Category: Academic Reading Tests

Cambridge IELTS 4 Academic Reading Test 3

Reading Passage 1

MICRO ENTERPRISE CREDIT FOR STREET YOUTH

‘I am from a large, poor family and for many years we have done without breakfast. Ever since I joined the Street Kids International Program I have been able to buy my family sugar and buns for breakfast. I have also bought myself decent second hand clothes and shoes.’ – Doreen Soko

‘We have had business experience. Now I am confident to expand what we have been doing. I have learnt cash management and the way of keeping money so we save for reinvestment. Now business is a part of our lives. As well, we did not know each other before – now we have made new friends.’ – Fan Kaoma

Participants in the Youth Skill Enterprise Initiative Program, Zambia

Introduction
Although small-scale business training and credit programs have become more common throughout the world, relatively little attention has been paid to the need to direct such opportunities to young people. Even less attention has been paid to children living on the street or in difficult circumstances.

Over the past nine years, Street Kids International (S.K.I.) has been working with partner organisations in Africa, Latin America and India to support the economic lives of street children. The purpose of this paper is to share some of the lessons S.K.I. and our partners have learned.

Background
Typically, children do not end up on the streets due to a single cause, but to a combination of factors: a dearth of adequately funded schools, the demand for income at home, family breakdown and violence. The street may be attractive to children as a place to find adventurous play and money. However, it is also a place where some children are exposed, with little or no protection, to exploitative employment, urban crime, and abuse.

Children who work on the streets are generally involved in unskilled, labour-intensive tasks which require long hours, such as shining shoes, carrying goods, guarding or washing cars, and informal tracing. Some may also earn income through begging, or through theft and illegal activities. At the same time, there are street children who take pride in supporting themselves and their families and who often enjoy their work. Many children may choose entrepreneurship because it allows them a degree of independence, is less exploitative than many forms of paid employment, and is flexible enough to allow them to participate in other activities such as education and domestic tasks.

Street Business Partnerships
S.K.I. has worked with partner organisations in Latin America, Africa and India to develop innovative opportunities for street children to earn income.
• The S.K.I. Bicycle Courier Service first started in the Sudan. Participants in this enterprise were supplied with bicycles, which they used to deliver parcels and messages, and which they were required to pay for gradually from their wages. A similar program was taken up in Bangalore, India.

• Another successful project, The Shoe Shine Collective, was a partnership program with the Y.W.C.A. in the Dominican Republic. In this project, participants were lent money to purchase shoe shine boxes. They were also given a sale place to store their equipment, and facilities for individual savings plans.

• The Youth Skills Enterprise initiative in Zambia is a joint program with the Red Cross Society and the Y.W.C.A. Street youths are supported to start their own small business through business training, life skills training and access to credit.

Lessons learned
The following lessons have emerged from the programs that S.K.I. and partner organisations have created.

• Being an entrepreneur is not for everyone, nor for every street child. Ideally, potential participants will have been involved in the organisation’s programs for at least six months, and trust and relationship building will have already been established.

• The involvement of the participants has been essential to the development of relevant programs. When children have had a major role in determining procedures, they are more likely to abide by and enforce them.

• It is critical for all loans to be linked to training programs that include the development of basic business and life skills.

• There are tremendous advantages to involving parents or guardians in the program, where such relationships exits. Home visits allow staff the opportunity to know where the participants live, and to understand more about each individual’s situation.

• Small loans are provided initially for purchasing fixed assets such as bicycles, shoe shine kits and basic building materials for a market stall. As the entrepreneurs gain experience, the enterprises can be gradually expanded and consideration can be given to increasing loan amounts. The loan amounts in S.K.I. programs have generally ranged from US$90-$100.

• All S.K.I. programs have charged interest on the loans, primarily to get the entrepreneurs used to the concept of paying interest on borrowed money. Generally the rates have been modest (lower than bank rates)

Conclusion
There is a need to recognise the importance of access to credit for impoverished young people seeking to fulfill economic needs. The provision of small loans to support the entrepreneurial dreams and ambitions of youth can be an effective means to help them change their lives. However, we believe that credit must be extended in association with other types of support that help participants develop critical kills as well as productive businesses.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write your answers in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

The quotations in the box at the beginning of the article
1. exemplify the effects of S.K.I.
2. explain why S.K.I. was set up
3. outline the problems of street children
4. highlight the benefits to society of S.K.I.
The main purpose of S.K.I. is to
1. draw the attention of governments to the problem of street children.
2. provide schools and social support for street children.
3. encourage the public to give money to street children.
4. give business training and loans to street children.
Which of the following is mentioned by the writer as a reason why children end up living on the streets?
1. unemployment
2. war
3. poverty
4. crime
In order to become more independent, street children may
1. reject paid employment
2. leave their families
3. set up their own business
4. employ other children

Questions 5-8

Complete the table below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from Reading Passage 1 for each answer.

Country	Organisations involved	Type of project	Support provided
(5)……………… and ………….	– S.K.I.	courier service	– provision of (6)…………….
Dominican Republic	– S.K.I – Y.W.C.A.	(7)…………………	– loans – storage facilities – saving plans
Zambia	– S.K.I. – The Red Cross – Y.W.C.A.	setting up small business	– business training – (8)……………. training – access to credit

Questions 9-12

In boxes 9-12 on your answer sheet write:

YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

Any street child can set up their own small business if given enough support.
In some cases, the families of street children may need financial support from S.K.I.
Only one fixed loan should be given to each child.
The children have to pay back slightly more money than they borrowed.

Question 13

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write your answer in box 13 on your answer sheet.

The writers conclude that money should only be lent to street children

as part of a wider program of aid
for programs that are not too ambitious
when programs are supported by local businesses
if the projects planned are realistic and useful

Reading Passage 2

VOLCANOES – EARTH SHATTERING NEWS

A Volcanoes are the ultimate earth-moving machinery. A violent eruption can blow the top few kilometres off a mountain, scatter fine ash practically all over the globe and hurl rock fragments into the stratosphere to darken the skies a continent away.

But the classic eruption – cone-shaped mountain, big bang, mushroom cloud and surges of molten lava – is only a tiny part of a global story. Volcanism, the name given to volcanic processes, really has shaped the world. Eruptions have rifted continents, raised mountain chains, constructed islands and shaped the topography of the earth. The entire ocean floor has a basement of volcanic basalt.

Volcanoes have not only made the continents, they are also thought to have made the world’s first stable atmosphere and provided all the water for the oceans, rivers and ice-caps. There are now about 600 active volcanoes. Every year they add two or three cubic kilometres of rock to the continents. Imagine a similar number of volcanoes smoking away for the last 3,500 million years. That is enough rock to explain the continental crust.

What comes out of volcanic craters is mostly gas. More than 90% of this gas is water vapour from the deep earth: enough to explain, over 3,500 million years, the water in the oceans. The rest of the gas is nitrogen, carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, methane, ammonia and hydrogen. The quantity of these gases, again multiplied over 3,500 million years, is enough to explain the mass of the world’s atmosphere. We are alive because volcanoes provided the soil, air and water we need.

B Geologists consider the earth as having a molten core, surrounded by a semi-molten mantle and a brittle, outer skin. It helps to think of a soft-boiled egg with a runny yolk, a firm but squishy white and a hard shell. If the shell is even slightly cracked during boiling, the white material bubbles out and sets like a tiny mountain chain over the crack – like an archipelogo of volcanic islands such as the Hawaiian Islands. But the earth is so much bigger and the mantle below is so much hotter.

Even though the mantle rocks are kept solid by overlying pressure, they can still slowly ‘flow’ like thick treacle. The flow, thought to be in the form of convection currents, is powerful enough to fracture the ‘eggshell’ of the crust into plates, and keep them bumping and grinding against each other, or even overlapping, at the rate of a few centimetres a year. These fracture zones, where the collisions occur, are where earthquakes happen. And, very often, volcanoes.

C These zones are lines of weakness, or hot spots. Every eruption is different, but put at its simplest, where there are weaknesses, rocks deep in the mantle, heated to 1,350oC, will start to expand and rise. As they do so, the pressure drops, and they expand and become liquid and rise more swiftly.

Sometimes it is slow: vast bubbles of magma – molten rock from the mantle – inch towards the surface, cooling slowly, to show through as granite extrusions (as on Skye, or the Great Whin Sill, the lava dyke squeezed out like toothpaste that carries part of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England). Sometimes – as in Northern Ireland, Wales and the Karoo in South Africa – the magma rose faster, and then flowed out horizontally on to the surface in vast thick sheets. In the Deccan plateau in western India, there are more than two million cubic kilometres of lava, some of it 2,400 metres thick, formed over 500,000 years of slurping eruption.

Sometimes the magma moves very swiftly indeed. It does not have time to cool as it surges upwards. The gases trapped inside the boiling rock expand suddenly, the lava glows with heat, it begins to froth, and it explodes with tremendous force. Then the slightly cooler lava following it begins to flow over the lip of the crater. It happens on Mars, it happened on the moon, it even happens on some of the moons of Jupiter and Uranus. By studying the evidence, volcanologists can read the force of the great blasts of the past. Is the pumice light and full of holes? The explosion was tremendous. Are the rocks heavy, with huge crystalline basalt shapes, like the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland? It was a slow, gentle eruption.

The biggest eruption are deep on the mid-ocean floor, where new lava is forcing the continents apart and widening the Atlantic by perhaps five centimetres a year. Look at maps of volcanoes, earthquakes and island chains like the Philippines and Japan, and you can see the rough outlines of what are called tectonic plates – the plates which make up the earth’s crust and mantle. The most dramatic of these is the Pacific ‘ring of fire’ where there have the most violent explosions – Mount Pinatubo near Manila, Mount St Helen’s in the Rockies and El Chichón in Mexico about a decade ago, not to mention world-shaking blasts like Krakatoa in the Sunda Straits in 1883.

D But volcanoes are not very predictable. That is because geological time is not like human time. During quiet periods, volcanoes cap themselves with their own lava by forming a powerful cone from the molten rocks slopping over the rim of the crater; later the lava cools slowly into a huge, hard, stable plug which blocks any further eruption until the pressure below becomes irresistible. In the case of Mount Pinatubo, this took 600 years.

Then, sometimes, with only a small warning, the mountain blows its top. It did this at Mont Pelée in Martinique at 7.49 a.m. on 8 May, 1902. Of a town of 28,000, only two people survived. In 1815, a sudden blast removed the top 1,280 metres of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. The eruption was so fierce that dust thrown into the stratosphere darkened the skies, canceling the following summer in Europe and North America. Thousands starved as the harvest failed, after snow in June and frosts in August. Volcanoes are potentially world news, especially the quiet ones.

Questions 14-17

Reading Passage 2 has four sections A-D.

Choose the correct heading for the each section from the list of headings below.

Write the correct number i-vi in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

Causes of volcanic eruption
Efforts to predict volcanic eruption
Volcanoes and the features of our planet
Different types of volcanic eruption
International relief efforts
The unpredictability of volcanic eruption

Section A
Section B
Section C
Section D

Questions 18-21

Answer the questions below using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/ OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 18-21 on your answer sheet.

What are the sections of the earth’s crust, often associated with volcanic activity, called?
What is the name given to molten rock from the mantle?
What is the earthquake zone on the Pacific Ocean called?
For how many years did Mount Pinatubo remain inactive?

Questions 22-26

Complete the summary below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 22-26 on your answer sheets.

Volcanic eruptions have shaped the earth’s land surface. They may also have produced the world’s atmosphere and (22) …………………. Eruptions occur when molten rocks from the earth’s mantle rise and expand. When they become liquid, they move more quickly through cracks in the surface. There are different types of eruption. Sometimes the (23) …………………… moves slowly and forms outcrops of granite on the earth’s surface. When it moves more quickly it may flow out in thick horizontal sheets. Examples of this type of eruption can be found in Northern Ireland, Wales, South Africa and (24) …………………… A third type of eruption occurs when the lava emerges very quickly and (25) ………………. violently. This happens because the magma moves so suddenly that (26) ……………….. are emitted.

Reading Passage 2

OBTAINING LINGUISTIC DATA

A Many procedures are available for obtaining data about a language. They range from a carefully planned, intensive field investigation in a foreign country to a casual introspection about one’s mother tongue carried out in an armchair at home.

B In all cases, someone has to act as a source of language data — an informant. Informants are (ideally) native speakers of a language, who provide utterances for analysis and other kinds of information about the language (e.g. translations, comments about correctness, or judgments on usage). Often, when studying their mother tongue, linguists act as their own informants, judging the ambiguity, acceptability, or other properties of utterances against their own intuitions. The convenience of this approach makes it widely used, and it is considered the norm in the generative approach to linguistics. But a linguist’s personal judgments are often uncertain, or disagree with the judgments of other linguists, at which point recourse is needed to more objective methods of enquiry, using non-linguists as informants. The latter procedure is unavoidable when working on foreign languages, or child speech.

C Many factors must be considered when selecting informants – whether one is working with single speakers (a common situation when language has not been described before), two people interacting small groups or large-scale samples. Age, sex, social background and other aspects of identity are important, as these factors are known to influence the kind of language used. The topic of conversation and the characteristics of the social setting (e.g. the level of formality) are also highly relevant, as are the personal qualities of the informants (e.g. their fluency and consistency). For large studies, scrupulous attention has been paid to the sampling theory employed, and in all cases, decisions have to be made about the best investigative techniques to use.

D Today, researchers often tape-record informants. This enables the linguist’s claims about the language to be checked, and provides a way of making those claims more accurate (“difficult” pieces of speech can be listened to repeatedly). But obtaining naturalistic, good-quality data is never easy. People talk abnormally when they know they are being recorded, and sound quality can be poor. A variety of tape-recording procedures have thus been devised to minimize the “observer’s paradox” (how to observe the way people behave when they are not being observed). Some recordings are made without the speakers being aware of the fact- a procedure that obtains very natural data, though ethical objections must be anticipated. Alternatively, attempts can be made to make the speaker forget about the recording, such as keeping the tape recorder out of sight, or using radio microphones. A useful technique is to introduce a topic that quickly involves the speaker, and stimulates a natural language style (e.g. asking older informants about how times have changed in their locality).

E An audio tape recording does not solve all the linguist’s problems, however. Speech is often unclear and ambiguous. Where possible, therefore, the recording has to be supplemented by the observer’s written comments on the non-verbal behavior of the participants, and about the context in general. A facial expression, for example, can dramatically alter the meaning of what is said. Video recordings avoid these problems to a large extent, but even they have limitations (the camera cannot be everywhere), and transcriptions always benefit from any additional commentary provided by an observer.

F Linguists also make great use of structured sessions, in which they systematically ask their informants for utterances that describe certain actions, objects or behaviour. With a bilingual informant, or through use of an interpreter, it is possible to use translation techniques (‘How do you say table in your language?’). A large number of points can be covered in a short time, using interview worksheets and questionnaires. Often , the researcher wishes to obtain information about just s single variable, in which case a restricted set of questions may be used a particular feature of pronunciation, for example, can be elicited by asking the informant to say a restricted set of words. There are also several direct methods of elicitation, such as asking informants to fill in the blanks in a substitution frame (e.g. I___ see a car), or feeding them the wrong stimulus of correction (‘is it possible to say I no can see?’)

G A representative sample of language, compiled for the purpose of linguistic analysis, is known as a corpus. A corpus enables the linguist to make unbiased statements about frequency of usage, and it provides accessible data for the use of different researchers. Its range and size are variable. Some corpora attempt to cover the language as a whole, taking extracts from many kinds of text, others are extremely selective, providing a collection of material that deals only with a particular linguistic feature. The size of the corpus depends on practical factors, such as the time available to collect, process and store the data it can take up to several hours to provide an accurate transcription of a few minutes of speech. Sometimes a small sample of data will be enough to decide a linguistic hypothesis; by contrast, corpora in major research projects can total millions of words. An important principle is that all corpora, whatever their size, are inevitably limited in their coverage, and always need to be supplemented by data derived from the intuitions of native speakers of the language, through either introspection or experimentation.

Questions 27-31

Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs labeled A-G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-G in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

the effect of recording on the way people talk
the importance of taking notes on body language
the fact that language is influenced by social situation
how informants can be helped to be less self-conscious
various methods that can be used to generate specific data

Questions 32-36

Complete the table below.

Choose NO MORE THAT THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 32-36 on your answer sheet.

Methods of obtaining linguistic data	Advantages	Disadvantages
(32)………………as informant	convenient	method of enquiry not objective enough
Non-linguistic as informant	necessary with (33)…………….. and child speech	the number of factors to be considered
Recording as informant	allows linguistics’ claims to be checked	(34)…………………. of sound
Videoing as informant	allows speakers’ (35)………………to be observed	(36)………………might miss certain things

Questions 37-40

Complete the summary of paragraph G below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

A linguist can use a corpus to comment objectively on (37)……………….. Some corpora include a wide range of language while others are used to focus on a (38)………..…….…. The length of time the process takes will affect the (39)………….…..… of the corpus. No corpus can ever cover the whole language and so linguists often find themselves relying on the additional information that can be gained from the (40)…….……….…of those who speak the language concerned.

Cambridge IELTS 4 Academic Reading Test 3 passage 1 answers

A
D
C
C
Sudan, India IN EITHER ORDER, BOTH REQUIRED FOR ONE MARK
bicycles
Shoe Shine I Shoe Shine Collective
life skills
NO
NOT GIVEN
NO
YES
A

Cambridge IELTS 4 Academic Reading Test 3 passage 2 answers

iii
i
iv
vi
18 plates/ the plates/ the tectonic plates
magma
ring of fire
600 / 600 years/ for 600 years
water / the water / oceans / the oceans
lava / magma / molten rock
India/ western India
explodes
gases / the gases / trapped gases

Cambridge IELTS 4 Academic Reading Test 3 passage 2 answers

iii
i
iv
vi
18 plates/ the plates/ the tectonic plates
magma
ring of fire
600 / 600 years/ for 600 years
water / the water / oceans / the oceans
lava / magma / molten rock
India/ western India
explodes
gases / the gases / trapped gases

Cambridge IELTS 4 Academic Reading Test 3 passage 3 answers

D
E
C
D
F
(the) linguist (acts) / (the) linguists (act)
foreign languages
quality/ the quality/ the poor quality
non-verbal behaviour / non-verbal behaviour / facial expression(s)
(video) camera / (video) recording
usage frequency / frequency of usage
Particular linguistics feature
size
intutions

April 4, 2024

Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 2

Reading Passage 1

The Risks Agriculture Faces In Developing Countries

A Two things distinguish food production from all other productive activities: first, every single person needs food each day and has a right to it; and second, it is hugely dependent on nature. These two unique aspects, one political, the other natural, make food production highly vulnerable and different from any other business. At the same time, cultural values are highly entrenched in food and agricultural systems worldwide.

B Farmers everywhere face major risks; including extreme weather, long-term climate change, and price volatility in input and product markets. However, smallholder farmers in developing countries must in addition deal with adverse environments, both natural, in terms of soil quality, rainfall, etc. and human, in terms of infrastructure, financial systems, markets, knowledge and technology. Counter-intuitively, hunger is prevalent among many smallholder farmers in the developing world.

C Participants in the online debate argued that our biggest challenge is to address the underlying causes of the agricultural system’s inability to ensure sufficient food for all, and they identified as drivers of this problem our dependency on fossil fuels and unsupportive government policies.

D On the question of mitigating the risks farmers face, most essayists called for greater state intervention. In his essay, Kanayo F. Nwanze, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, argued that governments can significantly reduce risks for farmers by providing basic services like roads to get produce more efficiently to markets, or water and food storage facilities to reduce losses. Sophia Murphy, senior advisor to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, suggested that the procurement and holding of stocks by governments can also help mitigate wild swings in food prices by alleviating uncertainties about market supply.

E Shenggen Fan, Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute, held up social safety nets and public welfare programmes in Ethiopia, Brazil and Mexico as valuable ways to address poverty among farming families and reduce their vulnerability to agriculture shocks. However, some commentators responded that cash transfers to poor families do not necessarily translate into increased food security, as these programmes do not always strengthen food production or raise incomes. Regarding state subsidies for agriculture, Rokeya Kabir, Executive Director of Bangladesh Nari Progati Sangha, commented in her essay that these ‘have not compensated for the stranglehold exercised by private traders. In fact, studies show that sixty percent of beneficiaries of subsidies are not poor, but rich landowners and non-farmer traders.

F Nwanze, Murphy and Fan argued that private risk management tools, like private insurance, commodity futures markets, and rural finance can help small-scale producers mitigate risk and allow for investment in improvements. Kabir warned that financial support schemes often encourage the adoption of high-input agricultural practices, which in the medium term may raise production costs beyond the value of their harvests. Murphy noted that when futures markets become excessively financialised they can contribute to short-term price volatility, which increases farmers’ food insecurity. Many participants and commentators emphasised that greater transparency in markets is needed to mitigate the impact of volatility, and make evident whether adequate stocks and supplies are available. Others contended that agribusiness companies should be held responsible for paying for negative side effects.

G Many essayists mentioned climate change and its consequences for small-scale agriculture. Fan explained that in addition to reducing crop yields, climate change increases the magnitude and the frequency of extreme weather events, which increase smallholder vulnerability. The growing unpredictability of weather patterns increases farmers’ difficulty in managing weather-related risks. According to this author, one solution would be to develop crop varieties that are more resilient to new climate trends and extreme weather patterns. Accordingly, Pat Mooney, co-founder and executive director of the ETC Group, suggested that ‘if we are to survive climate change, we must adopt policies that let peasants diversify the plant and animal species and varieties/breeds that make up our menus.

H Some participating authors and commentators argued in favour of community- based and autonomous risk management strategies through collective action groups, co-operatives or producers’ groups. Such groups enhance market opportunities for small-scale producers, reduce marketing costs and synchronise buying and selling with seasonal price conditions. According to Murphy, ‘collective action offers an important way for farmers to strengthen their political and economic bargaining power, and to reduce their business risks. One commentator, Giel Ton, warned that collective action does not come as a free good. It takes time, effort and money to organise, build trust and to experiment. Others, like Marcel Vernooij and Marcel Beukeboom, suggested that in order to ‘apply what we already know’, all stakeholders, including business, government, scientists and civil society, must work together, starting at the beginning of the value chain.

I Some participants explained that market price volatility is often worsened by the presence of intermediary purchasers who, taking advantage of farmers’ vulnerability, dictate prices. One commentator suggested farmers can gain greater control over prices and minimise price volatility by selling directly to consumers. Similarly, Sonali Bisht, founder and advisor to the Institute of Himalayan Environmental Research and Education (INHERE), India, wrote that copipunity-supported agriculture, where consumers invest in local farmers by subscription and guarantee producers a fair price, is a risk-sharing model worth more attention. Direct food distribution systems not only encourage small-scale agriculture but also give consumers more control over the food they consume, she wrote.

Questions 1-3

Reading passage 1 has nine paragraphs A-I.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

a reference to characteristics that only apply to food production
a reference to challenges faced only by farmers in certain parts of the world
a reference to difficulties in bringing about co-operation between farmers

Questions 4-9

Look at the following statements (questions 4-9) and list of people below.

Match each statement with the correct person A-G.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

Financial assistance from the government does not always go to the farmers who most need it.
Farmers can benefit from collaborating as a group.
Financial assistance from the government can improve the standard of living of farmers.
Farmers may be helped if there is financial input by the same individuals who buy from them.
Governments can help to reduce variation in prices.
Improvements to infrastructure can have a major impact on risk for farmers.

List of people

Kanayo F. Nwanze
Sophia Murphy
Shenggen Fan
Rokeya Kabir
Pat Mooney
Giel Ton
Sonali Bisht

Questions 10 and 11

Choose TWO letters A-E.

Which TWO problems are mentioned which affect farmers with small farms in developing countries?

lack of demand for locally produced food
lack of irrigation programmes
being unable to get insurance
the effects of changing weather patterns
having to sell their goods to intermediary buyers

Questions 12 and 13

Choose TWO letters A-E.

Which TWO actions are recommended for improving conditions for farmers?

reducing the size of food stocks
attempting to ensure that prices rise at certain times of the year
organizing co-operation between a wide range of interested parties
encouraging consumers to take a financial stake in farming
making customers aware of the reasons for changing food prices

Reading passage 2

The Lost City

A When the US explorer and academic Hiram Bingham arrived in South America in 1911, he was ready for what was to be the greatest achievement of his life: the exploration of the remote hinterland to the west of Cusco, the old capital of the Inca empire in the Andes mountains of Peru. His goal was to locate the remains of a city called Vitcos, the last capital of the Inca civilisation. Cusco lies on a high plateau at an elevation of more than 3,000 metres, and Bingham’s plan was to descend from this plateau along the valley of the Urubamba river, which takes a circuitous route down to the Amazon and passes through an area of dramatic canyons and mountain ranges.

