.                TRUE               FALSE               NOT GIVEN          
19. We are able to detect a lot of different scents because of a variety of odor receptors, which translate impact of molecules into a neural code.                TRUE               FALSE               NOT GIVEN          


Questions 20-25
Complete the sentences below.
Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 20-25 on your answer sheet.

20. The part of our brain responsible for identifying the smell is called  .
21. The  is a region in our brain that serves as a transition station for all sensory information that we receive.
22. Sense of smell is closely related to  .
23.  and  are involved in arousing memories caused by specific smells.
24. The experiment proved that the average person can discriminate between at least  smells.
25. Sea mammals can smell only odorants that are  in water.

ANSWERS
Each question correctly answered scores 1 mark. Correct spelling is needed in all answers.
Section 2

14. Not Given
15. False
16. True
17. False
18. Not Given
19. True
20. Piriform cortex
21. Thalamus
22. Sense of taste
23. Hippocampus, Amygdala
24. One trillion
25. Soluble