Ielts reading question-type based tests true false not given matching headings

Welcome to Mr Aslanov’s Lessons 
QUESTION-TYPE BASED TESTS 
FunEnglishwithme [phone] 
in predators’ response to eye spots, the conspicuous circular markings seen on some moths, butterflies and 
fish. These act as a deterrent to predators because they mimic the eyes of other creatures that the potential 
predators might see as a threat. Another researcher who leans towards overgeneralisation is Alexander 
Todorov. With Princeton colleague Nikolaas Oosterhof, he recently put forward a theory which he says 
explains our snap judgements of faces in terms of how threatening they appear. 
Todorov and Oosterhof asked people for their gut reactions to pictures of emotionally neutral faces, 
sifted through all the responses, and boiled them down to two underlying factors: how trustworthy the face 
looks, and how dominant. Todorov and Oosterhof conclude that personality judgements based on people’s 
faces are an overgeneralisation of our evolved ability to infer emotions from facial expressions, and hence a 
person’s intention to cause us harm and their ability to carry it out. Todorov, however, stresses that 
overgeneralisation does not rule out the idea that there is sometimes a kernel of truth in these assessments of 
personality. 
So if there is a kernel of truth, where does it come from? Perrett has a hunch that the link arises when 
our prejudices about faces turn into self-fulfilling prophecies an idea that was investigated by other 
researchers back in 1977. Our expectations can lead us to influence people to behave in ways that confirm 
those expectations: consistently treat someone as untrustworthy and they end up behaving that way. This 
effect sometimes works the other way round, however, especially for those who look cute. The Nobel prize-
winning ethologist Konrad Lorenz once suggested that baby-faced features evoke a nurturing response. 
Support for this has come from work by Zebrowitz, who has found that baby-faced boys and men stimulate 
an emotional centre of the brain, the amygdala, in a similar way. But there’s a twist. Babyfaced men are, on 
average, better educated, more assertive and apt to win more military medals than their mature-looking 
counterparts. They are also more likely to be criminals; think Al Capone. Similarly, Zebrowitz found baby-
faced boys to be quarrelsome and hostile, and more likely to be academic highfliers. She calls this the “self-
defeating prophecy effect”: a man with a baby face strives to confound expectations and ends up 
overcompensating. 
There is another theory that recalls the old parental warning not to pull faces, because they might 
freeze that way. According to this theory, our personality moulds the way our faces look. It is supported by a 
study two decades ago which found that angry old people tend to look cross even when asked to strike a 
neutral expression. A lifetime of scowling, grumpiness and grimaces seemed to have left its mark. 

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