B When Bingham and his team set off down the Urubamba in late July, they had an advantage over travellers who had preceded them: a track had recently been blasted down the valley canyon to enable rubber to be brought up by mules from the jungle. Almost all previous travellers had left the river at Ollantaytambo and taken a high pass across the mountains to rejoin the river lower down, thereby cutting a substantial corner, but also therefore never passing through the area around Machu Picchu.

C On 24 July they were a few days into their descent of the valley. The day began slowly, with Bingham trying to arrange sufficient mules for the next stage of the trek. His companions showed no interest in accompanying him up the nearby hill to see some ruins that a local farmer, Melchor Arteaga, had told them about the night before. The morning was dull and damp, and Bingham also seems to have been less than keen on the prospect of climbing the hill. In his book Lost City of the Incas, he relates that he made the ascent without having the least expectation that he would find anything at the top.

D Bingham writes about the approach in vivid style in his book. First, as he climbs up the hill, he describes the ever-present possibility of deadly snakes, ‘capable of making considerable springs when in pursuit of their prey’; not that he sees any. Then there’s a sense of mounting discovery as he comes across great sweeps of terraces, then a mausoleum, followed by monumental staircases and, finally, the grand ceremonial buildings of Machu Picchu. ‘It seemed like an unbelievable dream the sight held me spellbound ’, he wrote.

E We should remember, however, that Lost City of the Incas is a work of hindsight, not written until 1948, many years after his journey. His journal entries of the time reveal a much more gradual appreciation of his achievement. He spent the afternoon at the ruins noting down the dimensions of some of the buildings, then descended and rejoined his companions, to whom he seems to have said little about his discovery. At this stage, Bingham didn’t realise the extent or the importance of the site, nor did he realise what use he could make of the discovery.

F However, soon after returning it occurred to him that he could make a name for himself from this discovery. When he came to write the National Geographic magazine article that broke the story to the world in April 1913, he knew he had to produce a big idea. He wondered whether it could have been the birthplace of the very first Inca, Manco the Great, and whether it could also have been what chroniclers described as ‘the last city of the Incas’. This term refers to Vilcabamba the settlement where the Incas had fled from Spanish invaders in the 1530s. Bingham made desperate attempts to prove this belief for nearly 40 years. Sadly, his vision of the site as both the beginning and end of the Inca civilisation, while a magnificent one, is inaccurate. We now know, that Vilcabamba actually lies 65 kilometres away in the depths of the jungle.

G One question that has perplexed visitors, historians and archaeologists alike ever since Bingham, is why the site seems to have been abandoned before the Spanish Conquest. There are no references to it by any of the Spanish chroniclers – and if they had known of its existence so close to Cusco they would certainly have come in search of gold. An idea which has gained wide acceptance over the past few years is that Machu Picchu was a moya, a country estate built by an Inca emperor to escape the cold winters of Cusco, where the elite could enjoy monumental architecture and spectacular views. Furthermore, the particular architecture of Machu Picchu suggests that it was constructed at the time of the greatest of all the Incas, the emperor Pachacuti (1438-71). By custom, Pachacuti’s descendants built other similar estates for their own use, and so Machu Picchu would have been abandoned after his death, some 50 years before the Spanish Conquest.

Questions 14-20

Reading passage 2 has seven paragraphs A-G.

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.

List of headings

Different accounts of the same journey
Bingham gains support
A common belief
The aim of the trip
dramatic description
A new route
Bingham publishes his theory
Bingham’s lack of enthusiasm

Paragraph A
Paragraph B
Paragraph C
Paragraph D
Paragraph E
Paragraph F
Paragraph G

Questions 21-24

Do the following statements agree with the information given in reading passage 2?

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

Bingham went to South America in search of an Inca city.
Bingham chose a particular route down the Urubamba valley because it was the most common route used by travelers.
Bingham understood the significance of Machu Picchu as soon as he saw it.
Bingham returned to Machu Picchu in order to find evidence to support his theory.

Questions 25 and 26

Complete the sentences below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage

The track that took Bingham down the Urubamba valley had been created for the transportation of……………..
Bingham found out about the ruins of Machu Picchu from a…………………………….in the Urubamba valley.

Reading passage 3

The Benefits Of Being Bilingual

A According to the latest figures, the majority of the world’s population is now bilingual or multilingual, having grown up speaking two or more languages. In the past, such children were considered to be at a disadvantage compared with their monolingual peers. Over the past few decades, however, technological advances have allowed researchers to look more deeply at how bilingualism interacts with and changes the cognitive and neurological systems, thereby identifying several clear benefits of being bilingual.

B Research shows that when a bilingual person uses one language, the other is active at the same time. When we hear a word, we don’t hear the entire word all at once: the sounds arrive in sequential order. Long before the word is finished, the brain’s language system begins to guess what that word might be. If you hear ‘can’, you will likely activate words like ‘candy’ and ‘candle’ as well, at least during the earlier stages of word recognition. For bilingual people, this activation is not limited to a single language; auditory input activates corresponding words regardless of the language to which they belong. Some of the most compelling evidence for this phenomenon, called ‘language co-activation’, comes from studying eye movements. A Russian-English bilingual asked to ‘pick up a marker’ from a set of objects would look more at a stamp than someone who doesn’t know Russian, because the Russian word for ‘stamp’, marka, sounds like the English word he or she heard, ‘marker’. In cases like this, language co-activation occurs because what the listener hears could map onto words in either language.

C Having to deal with this persistent linguistic competition can result in difficulties, however. For instance, knowing more than one language can cause speakers to name pictures more slowly, and can increase ‘tip-of-the-tongue states’, when you can almost, but not quite, bring a word to mind. As a result, the constant juggling of two languages creates a need to control how much a person accesses a language at any given time. For this reason, bilingual people often perform better on tasks that require conflict management. In the classic Stroop Task, people see a word and are asked to name the colour of the word’s font. When the colour and the word match (i., the word ‘red’ printed in red), people correctly name the colour more quickly than when the colour and the word don’t match (i., the word ‘red’ printed in blue). This occurs because the word itself (‘red’) and its font colour (blue) conflict. Bilingual people often excel at tasks such as this, which tap into the ability to ignore competing perceptual information and focus on the relevant aspects of the input. Bilinguals are also better at switching between two tasks; for example, when bilinguals have to switch from categorizing objects by colour (red or green) to categorizing them by shape (circle or triangle), they do so more quickly than monolingual people, reflecting better cognitive control when having to make rapid changes of strategy.

D It also seems that the neurological roots of the bilingual advantage extend to brain areas more traditionally associated with sensory processing. When monolingual and bilingual adolescents listen to simple speech sounds without any intervening background noise, they show highly similar brain stem responses. When researchers play the same sound to both groups in the presence of background noise, however, the bilingual listeners’ neural response is considerably larger, reflecting better encoding of the sound’s fundamental frequency, a feature of sound closely related to pitch perception.

E Such improvements in cognitive and sensory processing may help a bilingual person to process information in the environment, and help explain why bilingual adults acquire a third language better than monolingual adults master a second language. This advantage may be rooted in the skill of focussing on information about the new language while reducing interference from the languages they already know.

F Research also indicates that bilingual experience may help to keep the cognitive mechanisms sharp by recruiting alternate brain networks to compensate for those that become damaged during aging. Older bilinguals enjoy improved memory relative to monolingual people, which can lead to real-world health benefits. In a study of over 200 patients with Alzheimer’s disease, a degenerative brain disease, bilingual patients reported showing initial symptoms of the disease an average of five years later than monolingual patients. In a follow-up study, researchers compared the brains of bilingual and monolingual patients matched on the severity of Alzheimer’s symptoms. Surprisingly, the bilinguals’ brains had more physical signs of disease than their monolingual counterparts, even though their outward behaviour and abilities were the same. If the brain is an engine, bilingualism may help it to go farther on the same amount of fuel.

G Furthermore, the benefits associated with bilingual experience seem to start very early. In one study, researchers taught seven-month-old babies growing up in monolingual or bilingual homes that when they heard a tinkling sound, a puppet appeared on one side of a screen. Halfway through the study, the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen. In order to get a reward, the infants had to adjust the rule they’d learned; only the bilingual babies were able to successfully learn the new rule. This suggests that for very young children, as well as for older people, navigating a multilingual environment imparts advantages that transfer far beyond language.

Questions 27-31

Complete the table below.

Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

Test	Findings
Observing the (27)………………..of Russina-English bilingual people when asked to select certain objects	bilingual people engage both languages simultaneously a mechanism known as (28)…………………
A test called the (29)……………….focusing on naming colors	bilingual people are more able to handle tasks involving a skill called (30)………………….
A test involving switching between tasks	when changing strategies bilingual people have started (31)…………..

Questions 32-36

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in reading passage 3?

YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

Attitudes towards bilingualism have changed in recent years.
Bilingual people are better than monolingual people at guessing correctly what words are before they are finished.
Bilingual people consistently name images faster than monolingual people.
Bilingual people’s brains process single sounds more efficiently than monolingual people in all situations.
Fewer bilingual people than monolingual people suffer from brain disease in old age.

Questions 37-40

Reading passage 3 has seven paragraphs A-G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

an example of how bilingual and monolingual people’s brains respond differently to a certain type of non-verbal auditory input
a demonstration of how a bilingual upbringing has benefits even before we learn to speak
a description of the process by which people identify words that they hear
reference to some negative consequences of being bilingual

Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 2 The Risks Agriculture Faces In Developing Countries Answers

Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 2 The Lost City Answers

iv
vi
viii
v
i
vii
iii
true
false
false
not given
rubber
farmer

Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 2 The Benefits Of Being Bilingual Answers

eye movements
language coactivation
stroop task
conflict management
cognitive control
yes
not given
no
no
not given
D
G
B
C

March 18, 2024

Cambridge IELTS 13 Academic Reading Test 3

Reading Passage 1

The Coconut Palm

For millennia, the coconut has been central to the lives of Polynesian and Asian peoples. In the western world, on the other hand, coconuts have always been exotic and unusual, sometimes rare. The Italian merchant traveller Marco Polo apparently saw coconuts in South Asia in the late 13th century, and among the mid-14th-century travel writings of Sir John Mandeville there is mention of ‘great Notes of Ynde’ (great Nuts of India). Today, images of palm-fringed tropical beaches are cliches in the west to sell holidays, chocolate bars fizzy drinks and even romance.

Typically, we envisage coconuts as brown cannonballs that, when opened, provide sweet white flesh. But we see only part of the fruit and none of the plant from which they come. The coconut palm has a smooth, slender, grey trunk, up to 30 metres tall. This is an important source of timber for building houses, and is increasingly being used as a replacement for endangered hardwoods in the furniture construction industry. The trunk is surmounted by a rosette of leaves, each of which may be up to six metres long. The leaves have hard veins in their centres which, in many parts of the world, are used as brushes after the green part of the leaf has been stripped away. Immature coconut flowers are tightly clustered together among the leaves at the top of the trunk. The flower stems may be tapped for their sap to produce a drink, and the sap can also be reduced by boiling to produce a type of sugar used for cooking.

Coconut palms produce as many as seventy fruits per year, weighing more than a kilogram each. The wall of the fruit has three layers: a waterproof outer layer, a fibrous middle layer and a hard, inner layer. The thick fibrous middle layer produces coconut fibre, ‘coir’, which has numerous uses and is particularly important in manufacturing ropes. The woody innermost layer, the shell, with its three prominent ‘eyes’, surrounds the seed. An important product obtained from the shell is charcoal, which is widely used in various industries as well as in the home as a cooking fuel. When broken in half, the shells are also used as bowls in many parts of Asia.

Inside the shell are the nutrients (endosperm) needed by the developing seed. Initially, the endosperm is a sweetish liquid, coconut water, which is enjoyed as a drink, but also provides the hormones which encourage other plants to grow more rapidly and produce higher yields. As the fruit matures, the coconut water gradually solidifies to form the brilliant white, fat-rich, edible flesh or meat. Dried coconut flesh, ‘copra’, is made into coconut oil and coconut milk, which are widely used in cooking in different parts of the world, as well as in cosmetics. A derivative of coconut fat, glycerine, acquired strategic importance in a quite different sphere, as Alfred Nobel introduced the world to his nitroglycerine-based invention: dynamite.

Their biology would appear to make coconuts the great maritime voyagers and coastal colonizers of the plant world. The large, energy-rich fruits are able to float in water and tolerate salt, but cannot remain viable indefinitely; studies suggest after about 110 days at sea they are no longer able to germinate. Literally cast onto desert island shores, with little more than sand to grow in and exposed to the full glare of the tropical sun, coconut seeds are able to germinate and root. The air pocket in the seed, created as the endosperm solidifies, protects the embryo. In addition, the fibrous fruit wall that helped it to float during the voyage stores moisture that can be taken up by the roots of the coconut seedling as it starts to grow.

There have been centuries of academic debate over the origins of the coconut. There were no coconut palms in West Africa, the Caribbean or the east coast of the Americas before the voyages of the European explorers Vasco da Gama and Columbus in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. 16th century trade and human migration patterns reveal that Arab traders and European sailors are likely to have moved coconuts from South and Southeast Asia to Africa and then across the Atlantic to the east coast of America. But the origin of coconuts discovered along the west coast of America by 16th century sailors has been the subject of centuries of discussion. Two diametrically opposed origins have been proposed: that they came from Asia, or that they were native to America. Both suggestions have problems. In Asia, there is a large degree of coconut diversity and evidence of millennia of human use – but there are no relatives growing in the wild. In America, there are close coconut relatives, but no evidence that coconuts are indigenous. These problems have led to the intriguing suggestion that coconuts originated on coral islands in the Pacific and were dispersed from there.

Questions 1-8
Complete the table below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage.

The Coconut Palm

Part	Description	Uses
Trunk	up to 30 meters	timber for houses and the making of (1)…………………..
Leaves	up to 6 meters long	to make brushes
Flowers	at the top of the trunk	stems provide sap, used as a drink or a source of (2)…………….
Fruits	– outer layer – middle layer (coir) – inner layer (shell) – coconut water – coconut flesh	– used for (3)………………..etc – a source of (4)………………(when halved) for (5)……………….. – a drink and a source of (6)…………………for other plants – oil and milk for cooking and (7)………………glycerine (an ingredient in (8)…………………

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage?

In 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 mention of this

Coconut seeds need shade in order to germinate.
Coconuts were probably transported to Asia from America in the 16th century.
Coconuts found on the west coast of America were a different type from those found on the east coast.
All the coconuts found in Asia are cultivated varieties.
Coconuts are cultivated in different ways in America and the Pacific.

Reading passage 2

How Baby Talk Gives Infant Brains A Boost

A The typical way of talking to a baby – high-pitched, exaggerated and repetitious – is a source of fascination for linguists who hope to understand how ‘baby talk’ impacts on learning. Most babies start developing their hearing while still in the womb, prompting some hopeful parents to play classical music to their pregnant bellies. Some research even suggests that infants are listening to adult speech as early as 10 weeks before being born, gathering the basic building blocks of their family’s native tongue.

B Early language exposure seems to have benefits to the brain – for instance, studies suggest that babies raised in bilingual homes are better at learning how to mentally prioritize information. So how does the sweet if sometimes absurd sound of infant- directed speech influence a baby’s development? Here are some recent studies that explore the science behind baby talk.

C Fathers don’t use baby talk as often or in the same ways as mothers – and that’s perfectly OK, according to a new study. Mark Van Dam of Washington State University at Spokane and colleagues equipped parents with recording devices and speech-recognition software to study the way they interacted with their youngsters during a normal day. ‘We found that moms do exactly what you’d expect and what’s been described many times over,’ VanDam explains. ‘But we found that dads aren’t doing the same thing. Dads didn’t raise their pitch or fundamental frequency when they talked to kids.’ Their role may be rooted in what is called the bridge hypothesis, which dates back to 1975. It suggests that fathers use less familial language to provide their children with a bridge to the kind of speech they’ll hear in public. The idea is that a kid gets to practice a certain kind of speech with mom and another kind of speech with dad, so the kid then has a wider repertoire of kinds of speech to practice,’ says VanDam.

D Scientists from the University of Washington and the University of Connecticut collected thousands of 30-second conversations between parents and their babies, fitting 26 children with audio-recording vests that captured language and sound during a typical eight-hour day. The study found that the more baby talk parents used, the more their youngsters began to babble. And when researchers saw the same babies at age two, they found that frequent baby talk had dramatically boosted vocabulary, regardless of socioeconomic status. Those children who listened to a lot of baby talk were talking more than the babies that listened to more adult talk or standard speech,’ says Nairan Ramirez-Esparza of the University of Connecticut. ‘We also found that it really matters whether you use baby talk in a one-on-one context,’ she adds. The more parents use baby talk one-on-one, the more babies babble, and the more they babble, the more words they produce later in life.’

E Another study suggests that parents might want to pair their youngsters up so they can babble more with their own kind. Researchers from McGill University and Universite du Quebec a Montreal found that babies seem to like listening to each other rather than to adults – which may be why baby talk is such a universal tool among parents. They played repeating vowel sounds made by a special synthesizing device that mimicked sounds made by either an adult woman or another baby. This way, only the impact of the auditory cues was observed. The team then measured how long each type of sound held the infants’ attention. They found that the ‘infant’ sounds held babies’ attention nearly 40 percent longer. The baby noises also induced more reactions in the listening infants, like smiling or lip moving, which approximates sound making. The team theorizes that this attraction to other infant sounds could help launch the learning process that leads to speech. It may be some property of the sound that is just drawing their attention,’ says study co-author Linda Polka. ‘Or maybe they are really interested in that particular type of sound because they are starting to focus on their own ability to make sounds. We are speculating here but it might catch their attention because they recognize it as a sound they could possibly make.’

F In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a total of 57 babies from two slightly different age groups – seven months and eleven and a half months – were played a number of syllables from both their native language (English) and a non-native tongue (Spanish). The infants were placed in a brain- activation scanner that recorded activity in a brain region known to guide the motor movements that produce speech. The results suggest that listening to baby talk prompts infant brains to start practicing their language skills. Finding activation in motor areas of the brain when infants are simply listening is significant, because it means the baby brain is engaged in trying to talk back right from the start, and suggests that seven-month-olds’ brains are already trying to figure out how to make the right movements that will produce words,’ says co-author Patricia Kuhl. Another interesting finding was that while the seven-month-olds responded to all speech sounds regardless of language, the brains of the older infants worked harder at the motor activations of non-native sounds compared to native sounds. The study may have also uncovered a process by which babies recognize differences between their native language and other tongues.

Questions 14-17

Look at the following ideas (Questions 14-17) and the list of researchers below.

Match each idea with the correct researcher, A, B or C.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

the importance of adults giving babies individual attention when talking to them
the connection between what babies hear and their own efforts to create speech
the advantage for the baby of having two parents each speaking in a different way
the connection between the amount of baby talk babies hear and how much vocalising they do themselves

List of researchers

Mark VanDam
Nairan Ramirez-Esparza
Patricia Kuhl

Questions 18-23

Complete the summary below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Research into how parents talk to babies

Researchers at Washington State University used (18)……………………………., together with specialised computer programs, to analyse how parents interacted with their babies during a normal day. The study revealed that (19)………………………..tended not to modify their ordinary speech patterns when interacting with their babies. According to an idea known as the (20)……………………………, they may use a more adult type of speech to prepare infants for the language they will hear outside the family home. According to the researchers, hearing baby talk from one parent and ‘normal’ language from the other expands the baby’s (21)………………………..of types of speech which they can practise.

Meanwhile, another study carried out by scientists from the University of Washington and the University of Connecticut recorded speech and sound using special (22)…………………………that the babies were equipped with. When they studied the babies again at age two, they found that those who had heard a lot of baby talk in infancy had a much larger (23)………………………..than those who had not.

Questions 24-26

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

a reference to a change which occurs in babies’ brain activity before the end of their first year
an example of what some parents do for their baby’s benefit before birth
a mention of babies’ preference for the sounds that other babies make

Reading passage 3

Whatever Happened To The Harappan Civilisation?

A The Harappan Civilisation of ancient Pakistan and India flourished 5,000 years ago, but a thousand years later their cities were abandoned. The Harappan Civilisation was a sophisticated Bronze Age society who built ‘megacities’ and traded internationally in luxury craft products, and yet seemed to have left almost no depictions of themselves. But their lack of self-imagery – at a time when the Egyptians were carving and painting representations of themselves all over their temples – is only part of the mystery.

B ‘There is plenty of archaeological evidence to tell us about the rise of the Harappan Civilisation, but relatively little about its fall,’ explains archaeologist Dr Cameron Petrie of the University of Cambridge. ‘As populations increased, cities were built that had great baths, craft workshops, palaces and halls laid out in distinct sectors. Houses were arranged in blocks, with wide main streets and narrow alleyways, and many had their own wells and drainage systems. It was very much a “thriving civilisation.’ Then around 2100 BC, a transformation began. Streets went uncleaned, buildings started to be abandoned, and ritual structures fell out of use. After their final demise, a millennium passed before really large-scale cities appeared once more in South Asia.

C Some have claimed that major glacier-fed rivers changed their course, dramatically affecting the water supply and agriculture; or that the cities could not cope with an increasing population, they exhausted their resource base, the trading economy broke down or they succumbed to invasion and conflict; and yet others that climate change caused an environmental change that affected food and water provision. ‘It is unlikely that there was a single cause for the decline of the civilisation. But the fact is, until now, we have had little solid evidence from the area for most of the key elements,’ said Petrie. ‘A lot of the archaeological debate has really only been well- argued speculation.’

D A research team led by Petrie, together with Dr Ravindanath Singh of Banaras Hindu University in India, found early in their investigations that many of the archaeological sites were not where they were supposed to be, completely altering understanding of the way that this region was inhabited in the past. When they carried out a survey of how the larger area was settled in relation to sources of water, they found inaccuracies in the published geographic locations of ancient settlements ranging from several hundred metres to many kilometres. They realised that any attempts to use the existing data were likely to be fundamentally flawed. Over the course of several seasons of fieldwork they carried out new surveys, finding an astonishing 198 settlement sites that were previously unknown.

E Now, research published by Dr Yama Dixit and Professor David Hodell, both from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, has provided the first definitive evidence for climate change affecting the plains of north-western India, where hundreds of Harappan sites are known to have been situated. The researchers gathered shells of Melanoides tuberculata snails from the sediments of an ancient lake and used geochemical analysis as a means of tracing the climate history of the region. ’As today, the major source of water into the lake is likely to have been the summer monsoon,’ says Dixit. ‘But we have observed that there was an abrupt change about 4,100 years ago, when the amount of evaporation from the lake exceeded the rainfall – indicative of a drought.’ Hodell adds: ‘We estimate that the weakening of the Indian summer monsoon climate lasted about 200 years before recovering to the previous conditions, which we still see today.’

F It has long been thought that other great Bronze Age civilisations also declined at a similar time, with a global-scale climate event being seen as the cause. While it is possible that these local-scale processes were linked, the real archaeological interest lies in understanding the impact of these larger-scale events on different environments and different populations. ‘Considering the vast area of the Harappan Civilisation with its variable weather systems,’ explains Singh, ‘it is essential that we obtain more climate data from areas close to the two great cities at Mohenjodaro and Harappa and also from the Indian Punjab.’

G Petrie and Singh’s team is now examining archaeological records and trying to understand details of how people led their lives in the region five millennia ago. They are analysing grains cultivated at the time, and trying to work out whether they were grown under extreme conditions of water stress, and whether they were adjusting the combinations of crops they were growing for different weather systems. They are also looking at whether the types of pottery used, and other aspects of their material culture, were distinctive to specific regions or were more similar across larger areas. This gives us insight into the types of interactive networks that the population was involved in, and whether those changed.

H Petrie believes that archaeologists are in a unique position to investigate how past societies responded to environmental and climatic change. ’By investigating responses to environmental pressures and threats, we can learn from the past to engage with the public, and the relevant governmental and administrative bodies, to be more proactive in issues such as the management and administration of water supply, the balance of urban and rural development, and the importance of preserving cultural heritage in the future.’

Questions 27-31

Reading Passage 3 has eight paragraphs, A-H.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

NB You may use any letter more than once.

proposed explanations for the decline of the Harappan Civilisation
reference to a present-day application of some archaeological research findings
a difference between the Harappan Civilisation and another culture of the same period
a description of some features of Harappan urban design
reference to the discovery of errors made by previous archaeologists

Questions 32-36

Complete the summary below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for answer.

Looking at evidence of climate change

Yama Dixit and David Hodell have found the first definitive evidence of climate change affecting the plains of north-western India thousands of years ago. By collecting the (32)……………………………of snails and analysing them, they discovered evidence of a change in water levels in a (33)……………………….in the region. This occurred when there was less (34)…………………………… than evaporation, and suggests that there was an extended period of drought.

Petrie and Singh’s team are using archaeological records to look at (35)…………………………….. from five millennia ago, in order to know whether people had adapted their agricultural practices to changing climatic conditions. They are also examining objects including (36)……………………………., so as to find out about links between inhabitants of different parts of the region and whether these changed over time.

Questions 37-40

Look at the following statements (Questions 37-40) and the list of researchers below.

Match each statement with the correct researcher, A, B, C or D.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

Finding further information about changes to environmental conditions in the region is vital.
Examining previous patterns of behaviour may have long-term benefits.
Rough calculations indicate the approximate length of a period of water shortage.
Information about the decline of the Harappan Civilisation has been lacking.

List of researchers

Cameron Petrie
Ravindanath Singh
Yama Dixit
David Hodell

Cambridge IELTS 13 Academic Reading Test 3 The Coconut Palm Answers

furniture
sugar
ropes
charcoal
bowls
hormones
cosmetics
dynamite
false
false
not given
true
not given

Cambridge IELTS 13 Academic Reading Test 3 How Baby Talk Gives Infant Brains A Boost Answers

B
C
A
B
recording devices
dads
bridge hypothesis
repertoire
vests
vocabulary
F
A
E

Cambridge IELTS 13 Academic Reading Test 3 Whatever Happened To The Harappan Civilisation? Answers

C
H
A
B
D
shells
lake
rainfall
grains
pottery
B
A
D
A

March 18, 2024

Cambridge IELTS 13 Academic Reading Test 1

Reading passage 1

Case Study: Tourism New Zealand Website

New Zealand is a small country of four million inhabitants, a long-haul flight from all the major tourist-generating markets of the world. Tourism currently makes up 9% of the country’s gross domestic product, and is the country’s largest export sector. Unlike other export sectors, which make products and then sell them overseas, tourism brings its customers to New Zealand. The product is the country itself – the people, the places and the experiences. In 1999, Tourism New Zealand launched a campaign to communicate a new brand position to the world. The campaign focused on New Zealand’s scenic beauty, exhilarating outdoor activities and authentic Maori culture, and it made New Zealand one of the strongest national brands in the world.

A key feature of the campaign was the website www.newzealand.com, which provided potential visitors to New Zealand with a single gateway to everything the destination had to offer. The heart of the website was a database of tourism services operators, both those based in New Zealand and those based abroad which offered tourism services to the country. Any tourism-related business could be listed by filling in a simple form. This meant that even the smallest bed and breakfast address or specialist activity provider could gain a web presence with access to an audience of long-haul visitors. In addition, because participating businesses were able to update the details they gave on a regular basis, the information provided remained accurate. And to maintain and improve standards, Tourism New Zealand organised a scheme whereby organisations appearing on the website underwent an independent evaluation against a set of agreed national standards of quality. As part of this, the effect of each business on the environment was considered.

To communicate the New Zealand experience, the site also carried features relating to famous people and places. One of the most popular was an interview with former New Zealand All Blacks rugby captain Tana Umaga. Another feature that attracted a lot of attention was an interactive journey through a number of the locations chosen for blockbuster films which had made use of New Zealand’s stunning scenery as a backdrop. As the site developed, additional features were added to help independent travellers devise their own customised itineraries. To make it easier to plan motoring holidays, the site catalogued the most popular driving routes in the country, highlighting different routes according to the season and indicating distances and times.

Later a Travel Planner feature was added, which allowed visitors to click and ‘bookmark’ : paces or attractions they were interested in, and then view the results on a map. The Travel Planner offered suggested routes and public transport options between the chosen locations. There were also links to accommodation in the area. By registering with the website, users could save their Travel Plan and return to it later, or print it out take on the visit. The website also had a ‘Your Words’ section where anyone could submit a blog of their New Zealand travels for possible inclusion on the website.

The Tourism New Zealand website won two Webby awards for online achievement and innovation. More importantly perhaps, the growth of tourism to New Zealand was impressive. Overall tourism expenditure increased by an average of 6.9% per year between 1999 and 2004. From Britain, visits to New Zealand grew at an average annual rate of 13% between 2002 and 2006, compared to a rate of 4% overall for British visits abroad.

The website was set up to allow both individuals and travel organisations to create itineraries and travel packages to suit their own needs and interests. On the website, visitors can search for activities not solely by geographical location, but also by the particular nature of the activity. This is important as research shows that activities are the key driver of visitor satisfaction, contributing 74% to visitor satisfaction, while transport and accommodation account for the remaining 26%. The more activities that visitors undertake, the more satisfied they will be. It has also been found that visitors enjoy cultural activities most when they are interactive, such as visiting a marae (meeting ground) to learn about traditional Maori life. Many long-haul travellers enjoy such earning experiences, which provide them with stories to take home to their friends and family. In addition, it appears that visitors to New Zealand don’t want to be ‘one of the crowd’ and find activities that involve only a few people more special and meaningful.

It could be argued that New Zealand is not a typical destination. New Zealand is a small country with a visitor economy composed mainly of small businesses. It is generally perceived as a safe English-speaking country with a reliable transport infrastructure. Because of the long-haul flight, most visitors stay for longer (average 20 days) and want to see as much of the country as possible on what is often seen as a once-in-a-lifetime visit. However, the underlying lessons apply anywhere-the effectiveness of a strong brand, a strategy based on unique experiences and a comprehensive and user-friendly website.

Questions 1-7

Complete the table below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

Section of website	Comments
Database of tourism	– easy for tourism-related businesses to get on the list – allowed businesses to (1)………………………information regularly – provided a country-wide evaluation of businesses including their impact on the (2)……………..
Special features on local topics	– e.g. an interview with a former a sports (3)………………..and an interactive tour of various locations used in (4)………………….
Information on driving routes	– varied depending on the (5)……………….
Travel planner	– included a map showing selected places, details of public transport and local (6)……………..
Your Words	– travellers could send a link to their (7)………………….

Questions 8-13

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 8-13 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

The website www.newzealand.com aimed to provide ready-made itineraries and packages for travel companies and individual tourists.
It was found that most visitors started searching on the website by geographical location.
According to research, 26% of visitor satisfaction is related to their accommodation.
Visitors to New Zealand like to become involved in the local culture.
Visitors like staying in small hotels in New Zealand rather than in larger ones.
Many visitors feel it is unlikely that they will return to New Zealand after their visit.

Reading passage 2

Why Being Bored Is Stimulating – And Useful Too

A We all know how it feels – it’s impossible to keep your mind on anything, time stretches out, and all the things you could do seem equally unlikely to make you feel better. But defining boredom so that it can be studied in the lab has proved difficult. For a start, it can include a lot of other mental states, such as frustration, apathy, depression and indifference. There isn’t even agreement over whether Boredom is always a low-energy, flat kind of emotion or whether feeling agitated and restless counts as boredom, too. In his book, Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey at the University of Calgary, Canada, compares it to disgust – an emotion that motivates us to stay away from certain situations. ‘If disgust protects humans from infection, boredom may protect them from “infectious” social situations,’ he suggests.

B By asking people about their experiences of boredom, Thomas Goetz and his team at the University of Konstanz in Germany have recently identified five distinct types: indifferent, calibrating, searching, reactant and apathetic. These can be plotted on two axes – one running left to right, which measures low to high arousal, and the other from top to bottom, which measures how positive or negative the feeling is. Intriguingly, Goetz has found that while people experience all kinds of boredom, they tend to specialise in one. Of the five types, the most damaging is ‘reactant’ boredom with its explosive combination of high arousal and negative emotion. The most useful is what Goetz calls ‘indifferent’ boredom: someone isn’t engaged in anything satisfying but still feels relaxed and calm. However, it remains to be seen whether there are any character traits that predict the kind of boredom each of us might be prone to.

C Psychologist Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, goes further. All emotions are there for a reason, including boredom,’ she says Mann has found that being bored makes us more creative. ‘We’re all afraid of being bored but in actual fact it can lead to all kinds of amazing things,’ she says. In experiments published last year, Mann found that people who had been made to feel bored by copying numbers out of the phone book for 15 minutes came up with more creative ideas about how to use a polystyrene cup than a control group. Mann concluded that a passive, boring activity is best for creativity because it allows the mind to wander. In fact, she goes so far as to suggest that we should seek out more boredom in our lives.

D Psychologist John Eastwood at York University in Toronto, Canada isn’t convinced. ‘If you are in a state of mind-wandering you are not bored,’ he says. ‘In my view, by definition boredom is an undesirable state.’ That doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t adaptive, he adds. ‘Pain is adaptive – if we didn’t have physical pain, bad things would happen to us. Does that mean that we should actively cause pain? No. But even if boredom has evolved to help us survive, it can still be toxic if allowed to fester.’ For Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is a failure to put our ‘attention system’ into gear. This causes an inability to focus on anything, which makes time seem to go painfully slowly. What’s more, your efforts to improve the situation can end up making you feel worse. ‘People try to connect with the world and if they are not successful there’s that frustration and irritability,’ he says. Perhaps most worryingly, says Eastwood, repeatedly failing to engage attention can lead to a state where we don’t know what to do any more, and no longer care.

E Eastwood’s team is now trying to explore why the attention system fails. It’s early days but they think that at least some of it comes down to personality. Boredom proneness has been linked with a variety of traits. People who are motivated by pleasure seem to suffer particularly badly. Other personality traits, such as curiosity, are associated with a high boredom threshold. More evidence that boredom has detrimental effects comes from studies of people who are more or less prone to boredom. It seems those who bore easily face poorer prospects in education, their career and even life in general. But of course, boredom itself cannot kill -it’s the things we do to deal with it that may put us in danger. What can we do to alleviate it before it comes to that? Goetz’s group has one suggestion. Working with teenagers, they found that those who ‘approach’ a boring situation – in other words, see that it’s boring and get stuck in anyway – report less boredom than those who try to avoid it by using snacks, TV or social media for distraction.

F Psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder speculates that our over-connected lifestyles might even be a new source of boredom. ‘In modern human society there is a lot of overstimulation but still a lot of problems finding meaning,’ she says. So instead of seeking yet more mental stimulation, perhaps we should leave our phones alone, and use boredom to motivate us to engage with the world in a more meaningful way.

Questions 14-19

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.

Write the correct number, i-viii, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

The productive outcomes that may result from boredom
What teachers can do to prevent boredom
A new explanation and a new cure for boredom
Problems with a scientific approach to boredom
A potential danger arising from boredom
Creating a system of classification for feelings of boredom
Age groups most affected by boredom
Identifying those most affected by boredom

Paragraph A
Paragraph B
Paragraph C
Paragraph D
Paragraph E
Paragraph F

Questions 20-23

Look at the following people (Questions 20-23) and the list of ideas below.

Match each person with the correct idea, A-E.

Choose the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 20-23 on your answer sheet.

Peter Toohey
Thomas Goetz
John Eastwood
Francoise Wemelsfelder

List of Ideas

The way we live today may encourage boredom.
One sort of boredom is worse than all the others.
Levels of boredom may fall in the future.
Trying to cope with boredom can increase its negative effects.
Boredom may encourage us to avoid an unpleasant experience.

Questions 24-26

Complete the summary below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.

Responses to boredom

For John Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is that people cannot (24)………………………………, due to a failure in what he calls the ‘attention system’, and as a result they become frustrated and irritable. His team suggests that those for whom (25) …………………………………….is an important aim in life may have problems in coping with boredom, whereas those who have the characteristic of (26)………….. generally cope with it.

Reading passage 3

Artificial Artists

The Painting Fool is one of a growing number of computer programs which, so their makers claim, possess creative talents. Classical music by an artificial composer has had audiences enraptured, and even tricked them into believing a human was behind the score. Artworks painted by a robot have sold for thousands of dollars and been hung in prestigious galleries. And software has been built which creates art that could not have been imagined by the programmer.

Human beings are the only species to perform sophisticated creative acts regularly. If we can break this process down into computer code, where does that leave human creativity? This is a question at the very core of humanity,’ says Geraint Wiggins, a computational creativity researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. ‘It scares a lot of people. They are worried that it is taking something special away from what it means to be human.’

To some extent, we are all familiar with computerised art. The question is: where does the work of the artist stop and the creativity of the computer begin? Consider one of the oldest machine artists, Aaron, a robot that has had paintings exhibited in London’s Tate Modern and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Aaron can pick up a paintbrush and paint on canvas on its own. Impressive perhaps, but it is still little more than a tool to realise the programmer’s own creative ideas.

Simon Colton, the designer of the Painting Fool, is keen to make sure his creation doesn’t attract the same criticism. Unlike earlier ‘artists’ such as Aaron, the Painting Fool only needs minimal direction and can come up with its own concepts by going online for material. The software runs its own web searches and trawls through social media sites. It is now beginning to display a kind of imagination too, creating pictures from scratch. One of its original works is a series of fuzzy landscapes, depicting trees and sky. While some might say they have a mechanical look, Colton argues that such reactions arise from people’s double standards towards software-produced and human-produced art. After all, he says, consider that the Painting Fool painted the landscapes without referring to a photo. ‘If a child painted a new scene from its head, you’d say it has a certain level of imagination,’ he points out. The same should be true of a machine.’ Software bugs can also lead to unexpected results. Some of the Painting Fool’s paintings of a chair came out in black and white, thanks to a technical glitch. This gives the work an eerie, ghostlike quality. Human artists like the renowned Ellsworth Kelly are lauded for limiting their colour palette – so why should computers be any different?

Researchers like Colton don’t believe it is right to measure machine creativity directly to that of humans who have had millennia to develop our skills’. Others, though, are fascinated by the prospect that a computer might create something as original and subtle as our best artists So far, only one has come close. Composer David Cope invented a program called Experiments in Musical Intelligence, or EMI, Not only did EMI create compositions in Cope s style, but also that of the most revered classical composers, including Bach, Chopin and Mozart. Audiences were moved to tears, and EMI even fooled classical music experts into thinking they were hearing genuine Bach. Not everyone was impressed however. Some, such as Wiggins, have blasted Cope’s work as pseudoscience, and condemned him for his deliberately vague explanation of how the software worked. Meanwhile. Douglas Hofstadter of Indiana University said EMI created replicas which still rely completely on the original artist’s creative impulses, When audiences found out the truth they were often outraged with Cope, and one music lover even tried to punch him. Amid such controversy, Cope destroyed EMI’s vital databases.

But why did so many people love the music, yet recoil when they discovered how it was composed? A study by computer scientist David Moffat of Glasgow Caledonian University provides a clue. He asked both expert musicians and non-experts to assess six compositions. The participants weren’t told beforehand whether the tunes were composed by humans or computers, but were asked to guess, and then rate how much they liked each one. People who thought the composer was a computer tended to dislike the piece more than those who believed it was human. This was true even among the experts, who might have been expected to be more objective in their analyses.

Where does this prejudice come from? Paul Bloom of Yale University has a suggestion: he reckons part of the pleasure we get from art stems from the creative process behind the work. This can give it an ‘irresistible essence’, says Bloom. Meanwhile, experiments by Justin Kruger of New York University have shown that people s enjoyment of an artwork increases if they think more time and effort was needed to create it. Similarly, Colton thinks that when people experience art, they wonder what the artist might have been thinking or what the artist is trying to tell them. It seems obvious, therefore, that with computers producing art, this speculation is cut short – there’s nothing to explore. But as technology becomes increasingly complex, finding those greater depths in computer art could become possible. This is precisely why Colton asks the Painting Fool to tap into online social networks for its inspiration: hopefully this way it will choose themes that will already be meaningful to us.

Questions 27-31

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

What is the writer suggesting about computer-produced works in the first paragraph?
1. People’s acceptance of them can vary considerably.
2. A great deal of progress has already been attained in this field.
3. They have had more success in some artistic genres than in others.
4. The advances are not as significant as the public believes them to be.
According to Geraint Wiggins, why are many people worried by computer art?
1. It is aesthetically inferior to human art.
2. It may ultimately supersede human art.
3. It undermines a fundamental human quality.
4. It will lead to a deterioration in human ability.
What is a key difference between Aaron and the Painting Fool?
1. its programmer’s background
2. public response to its work
3. the source of its subject matter
4. the technical standard of its output
What point does Simon Colton make in the fourth paragraph?
1. Software-produced art is often dismissed as childish and simplistic.
2. The same concepts of creativity should not be applied to all forms of art.
3. It is unreasonable to expect a machine to be as imaginative as a human being.
4. People tend to judge computer art and human art according to different criteria.
The writer refers to the paintings of a chair as an example of computer art which
1. achieves a particularly striking effect.
2. exhibits a certain level of genuine artistic skill.
3. closely resembles that of a well-known artist.
4. highlights the technical limitations of the software.

Questions 32-37

Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-G below.

Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 32-37 on your answer sheet.

Simon Colton says it is important to consider the long-term view when
David Cope’s EMI software surprised people by
Geraint Wiggins criticised Cope for not
Douglas Hofstadter claimed that EMI was
Audiences who had listened to EMI’s music became angry after
The participants in David Moffat’s study had to assess music without

List of Ideas

generating work that was virtually indistinguishable from that of humans.
knowing whether it was the work of humans or software.
producing work entirely dependent on the imagination of its creator.
comparing the artistic achievements of humans and computers.
revealing the technical details of his program.
persuading the public to appreciate computer art.
discovering that it was the product of a computer program.

Questions 38-40

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

Moffat’s research may help explain people’s reactions to EMI.
The non-experts in Moffat’s study all responded in a predictable way.
Justin Kruger s findings cast doubt on Paul Bloom’s theory about people’s prejudice towards computer art.

Cambridge IELTS 13 Academic Reading Test 1 Case Study: Tourism New Zealand Website Reading Answers

update
environment
captain
films
season
accommodation
blog
false
not given
false
true
not given
true

Cambridge IELTS 13 Academic Reading Test 1 Why Being Bored Is Stimulating – And Useful Too Reading Answers

iv
vi
i
v
viii
iii
E
B
D
A
focus
pleasure
curiosity

Cambridge IELTS 13 Academic Reading Test 1 Artificial Artists Reading Answers

B
C
C
D
A
D
A
E
C
G
B
yes
not given
no

March 18, 2024

Cambridge IELTS 13 Academic Reading Test 2
Reading Passage 1

Bringing Cinnamon to Europe

Cinnamon is a sweet, fragrant spice produced from the inner bark of trees of the genus Cinnamomum, which is native to the Indian sub-continent. It was known in biblical times, and is mentioned in several books of the Bible, both as an ingredient that was mixed with oils for anointing people’s bodies, and also as a token indicating friendship among lovers and friends. In ancient Rome, mourners attending funerals burnt cinnamon to create a pleasant scent. Most often, however, the spice found its primary use as an additive to food and drink. In the Middle Ages, Europeans who could afford the spice used it to flavour food, particularly meat, and to impress those around them with their ability to purchase an expensive condiment from the exotic’ East. At a banquet, a host would offer guests a plate with various spices piled upon it as a sign of the wealth at his or her disposal. Cinnamon was also reported to have health benefits, and was thought to cure various ailments, such as indigestion.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the European middle classes began to desire the lifestyle of the elite, including their consumption of spices. This led to a growth in demand for cinnamon and other spices. At that time, cinnamon was transported by Arab merchants, who closely guarded the secret of the source of the spice from potential rivals. They took it from India, where it was grown, on camels via an overland route to the Mediterranean. Their journey ended when they reached Alexandria. European traders sailed there to purchase their supply of cinnamon, then brought it back to Venice. The spice then travelled from that great trading city to markets all around Europe. Because the overland trade route allowed for only small quantities of the spice to reach Europe, and because Venice had a virtual monopoly of the trade, the Venetians could set the price of cinnamon exorbitantly high. These prices, coupled with the increasing demand, spurred the search for new routes to Asia by Europeans eager to take part in the spice trade.

Seeking the high profits promised by the cinnamon market, Portuguese traders arrived on the island of Ceylon in the Indian Ocean toward the end of the 15th century. Before Europeans arrived on the island, the state had organized the cultivation of cinnamon. People belonging to the ethnic group called the Salagama would peel the bark off young shoots of the cinnamon plant in the rainy season, when the wet bark was more pliable. During the peeling process, they curled the bark into the ‘stick’ shape still associated with the spice today. The Salagama then gave the finished product to the king as a form of tribute. When the Portuguese arrived, they needed to increase production significantly, and so enslaved many other members of the Ceylonese native population, forcing them to work in cinnamon harvesting. In 1518, the Portuguese built a fort on Ceylon, which enabled them to protect the island, so helping them to develop a monopoly in the cinnamon trade and generate very high profits. In the late 16th century, for example, they enjoyed a tenfold profit when shipping cinnamon over a journey of eight days from Ceylon to India.

When the Dutch arrived off the coast of southern Asia at the very beginning of the 17th century, they set their sights on displacing the Portuguese as kings of cinnamon. The Dutch allied themselves with Kandy, an inland kingdom on Ceylon. In return for payments of elephants and cinnamon, they protected the native king from the Portuguese. By 1640, the Dutch broke the 150-year Portuguese monopoly when they overran and occupied their factories. By 1658, they had permanently expelled the Portuguese from the island, thereby gaining control of the lucrative cinnamon trade.

In order to protect their hold on the market, the Dutch, like the Portuguese before them, treated the native inhabitants harshly Because of the need to boost production and satisfy Europe’s ever-increasing appetite for cinnamon, the Dutch began to alter the harvesting practices of the Ceylonese. Over time, the supply of cinnamon trees on the island became nearly exhausted, due to systematic stripping of the bark. Eventually, the Dutch began cultivating their own cinnamon trees to supplement the diminishing number of wild trees available for use.

Then, in 1796, the English arrived on Ceylon, thereby displacing the Dutch from their control of the cinnamon monopoly. By the middle of the 19th century, production of cinnamon reached 1.000 tons a year, after a lower grade quality of the spice became acceptable to European tastes By that time, cinnamon was being grown in other parts of the Indian Ocean region and in the West Indies, Brazil, and Guyana. Not only was a monopoly of cinnamon becoming impossible, but the spice trade overall was diminishing in economic potential, and was eventually superseded by the rise of trade in coffee, tea, chocolate, and sugar.

Questions 1-9

Complete the notes below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage.

The early history of Cinnamon

Biblical times: added to (1)…………..
Used to show (2)……………………between people

Ancient Rome: used for its sweet smell at (3)………………….
Was an indication of a person’s (4)…………………….
Known as a treatment for (5)……………………………..and other health problems
Grown in (6)…………………………
Merchants used (7)……………………………to bring it to the Mediterranean
Arrived in the Mediterranean at (8)………………………
Traders took it to (9)………………………and sold it to destinations around Europe

Questions 10-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage. 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
1. The Portuguese had control over the cinnamon trade in Ceylon throughout the 16th century.
2. The Dutch took over the cinnamon trade from the Portuguese as soon as they arrived in Ceylon.
3. The trees planted by the Dutch produced larger quantities of cinnamon than the wild trees.
4. The spice trade maintained its economic importance during the 19th century.
Reading Passage 2

Oxytocin

A Oxytocin is a chemical, a hormone produced in the pituitary gland in the brain. It was through various studies focusing on animals that scientists first became aware of the influence of oxytocin. They discovered that it helps reinforce the bonds between prairie voles, which mate for life, and triggers the motherly behaviour that sheep show towards their newborn lambs. It is also released by women in childbirth, strengthening the attachment between mother and baby. Few chemicals have as positive a reputation as oxytocin, which is sometimes referred to as the ‘love hormone’. One sniff of it can, it is claimed, make a person more trusting, empathetic, generous and cooperative. It is time, however, to revise this wholly optimistic view. A new wave of studies has shown that its effects vary greatly depending on the person and the circumstances, and it can impact on our social interactions for worse as well as for better.

B Oxytocin’s role in human behaviour first emerged in 2005. In a groundbreaking experiment, Markus Heinrichs and his colleagues at the University of Freiburg, Germany, asked volunteers to do an activity in which they could invest money with an anonymous person who was not guaranteed to be honest. The team found that participants who had sniffed oxytocin via a nasal spray beforehand invested more money than those who received a placebo instead. The study was the start of research into the effects of oxytocin on human interactions. ‘For eight years, it was quite a lonesome field,’ Heinrichs recalls. ‘Now, everyone is interested.’ These follow-up studies have shown that after a sniff of the hormone, people become more charitable, better at reading emotions on others’ faces and at communicating constructively in arguments. Together, the results fuelled the view that oxytocin universally enhanced the positive aspects of our social nature.

C Then, after a few years, contrasting findings began to emerge. Simone Shamay- Tsoory at the University of Haifa, Israel, found that when volunteers played a competitive game, those who inhaled the hormone showed more pleasure when they beat other players, and felt more envy when others won. What’s more, administering oxytocin also has sharply contrasting outcomes depending on a person’s disposition. Jennifer Bartz from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, found that it improves people’s ability to read emotions, but only if they are not very socially adept to begin with. Her research also shows that oxytocin in fact reduces cooperation in subjects who are particularly anxious or sensitive to rejection.

D Another discovery is that oxytocin’s effects vary depending on who we are interacting with. Studies conducted by Carolyn DeClerck of the University of Antwerp, Belgium, revealed that people who had received a dose of oxytocin actually became less cooperative when dealing with complete strangers. Meanwhile, Carsten De Dreu at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands discovered that volunteers given oxytocin showed favouritism: Dutch men became quicker to associate positive words with Dutch names than with foreign ones, for example. According to De Dreu, oxytocin drives people to care for those in their social circles and defend them from outside dangers. So, it appears that oxytocin strengthens biases, rather than promoting general goodwill, as was previously thought.

E There were signs of these subtleties from the start. Bartz has recently shown that in almost half of the existing research results, oxytocin influenced only certain individuals or in certain circumstances. Where once researchers took no notice of such findings, now a more nuanced understanding of oxytocin’s effects is propelling investigations down new lines. To Bartz, the key to understanding what the hormone does lies in pinpointing its core function rather than in cataloguing its seemingly endless effects. There are several hypotheses which are not mutually exclusive. Oxytocin could help to reduce anxiety and fear. Or it could simply motivate people to seek out social connections. She believes that oxytocin acts as a chemical spotlight that shines on social clues – a shift in posture, a flicker of the eyes, a dip in the voice – making people more attuned to their social environment. This would explain why it makes us more likely to look others in the eye and improves our ability to identify emotions. But it could also make things worse for people who are overly sensitive or prone to interpreting social cues in the worst light.

F Perhaps we should not be surprised that the oxytocin story has become more perplexing. The hormone is found in everything from octopuses to sheep, and its evolutionary roots stretch back half a billion years. ‘It’s a very simple and ancient molecule that has been co-opted for many different functions,’ says Sue Carter at the University of Illinois, Chicago, USA. ‘It affects primitive parts of the brain like the amygdala, so it’s going to have many effects on just about everything.’ Bartz agrees. ‘Oxytocin probably does some very basic things, but once you add our higher-order thinking and social situations, these basic processes could manifest in different ways depending on individual differences and context.’

Questions 14-17

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.
1. reference to research showing the beneficial effects of oxytocin on people
2. reasons why the effects of oxytocin are complex
3. mention of a period in which oxytocin attracted little scientific attention
4. reference to people ignoring certain aspects of their research data
Questions 18-20

Look at the following research findings (Questions 18-20) and the list of researchers below.

Match each research finding with the correct researcher, A-F.

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 18-20 on your answer sheet.
1. People are more trusting when affected by oxytocin.
2. Oxytocin increases people’s feelings of jealousy.
3. The effect of oxytocin varies from one type of person to another.
List of researchers
1. Markus Heinrichs
2. Simone Shamay-Tsoory
3. Jennifer Bartz
4. Carolyn DeClerck
5. Carsten De Dreu
6. Sue Carter
Questions 21-26

Complete the summary below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 21-26 on your answer sheet.

Oxytocin research

The earliest findings about oxytocin and bonding came from research involving (21)……………………….. it was also discovered that humans produce oxytocin during (22)………………………. An experiment in 2005, in which participants were given either oxytocin or a (23)………………………….reinforced the belief that the hormone had a
positive effect.

However, later research suggests that this is not always the case. A study at the University of Haifa where participants took part in a (24)………………………..revealed the negative emotions which oxytocin can trigger. A study at the University of Antwerp showed people’s lack of willingness to help (25)……………………….while under the influence of oxytocin. Meanwhile, research at the University of Amsterdam revealed that people who have been given oxytocin consider (26)…………………………..that are familiar to them in their own country to have more positive associations than those from other cultures.

Reading Passage 3

Making the most of trends

Most managers can identify the major trends of the day. But in the course of conducting research in a number of industries and working directly with companies, we have discovered that managers often fail to recognize the less obvious but profound ways these trends are influencing consumers’ aspirations, attitudes, and behaviors. This is especially true of trends that managers view as peripheral to their core markets.

Mam ignore trends in their innovation strategies or adopt a wait-and-see approach and let competitors take the lead. At a minimum, such responses mean missed profit opportunities. At the extreme, they can jeopardize a company by ceding to rivals the opportunity to transform the industry. The purpose of this article is twofold: to spur managers to think more expansively about how trends could engender new value propositions in their core markets, and to provide some high-level advice on how’ to make market research and product development personnel more adept at analyzing and exploiting trends.

One strategy, known as ‘infuse and augment’, is to design a product or service that retains most of the attributes and functions of existing products in the category but adds others that address the needs and desires unleashed by a major trend. A case in point is the Poppy range of handbags, which the firm Coach created in response to the economic downturn of 2008. The Coach brand had been a symbol of opulence and luxury for nearly 70 years, and the most obvious reaction to the downturn would have been to lower prices. However, that would have risked cheapening the brand’s image. Instead, they initiated a consumer-research project which revealed that customers were eager to lift themselves and the country out of tough limes. Using these insights. Coach launched the lower-priced Poppy handbags, which were in vibrant colors, and looked more youthful and playful than conventional Coach products. Creating the sub-brand allowed Coach to avert an across-the-board price cut. In contrast to the many companies that responded to the recession by cutting prices. Coach saw the new consumer mindset as an opportunity for innovation and renewal.

A further example of this strategy was supermarket Tesco’s response to consumers’ growing concerns about the environment. With that in mind. Tesco, one of the world’s top five retailers, introduced its Greener Living program, which demonstrates the company’s commitment to protecting the environment by involving consumers in ways that produce tangible results. For example. Tesco customers can accumulate points for such activities as reusing bags, recycling cans and printer cartridges, and buying home-insulation materials. Like points earned on regular purchases, these green points can be redeemed for cash. Tesco has not abandoned its traditional retail offerings but augmented its business with these innovations, thereby infusing its value proposition with a green streak.

A more radical strategy is ‘combine and transcend’. This entails combining aspects of the product s existing value proposition with attributes addressing changes arising from a trend, to create a novel experience – one that may land the company in an entirely new market space. At first glance, spending resources to incorporate elements of a seemingly irrelevant trend into one’s core offerings sounds like it’s hardly worthwhile. But consider Nike’s move to integrate the digital revolution into its reputation for high-performance athletic footwear. In 2006, they teamed up with technology company Apple to launch Nike-f. a digital sports kit comprising a sensor that attaches to the running shoe and a wireless receiver that connects to the user’s iPod, By combining Nike’s original value proposition for amateur athletes with one for digital consumers, the Nike • sports kit and web interface moved the company from a focus on athletic apparel to a new plane of engagement with its customers.

A third approach, known as ‘counteract and reaffirm’, involves developing products or services that stress the values traditionally associated with the category in ways that allow consumers to oppose or at least temporarily escape from the aspects of trends they view as undesirable. A product that accomplished this is the ME2, a video game created by Canada’s iToys. By reaffirming the toy category’s association with physical play, the ME2 counteracted some of the widely perceived negative impacts of digital gaming devices. Like other handheld games, the device featured a host of exciting interactive games, a lull-color LCD screen, and advanced 3D graphics. What set it apart was that it incorporated the traditional physical component of children’s play: it contained a pedometer, which tracked and awarded points for physical activity (walking, running, biking, skateboarding, climbing stairs). The child could use the points to enhance various virtual skills needed for the video game. The ME2, introduced in mid- 2008, catered to kids’ huge desire to play video games while countering the negatives, such as associations with lack of exercise and obesity.

Once you have gained perspective on how trend-related changes in consumer opinions and behaviors impact on your category, you can determine which of our three innovation strategies to pursue. When your category’s basic value proposition continues to be meaningful for consumers influenced by the trend, the infuse-and-augment strategy will allow you to reinvigorate the category. If analysis reveals an increasing disparity between y our category and consumers’ new focus, your innovations need to transcend the category to integrate the two worlds. Finally, if aspects of the category clash with undesired outcomes of a trend, such as associations with unhealthy lifestyles, there is an opportunity to counteract those changes by reaffirming the core values of your category.

Trends – technological, economic, environmental, social, or political – that affect how people perceive the world around them and shape what they expect from products and services present firms with unique opportunities for growth.

Questions 27-31

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
1. In the first paragraph, the writer says that most managers
  1. fail to spot the key consumer trends of the moment.
  2. make the mistake of focusing only on the principal consumer trends.
  3. misinterpret market research data relating to current consumer trends.
  4. are unaware of the significant impact that trends have on consumers’ lives.
2. According to the third paragraph, Coach was anxious to
  1. follow what some of its competitors were doing.
  2. maintain its prices throughout its range.
  3. safeguard its reputation as a manufacturer of luxury goods.
  4. modify the entire look of its brand to suit the economic climate.
3. What point is made about Tesco’s Greener Living programme?
  1. It did not require Tesco to modify its core business activities.
  2. It succeeded in attracting a more eco-conscious clientele.
  3. Its main aim was to raise consumers’ awareness of environmental issues.
  4. It was not the first time that Tesco had implemented such an initiative.
4. What does the writer suggest about Nike’s strategy?
  1. It was an extremely risky strategy at the time.
  2. It was a strategy that only a major company could afford to follow.
  3. It was the type of strategy that would not have been possible in the past.
  4. It was the kind of strategy which might appear to have few obvious benefits.
5. What was original about the ME2?
  1. It contained technology that had been developed for the sports industry.
  2. It appealed to young people who were keen to improve their physical fitness.
  3. It took advantage of a current trend for video games with colourful 3D graphics.
  4. It was a handheld game that addressed people’s concerns about unhealthy lifestyles
Questions 32-37

Look at the following statements and the list of companies below.

Match each statement with the correct company A, B, C or D.
1. It turned the notion that its products could have harmful effects to its own advantage.
2. It extended its offering by collaborating with another manufacturer.
3. It implemented an incentive scheme to demonstrate its corporate social responsibility.
4. It discovered that customers had a positive attitude towards dealing with difficult circumstances.
5. It responded to a growing lifestyle trend in an unrelated product sector.
6. It successfully avoided having to charge its customers less for its core products.
List of companies
1. Coach
2. Tesco
3. Nike
4. iToys
Questions 38-40

Complete each sentence with the correct ending. A, B, C or D below.
1. If there are any trend-related changes impacting on your category, you should
2. If a current trend highlights a negative aspect of your category, you should
3. If the consumers’ new focus has an increasing lack of connection with your offering, you should
1. employ a combination of strategies to maintain your consumer base.
2. identify the most appropriate innovation strategy to use.
3. emphasise your brand’s traditional values with the counteract-and- affirm strategy.
4. use the combine-and-transcend strategy to integrate the two worlds.
Cambridge IELTS 13 Academic Reading Test 2 Passage 1 Bringing Cinnamon to Europe Answers
1. oils
2. friendship
3. funerals
4. wealth
5. indigestion
6. India
7. camels
8. Alexandria
9. Venice
10. true
11. false
12. not given
13. false
Cambridge IELTS 13 Academic Reading Test 2 Passage 2 Oxytocin Answers
1. B
2. F
3. B
4. E
5. A
6. B
7. C
8. animals
9. childbirth
10. placebo
11. game
12. strangers
13. names
Cambridge IELTS 13 Academic Reading Test 2 Passage 3 Making the most of trends Answers
1. D
2. C
3. A
4. D
5. D
6. D
7. C
8. B
9. A
10. C
11. A
12. B
13. C
14. D
March 18, 2024
Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 4
Reading Passage 1

The History of Glass

From our earliest origins, man has been making use of glass. Historians have discovered that a type of natural glass – obsidian – formed in places such as the mouth of a volcano as a result of the intense heat of an eruption melting sand – was first used as tips for spears. Archaeologists have even found evidence of man-made glass which dates back to 4000 BC; this took the form of glazes used for coating stone beads. It was not until 1500 BC, however, that the first hollow glass container was made by covering a sand core with a layer of molten glass.

Glass blowing became the most common way to make glass containers from the first century BC. The glass made during this time was highly coloured due to the impurities of the raw material. In the first century AD, methods of creating colourless glass were developed, which was then tinted by the addition of colouring materials. The secret of glass making was taken across Europe by the Romans during this century. However, they guarded the skills and technology required to make glass very closely, and it was not until their empire collapsed in 476 AD that glass- making knowledge became widespread throughout Europe and the Middle East. From the 10th century onwards, the Venetians gained a reputation for technical skill and artistic ability in the making of glass bottles, and many of the city’s craftsmen left Italy to set up glassworks throughout Europe.

A major milestone in the history of glass occurred with the invention of lead crystal glass by the English glass manufacturer George Ravenscroft (1632 – 1683). He attempted to counter the effect of clouding that sometimes occurred in blown glass by introducing lead to the raw materials used in the process. The new glass he created was softer and easier to decorate, and had a higher refractive index, adding to its brilliance and beauty, and it proved invaluable to the optical industry. It is thanks to Ravenscroft’s invention that optical lenses, astronomical telescopes, microscopes and the like became possible.

In Britain, the modem glass industry only really started to develop after the repeal of the Excise Act in 1845. Before that time, heavy taxes had been placed on the amount of glass melted in a glasshouse, and were levied continuously from 1745 to 1845. Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 marked the beginning of glass as a material used in the building industry. This revolutionary new building encouraged the use of glass in public, domestic and horticultural architecture. Glass manufacturing techniques also improved with the advancement of science and the development of better technology.

From 1887 onwards, glass making developed from traditional mouth-blowing to a semi-automatic process, after factory- owner HM Ashley introduced a machine capable of producing 200 bottles per hour in Castleford, Yorkshire, England – more than three times quicker than any previous production method. Then in 1907, the first fully automated machine was developed in the USA by Michael Owens – founder of the Owens Bottle Machine Company (later the major manufacturers Owens- Illinois) – and installed in its factory. Owens’ invention could produce an impressive 2,500 bottles per hour Other developments followed rapidly, but it | was not until the First World War when Britain became cut off from essential glass suppliers, that glass became part of the scientific sector. Previous to this, glass had been seen as a craft rather than a precise science.

Today, glass making is big business. It has become a modem, hi-tech industry operating in a fiercely competitive global market where quality, design and service levels are critical to maintaining market share. Modem glass plants are capable of making millions of glass containers a day in many different colours, with green, brown and clear remaining the most popular. Few of us can imagine modem life without glass. It features in almost every aspect of our lives – in our homes, our cars and whenever we sit down to eat or drink. Glass packaging is used for many products, many beverages are sold in glass, as are numerous foodstuffs, as well as medicines and cosmetics.

Glass is an ideal material for recycling, and with growing consumer concern for green issues, glass bottles and jars are becoming ever more popular. Glass recycling is good news for the environment. It saves used glass containers being sent to landfill. As less energy is needed to melt recycled glass than to melt down raw materials, this also saves fuel and production costs. Recycling also reduces the need for raw materials to be quarried, thus saving precious resources.

Questions 1-8

Complete the notes below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage.

The History of Glass

• Early humans used a material called (1)……………………………..to make the sharp points of their (2)…………………..
• 4000 BC: (3)……………………….made of stone were covered in a coating of man made glass
• First century BC: glass was colored because of the (4)…………………….in the material
• Until 476 AD: only the (5)……………………………knew how to make glass
• From 10th century: Venetians became famous for making bottles out of glass
• 17th century: George Ravenscroft developed a process using (6)………………….to avoid the occurrence of (7)……………………………in blown glass
• Mid 19th century: British glass production developed after changes to laws concerning (8)……………………

Questions 9-13
In boxes 9-13 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
1. In 1887, HM Ashley has the fastest bottle producing machine that existed at the time.
2. Micheal Owens was hired by a large US company to design a fully automated bottle manufacturing machine for them.
3. Nowadays, most glass is produced by large international manufacturers.
4. Concern for the environment is leading to an increased demand for glass containers.
5. It is more expensive to produce recycle glass than to manufacture new glass.
Reading passage 2

Bring back the big cats

It’s time to start returning vanished native animals to Britain, says John Vesty There is a poem, written around 598 AD, which describes hunting a mystery animal called a llewyn. But what was it? Nothing seemed to fit, until 2006, when an animal bone, dating from around the same period, was found in the Kinsey Cave in northern England. Until this discovery, the lynx – a large spotted cat with tassel led ears – was presumed to have died out in Britain at least 6,000 years ago, before the inhabitants of these islands took up farming. But the 2006 find, together with three others in Yorkshire and Scotland, is compelling evidence that the lynx and the mysterious llewyn were in fact one and the same animal. If this is so, it would bring forward the tassel-eared cat’s estimated extinction date by roughly 5,000 years.

However, this is not quite the last glimpse of the animal in British culture. A 9th- century stone cross from the Isle of Eigg shows, alongside the deer, boar and aurochs pursued by a mounted hunter, a speckled cat with tasselled ears. Were it not for the animal’s backside having worn away with time, we could have been certain, as the lynx’s stubby tail is unmistakable. But even without this key feature, it’s hard to see what else the creature could have been. The lynx is now becoming the totemic animal of a movement that is transforming British environmentalism: rewilding.

Rewilding means the mass restoration of damaged ecosystems. It involves letting trees return to places that have been denuded, allowing parts of the seabed to recover from trawling and dredging, permitting rivers to flow freely again. Above all, it means bringing back missing species. One of the most striking findings of modern ecology is that ecosystems without large predators behave in completely different ways from those that retain them Some of them drive dynamic processes that resonate through the whole food chain, creating niches for hundreds of species that might otherwise struggle to survive. The killers turn out to be bringers of life.

Such findings present a big challenge to British conservation, which has often selected arbitrary assemblages of plants and animals and sought, at great effort and expense, to prevent them from changing. It has tried to preserve the living world as if it were a jar of pickles, letting nothing in and nothing out, keeping nature in a state of arrested development. But ecosystems are not merely collections of species; they are also the dynamic and ever-shifting relationships between them. And this dynamism often depends on large predators.

At sea the potential is even greater: by protecting large areas from commercial fishing, we could once more see what 18th-century literature describes: vast shoals of fish being chased by fin and sperm whales, within sight of the English shore. This policy would also greatly boost catches in the surrounding seas; the fishing industry’s insistence on scouring every inch of seabed, leaving no breeding reserves, could not be more damaging to its own interests.

Rewilding is a rare example of an environmental movement in which campaigners articulate what they are for rather than only what they are against. One of the reasons why the enthusiasm for rewilding is spreading so quickly in Britain is that it helps to create a more inspiring vision than the green movement’s usual promise of ‘Follow us and the world will be slightly less awful than it would otherwise have been.

The lynx presents no threat to human beings: there is no known instance of one preying on people. It is a specialist predator of roe deer, a species that has exploded in Britain in recent decades, holding back, by intensive browsing, attempts to re-establish forests. It will also winkle out sika deer: an exotic species that is almost impossible for human beings to control, as it hides in impenetrable plantations of young trees. The attempt to reintroduce this predator marries well with the aim of bringing forests back to parts of our bare and barren uplands. The lynx requires deep cover, and as such presents little risk to sheep and other livestock, which are supposed, as a condition of farm subsidies, to be kept out of the woods.

On a recent trip to the Cairngorm Mountains, I heard several conservationists suggest that the lynx could be reintroduced there within 20 years. If trees return to the bare hills elsewhere in Britain, the big cats could soon follow. There is nothing extraordinary about these proposals, seen from the perspective of anywhere else in Europe. The lynx has now been reintroduced to the Jura Mountains, the Alps, the Vosges in eastern France and the Harz mountains in Germany, and has re-established itself in many more places. The European population has tripled since 1970 to roughly 10,000. As with wolves, bears, beavers, boar, bison, moose and many other species, the lynx has been able to spread as farming has, left the hills and people discover that it is more lucrative to protect charismatic wildlife than to hunt it, as tourists will pay for the chance to see it. Large-scale rewilding is happening almost everywhere – except Britain.

Here, attitudes are just beginning to change. Conservationists are starting to accept that the old preservation-jar model is failing, even on its own terms. Already, projects such as Trees for Life in the Highlands provide a hint of what might be coming. An organisation is being set up that will seek to catalyse the rewilding of land and sea across Britain, its aim being to reintroduce that rarest of species to British ecosystems: hope.

Questions 14-18

Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
1. What did the 2006 discovery of the animal bone reveal about the lynx?
  1. its physical appearance was very distinctive
  2. its extinction was linked to the spread of farming
  3. it vanished from Britain several thousand years ago
  4. it survived in Britain longer than was previously thought
2. What point does the writer make about large predators in the third paragraph?
  1. their presence can increase biodiversity
  2. they may cause damage to local ecosystems
  3. their behavior can alter according to the environment
  4. they should be reintroduced only to areas where they were native
3. What does the write suggest about British conservation in the fourth paragraph?
  1. it has failed to achieve its aims
  2. it is beginning to change direction
  3. it has taken a misguided approach
  4. it has focused on the most widespread species
4. Protecting large areas of the sea from commercial fishing would result in
  1. practical benefits for the fishing industry
  2. some short term losses to the fishing industry
  3. widespread opposition from the fishing industry
  4. certain changes to techniques within the fishing industry
5. According to the author, what distinguishes rewilding from other environmental campaigns?
  1. its objective is more achievable
  2. its supporters are more articulate
  3. its positive message is more appealing
  4. it is based on sounder scientific principles
Questions 19-22

Complete the summary using the list of words and phrases A-F below.

Reintroducing the lynx to Britain

There would be many advantages to reintroducing the lynx to Britain. While there is no evidence that the lynx has ever put (19)………………………….in danger, it would reduce the numbers of certain (20)………………………..whose populations have increased enormously in recent decades. It would present only a minimal threat to (21)……………………….provided these were kept away from lynx habitats. Furthermore, the reintroduction programme would also like efficiently with initiatives to return native (22)……………………….to certain areas of the country.
1. Trees
2. Endangered species
3. Hillsides
4. Wild animals
5. Humans
6. Farm animals
Questions 23-26

In boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet, write
- YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
- NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
- NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
1. Britain could become the first European country to reintroduce the lynx.
2. The large growth in the European lynx population since 1970 has exceeded conservationists’ expectations.
3. Changes in agricultural practices have extended the habitat of the lynx in Europe.
4. It has become apparent that species reintroduction has commercial advantages.
Reading passage 3

UK companies need more effective boards of directors

A After a number of serious failures of governance (that is, how they are managed at the highest level), companies in Britain, as well as elsewhere, should consider radical changes to their directors’ roles. It is clear that the role of a board director today is not an easy one. Following the 2008 financial meltdown, which resulted in a deeper and more prolonged period of economic downturn than anyone expected, the search for explanations in the many post-mortems of the crisis has meant blame has been spread far and wide. Governments, regulators, central banks and auditors have all been in the frame. The role of bank directors and management and their widely publicised failures have been extensively picked over and examined in reports, inquiries and commentaries.

B The knock-on t of this scrutiny has been to make the governance of companies in general an issue of intense public debate and has significantly increased the pressures on, and the responsibilities of, directors. At the simplest and most practical level, the time involved in fulfilling the demands of a board directorship has increased significantly, calling into question the effectiveness of the classic model of corporate governance by part-time, independent non-executive directors. Where once a board schedule may have consisted of between eight and ten meetings a year, in many companies the number of events requiring board input and decisions has dramatically risen. Furthermore, the amount of reading and preparation required for each meeting is increasing. Agendas can become overloaded and this can mean the time for constructive debate must necessarily be restricted in favour of getting through the business.

C Often, board business is devolved to committees in order to cope with the workload, which may be more efficient but can mean that the board as a whole is less involved in fully addressing some of the most important issues. It is not uncommon for the audit committee meeting to last longer than the main board meeting itself. Process may take the place of discussion and be at the expense of real collaboration, so that boxes are ticked rather than issues tackled.

D A radical solution, which may work for some very large companies whose businesses are extensive and complex, is the professional board, whose members would work up to three or four days a week, supported by their own dedicated staff and advisers. There are obvious risks to this and it would be important to establish clear guidelines for such a board to ensure that it did not step on the toes of management by becoming too engaged in the day- to-day running of the company. Problems of recruitment, remuneration and independence could also arise and this structure would not be appropriate for all companies. However, more professional and better-informed boards would have been particularly appropriate for banks where the executives had access to information that part-time non-executive directors lacked, leaving the latter unable to comprehend or anticipate the 2008 crash.

E One of the main criticisms of boards and their directors is that they do not focus sufficiently on longer-term matters of strategy, sustainability and governance, but instead concentrate too much on short-term financial metrics. Regulatory requirements and the structure of the market encourage this behaviour. The tyranny of quarterly reporting can distort board decision-making, as directors have to ‘make the numbers’ every four months to meet the insatiable appetite of the market for more data. This serves to encourage the trading methodology of a certain kind of investor who moves in and out of a stock without engaging in constructive dialogue with the company about strategy or performance, and is simply seeking a short¬ term financial gain. This effect has been made worse by the changing profile of investors due to the globalisation of capital and the increasing use of automated trading systems. Corporate culture adapts and management teams are largely incentivised to meet financial goals.

F Compensation for chief executives has become a combat zone where pitched battles between investors, management and board members are fought, often behind closed doors but increasingly frequently in the full glare of press attention. Many would argue that this is in the interest of transparency and good governance as shareholders use their muscle in the area of pay to pressure boards to remove underperforming chief executives. Their powers to vote down executive remuneration policies increased when binding votes came into force. The chair of the remuneration committee can be an exposed and lonely role, as Alison Carnwath, chair of Barclays Bank’s remuneration committee, found when she had to resign, having been roundly criticised for trying to defend the enormous bonus to be paid to the chief executive; the irony being that she was widely understood to have spoken out against it in the privacy of the committee.

G The financial crisis stimulated a debate about the role and purpose of the company and a heightened awareness of corporate ethics. Trust in the corporation has been eroded and academics such as Michael Sandel, in his thoughtful and bestselling book What Money Can’t Buy, are questioning the morality of capitalism and the market economy. Boards of companies in all sectors will need to widen their perspective to encompass these issues and this may involve a realignment of corporate goals. We live in challenging times.

Questions 27-33

Reading passage 3 has seven paragraphs A-G.

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of heading below.

List of headings
1. Disputes over financial arrangements regarding senior managers
2. The impact on companies of being subjected to close examination
3. The possible need to fundamental change in every area of business
4. Many external bodies being held responsible for problems
5. The falling number of board members with broad enough experience
6. A risk that not all directors take part in solving major problems
7. Boards not looking far enough ahead
8. A proposal to change the way the board operates
1. Paragraph A
2. Paragraph B
3. Paragraph C
4. Paragraph D
5. Paragraph E
6. Paragraph F
7. Paragraph G
Questions 34-37

In boxes 34-37 on your answer sheet write
- YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
- NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
- NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
1. Close scrutiny of the behavior of boards has increased since the economic downturn.
2. Banks have been mismanaged to a greater extent than other businesses.
3. Board meetings normally continue for as long as necessary to debate matters in full.
4. Using a committee structure would ensure that board members are fully informed about significant issues.
Questions 38-40

Complete the sentences below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage.
1. Before 2008, non-executive directors were at a disadvantage because of their lack of………………….
2. Boards tend to place too much emphasis on…………………………..considerations that are only of short term relevance.
3. On certain matters, such as pay the board may have to accept the views of…………………..
Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 4 The History of Glass Answers
1. obsidian
2. spears
3. beads
4. impurities
5. romans
6. lead
7. clouding
8. taxes
9. true
10. false
11. not given
12. true
13. false
Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 4 Bring back the big cats Answers
1. D
2. A
3. C
4. A
5. C
6. E
7. D
8. F
9. A
10. no
11. not given
12. yes
13. yes
Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 4 Reintroducing the lynx to Britain Answers
1. iv
2. ii
3. vi
4. viii
5. vii
6. i
7. iii
8. yes
9. not given
10. no
11. no
12. information
13. financial
14. shareholders/ investors
March 18, 2024

Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 1

Reading passage 1

Nutmeg – A Valuable Spice

The nutmeg tree, Myristica fragrans, is a large evergreen tree native to Southeast Asia. Until the late 18th century, it only grew in one place in the world: a small group of islands in the Banda Sea, part of the Moluccas – or Spice Islands – in northeastern Indonesia. The tree is thickly branched with dense foliage of tough, dark green oval leaves, and produces small, yellow, bell-shaped flowers and pale yellow pear-shaped fruits. The fruit is encased in a fleshy husk. When the fruit is ripe, this husk splits into two halves along a ridge running the length of the fruit. Inside is a purple-brown shiny seed, 2-3 cm long by about 2cm across, surrounded by a lacy red or crimson covering called an ‘aril’. These are the sources of the two spices nutmeg and mace, the former being produced from the dried seed and the latter from the aril.

Nutmeg was a highly prized and costly ingredient in European cuisine in the Middle Ages, and was used as a flavouring, medicinal, and preservative agent. Throughout this period, the Arabs were the exclusive importers of the spice to Europe. They sold nutmeg for high prices to merchants based in Venice, but they never revealed the exact location of the source of this extremely valuable commodity. The Arab-Venetian dominance of the trade finally ended in 1512, when the Portuguese reached the Banda Islands and began exploiting its precious resources.

Always in danger of competition from neighbouring Spain, the Portuguese began subcontracting their spice distribution to Dutch traders. Profits began to flow into the Netherlands, and the Dutch commercial fleet swiftly grew into one of the largest in the world. The Dutch quietly gained control of most of the shipping and trading of spices in Northern Europe. Then, in 1580, Portugal fell under Spanish rule, and by the end of the 16th century the Dutch found themselves locked out of the market. As prices for pepper, nutmeg, and other spices soared across Europe, they decided to fight back.

In 1602, Dutch merchants founded the VOC, a trading corporation better known as the Dutch East India Company. By 1617, the VOC was the richest commercial operation in the world. The company had 50,000 employees worldwide, with a private army of 30,000 men and a fleet of 200 ships. At the same time, thousands of people across Europe were dying of the plague, a highly contagious and deadly disease. Doctors were desperate for a way to stop the spread of this disease, and they decided nutmeg held the cure. Everybody wanted nutmeg, and many were willing to spare no expense to have it. Nutmeg bought for a few pennies in Indonesia could be sold for 68,000 times its original cost on the streets of London. The only problem was the short supply. And that’s where the Dutch found their opportunity.

The Banda Islands were ruled by local sultans who insisted on maintaining a neutral trading policy towards foreign powers. This allowed them to avoid the presence of Portuguese or Spanish troops on their soil, but it also left them unprotected from other invaders. In 1621, the Dutch arrived and took over. Once securely in control of the Bandas, the Dutch went to work protecting their new investment. They concentrated all nutmeg production into a few easily guarded areas, uprooting and destroying any trees outside the plantation zones. Anyone caught growing a nutmeg seedling or carrying seeds without the proper authority was severely punished. In addition, all exported nutmeg was covered with lime to make sure there was no chance a fertile seed which could be grown elsewhere would leave the islands. There was only one obstacle to Dutch domination. One of the Banda Islands, a sliver of land called Run, only 3 Ion long by less than 1 km wide, was under the control of the British. After decades of fighting for control of this tiny island, the Dutch and British arrived at a compromise settlement, the Treaty of Breda, in 1667. Intent on securing their hold over every nutmeg-producing island, the Dutch offered a trade: if the British would give them the island of Run, they would in turn give Britain a distant and much less valuable island in North America. The British agreed. That other island was Manhattan, which is how New Amsterdam became New York. The Dutch now had a monopoly over the nutmeg trade which would last for another century.

Then, in 1770, a Frenchman named Pierre Poivre successfully smuggled nutmeg plants to safety in Mauritius, an island off the coast of Africa. Some of these were later exported to the Caribbean where they thrived, especially on the island of Grenada. Next, in 1778, a volcanic eruption in the Banda region caused a tsunami that wiped out half the nutmeg groves. Finally, in 1809, the British returned to Indonesia and seized the Banda Islands by force. They returned the islands to the Dutch in 1817, but not before transplanting hundreds of nutmeg seedlings to plantations in several locations across southern Asia. The Dutch nutmeg monopoly was over.

Today, nutmeg is grown in Indonesia, the Caribbean, India, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea and Sri Lanka, and world nutmeg production is estimated to average between 10,000 and 12,000 tonnes per year.

Questions 1-4

Complete the notes below.

Write ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

The nutmeg tree and fruit
• The leaves of the tree are (1) ……………….. in shape
• The (2) ………………. surrounds the fruit and breaks open when the fruit is ripe
• The (3) ………………. is used to produce the spice nutmeg
• The covering known as the aril is used to produce (4) ………………

Questions 5-7

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 5-7, 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

In the Middle Ages, most Europeans knew where nutmeg was grown.
The VOC was the world’s first major trading company.
Following the Treaty of Breda, the Dutch had control of all the islands where nutmeg grew.

Questions 8-13

Complete the table below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage.

Middle ages	Nutmeg was brought to Europe by the (8)………………..
16th century	European nations took control of the nutmeg trade
17th century	Demand for nutmeg grew, as it was believed to be effective against the disease known as the (9)…………… The Dutch – took control of the Banda Islands – restricted nutmeg production to a few areas – put (10)……………..on nutmeg to avoid it being cultivated outside the islands – finally obtained the island of (11)………………from the British
Late 18th century	1770 – nutmeg plants were secretly taken to (12)…………….. 1778 – half the Banda Islands’ nutmeg plantations were destroyed by a (13)………………..

Reading Passage 2

Driverless Cars

A The automotive sector is well used to adapting to automation in manufacturing. The implementation of robotic car manufacture from the 1970s onwards led to significant cost savings and improvements in the reliability and flexibility of vehicle mass production. A new challenge to vehicle production is now on the horizon and, again, it comes from automation. However, this time it is not to do with the manufacturing process, but with the vehicles themselves.

Research projects on vehicle automation are not new. Vehicles with limited self-driving capabilities have been around for more than 50 years, resulting in significant contributions towards driver assistance systems. But since Google announced in 2010 that it had been trialling self-driving cars on the streets of California, progress in this field has quickly gathered pace.

B There are many reasons why technology is advancing so fast. One frequently cited motive is safety; indeed, research at the UK’s Transport Research Laboratory has demonstrated that more than 90 percent of road collisions involve human error as a contributory factor, and it is the primary cause in the vast majority. Automation may help to reduce the incidence of this.

Another aim is to free the time people spend driving for other purposes. If the vehicle can do some or all of the driving, it may be possible to be productive, to socialise or simply to relax while automation systems have responsibility for safe control of the vehicle. If the vehicle can do the driving, those who are challenged by existing mobility models – such as older or disabled travellers – may be able to enjoy significantly greater travel autonomy.

C Beyond these direct benefits, we can consider the wider implications for transport and society, and how manufacturing processes might need to respond as a result. At present, the average car spends more than 90 percent of its life parked. Automation means that initiatives for car-sharing become much more viable, particularly in urban areas with significant travel demand. If a significant proportion of the population choose to use shared automated vehicles, mobility demand can be met by far fewer vehicles.

D The Massachusetts Institute of Technology investigated automated mobility in Singapore, finding that fewer than 30 percent of the vehicles currently used would be required if fully automated car sharing could be implemented. If this is the case, it might mean that we need to manufacture far fewer vehicles to meet demand. However, the number of trips being taken would probably increase, partly because empty vehicles would have to be moved from one customer to the next.

Modelling work by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute suggests automated vehicles might reduce vehicle ownership by 43 percent, but that vehicles’ average annual mileage would double as a result. As a consequence, each vehicle would be used more intensively, and might need replacing sooner. This faster rate of turnover may mean that vehicle production will not necessarily decrease.

E Automation may prompt other changes in vehicle manufacture. If we move to a model where consumers are tending not to own a single vehicle but to purchase access to a range of vehicles through a mobility provider, drivers will have the freedom to select one that best suits their needs for a particular journey, rather than making a compromise across all their requirements.

Since, for most of the time, most of the seats in most cars are unoccupied, this may boost production of a smaller, more efficient range of vehicles that suit the needs of individuals. Specialised vehicles may then be available for exceptional journeys, such as going on a family camping trip or helping a son or daughter move to university.

F There are a number of hurdles to overcome in delivering automated vehicles to our roads. These include the technical difficulties in ensuring that the vehicle works reliably in the infinite range of traffic, weather and road situations it might encounter; the regulatory challenges in understanding how liability and enforcement might change when drivers are no longer essential for vehicle operation; and the societal changes that may be required for communities to trust and accept automated vehicles as being a valuable part of the mobility landscape.

G It’s clear that there are many challenges that need to be addressed but, through robust and targeted research, these can most probably be conquered within the next 10 years. Mobility will change in such potentially significant ways and in association with so many other technological developments, such as telepresence and virtual reality, that it is hard to make concrete predictions about the future. However, one thing is certain: change is coming, and the need to be flexible in response to this will be vital for those involved in manufacturing the vehicles that will deliver future mobility.

Questions 14-18

Reading Passage 2 has seven sections, A-G.

Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 14-18.

Which section contains the following information?

reference to the amount of time when a car is not in use
mention of several advantages of driverless vehicles for individual road-users
reference to the opportunity of choosing the most appropriate vehicle for each trip
an estimate of how long it will take to overcome a number of problems
a suggestion that the use of driverless cars may have no effect on the number of vehicles manufactured

Questions 19-22

Complete the summary below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

The impact of driverless cars

Figures from the Transport Research Laboratory indicate that most motor accidents are partly due to (19) ……………., so the introduction of driverless vehicles will result in greater safety. In addition to the direct benefits of automation, it may bring other advantages. For example, schemes for (20) ………………… will be more workable, especially in towns and cities, resulting in fewer cars on the road. According to the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, there could be a 43 percent drop in (21) ……………..of cars. However, this would mean that the yearly (22) …………………. of each car would, on average, be twice as high as it currently is. This would lead to a higher turnover of vehicles, and therefore no reduction in automotive manufacturing.

Questions 23 and 24

Choose TWO letters, A-E.

Which TWO benefits of automated vehicles does the writer mention?

Car travellers could enjoy considerable cost savings.
It would be easier to find parking spaces in urban areas.
Travellers could spend journeys doing something other than driving.
People who find driving physically difficult could travel independently.
A reduction in the number of cars would mean a reduction in pollution.

Questions 25 and 26

Choose TWO letters, A-E.

Which TWO challenges to automated vehicle development does the writer mention?

making sure the general public has confidence in automated vehicles
managing the pace of transition from conventional to automated vehicles
deciding how to compensate professional drivers who become redundant
setting up the infrastructure to make roads suitable for automated vehicles
getting automated vehicles to adapt to various different driving conditions

Reading passage 3

What Is Exploration?

We are all explorers. Our desire to discover, and then share that new-found knowledge, is part of what makes us human – indeed, this has played an important part in our success as a species. Long before the first caveman slumped down beside the fire and grunted news that there were plenty of wildebeest over yonder, our ancestors had learnt the value of sending out scouts to investigate the unknown. This questing nature of ours undoubtedly helped our species spread around the globe, just as it nowadays no doubt helps the last nomadic Penan maintain their existence in the depleted forests of Borneo, and a visitor negotiate the subways of New York.

Over the years, we’ve come to think of explorers as a peculiar breed – different from the rest of us, different from those of us who are merely ‘well travelled’, even; and perhaps there is a type of person more suited to seeking out the new, a type of caveman more inclined to risk venturing out. That, however, doesn’t take away from the fact that we all have this enquiring instinct, even today; and that in all sorts of professions – whether artist, marine biologist or astronomer – borders of the unknown are being tested each day.

Thomas Hardy set some of his novels in Egdon Heath, a fictional area of uncultivated land, and used the landscape to suggest the desires and fears of his characters. He is delving into matters we all recognise because they are common to humanity. This is surely an act of exploration, and into a world as remote as the author chooses. Explorer and travel writer Peter Fleming talks of the moment when the explorer returns to the existence he has left behind with his loved ones. The traveller ‘who has for weeks or months seen himself only as a puny and irrelevant alien crawling laboriously over a country in which he has no roots and no background, suddenly encounters his other self, a relatively solid figure, with a place in the minds of certain people’.

In this book about the exploration of the earth’s surface, I have confined myself to those whose travels were real and who also aimed at more than personal discovery. But that still left me with another problem: the word ‘explorer’ has become associated with a past era. We think back to a golden age, as if exploration peaked somehow in the 19th century – as if the process of discovery is now on the decline, though the truth is that we have named only one and a half million of this planet’s species, and there may be more than 10 million – and that’s not including bacteria. We have studied only 5 per cent of the species we know. We have scarcely mapped the ocean floors, and know even less about ourselves; we fully understand the workings of only 10 per cent of our brains.

Here is how some of today’s ‘explorers’ define the word. Ran Fiennes, dubbed the ‘greatest living explorer’, said, ‘An explorer is someone who has done something that no human has done before – and also done something scientifically useful.’ Chris Bonington, a leading mountaineer, felt exploration was to be found in the act of physically touching the unknown: ‘You have to have gone somewhere new.’ Then Robin Hanbury-Tenison, a campaigner on behalf of remote so-called ‘tribal’ peoples, said, ‘A traveller simply records information about some far-off world, and reports back; but an explorer changes the world.’ Wilfred Thesiger, who crossed Arabia’s Empty Quarter in 1946, and belongs to an era of unmechanised travel now lost to the rest of us, told me, ‘If I’d gone across by camel when I could have gone by car, it would have been a stunt.’ To him, exploration meant bringing back information from a remote place regardless of any great self-discovery.

Each definition is slightly different – and tends to reflect the field of endeavour of each pioneer. It was the same whoever I asked: the prominent historian would say exploration was a thing of the past, the cutting-edge scientist would say it was of the present. And so on. They each set their own particular criteria; the common factor in their approach being that they all had, unlike many of us who simply enjoy travel or discovering new things, both a very definite objective from the outset and also a desire to record their findings.

I’d best declare my own bias. As a writer, I’m interested in the exploration of ideas. I’ve done a great many expeditions and each one was unique. I’ve lived for months alone with isolated groups of people all around the world, even two ‘uncontacted tribes’. But none of these things is of the slightest interest to anyone unless, through my books, I’ve found a new slant, explored a new idea. Why? Because the world has moved on. The time has long passed for the great continental voyages – another walk to the poles, another crossing of the Empty Quarter. We know how the land surface of our planet lies; exploration of it is now down to the details – the habits of microbes, say, or the grazing behaviour of buffalo. Aside from the deep sea and deep underground, it’s the era of specialists. However, this is to disregard the role the human mind has in conveying remote places; and this is what interests me: how a fresh interpretation, even of a well-travelled route, can give its readers new insights.

Questions 27-32

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

The writer refers to visitors to New York to illustrate the point that
1. exploration is an intrinsic element of being human.
2. most people are enthusiastic about exploring.
3. exploration can lead to surprising results.
4. most people find exploration daunting.
According to the second paragraph, what is the writer’s view of explorers?
1. Their discoveries have brought both benefits and disadvantages.
2. Their main value is in teaching others.
3. They act on an urge that is common to everyone.
4. They tend to be more attracted to certain professions than to others.
29. The writer refers to a description of Egdon Heath to suggest that
1. Hardy was writing about his own experience of exploration.
2. Hardy was mistaken about the nature of exploration.
3. Hardy’s aim was to investigate people’s emotional states.
4. Hardy’s aim was to show the attraction of isolation.
In the fourth paragraph, the writer refers to ‘a golden age’ to suggest that
1. the amount of useful information produced by exploration has decreased.
2. fewer people are interested in exploring than in the 19th century.
3. recent developments have made exploration less exciting.
4. we are wrong to think that exploration is no longer necessary.
In the sixth paragraph, when discussing the definition of exploration, the writer argues that
1. people tend to relate exploration to their own professional interests.
2. certain people are likely to misunderstand the nature of exploration.
3. the generally accepted definition has changed over time.
4. historians and scientists have more valid definitions than the general public.
In the last paragraph, the writer explains that he is interested in
1. how someone’s personality is reflected in their choice of places to visit.
2. the human ability to cast new light on places that may be familiar.
3. how travel writing has evolved to meet changing demands.
4. the feelings that writers develop about the places that they explore.

Questions 33-37

Look at the following statements (Questions 33-37) and the list of explorers below.

Match each statement with the correct explorer, A-E. Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 33-37.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

He referred to the relevance of the form of transport used.
He described feelings on coming back home after a long journey.
He worked for the benefit of specific groups of people.
He did not consider learning about oneself an essential part of exploration.
He defined exploration as being both unique and of value to others.

List of Explorers

Peter Fleming
Ran Fiennes
Chris Bonington
Robin Hanbury-Tenison
Wilfred Thesiger

Questions 38-40

Complete the summary below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

The writer’s own bias

The writer has experience of a large number of (38) …………………. , and was the first stranger that certain previously (39) …………………… people had encountered. He believes there is no need for further exploration of Earth’s (40) …………………, except to answer specific questions such as how buffalo eat.

Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 1 Passage 1 Nutmeg – A Valuable Spice Answers

Oval
Husk
Seed
Mace
False
Not given
True
Arabs
Plague
Lime
Run
Mauritius
Tsunami

Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 1 Passage 2 Driverless Cars Answers

C
B
E
G
D
Human error
Car (-) sharing
Ownership
Mileage
C, D
C, D
A, E
A, E

Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 1 Passage 3 What Is Exploration? Answers

A
C
C
D
A
B
E
A
D
E
B
(unique) expeditions
Uncontacted/ isolated
(land) surface

March 18, 2024

Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 1
Reading Passage 1

Cork

Cork – the thick bark of the cork oak tree (Quercus suber) – is a remarkable material. It is tough, elastic, buoyant, and fire-resistant, and suitable for a wide range of purposes. It has also been used for millennia: the ancient Egyptians sealed then sarcophagi (stone coffins) with cork, while the ancient Greeks and Romans used it for anything from beehives to sandals.

And the cork oak itself is an extraordinary tree. Its bark grows up to 20 cm in thickness, insulating the tree like a coat wrapped around the trunk and branches and keeping the inside at a constant 20°C all year round. Developed most probably as a defence against forest fires, the bark of the cork oak has a particular cellular structure – with about 40 million cells per cubic centimetre – that technology has never succeeded in replicating. The cells are filled with air, which is why cork is so buoyant. It also has an elasticity that means you can squash it and watch it spring back to its original size and shape when you release the pressure.

Cork oaks grow in a number of Mediterranean countries, including Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Morocco. They flourish in warm, sunny climates where there is a minimum of 400 millimetres of rain per year, and no more than 800 millimetres. Like grape vines, the trees thrive in poor soil, putting down deep root in search of moisture and nutrients. Southern Portugal’s Alentejo region meets all of these requirements, which explains why, by the early 20th century, this region had become the world’s largest producer of cork, and why today it accounts for roughly half of all cork production around the world.

Most cork forests are family-owned. Many of these family businesses, and indeed many of the trees themselves, are around 200 years old. Cork production is, above all, an exercise in patience. From the planting of a cork sapling to the first harvest takes 25 years, and a gap of approximately a decade must separate harvests from an individual tree. And for top- quality cork, it’s necessary to wait a further 15 or 20 years. You even have to wait for the right kind of summer’s day to harvest cork. If the bark is stripped on a day when it’s too cold – or when the air is damp – the tree will be damaged.

Cork harvesting is a very specialised profession. No mechanical means of stripping cork bark has been invented, so the job is done by teams of highly skilled workers. First, they make vertical cuts down the bark using small sharp axes, then lever it away in pieces as large as they can manage. The most skilful cork- strippers prise away a semi-circular husk that runs the length of the trunk from just above ground level to the first branches. It is then dried on the ground for about four months, before being taken to factories, where it is boiled to kill any insects that might remain in the cork. Over 60% of cork then goes on to be made into traditional bottle stoppers, with most of the remainder being used in the construction trade, Corkboard and cork tiles are ideal for thermal and acoustic insulation, while granules of cork are used in the manufacture of concrete.

Recent years have seen the end of the virtual monopoly of cork as the material for bottle stoppers, due to concerns about the effect it may have on the contents of the bottle. This is caused by a chemical compound called 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), which forms through the interaction of plant phenols, chlorine and mould. The tiniest concentrations – as little as three or four parts to a trillion – can spoil the taste of the product contained in the bottle.

The result has been a gradual yet steady move first towards plastic stoppers and, more recently, to aluminium screw caps. These substitutes are cheaper to manufacture and, in the case of screw caps, more convenient for the user.

The classic cork stopper does have several advantages, however. Firstly, its traditional image is more in keeping with that of the type of high quality goods with which it has long been associated. Secondly – and very importantly – cork is a sustainable product that can be recycled without difficulty. Moreover, cork forests are a resource which support local biodiversity, and prevent desertification in the regions where they are planted. So, given the current concerns about environmental issues, the future of this ancient material once again looks promising.

Questions 1-5

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?

In boxes 1-5 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
1. The cork oak has the thickest bark of any living tree.
2. Scientists have developed a synthetic cork with the same cellular structure as natural cork.
3. Individual cork oak trees must be left for 25 years between the first and second harvest.
4. Cork bark should be stripped in dry atmospheric conditions.
5. The only way to remove the bark from cork oak trees is by hand.
Questions 6-13

Complete the notes below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Comparison of aluminium screw caps and cork bottle stoppers

Advantages of aluminium screw caps
• do not affect the (6)…………………………………of the bottle contents
• are (7)………………………….. to produce
• are (8)……………………………….. to use
Advantages of cork bottle stoppers
• suit the (9)……………………………. of quality products
• made from a (10)………………………. material
• easily (11)……………………………..
• cork forests aid (12)……………………….
• cork forests stop (13)…………………………….happening

Reading Passage 2

Collecting As A Hobby

Collecting must one of the varied of human activities and its one that many of us psychologists find fascinating. Many forms of collecting have been dignified with a technical name: an archtophilist collects teddy bears, a philatelist collects postage stamps, and a deltiologist collects postcards. Amassing hundreds or even thousands of postcards, chocolate wrappers or whatever, takes time, energy and money that could surely to much more productive use. And yet there are millions of collectors around the world. Why do they do it?

There are the people who collect because they want to make money – this could be called an instrumental reason for collecting; that is, collecting as a means to an end. They’ll look for, say, antiques that they can buy cheaply and expect to be able to sell at a profit. But there may well be a psychological element, too – buying cheap and selling dear can give the collector a sense of triumph. And as selling online is so easy, more and more people are joining in.

Many collectors collect to develop their social life, attending meetings of a group of collectors and exchanging information on items. This is a variant on joining a bridge club or a gym, and similarly brings them into contact with like-minded people.

Another motive for collecting is the desire to find something special, or a particular example of the collected item, such as a rare early recording by a particular singer. Some may spend their whole lives in a hunt for this. Psychologically, this can give a purpose to a life that otherwise feels aimless. There is a danger, though, that if the individual is ever lucky enough to find what they’re looking for, rather than celebrating their success, they may feel empty, now that the goal that drove them on has gone.

If you think about collecting postage stamps another potential reason for it – Or, perhaps, a result of collecting is its educational value. Stamp collecting opens a window to other countries, and to the plants, animals, or famous people shown on their stamps. Similarly, in the 19th century, many collectors amassed fossils, animals and plants from around the globe, and their collections provided a vast amount of information about the natural world. Without those collections, our understanding would be greatly inferior to what it is.

In the past – and nowadays, too, though to a lesser extent – a popular form of collecting, particularly among boys and men, was trainspotting. This might involve trying to see every locomotive of a particular type, using published data that identifies each one, and ticking off each engine as it is seen. Trainspotters exchange information, these days often by mobile phone, so they can work out where to go to, to see a particular engine. As a by-product, many practitioners of the hobby become very knowledgeable about railway operations, or the technical specifications of different engine types.

Similarly, people who collect dolls may go beyond simply enlarging their collection, and develop an interest in the way that dolls are made, or the materials that are used. These have changed over the centuries from the wood that was standard in 16th century Europe, through the wax and porcelain of later centuries, to the plastics of today’s dolls. Or collectors might be inspired to study how dolls reflect notions of what children like, or ought to like.

Not all collectors are interested in learning from their hobby, though, so what we might call a psychological reason for collecting is the need for a sense of control, perhaps as a way of dealing with insecurity. Stamp collectors, for instance, arrange their stamps in albums, usually very neatly, organising their collection according to certain commonplace principles-perhaps by country in alphabetical order, or grouping stamps by what they depict -people, birds, maps, and so on.

One reason, conscious or not, for what someone chooses to collect is to show the collector’s individualism. Someone who decides to collect something as unexpected as dog collars, for instance, may be conveying their belief that they must be interesting themselves. And believe it or not, there is at least one dog collar museum in existence, and it grew out of a personal collection.

Of course, all hobbies give pleasure, but the common factor in collecting is usually passion: pleasure is putting it far too mildly. More than most other hobbies, collecting can be totally engrossing, and can give a strong sense of personal fulfilment. To non-collectors it may appear an eccentric, if harmless, way of spending time, but potentially, collecting has a lot going for it.

Questions 14-21

Complete the sentences below.

Write ONE WORD ONLY from the passage.
1. The writer mentions collecting………………….as an example of collecting in order to make money.
2. Collectors may get a feeling of ……………………………..from buying and selling items.
3. Collectors’ clubs provide opportunities to share…………………………
4. Collectors’ clubs offer……………………………with people who have similar interests.
5. Collecting sometimes involves a life-long………………………….for a special item.
6. Searching for something particular may prevent people from feeling their life is completely…………………..
7. Stamp collection may be………………………because it provides facts about different countries.
8. ……………………………….tends to be mostly a male hobby.
Questions 22-26

Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage.

In boxes 22-26 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
1. The number of people buying dolls has grown over the centuries.
2. Sixteenth century European dolls were normally made of wax and porcelain.
3. Arranging a stamp collection by the size of the stamps is less common than other methods.
4. Someone who collects unusual objects may want others to think he or she is also unusual.
5. Collecting gives a feeling that other hobbies are unlikely to inspire.
Reading Passage 3

What’s the purpose of gaining knowledge?

A ‘I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any subject’ That was the founders motto for Cornell University, and it seems an apt characterization of the different university, also in the USA, where I currently teach philosophy. A student can prepare for a career in resort management, engineering, interior design, accounting, music, law enforcement, you name it. But what would the founders of these two institutions have thought of a course called Arson for Profit’? I kid you not: we have it on the books. Any undergraduates who have met the academic requirements can sign up for the course in our program in ‘fire science’.

B Naturally, the course is intended for prospective arson investigators, who can learn all the tricks of the trade for detecting whether a fire was deliberately set, discovering who did it, and establishing a chain of evidence for effective prosecution in a court of law. But wouldn’t this also be the perfect course for prospective arsonists to sign up for? My point is not to criticize academic programs in fire science: they are highly welcome as part of the increasing professionalization of this and many other occupations. However, it’s not unknown for a firefighter to torch a building. This example suggests how dishonest and illegal behavior, with the help of higher education, can creep into every aspect of public and business life.

C I realized this anew when I was invited to speak before a class in marketing, which is another of our degree programs. The regular instructor is a colleague who appreciates the kind of ethical perspective I can bring as a philosopher. There are endless ways I could have approached this assignment, but I took my cue from the title of the course: ‘Principles of Marketing’. It made me think to ask the students, ‘Is marketing principled?’ After all, a subject matter can have principles in the sense of being codified, having rules, as with football or chess, without being principled in the sense of being ethical. Many of the students immediately assumed that the answer to my question about marketing principles was obvious: no. Just look at the ways in which everything under the sun has been marketed; obviously it need not be done in a principled (=ethical) fashion.

D Is that obvious? I made the suggestion, which may sound downright crazy in light of the evidence, that perhaps marketing is by definition principled. My inspiration for this judgement is the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that any body of knowledge consists of an end (or purpose) and a means.

E Let us apply both the terms ‘means’ and ‘end’ to marketing. The students have signed up for a course in order to learn how to market effectively. But to what end? There seem to be two main attitudes toward that question. One is that the answer is obvious: the purpose of marketing is to sell things and to make money. The other attitude is that the purpose of marketing is irrelevant: Each person comes to the program and course with his or her own plans, and these need not even concern the acquisition of marketing expertise as such. My proposal, which I believe would also be Kant’s, is that neither of these attitudes captures the significance of the end to the means for marketing. A field of knowledge or a professional endeavor is defined by both the means and the end;hence both deserve scrutiny. Students need to study both how to achieve X, and also what X is.

F It is at this point that ‘Arson for Profit’ becomes supremely relevant. That course is presumably all about means: how to detect and prosecute criminal activity. It is therefore assumed that the end is good in an ethical sense. When I ask fire science students to articulate the end, or purpose, of their field, they eventually generalize to something like, ‘The safety and welfare of society,’ which seems right. As we have seen, someone could use the very same knowledge of means to achieve a much less noble end, such as personal profit via destructive, dangerous, reckless activity. But we would not call that firefighting. We have a separate word for it: arson. Similarly, if you employed the ‘principles of marketing’ in an unprincipled way, you would not be doing marketing. We have another term for it: fraud. Kant gives the example of a doctor and a poisoner, who use the identical knowledge to achieve their divergent ends. We would say that one is practicing medicine, the other, murder.

Questions 27-32

Reading passage 3 has six sections A-F.

Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.

List of headings
1. Courses that require a high level of commitment
2. A course title with two meanings
3. The equal importance of two key issues
4. Applying a theory in an unexpected context
5. The financial benefits of studying
6. A surprising course title
7. Different names for different outcomes
8. The possibility of attracting the wrong kind of student
1. Section A
2. Section B
3. Section C
4. Section D
5. Section E
6. Section F
Questions 33-36

Complete the summary below.

Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The ‘Arson for Profit’ course

This is a university course intended for students who are undergraduates and who are studying (33)…………………….. The expectation is that they will become (34)………………………speacialising in arson. The course will help them to detect cases of arson and find (35)…………………………. of criminal intent, leading to successful (36)…………………………. in the courts.

Questions 37-40

Do the following statements agree with the views of the reading passage?
- YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
- NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
- NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
1. It is difficult to attract students onto courses that do no focus on a career.
2. The ‘Arson for Profit’ course would be useful for people intending to set fire to buildings.
3. Fire science are too academic to help people to be good at the job of firefighting.
4. The writer’s fire science students provided a detailed definition of the purpose of their studies.
Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 1 Cork Answers
1. not given
2. false
3. false
4. tue
5. true
6. taste
7. cheaper
8. convenient
9. image
10. sustainable
11. recycled
12. biodiversity
13. desertification
Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 1 Collecting As A Hobby Answers
1. antiques
2. triumph
3. information
4. contact/ meetings
5. hunt/ desire
6. aimless/ empty
7. educational
8. trainspotting
9. not given
10. false
11. not given
12. true
13. true
Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 1 What’s the purpose of gaining knowledge? Answers
1. vi
2. viii
3. ii
4. iv
5. iii
6. vii
7. fire science
8. investigators
9. evidence
10. prosecution
11. not given
12. yes
13. not given
14. no
March 17, 2024
Cambridge IELTS 13 Academic Reading Test 4
Reading Passage 1

Cutty Sark: the fastest sailing ship of all time

The nineteenth century was a period of great technological development in Britain, and for shipping the major changes were from wind to steam power, and from wood to iron and steel.

The fastest commercial sailing vessels of all time were clippers, three-masted ships built to transport goods around the world, although some also took passengers. From the l 840s until 1869, when the Suez Canal opened and steam propulsion was replacing sail, clippers dominated world trade. Although many were built, only one has survived more or less intact: Cutty Sark, now on display in Greenwich, southeast London.

Cutty Sark’s unusual name comes from the poem Tam O’Shanter by the Scottish poet Robert Bums. Tam, a farmer, is chased by a witch called Nannie, who is wearing a ‘cutty sark’ – an old Scottish name for a short nightdress. The witch is depicted in Cutty Sark’s figurehead – the carving of a woman typically at the front of old sailing ships. In legend, and in Burn’s poem, witches cannot cross water, so this was a rather strange choice of name for a ship.

Cutty Sark was built in Dumbarton. Scotland, in 1869, for a shipping company owned by John Willis. To carry out construction. Willis chose a new shipbuilding firm. Scott & Linton, and ensured that the contract with them put him in a very strong position. In the end, the firm was forced out of business, and the ship was finished by a competitor.

Willis’s company was active in the lea trade between China and Britain, where speed could bring shipowners both profits and prestige, so Cutty Sark was designed to make the journey more quickly than any other ship. On her maiden voyage, in 1870, she set sail from London, carrying large amounts of goods to China. She returned laden with tea, making the journey back to London in four months. However, Cutty Sark never lived up to the high expectations of her owner, as a result of bad winds and various misfortunes. On one occasion, in 1872, the ship and a rival clipper. Thermopylae, left port in China on the same day. Crossing the Indian Ocean, Cutty Sark gained a lead of over 400 miles, hut then her rudder was severely damaged in stormy seas, making her impossible to steer. The ship’s crew had the daunting task of repairing the rudder at sea, and only succeeded at the second attempt. Cutty Sark reached London a w eek after Thermopylae.

Steam ships posed a growing threat to clippers, as their speed and cargo capacity increased. In addition, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the same year that Cutty Sark was launched, had a serious impact. While steam ships could make use of the quick, direct route between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, the canal was of no use to sailing ships, which needed the much stronger winds of the oceans, and so had to sail a far greater distance. Steam ships reduced the journey time between Britain and China by approximately two months.

By 1878, tea traders weren’t interested in Cutty Sark, and instead, she look on the much less prestigious work of carrying any cargo between any two ports in the world. In 1880, violence aboard the ship led ultimately to the replacement of the captain with an incompetent drunkard who stole the crew’s wages. He was suspended from service, and a new captain appointed. This marked a turnaround and the beginning of the most successful period in Cult} Sark’s working life, transporting wool from Australia to Britain. One such journey took just under 12 weeks, beating every other ship sailing that year by around a month.

The ship’s next captain, Richard Woodget. was an excellent navigator, who got the best out of both his ship and his crew. As a sailing ship. Cutty Sark depended on the strong trade winds of the southern hemisphere, and Woodget look her further south than any previous captain, bringing her dangerously close to icebergs off the southern tip of South America. I lis gamble paid off, though, and the ship was the fastest vessel in the wool trade for ten years.

As competition from steam ships increased in the 1890s, and Cutty Sark approached the end of her life expectancy, she became less profitable. She was sold to a Portuguese firm, which renamed her Ferreira. For the next 25 years, she again carried miscellaneous cargoes around the world.

Badly damaged in a gale in 1922, she was put into Falmouth harbour in southwest England, for repairs. Wilfred Dowman, a retired sea captain who owned a training vessel, recognised her and tried to buy her, but without success. She returned to Portugal and was sold to another Portuguese company. Dowman was determined, however, and offered a high price: this was accepted, and the ship returned to Falmouth the following year and had her original name restored.

Dowman used Cutty Sark as a training ship, and she continued in this role after his death. When she was no longer required, in 1954, she was transferred to dry dock at Greenw ich to go on public display. The ship suffered from fire in 2007, and again, less seriously, in 2014, but now Cutty Sark attracts a quarter of a million visitors a year.

Questions 1-8

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In 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
1. Clippers were originally intended to be used as passenger ships.
2. Cutty Sark was given the name of a character in a poem.
3. The contract between John Willis and Scott & Linton favoured Willis.
4. John Willis wanted Cutty Sark to be the fastest tea clipper travelling between the UK and China.
5. Despite storm damage, Cutty Sark beat Thermopylae back to London.
6. The opening of the Suez Canal meant that steam ships could travel between Britain and China faster than clippers
7. Steam ships sometimes used the ocean route to travel between London and China.
8. Captain Woodget put Cutty Sark at risk of hitting an iceberg
Question 9-13

Complete the sentences below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
1. After 1880, Cutty Sark carried……………………………..as its main cargo during its most successful time
2. As a captain and……………………….Woodget was very skilled.
3. Ferreira went to Falmouth to repair damage that a………………………….had caused.
4. Between 1923 and 1954, Cutty Sark was used for…………………….
5. Cutty Sark has twice been damaged by………………………….in the 21st century.
Reading passage 2

Saving the soil

A More than a third of the world’s soil is endangered, according to a recent UN report. If we don’t slow the decline, all farmable soil could be gone in 60 years. Since soil grows 95% of our food, and sustains human life in other more surprising ways, that is a huge problem.

B Peter Groffman, from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York, points out that soil scientists have been warning about the degradation of the world’s soil for decades. At the same time, our understanding of its importance to humans has grown. A single gram of healthy soil might contain 100 million bacteria, as well as other microorganisms such as viruses and fungi, living amid decomposing plants and various minerals.

That means soils do not just grow our food, but are the source of nearly all our existing antibiotics, and could be our best hope in the fight against antibiotic- resistant bacteria. Soil is also an ally against climate change: as microorganisms within soil digest dead animals and plants, they lock in their carbon content, holding three times the amount of carbon as does the entire atmosphere. Soils also store water, preventing flood damage: in the UK, damage to buildings, roads and bridges from floods caused by soil degradation costs £233 million every year.

C If the soil loses its ability to perform these functions, the human race could be in big trouble. The danger is not that the soil will disappear completely, but that the microorganisms that give it its special properties will be lost. And once this has happened, it may take the soil thousands of years to recover.

Agriculture is by far the biggest problem. In the wild, when plants grow they remove nutrients from the soil, but then when the plants die and decay these nutrients are returned directly to the soil, Humans tend not to return unused parts of harvested crops directly to the soil to enrich it, meaning that the soil gradually becomes less fertile. In the past we developed strategies to get around the problem, such as regularly varying the types of crops grown, or leaving fields uncultivated for a season.

D But these practices became inconvenient as populations grew and agriculture had to be run on more commercial lines. A solution came in the early 20th century with the Haber-Bosch process for manufacturing ammonium nitrate. Farmers have been putting this synthetic fertiliser on their fields ever since.

But over the past few decades, it has become clear this was not such a bright idea. Chemical fertilisers can release polluting nitrous oxide into the atmosphere and excess is often washed away with the rain, releasing nitrogen into rivers. More recently, we have found that indiscriminate use of fertilisers hurts the soil itself, turning it acidic and salty, and degrading the soil they are supposed to nourish.

E One of the people looking for a solution to this problem is Pius Floris, who started out running a tree-care business in the Netherlands and now advises some of the world’s top soil scientists. He came to realise that the best way to ensure his trees flourished was to take care of the soil, and has developed a cocktail of beneficial bacteria, fungi and humus to do this. Researchers at the University of Valladolid in Spain recently used this cocktail on soils destroyed by years of fertiliser overuse. When they applied Floris’s mix to the desert-like test plots, a good crop of plants emerged that were not just healthy at the surface, but had roots strong enough to pierce dirt as hard as rock. The few plants that grew in the control plots, fed with traditional fertilisers, were small and weak.

F However, measures like this are not enough to solve the global soil degradation problem. To assess our options on a global scale we first need an accurate picture of what types of soil are out there, and the problems they face. That’s not easy. For one thing, there is no agreed international system for classifying soil. In an attempt to unify the different approaches, the UN has created the Global Soil Map project. Researchers from nine countries are working together to create a map linked to a database that can be fed measurements from field surveys, drone surveys, satellite imagery, lab analyses and so on to provide real-time data on the state of the soil. Within the next four years, they aim to have mapped soils worldwide to a depth of 100 metres, with the results freely accessible to all.

G But this is only a first step. We need ways of presenting the problem that bring it home to governments and the wider public, says Pamela Chasek at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, in Winnipeg, Canada. ‘Most scientists don’t speak language that policy-makers can understand and vice versa.’ Chasek and her colleagues have proposed a goal of ‘zero net land degradation’. Like the idea of carbon neutrality it is an easily understood target that can help shape expectations and encourage action.

For soils on the brink, that may be too late. Several researchers are agitating for the immediate creation of protected zones for endangered soils. One difficulty here is defining what these areas should conserve: areas where the greatest soil diversity is present? Or areas of unspoilt soils that could act as a future benchmark of quality?

Whatever, we do, if we want our soils to survive, we need to take action now.

Questions 14-17

Complete the summary below.

Write ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Why soil degradation could be a disaster for humans

Healthy soil contains a large variety of bacteria and other microorganisms, as well as plant remains and (14)………………….., It provides us with food and also with antibiotics, and its function in storing (15)…………………………..has a significant effect on the climate. In addition, it prevents damage to property and infrastructure because it holds (16)…………………………..

If these microorganisms are lost, soil may lose its special properties. The main factor contributing to soil degradation is the (17)…………………………carried out by humans.

Questions 18-21

Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F below. Write the correct letter. A-F. in boxes 18-21 on your answer sheet.
1. Nutrients contained in the unused parts of harvested crops
2. Synthetic fertilisers produced with the Haber-Bosch process
3. Addition of a mixture developed by Pius Floris to the soil
4. The idea of zero net soil degradation
1. may improve the number and quality of plants growing there.
2. may contain data from up to nine countries.
3. may not be put back into the soil.
4. may help governments to be more aware of soil-related issues.
5. may cause damage to different aspects of the environment.
6. may be better for use at a global level.
Questions 22-26

Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G.

Which section contains the following information?

NB You may use any letter more than once.
1. a reference to one person’s motivation for a soil-improvement project
2. an explanation of how soil stayed healthy before the development of farming
3. examples of different ways of collecting information on soil degradation
4. a suggestion for a way of keeping some types of soil safe in the near future
5. a reason why it is difficult to provide an overview of soil degradation
Reading passage 3

Book review

‘Happiness is the ultimate goal because it is self-evidently good. If we are asked why happiness matters we can give no further external reason. It just obviously does matter.’ This pronouncement by Richard Layard, an economist and advocate of ‘positive psychology’, summarises the beliefs of many people today. For Layard and others like him, it is obvious that the purpose of government is to promote a state of collective well-being. The only question is how to achieve it, and here positive psychology – a supposed science that not only identifies what makes people happy but also allows their happiness to be measured – can show the way. Equipped with this science, they say, governments can secure happiness in society in a way they never could in the past.

It is an astonishingly crude and simple-minded way of thinking, and for that very reason increasingly popular. Those who think in this way are oblivious to the vast philosophical literature in which the meaning and value of happiness have been explored and questioned, and write as if nothing of any importance had been thought on the subject until it came to their attention. It was the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) who was more than anyone else responsible for the development of this way of thinking. For Bentham it was obvious that the human good consists of pleasure and the absence of pain. The Greek philosopher Aristotle may have identified happiness with self-realisation in the 4th century BC, and thinkers throughout the ages may have struggled to reconcile the pursuit of happiness with other human values, but for Bentham all this was mere metaphysics or fiction. Without knowing anything much of him or the school of moral theory he established – since they are by education and intellectual conviction illiterate in the history of ideas – our advocates of positive psychology follow in his tracks in rejecting as outmoded and irrelevant pretty much the entirety of ethical reflection on human happiness to date.

But as William Davies notes in his recent book The Happiness Industry, the view that happiness is the only self-evident good is actually a way of limiting moral inquiry. One of the virtues of this rich, lucid and arresting book is that it places the current cult of happiness in a well-defined historical framework. Rightly, Davies begins his story with Bentham, noting that he was far more than a philosopher. Davies writes, ‘Bentham’s activities were those which we might now associate with a public sector management consultant’. In the 1790s, he wrote to the Home Office suggesting that the departments of government be linked together through a set of ‘conversation tubes’, and to the Bank of England with a design for a printing device that could produce unforgeable bank notes. He drew up plans for a ‘frigidarium’ to keep provisions such as meat, fish, fruit and vegetables fresh. His celebrated design for a prison to be known as ‘Panopticon’ in which prisoners would be kept in solitary confinement while being visible at all times to the guards, was very nearly adopted. (Surprisingly Davies does not discuss the fact that Bentham meant his Panopticon not just as a model prison but also as an instrument of control that could be applied to schools and factories).

Bentham was also a pioneer of the ‘science of happiness’. If happiness is to be regarded as a science, it has to be measured and Bentham suggested two ways in which this might be done. Viewing happiness as a complex of pleasurable sensations he suggest that it might be quantified by measuring the human pulse rate. Alternatively, money could be used as the standard for quantification: if two different goods have the same price, it can be claimed that they produce the same quantity of pleasure in the consumer, Bentham was more attracted by the latter measure. By associating money so closely to inner experience Davies writes, Bentham ‘set the stage for the entangling of psychological research and capitalism that would shape the business practices of the 20th century.

The Happiness Industry describes how the project of a science of happiness has become integral to capitalism. We learn much that is interesting about how economic problems are being redefined and treated as psychological maladies. In addition, Davies shows how the belief that inner states of pleasure and displeasure can be objectively measured has informed management studies and advertising. The tendency of thinkers such as J B Watson, the founder of behaviourism, was that human beings could be shaped, or manipulated, by policymakers and managers. Watson had no factual basis for his view of human action. When he became president of the American Psychological Association in 1915, he ’had never even studied a single human being’: his research had been confined to experiments on white rats. Yet Watson’s reductive model is now widely applied, with ‘behaviour change’ becoming the goal of governments: in Britain, a ‘Behaviour Insights Team’ has been established by the government to study how people can be encouraged, at minimum cost to the public purse, to live in what are considered to be socially desirable ways.

Modern industrial societies appear to need the possibility of ever-increasing happiness to motivate them in their labours. But whatever its intellectual pedigree, the idea that governments should be responsible for promoting happiness is always a threat to human freedom.

Questions 27-29
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D
1. What is the reviewer’s attitude to advocates of positive psychology?
  1. They are wrong to reject the ideas of Bentham.
  2. They are over-influenced by their study of Bentham’s theories.
  3. They have a fresh new approach to ideas on human happiness.
  4. They are ignorant about the ideas they should be considering.
2. The reviewer refers to the Greek philosopher Aristotle in order to suggest that happiness
  1. may not be just pleasure and the absence of pain.
  2. should not be the main goal of humans.
  3. is not something that should be fought for.
  4. is not just an abstract concept.
3. 29 According to Davies, Bentham’s suggestion for linking the price of goods to happiness was significant because
  1. it was the first successful way of assessing happiness.
  2. it established a connection between work and psychology
  3. it was the first successful example of psychological research.
  4. it involved consideration of the rights of consumers.
Questions 30-34

Complete the summary using the list of words A-G below.

Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham was active in other areas besides philosophy. In the 1790s he suggested a type of technology to improve (30)…………………………… for different Government departments. He developed a new way of printing banknotes to increase (31)……………………………….and also designed a method for the (32)…………………………….of food. He also drew up plans for a prison which allowed the (33)…………………………………of prisoners at all times, and believed the same design could be used for other institutions as well. When researching happiness, he investigated possibilities for its (34)……………………………. and suggested some methods of doing this.
1. measurement
2. security
3. implementation
4. observation
5. communication
6. preservation
Questions 35-40

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
- YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
- NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
- NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
1. One strength of The Happiness Industry is its discussion of the relationship between psychology and economics.
2. It is more difficult to measure some emotions than others.
3. Watson’s ideas on behaviourism were supported by research on humans he carried out before 1915.
4. Watson’s ideas have been most influential on governments outside America.
5. The need for happiness is linked to industrialisation.
6. A main aim of government should be to increase the happiness of the population.
Cambridge IELTS 13 Academic Reading Test 4 Cutty Sark: the fastest sailing ship of all time Answers
1. false
2. false
3. true
4. true
5. false
6. true
7. not given
8. true
9. wool
10. navigator
11. gale
12. training
13. fire
Cambridge IELTS 13 Academic Reading Test 4 Why soil degradation could be a disaster for humans Answers
1. minerals
2. carbon
3. water
4. agriculture
5. C
6. E
7. A
8. D
9. E
10. C
11. F
12. G
13. F
Cambridge IELTS 13 Academic Reading Test 4 Book review Answers
1. D
2. A
3. B
4. F
5. B
6. G
7. E
8. A
9. yes
10. not given
11. no
12. not given
13. yes
14. no
March 17, 2024
Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 3
Reading passage 1

Flying tortoises

A Forests of spiny cacti cover much of the uneven lava plains that separate the interior of the Galapagos island of Isabela from the Pacific Ocean. With its five distinct volcanoes, the island resembles a lunar landscape. Only the thick vegetation at the skirt of the often cloud-covered peak of Sierra Negra offers respite from the barren terrain below. This inhospitable environment is home to the giant Galapagos tortoise. Some time after the Galapagos’s birth, around five million years ago, the islands were colonised by one or more tortoises from mainland South America. As these ancestral tortoises settled on the individual islands, the different populations adapted to their unique environments, giving rise to at least 14 different subspecies. Island life agreed with them. In the absence of significant predators, they grew to become the largest and longest-living tortoises on the planet, weighing more than 400 kilograms, occasionally exceeding 1,8 metres in length and living for more than a century.

B Before human arrival, the archipelago’s tortoises numbered in the hundreds of thousands. From the 17th century onwards, pirates took a few on board for food, but the arrival of whaling ships in the 1790s saw this exploitation grow exponentially. Relatively immobile and capable of surviving for months without food or water, the tortoises were taken on board these ships to act as food supplies during long ocean passages. Sometimes, their bodies were processed into high- grade oil. In total, an estimated 200,000 animals were taken from the archipelago before the 20th century. This historical exploitation was then exacerbated when settlers came to the islands. They hunted the tortoises and destroyed their habitat to clear land for agriculture. They also introduced alien species – ranging from cattle, pigs, goats, rats and dogs to plants and ants – that either prey on the eggs and young tortoises or damage or destroy their habitat.

C Today, only 11 of the original subspecies survive and of these, several are highly endangered. In 1989, work began on a tortoise-breeding centre just outside the town of Puerto Villamil on Isabela, dedicated to protecting the island’s tortoise populations. The centre’s captive-breeding programme proved to be extremely successful, and it eventually had to deal with an overpopulation problem.

D The problem was also a pressing one. Captive-bred tortoises can’t be reintroduced into the wild until they’re at least five years old and weigh at least 4,5 kilograms, at which point their size and weight – and their hardened shells – are sufficient to protect them from predators. But if people wait too long after that point, the tortoises eventually become too large to transport.

E For years, repatriation efforts were carried out in small numbers, with the tortoises carried on the backs of men over weeks of long, treacherous hikes along narrow trails. But in November 2010, the environmentalist and Galapagos National Park liaison officer Godfrey Merlin, a visiting private motor yacht captain and a helicopter pilot gathered around a table in a small cafe in Puerto Ayora on the island of Santa Cruz to work out more ambitious reintroduction. The aim was to use a helicopter to move 300 of the breeding centre’s tortoises to various locations close to Sierra Negra.

F This unprecedented effort was made possible by the owners of the 67-metre yacht White Cloud, who provided the Galapagos National Park with free use of their helicopter and its experienced pilot, as well as the logistical support of the yacht, its captain and crew. Originally an air ambulance, the yacht’s helicopter has a rear double door and a large internal space that’s well suited for cargo, so a custom crate was designed to hold up to 33 tortoises with a total weight of about 150 kilograms. This weight, together with that of the fuel, pilot and four crew, approached the helicopter’s maximum payload, and there were times when it was clearly right on the edge of the helicopter’s capabilities. During a period of three days, a group of volunteers from the breeding centre worked around the clock to prepare the young tortoises for transport. Meanwhile, park wardens, dropped off ahead of time in remote locations, cleared landing sites within the thick brush, cacti and lava rocks.

G Upon their release, the juvenile tortoises quickly spread out over their ancestral territory, investigating their new surroundings and feeding on the vegetation. Eventually, one tiny tortoise came across a fully grown giant who had been lumbering around the island for around a hundred years. The two stood side by side, a powerful symbol of the regeneration of an ancient species.

Questions 1-7

Reading passage 1 has seven paragraphs A-G.

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.

List of headings
1. The importance of getting the timing right
2. Young meets old
3. Developments to the disadvantage of tortoise populations
4. Planning a bigger idea
5. Tortoises populate the islands
6. Carrying out a carefully prepared operation
7. Looking for a home for the islands’ tortoises
8. The start of the conservation project
1. Paragraph A
2. Paragraph B
3. Paragraph C
4. Paragraph D
5. Paragraph E
6. Paragraph F
7. Paragraph G
Questions 8-13

Complete the notes below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

The decline of the Galapagos tortoise

• Originally from mainland South America
• Numbers on Galapagos islands increased due to lack of predators
• 17th century: small numbers taken onto ships used by (8)………………………..
• 1790s: very large numbers taken onto whaling ships kept for (9)………………………and also used to produce (10)………………………….
• Hunted by (11)………………………..on the islands
• Habitat destruction: for the establishment of agriculture and by various (12)…………………………not native to the islands which also fed on baby tortoises and tortoises’ (13)……………………….

The Intersection of Health Sciences and Geography

A While many diseases that affect humans have been eradicated due to improvements in vaccinations and the availability of healthcare, there are still areas around the world where certain health issues are more prevalent. In a world that is far more globalised than ever before, people come into contact with one another through travel and living closer and closer to each other. As a result, super-viruses and other infections resistant to antibiotics are becoming more and more common.

B Geography can often play a very large role in the health concerns of certain populations. For instance, depending on where you live, you will not have the same health concerns as someone who lives in a different geographical region. Perhaps one of the most obvious examples of this idea is malaria-prone areas, which are usually tropical regions that foster a warm and damp environment in which the mosquitos that can give people this disease can grew. Malaria is much less of a problem in high-altitude deserts, for instance.

C In some countries, geographical factors influence the health and well-being of the population in very obvious ways. In many large cities, the wind is not strong enough to clear the air of the massive amounts of smog and pollution that cause asthma, lung problems, eyesight issues and more in the people who live there. Part of the problem is, of course, the massive number of cars being driven, in addition to factories that run on coal power. The rapid industrialisation of some countries in recent years has also led to the cutting down of forests to allow for the expansion of big cities, which makes it even harder to fight the pollution with the fresh air that is produced by plants.

D It is in situations like these that the field of health geography comes into its own. It is an increasingly important area of study in a world where diseases like polio are re-emerging, respiratory diseases continue to spread, and malaria-prone areas are still fighting to find a better cure. Health geography is the combination of, on the one hand, knowledge regarding geography and methods used to analyse and interpret geographical information, and on the other, the study of health, diseases and healthcare practices around the world. The aim of this hybrid science is to create solutions for common geography-based health problems. While people will always be prone to illness, the study of how geography affects our health could lead to the eradication of certain illnesses, and the prevention of others in the future. By understanding why and how we get sick, we can change the way we treat illness and disease specific to certain geographical locations.

E The geography of disease and ill health analyses the frequency with which certain diseases appear in different parts of the world, and overlays the data with the geography of the region, to see if there could be a correlation between the two. Health geographers also study factors that could make certain individuals or a population more likely to be taken ill with a specific health concern or disease, as compared with the population of another area. Health geographers in this field are usually trained as healthcare workers, and have an understanding of basic epidemiology as it relates to the spread of diseases among the population.

F Researchers study the interactions between humans and their environment that could lead to illness (such as asthma in places with high levels of pollution) and work to create a clear way of categorising illnesses, diseases and epidemics into local and global scales. Health geographers can map the spread of illnesses and attempt to identify the reasons behind an increase or decrease in illnesses, as they work to find a way to halt the further spread or re-emergence of diseases in vulnerable populations.

G The second subcategory of health geography is the geography of healthcare provision. This group studies the availability (of lack thereof) of healthcare resources to individuals and populations around the world. In both developed and developing nations there is often a very large discrepancy between the options available to people in different social classes, income brackets, and levels of education. Individuals working in the area of the geography of healthcare provision attempt to assess the levels of healthcare in the area (for instance, it may be very difficult for people to get medical attention because there is a mountain between their village and the nearest hospital). These researchers are on the frontline of making recommendations regarding policy to international organisations, local government bodies and others.

H The field of health geography is often overlooked, but it constitutes a huge area of need in the fields of geography and healthcare. If we can understand how geography affects our health no matter where in the world we are located, we can better treat disease, prevent illness, and keep people safe and well.

Questions 14-19

Reading passage 2 has eight sections A-H.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

NB You may use any letter more than once.
1. an acceptance that not all diseases can be totally eliminated
2. examples of physical conditions caused by human behavior
3. a reference to classifying diseases on the basis of how far they extend gepgraphically
4. reasons why the level of access to healthcare can vary within a country
5. a description of healthy geography as a mixture of different academic fields
6. a description of the type of area where a particular illness is rare
Questions 20-26

Complete the sentences below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
1. Certain diseases have disappeared thanks to better…………………………….and healthcare.
2. Because there is more contact between people………………………….are losing their usefulness.
3. Disease causing……………………….are most likely to be found in hot, damp regions.
4. One cause of pollution is………………………….that burn a particular fuel.
5. The growth of cities often has an impact on nearby.
6. …………………………………is one disease that is growing after having been eradicated.
7. A physical barrier such as a……………………………can prevent people from reaching a hospital.
Reading passage 3

Music and the emotions

Why does music make us feel? On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deeply. When listening to our favourite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. The pupils in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement, becomes strangely active. Blood is even re-directed to the muscles in our legs. In other words, sound stirs us at our biological roots.

A recent paper in Neuroscience by a research team in Montreal, Canada, marks an important step in repealing the precise underpinnings of ‘the potent pleasurable stimulus’ that is music. Although the study involves plenty of fancy technology, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and ligand-based positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, the experiment itself was rather straightforward. After screening 217 individuals who responded to advertisements requesting people who experience ‘chills’ to instrumental music, the scientists narrowed down the subject pool to ten. They then asked the subjects to bring in their playlist of favourite songs – virtually every genre was represented, from techno to tango – and played them the music while their brain activity was monitored. Because the scientists were combining methodologies (PET and fMRI), they were able to obtain an impressively exact and detailed portrait of music in the brain. The first thing they discovered is that music triggers the production of dopamine – a chemical with a key role in setting people’s moods – by the neurons (nerve cells) in both the dorsal and ventral regions of the brain. As these two regions have long been linked with the experience of pleasure, this finding isn’t particularly surprising.

What is rather more significant is the finding that the dopamine neurons in the caudate – a region of the brain involved in learning stimulus-response associations, and in anticipating food and other ‘reward’ stimuli – were at their most active around 15 seconds before the participants’ favourite moments in the music. The researchers call this the ‘anticipatory phase’ and argue that the purpose of this activity is to help us predict the arrival of our favourite part. The question, of course, is what all these dopamine neurons are up to. Why are they so active in the period preceding the acoustic climax? After all, we typically associate surges of dopamine with pleasure, with the processing of actual rewards. And yet, this cluster of cells is most active when the ‘chills’ have yet to arrive, when the melodic pattern is still unresolved.

One way to answer the question is to look at the music and not the neurons. While music can often seem (at least to the outsider) like a labyrinth of intricate patterns, it turns out that the most important part of every song or symphony is when the patterns break down, when the sound becomes unpredictable. If the music is too obvious, it is annoyingly boring, like an alarm clock. Numerous studies, after all, have demonstrated that dopamine neurons quickly adapt to predictable rewards. If we know what’s going to happen next, then we don’t get excited. This is why composers often introduce a key note in the beginning of a song, spend most of the rest of the piece in the studious avoidance of the pattern, and then finally repeat it only at the end. The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound.

To demonstrate this psychological principle, the musicologist Leonard Meyer, in his classic book Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), analysed the 5th movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131. Meyer wanted to show how music is defined by its flirtation with – but not submission to – our expectations of order. Meyer dissected 50 measures (bars) of the masterpiece, showing how Beethoven begins with the clear statement of a rhythmic and harmonic pattern and then, in an ingenious tonal dance, carefully holds off repeating it. What Beethoven does instead is suggest variations of the pattern. Me wants to preserve an element of uncertainty in his music, making our brains beg for the one chord he refuses to give us. Beethoven saves that chord for the end.

According to Meyer, it is the suspenseful tension of music, arising out of our unfulfilled expectations, that is the source of the music’s feeling. While earlier theories of music focused on the way a sound can refer to the real world of images and experiences – its ‘connotative’ meaning – Meyer argued that the emotions we find in music come from the unfolding events of the music itself. This ‘embodied meaning’ arises from the patterns the symphony invokes and then ignores. It is this uncertainty that triggers the surge of dopamine in the caudate, as we struggle to figure out what will happen next. We can predict some of the notes, but we can’t predict them all, and that is what keeps us listening, waiting expectantly for our reward, for the pattern to be completed.

Questions 27-31

Complete the summary below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

The Montreal Study

Participants who were recruited for the study through advertisements had their brain activity monitored while listening to their favourite music. It was noted that the music stimulated the brain’s neurons to release a substance called (27)……………………….in two of the parts of the brain which are associated with feeling (28)………………………….. Researchers also observed that the neurons in the area of the brain called the (29)……………………..were particularly active just before the participants’ favourite moments in the music – the period known as the (30)……………………………….Activity in this part of the brain is associated with the expectation of reward stimuli such as (31)………………………….

Questions 32-36

Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
1. What point does the writer emphasise in the first paragraph?
  1. how dramatically our reactions to music can vary
  2. how intense our physical responses to music can be
  3. how little we know about the way that music affects us
  4. how much music can tell us about how our brains operate
2. 33. What view of the Montreal study does the writer express in the second paragraph?
  1. its aims were innovative
  2. the approach was too simplistic
  3. it produces some remarkably precise data
  4. the technology used was unnecessarily complex
3. What does the writer find interesting about the results of the Montreal study?
  1. the timing of participants’ neural responses to the music
  2. the impact of the music on participants’ emotional state
  3. the section of participants’ brains which was activated by the music
  4. the type of music which has the strongest effect on the participants’ brains
4. Why does the writer refer to Meyer’s work on music and emotion?
  1. to propose an original theory about the subject
  2. to offer support for the findings of the Montreal study
  3. to recommend the need for further research into the subject
  4. to present a view which opposes that of the Montreal researchers
5. According to Leonard Meyer, what causes the listener’s emotional response to music?
  1. the way the music evokes poignant memories in the listener
  2. the association of certain musical chords with certain feelings
  3. the listener’s sympathy with the composer’s intentions
  4. the internal structure of the musical composition
Questions 37-40

Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-F below.
1. The Montreal researchers discovered that
2. Many studies have demonstrated that
3. Meyer’s analysis of Beethoven’s music shows that
4. Earlier theories of music suggested that
1. Our response to music depends on our initial emotional state.
2. neuron activity decreases if outcomes become predictable.
3. emotive music can bring to mind actual pictures and events.
4. experiences in our past can influence our emotional reaction to music.
5. emotive music delays giving listeners what they expect to hear.
6. neuron activity increases prior to key points in a musical piece.
Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 3 Flying tortoises Answers
1. v
2. iii
3. viii
4. i
5. iv
6. vi
7. ii
8. pirates
9. food
10. oil
11. settlers
12. species
13. eggs
Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 3 The Intersection of Health Sciences and Geography Answers
1. D
2. C
3. F
4. G
5. D
6. B
7. vaccinations
8. antibiotics
9. mosquitoes
10. factories
11. forests
12. polio
13. mountain
Cambridge IELTS 12 Academic Reading Test 3 Music and the emotions Answers
1. dopamine
2. pleasure
3. caudate
4. anticipatory phase
5. food
6. B
7. C
8. A
9. B
10. D
11. F
12. B
13. E
14. C
March 17, 2024
Cambridge IELTS 14 Academic Reading Test 4
Reading Passage 1

The secret of staying young

Pheidole dentata, a native ant of the south-eastern U.S., isn’t immortal. But scientists have found that it doesn’t seem to show any signs of aging. Old worker ants can do everything just as well as the youngsters, and their brains appear just as sharp. ‘We get a picture that these ants really don’t decline,’ says Ysabel Giraldo, who studied the ants for her doctoral thesis at Boston University.

Such age-defying feats are rare in the animal kingdom. Naked mole rats can live for almost 30 years and stay fit for nearly their entire lives. They can still reproduce even when old, and they never get cancer. But the vast majority of animals deteriorate with age just like people do. Like the naked mole rat, ants are social creatures that usually live in highly organised colonies. ‘It’s this social complexity that makes P. dentata useful for studying aging in people,’ says Giraldo, now at the California Institute of Technology. Humans are also highly social, a trait that has been connected to healthier aging. By contrast, most animal studies of aging use mice, worms or fruit flies, which all lead much more isolated lives.

In the lab, P. dentata worker ants typically live for around 140 days. Giraldo focused on ants at four age ranges: 20 to 22 days, 45 to 47 days, 95 to 97 days and 120 to 122 days. Unlike all previous studies, which only estimated how old the ants were, her work tracked the ants from the time the pupae became adults, so she knew their exact ages. Then she put them through a range of tests.

Giraldo watched how well the ants took care of the young of the colony, recording how often each ant attended to, carried and fed them. She compared how well 20-day-old and 95-day-old ants followed the telltale scent that the insects usually leave to mark a trail to food. She tested how ants responded to light and also measured how active they were by counting how often ants in a small dish walked across a line. And she experimented with how ants react to live prey: a tethered fruit fly. Giraldo expected the older ants to perform poorly in all these tasks. But the elderly insects were all good caretakers and trail-followers—the 95-day-old ants could track the scent even longer than their younger counterparts. They all responded to light well, and the older ants were more active. And when it came to reacting to prey, the older ants attacked the poor fruit fly just as aggressively as the young ones did, flaring their mandibles or pulling at the fly’s legs.

Then Giraldo compared the brains of 20-day-old and 95-day-old ants, identifying any cells that were close to death. She saw no major differences with age, nor was there any difference in the location of the dying cells, showing that age didn’t seem to affect specific brain functions. Ants and other insects have structures in their brains called mushroom bodies, which are important for processing information, learning and memory. She also wanted to see if aging affects the density of synaptic complexes within these structures—regions where neurons come together. Again, the answer was no. What was more, the old ants didn’t experience any drop in the levels of either serotonin or dopamine—brain chemicals whose decline often coincides with aging. In humans, for example, a decrease in serotonin has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

‘This is the first time anyone has looked at both behavioral and neural changes in these ants so thoroughly,’ says Giraldo, who recently published the findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Scientists have looked at some similar aspects in bees, but the results of recent bee studies were mixed—some studies showed age-related declines, which biologists call senescence, and others didn’t. ‘For now, the study raises more questions than it answers,’ Giraldo says, ‘including how P. dentata stays in such good shape.’

Also, if the ants don’t deteriorate with age, why do they die at all? Out in the wild, the ants probably don’t live for a full 140 days thanks to predators, disease and just being in an environment that’s much harsher than the comforts of the lab. ‘The lucky ants that do live into old age may suffer a steep decline just before dying,’ Giraldo says, but she can’t say for sure because her study wasn’t designed to follow an ant’s final moments.

‘It will be important to extend these findings to other species of social insects,’ says Gene E. Robinson, an entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This ant might be unique, or it might represent a broader pattern among other social bugs with possible clues to the science of aging in larger animals. Either way, it seems that for these ants, age really doesn’t matter.

Questions 1–8

Complete the notes below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answer in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet.

Ysabel Giraldo’s research

Focused on a total of (1)………………different age groups of ants, analysing

Behaviour:
• how well ants looked after their (2)………………
• their ability to locate (3)……………..using a scent trail
• the effect that (4)………….had on them
• how (5)………………they attacked prey

Brains:
• comparison between age and the (6)……………….of dying cells in the brains of ants
• condition of synaptic complexes (areas in which (7)……………….meet) in the brain’s ‘mushroom bodies’
• level of two (8)…………….in the brain associated with ageing

Questions 9–13

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 9-13 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
1. Pheidole dentata ants are the only known animals which remain active for almost their whole lives.
2. Ysabel Giraldo was the first person to study Pheidole dentata ants using precise data about the insects’ ages.
3. The ants in Giraldo’s experiments behaved as she had predicted that they would.
4. The recent studies of bees used different methods of measuring age- related decline.
5. Pheidole dentata ants kept in laboratory conditions tend to live longer lives.
Reading Passage 2

Why zoos are good

A In my view, it is perfectly possible for many species of animals living in zoos or wildlife parks to have a quality of life as high as, or higher than, in the wild. Animals in good zoos get a varied and high-quality diet with all the supplements required, and any illnesses they might have will be treated. Their movement might be somewhat restricted, but they have a safe environment in which to live, and they are spared bullying and social ostracism by others of their kind. They do not suffer from the threat or stress of predators, or the irritation and pain of parasites or injuries. The average captive animal will have a greater life expectancy compared with its wild counterpart, and will not die of drought, of starvation or in the jaws of a predator. A lot of very nasty things happen to truly ‘wild’ animals that simply don’t happen in good zoos, and to view a life that is ‘free’ as one that is automatically ‘good’ is, I think, an error. Furthermore, zoos serve several key purposes.

B Firstly, zoos aid conservation. Colossal numbers of species are becoming extinct across the world, and many more are increasingly threatened and therefore risk extinction. Moreover, some of these collapses have been sudden, dramatic and unexpected, or were simply discovered very late in the day. A species protected in captivity can be bred up to provide a reservoir population against a population crash or extinction in the wild. A good number of species only exist in captivity, with many of these living in zoos. Still more only exist in the wild because they have been reintroduced from zoos, or have wild populations that have been boosted by captive bred animals. Without these efforts there would be fewer species alive today. Although reintroduction successes are few and far between, the numbers are increasing, and the very fact that species have been saved or reintroduced as a result of captive breeding proves the value of such initiatives.

C Zoos also provide education. Many children and adults, especially those in cities, will never see a wild animal beyond a fox or pigeon. While it is true that television documentaries are becoming ever more detailed and impressive, and many natural history specimens are on display in museums, there really is nothing to compare with seeing a living creature in the flesh, hearing it, smelling it, watching what it does and having the time to absorb details. That alone will bring a greater understanding and perspective to many, and hopefully give them a greater appreciation for wildlife, conservation efforts and how they can contribute.

D In addition to this, there is also the education that can take place in zoos through signs, talks and presentations which directly communicate information to visitors about the animals they are seeing and their place in the world. This was an area where zoos used to be lacking, but they are now increasingly sophisticated in their communication and outreach work. Many zoos also work directly to educate conservation workers in other countries, or send their animal keepers abroad to contribute their knowledge and skills to those working in zoos and reserves, thereby helping to improve conditions and reintroductions all over the world.

E Zoos also play a key role in research. If we are to save wild species and restore and repair ecosystems we need to know about how key species live, act and react. Being able to undertake research on animals in zoos where there is less risk and fewer variables means real changes can be effected on wild populations. Finding out about, for example, the oestrus cycle of an animal or its breeding rate helps us manage wild populations. Procedures such as capturing and moving at-risk or dangerous individuals are bolstered by knowledge gained in zoos about doses for anaesthetics, and by experience in handling and transporting animals. This can make a real difference to conservation efforts and to the reduction of human-animal conflicts, and can provide a knowledge base for helping with the increasing threats of habitat destruction and other problems.

F In conclusion, considering the many ongoing global threats to the environment, it is hard for me to see zoos as anything other than essential to the long-term survival of numerous species. They are vital not just in terms of protecting animals, but as a means of learning about them to aid those still in the wild, as well as educating and informing the general population about these animals and their world so that they can assist or at least accept the need to be more environmentally conscious. Without them, the world would be, and would increasingly become, a much poorer place.

Questions 14 – 17

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.
1. a reference to how quickly animal species can die out
2. reasons why it is preferable to study animals in captivity rather than in the wild
3. mention of two ways of learning about animals other than visiting them in zoos
4. reasons why animals in zoos may be healthier than those in the wild
Questions 18 – 22

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?

In boxes 18-22 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
1. An animal is likely to live longer in a zoo than in the wild.
2. There are some species in zoos which can no longer be found in the wild.
3. Improvements in the quality of TV wildlife documentaries have resulted in increased numbers of zoo visitors.
4. Zoos have always excelled at transmitting information about animals to the public.
5. Studying animals in zoos is less stressful for the animals than studying them in the wild.
Questions 23 and 24

Choose TWO letters, A-E.

Write the correct letters in boxes 23 and 24 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following are stated about zoo staff in the text?
1. Some take part in television documentaries about animals.
2. Some travel to overseas locations to join teams in zoos.
3. Some get experience with species in the wild before taking up zoo jobs.
4. Some teach people who are involved with conservation projects.
5. Some specialise in caring for species which are under threat.
Questions 25 and 26

Choose TWO letters, A-E.

Write the correct letters in boxes 25 and 26 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of these beliefs about zoos does the writer mention in the text?
1. They can help children overcome their fears of wild animals.
2. They can increase public awareness of environmental issues.
3. They can provide employment for a range of professional people.
4. They can generate income to support wildlife conservation projects.
5. They can raise animals which can later be released into the wild.
READING PASSAGE 3

Chelsea Rochman, an ecologist at the University of California, Davis, has been trying to answer a dismal question: Is everything terrible, or are things just very, very bad?

Rochman is a member of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis’s marine-debris working group, a collection of scientists who study, among other things, the growing problem of marine debris, also known as ocean trash. Plenty of studies have sounded alarm bells about the state of marine debris; in a recent paper published in the journal Ecology, Rochman and her colleagues set out to determine how many of those perceived risks are real.

Often, Rochman says, scientists will end a paper by speculating about the broader impacts of what they’ve found. For example, a study could show that certain seabirds eat plastic bags, and go on to warn that whole bird populations are at risk of dying out. ‘But the truth was that nobody had yet tested those perceived threats,’ Rochman says. ‘There wasn’t a lot of information.’

Rochman and her colleagues examined more than a hundred papers on the impacts of marine debris that were published through 2013. Within each paper, they asked what threats scientists had studied – 366 perceived threats in all – and what they’d actually found.

In 83 percent of cases, the perceived dangers of ocean trash were proven true. In the remaining cases, the working group found the studies had weaknesses in design and content which affected the validity of their conclusions – they lacked a control group, for example, or used faulty statistics.

Strikingly, Rochman says, only one well-designed study failed to find the effect it was looking for, an investigation of mussels ingesting microscopic plastic bits. The plastic moved from the mussels’ stomachs to their bloodstreams, scientists found, and stayed there for weeks – but didn’t seem to stress out the shellfish.

While mussels may be fine eating trash, though, the analysis also gave a clearer picture of the many ways that ocean debris is bothersome.

Within the studies they looked at, most of the proven threats came from plastic debris, rather than other materials like metal or wood. Most of the dangers also involved large pieces of debris – animals getting entangled in trash, for example, or eating it and severely injuring themselves.

But a lot of ocean debris is ‘microplastic’, or pieces smaller than five millimeters. These may be ingredients used in cosmetics and toiletries, fibers shed by synthetic clothing in the wash, or eroded remnants of larger debris. Compared to the number of studies investigating large-scale debris, Rochman’s group found little research on the effects of these tiny bits. ‘There are a lot of open questions still for microplastic,’ Rochman says, though she notes that more papers on the subject have been published since 2013, the cutoff point for the group’s analysis.

There are also, she adds, a lot of open questions about the ways that ocean debris can lead to sea-creature death. Many studies have looked at how plastic affects an individual animal, or that animal’s tissues or cells, rather than whole populations. And in the lab, scientists often use higher concentrations of plastic than what’s really in the ocean. None of that tells us how many birds or fish or sea turtles could die from plastic pollution – or how deaths in one species could affect that animal’s predators, or the rest of the ecosystem.

‘We need to be asking more ecologically relevant questions,’ Rochman says. Usually, scientists don’t know exactly how disasters such as a tanker accidentally spilling its whole cargo of oil and polluting huge areas of the ocean will affect the environment until after they’ve happened. ‘We don’t ask the right questions early enough,’ she says. But if ecologists can understand how the slow-moving effect of ocean trash is damaging ecosystems, they might be able to prevent things from getting worse.

Asking the right questions can help policy makers, and the public, figure out where to focus their attention. The problems that look or sound most dramatic may not be the best places to start. For example, the name of the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ – a collection of marine debris in the northern Pacific Ocean – might conjure up a vast, floating trash island. In reality though, much of the debris is tiny or below the surface; a person could sail through the area without seeing any trash at all. A Dutch group called ‘The Ocean Cleanup’ is currently working on plans to put mechanical devices in the Pacific Garbage Patch and similar areas to suck up plastic. But a recent paper used simulations to show that strategically positioning the cleanup devices closer to shore would more effectively reduce pollution over the long term.

‘I think clearing up some of these misperceptions is really important,’ Rochman says. Among scientists as well as in the media, she says, ‘A lot of the images about strandings and entanglement and all of that cause the perception that plastic debris is killing everything in the ocean.’ Interrogating the existing scientific literature can help ecologists figure out which problems really need addressing, and which ones they’d be better off- like the mussels – absorbing and ignoring.

Questions 27–33

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 27-33 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
1. Rochman and her colleagues were the first people to research the problem of marine debris.
2. The creatures most in danger from ocean trash are certain seabirds.
3. The studies Rochman has reviewed have already proved that populations of some birds will soon become extinct.
4. Rochman analysed papers on the different kinds of danger caused by ocean trash.
5. Most of the research analysed by Rochman and her colleagues was badly designed.
6. One study examined by Rochman was expecting to find that mussels were harmed by eating plastic.
7. Some mussels choose to eat plastic in preference to their natural diet.
Questions 34–39

Complete the notes below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 34-39 on your answer sheet.

Findings related to marine debris

Studies of marine debris found the biggest threats were
• plastic (not metal or wood)
• bits of debris that were (34)……………..(harmful to animals)

There was little research into (35)……………….e.g. from synthetic fibres.

Drawbacks of the studies examined
• most of them focused on individual animals, not entire (36) ………………….
• the (37)…………………….of plastic used in the lab did not always reflect those in the ocean
• there was insufficient information on
– numbers of animals which could be affected
– the impact of a reduction in numbers on the (38)……….………….of that species
– the impact on the ecosystem

Rochman says more information is needed on the possible impact of future (39)……………….(e.g. involving oil).

Question 40

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
1. What would be the best title for this passage?
  1. Assessing the threat of marine debris
  2. Marine debris: who is to blame?
  3. A new solution to the problem of marine debris
  4. Marine Debis: the need for international action
Cambridge IELTS 14 Academic Reading Test 4 Passage 1 The secret of staying young Answers
1. 4
2. young
3. food
4. light
5. aggressively
6. location
7. neurons
8. chemicals
9. False
10. True
11. False
12. Not given
13. True
Cambridge IELTS 14 Academic Reading Test 4 Passage 2 Why zoos are good Answers
1. B
2. E
3. C
4. A
5. True
6. True
7. Not given
8. False
9. Not given
10. B
11. D
12. B
13. E
Cambridge IELTS 14 Academic Reading Test 4 Passage 3 Chelsea Rochman Answers
1. False
2. Not given
3. False
4. True
5. False
6. True
7. Not given
8. large
9. microplastic
10. populations
11. concentrations
12. predators
13. disasters
14. A
February 23, 2024
Cambridge IELTS 14 Academic Reading Test 2
Reading Passage 1

Alexander Henderson

Alexander Henderson was born in Scotland in 1831 and was the son of a successful merchant. His grandfather, also called Alexander, had founded the family business, and later became the first chairman of the National Bank of Scotland. The family had extensive landholdings in Scotland. Besides its residence in Edinburgh, it owned Press Estate, 650 acres of farmland about 35 miles southeast of the city. The family often stayed at Press Castle, the large mansion on the northern edge of the property, and Alexander spent much of his childhood in the area, playing on the beach near Eyemouth or fishing in the streams nearby.

Even after he went to school at Murcheston Academy on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Henderson returned to Press at weekends. In 1849 he began a three-year apprenticeship to become an accountant. Although he never liked the prospect of a business career, he stayed with it to please his family. In October 1855, however, he emigrated to Canada with his wife Agnes Elder Robertson and they settled in Montreal.

Henderson learned photography in Montreal around the year 1857 and quickly took it up as a serious amateur. He became a personal friend and colleague of the Scottish-Canadian photographer William Notman. The two men made a photographic excursion to Niagara Falls in 1860 and they cooperated on experiments with magnesium flares as a source of artificial light in 1865. They belonged to the same societies and were among the founding members of the Art Association of Montreal. Henderson acted as chairman of the association’s first meeting, which was held in Notman’s studio on 11 January 1860.

In spite of their friendship, their styles of photography were quite different. While Notman’s landscapes were noted for their bold realism, Henderson for the first 20 years of his career produced romantic images, showing the strong influence of the British landscape tradition. His artistic and technical progress was rapid and in 1865 he published his first major collection of landscape photographs. The publication had limited circulation (only seven copies have ever been found), and was called Canadian Views and Studies. The contents of each copy vary significantly and have proved a useful source for evaluating Henderson’s early work.

In 1866, he gave up his business to open a photographic studio, advertising himself as a portrait and landscape photographer. From about 1870 he dropped portraiture to specialize in landscape photography and other views. His numerous photographs of city life revealed in street scenes, houses, and markets are alive with human activity, and although his favourite subject was landscape he usually composed his scenes around such human pursuits as farming the land, cutting ice on a river, or sailing down a woodland stream. There was sufficient demand for these types of scenes and others he took depicting the lumber trade, steamboats and waterfalls to enable him to make a living. There was little competing hobby or amateur photography before the late 1880s because of the time-consuming techniques involved and the weight of the equipment. People wanted to buy photographs as souvenirs of a trip or as gifts, and catering to this market, Henderson had stock photographs on display at his studio for mounting, framing, or inclusion in albums.

Henderson frequently exhibited his photographs in Montreal and abroad, in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, New York, and Philadelphia. He met with greater success in 1877 and 1878 in New York when he won first prizes in the exhibition held by E and H T Anthony and Company for landscapes using the Lambertype process. In 1878 his work won second prize at the world exhibition in Paris.

In the 1870s and 1880s Henderson travelled widely throughout Quebec and Ontario, in Canada, documenting the major cities of the two provinces and many of the villages in Quebec. He was especially fond of the wilderness and often travelled by canoe on the Blanche, du Lievre, and other noted eastern rivers. He went on several occasions to the Maritimes and in 1872 he sailed by yacht along the lower north shore of the St Lawrence River. That same year, while in the lower St Lawrence River region, he took some photographs of the construction of the Intercolonial Railway. This undertaking led in 1875 to a commission from the railway to record the principal structures along the almost-completed line connecting Montreal to Halifax. Commissions from other railways followed. In 1876 he photographed bridges on the Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa and Occidental Railway between Montreal and Ottawa. In 1885 he went west along the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) as far as Rogers Pass in British Columbia, where he took photographs of the mountains and the progress of construction.

In 1892 Henderson accepted a full-time position with the CPR as manager of a photographic department which he was to set up and administer. His duties included spending four months in the field each year. That summer he made his second trip west, photographing extensively along the railway line as far as Victoria. He continued in this post until 1897, when he retired completely from photography.

When Henderson died in 1913, his huge collection of glass negatives was stored in the basement of his house. Today collections of his work are held at the National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, and the McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal.

Questions 1 – 8

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 1-8 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
1. Henderson rarely visited the area around Press estate when he was younger.
2. Henderson pursued a business career because it was what his family wanted.
3. Henderson and Notman were surprised by the results of their 1865 experiment.
4. There were many similarities between Henderson’s early landscapes and those of Notman.
5. The studio that Henderson opened in 1866 was close to his home.
6. Henderson gave up portraiture so that he could focus on taking photographs of scenery.
7. When Henderson began work for the Intercolonial Railway, the Montreal to Halifax line had been finished.
8. Henderson’s last work as a photographer was with the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Questions 9 – 13

Complete the notes below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.

Alexander Henderson

Early life
• was born in Scotland in 1831 – father was a (9)…………….
• trained as an accountant, emigrated to Canada in 1855

Start of a photographic career
• opened up a photographic studio in 1866
• took photos of city life, but preferred landscape photography
• people bought Henderson’s photos because photography took up considerable time and the (10)…………… was heavy
• the photographs Hederson sold were (11)……………….or souvenirs

Travelling as a professional photographer
• travelled widely in Quebec and Ontario in 1870s and 1880s
• took many trips along eastern rivers in a (12)……………..
• worked for Canadian railways between 1875 and 1897
• worked for CPR in 1885 and photographed the (13)…………….and the railway at Rogers Pass

Reading Passage 2

Back to the future of skyscraper design

A The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture by Professor Alan Short is the culmination of 30 years of research and award-winning green building design by Short and colleagues in Architecture, Engineering, Applied Maths and Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge. The crisis in building design is already here,’ said Short. ‘Policy makers think you can solve energy and building problems with gadgets. You can’t. As global temperatures continue to rise, we are going to continue to squander more and more energy on keeping our buildings mechanically cool until we have run out of capacity.’

B Short is calling for a sweeping reinvention of how skyscrapers and major public buildings are designed – to end the reliance on sealed buildings which exist solely via the ‘life support’ system of vast air conditioning units. Instead, he shows it is entirely possible to accommodate natural ventilation and cooling in large buildings by looking into the past, before the widespread introduction of air conditioning systems, which were ‘relentlessly and aggressively marketed’ by their inventors.

C Short points out that to make most contemporary buildings habitable, they have to be sealed and air conditioned. The energy use and carbon emissions this generates is spectacular and largely unnecessary. Buildings in the West account for 40-50% of electricity usage, generating substantial carbon emissions, and the rest of the world is catching up at a frightening rate. Short regards glass, steel and air-conditioned skyscrapers as symbols of status, rather than practical ways of meeting our requirements.

D Short’s book highlights a developing and sophisticated art and science of ventilating buildings through the 19th and earlier-20th centuries, including the design of ingeniously ventilated hospitals. Of particular interest were those built to the designs of John Shaw Billings, including the first Johns Hopkins Hospital in the US city of Baltimore (1873-1889). ‘We spent three years digitally modelling Billings’ final designs,’ says Short. ‘We put pathogens in the airstreams, modelled for someone with tuberculosis (TB) coughing in the wards and we found the ventilation systems in the room would have kept other patients safe from harm.

E ‘We discovered that 19th-century hospital wards could generate up to 24 air changes an hour – that’s similar to the performance of a modern-day, computer-controlled operating theatre. We believe you could build wards based on these principles now. Single rooms are not appropriate for all patients. Communal wards appropriate for certain patients – older people with dementia, for example – would work just as well in today’s hospitals, at a fraction of the energy cost.’ Professor Short contends the mindset and skill-sets behind these designs have been completely lost, lamenting the disappearance of expertly designed theatres, opera houses, and other buildings where up to half the volume of the building was given over to ensuring everyone got fresh air.

F Much of the ingenuity present in 19th-century hospital and building design was driven by a panicked public clamouring for buildings that could protect against what was thought to be the lethal threat of miasmas – toxic air that spread disease. Miasmas were feared as the principal agents of disease and epidemics for centuries, and were used to explain the spread of infection from the Middle Ages right through to the cholera outbreaks in London and Paris during the 1850s. Foul air, rather than germs, was believed to be the main driver of ‘hospital fever’, leading to disease and frequent death. The prosperous steered clear of hospitals. While miasma theory has been long since disproved, Short has for the last 30 years advocated a return to some of the building design principles produced in its wake.

G Today, huge amounts of a building’s space and construction cost are given over to air conditioning. ‘But I have designed and built a series of buildings over the past three decades which have tried to reinvent some of these ideas and then measure what happens. To go forward into our new low-energy, low-carbon future, we would be well advised to look back at design before our high-energy, high-carbon present appeared. What is surprising is what a rich legacy we have abandoned.’

H Successful examples of Short’s approach include the Queen’s Building at De Montfort University in Leicester. Containing as many as 2,000 staff and students, the entire building is naturally ventilated, passively cooled and naturally lit, including the two largest auditoria, each seating more than 150 people. The award-winning building uses a fraction of the electricity of comparable buildings in the UK. Short contends that glass skyscrapers in London and around the world will become a liability over the next 20 or 30 years if climate modelling predictions and energy price rises come to pass as expected.

I He is convinced that sufficiently cooled skyscrapers using the natural environment can be produced in almost any climate. He and his team have worked on hybrid buildings in the harsh climates of Beijing and Chicago – built with natural ventilation assisted by back-up air conditioning – which, surprisingly perhaps, can be switched off more than half the time on milder days and during the spring and autumn. Short looks at how we might reimagine the cities, offices and homes of the future. Maybe it’s time we changed our outlook.

Questions 14 – 18
Reading Passage 2 has nine sections, A-l.

Which section contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-l, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.
1. why some people avoided hospitals in the 19th century
2. a suggestion that the popularity of tall buildings is linked to prestige
3. a comparison between the circulation of air in a 19th-century building and modern standards
4. how Short tested the circulation of air in a 19th-century building
5. an implication that advertising led to the large increase in the use of air conditioning
Questions 19 – 26

Complete the summary below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 19-26 on your answer sheet.

Ventilation in 19th-century hospital wards

Professor Alan Short examined the work of John Shaw Billings, who influenced the architectural (19)…………….. of hospitals to ensure they had good ventilation. He calculated that (20)……………in the air coming from patients suffering from (21)……………..would not have harmed other patients. He also found that the air in (22)…………………in hospitals could change as often as in a modern operating theatre. He suggests that energy use could be reduced by locating more patients in (23)……………..areas. A major reason for improving ventilation in 19th-century hospitals was the demand from the (24)……………for protection against bad air, known as (25)………………..These were blamed for the spread of disease for hundreds of years, including epidemics of (26)……………..in London and Paris in the middle of the 19th century.

Reading Passage 3

Why companies should welcome disorder

A Organisation is big business. Whether it is of our lives – all those inboxes and calendars – or how companies are structured, a multi-billion dollar industry helps to meet this need. We have more strategies for time management, project management and self-organisation than at any other time in human history. We are told that we ought to organise our company, our home life, our week, our day and even our sleep, all as a means to becoming more productive. Every week, countless seminars and workshops take place around the world to tell a paying public that they ought to structure their lives in order to achieve this. This rhetoric has also crept into the thinking of business leaders and entrepreneurs, much to the delight of self-proclaimed perfectionists with the need to get everything right. The number of business schools and graduates has massively increased over the past 50 years, essentially teaching people how to organise well.

B Ironically, however, the number of businesses that fail has also steadily increased. Work-related stress has increased. A large proportion of workers from all demographics claim to be dissatisfied with the way their work is structured and the way they are managed. This begs the question: what has gone wrong? Why is it that on paper the drive for organisation seems a sure shot for increasing productivity, but in reality falls well short of what is expected?

C This has been a problem for a while now. Frederick Taylor was one of the forefathers of scientific management. Writing in the first half of the 20th century, he designed a number of principles to improve the efficiency of the work process, which have since become widespread in modern companies. So the approach has been around for a while.

D New research suggests that this obsession with efficiency is misguided. The problem is not necessarily the management theories or strategies we use to organise our work; it’s the basic assumptions we hold in approaching how we work. Here it’s the assumption that order is a necessary condition for productivity. This assumption has also fostered the idea that disorder must be detrimental to organisational productivity. The result is that businesses and people spend time and money organising themselves for the sake of organising, rather than actually looking at the end goal and usefulness of such an effort.

E What’s more, recent studies show that order actually has diminishing returns. Order does increase productivity to a certain extent, but eventually the usefulness of the process of organisation, and the benefit it yields, reduce until the point where any further increase in order reduces productivity. Some argue that in a business, if the cost of formally structuring something outweighs the benefit of doing it, then that thing ought not to be formally structured. Instead, the resources involved can be better used elsewhere.

F In fact, research shows that, when innovating, the best approach is to create an environment devoid of structure and hierarchy and enable everyone involved to engage as one organic group. These environments can lead to new solutions that, under conventionally structured environments (filled with bottlenecks in terms of information flow, power structures, rules, and routines) would never be reached.

G In recent times companies have slowly started to embrace this disorganisation. Many of them embrace it in terms of perception (embracing the idea of disorder, as opposed to fearing it) and in terms of process (putting mechanisms in place to reduce structure). For example, Oticon, a large Danish manufacturer of hearing aids, used what it called a ‘spaghetti’ structure in order to reduce the organisation’s rigid hierarchies. This involved scrapping formal job titles and giving staff huge amounts of ownership over their own time and projects. This approach proved to be highly successful initially, with clear improvements in worker productivity in all facets of the business. In similar fashion, the former chairman of General Electric embraced disorganisation, putting forward the idea of the ‘boundaryless’ organisation. Again, it involves breaking down the barriers between different parts of a company and encouraging virtual collaboration and flexible working. Google and a number of other tech companies have embraced (at least in part) these kinds of flexible structures, facilitated by technology and strong company values which glue people together.

H A word of warning to others thinking of jumping on this bandwagon: the evidence so far suggests disorder, much like order, also seems to have diminishing utility, and can also have detrimental effects on performance if overused. Like order, disorder should be embraced only so far as it is useful. But we should not fear it – nor venerate one over the other. This research also shows that we should continually question whether or not our existing assumptions work.

Questions 27 – 34

Reading Passage 3 has eight sections, A-H.

Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.

Write the correct number, i-ix, in boxes 27-34 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
1. Complaints about the impact of a certain approach
2. Fundamental beliefs that are in fact incorrect
3. Early recommendations concerning business activities
4. Organisations that put a new approach into practice
5. Companies that have suffered from changing their approach
6. What people are increasingly expected to do
7. How to achieve outcomes that are currently impossible
8. Neither approach guarantees continuous improvement
9. Evidence that a certain approach can have more disadvantages than advantages
1. Section A
2. Section B
3. Section C
4. Section D
5. Section E
6. Section F
7. Section G
8. Section H
Questions 35 – 37

Complete the sentences below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 35-37 on your answer sheet.
1. Numerous training sessions are aimed at people who feel they are not…………….enough.
2. Being organised appeals to people who regard themselves as………………
3. Many people feel…………….with aspects of their work.
Questions 38 – 40

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 38-40 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
1. Both businesses and people aim at order without really considering its value.
2. Innovation is most successful if the people involved have distinct roles.
3. Google was inspired to adopt flexibility by the success of General Electric.
Cambridge IELTS 14 Academic Reading Test 2 Reading Passage 1 Alexander Henderson Answers
1. False
2. True
3. Not Given
4. False
5. Not Given
6. True
7. False
8. True
9. merchant
10. equipment
11. gifts
12. canoe
13. mountains
Cambridge IELTS 14 Academic Reading Test 2 Reading Passage 2 Back to the future of skyscraper design Answers
1. F
2. C
3. E
4. D
5. B
6. designs
7. pathogens
8. tuberculosis
9. wards
10. communal
11. public
12. miasmas
13. cholera
Cambridge IELTS 14 Academic Reading Test 2 Reading Passage 3 Why companies should welcome disorder Answers
1. vi
2. i
3. iii
4. ii
5. ix
6. vii
7. iv
8. viii
9. productive
10. perfectionists
11. dissatisfied
12. True
13. False
14. Not given
February 15, 2024

Category: Academic Reading Tests

Reading Passage 1

MICRO ENTERPRISE CREDIT FOR STREET YOUTH

Questions 1-4

Questions 5-8

Questions 9-12

Question 13

Reading Passage 2

VOLCANOES – EARTH SHATTERING NEWS

Questions 14-17

Questions 18-21

Questions 22-26

Reading Passage 2

OBTAINING LINGUISTIC DATA

Questions 27-31

Questions 32-36

Questions 37-40

Reading Passage 1

The Risks Agriculture Faces In Developing Countries

Questions 1-3

Questions 4-9

Questions 10 and 11

Reading passage 2

The Lost City

Questions 14-20

Questions 21-24

Questions 25 and 26

Reading passage 3

The Benefits Of Being Bilingual

Questions 27-31

Questions 32-36

Questions 37-40

Reading Passage 1

The Coconut Palm

The Coconut Palm

Questions 9-13

Reading passage 2

How Baby Talk Gives Infant Brains A Boost

Questions 14-17

Questions 18-23

Research into how parents talk to babies

Questions 24-26

Reading passage 3

Whatever Happened To The Harappan Civilisation?

Questions 27-31

Looking at evidence of climate change

Questions 37-40

Reading passage 1

Case Study: Tourism New Zealand Website

Questions 1-7

Questions 8-13

Reading passage 2

Why Being Bored Is Stimulating – And Useful Too

Questions 14-19

Questions 20-23

Questions 24-26

Responses to boredom

Reading passage 3

Artificial Artists

Questions 27-31

Questions 32-37

Questions 38-40

Reading Passage 1

Bringing Cinnamon to Europe

Questions 1-9

The early history of Cinnamon

Reading Passage 2

Oxytocin

Questions 14-17

Questions 18-20

Questions 21-26

Oxytocin research

Reading Passage 3

Making the most of trends

Questions 27-31

Questions 32-37

Questions 38-40

Reading Passage 1

The History of Glass

Questions 1-8