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Category: Academic Reading Tests

  • Cambridge IELTS 9 Academic Reading Test 1

    Reading Passage 1

    William Henry Perkin

    The man who invented synthetic dyes

    William Henry Perkin was born on March 12, 1838, in London, England. As a boy, Perkin’s curiosity prompted early interests in the arts, sciences, photography, and engineering. But it was a chance stumbling upon a run-down, yet functional, laboratory in his late grandfather’s home that solidified the young man`s enthusiasm for chemistry. 

    As a student at the City of London School, Perkin became immersed in the study of chemistry. His talent and devotion to the subject were perceived by his teacher, Thomas Hall, who encouraged him to attend a series of lectures given by the eminent scientist Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution. Those speeches tired the young chemist`s enthusiasm further, and he later went on to attend the Royal College of Chemistry, which he succeeded in entering in 1853, at the age of 15. 

    At the time of Perkin’s enrollment, the Royal College of Chemistry was headed by the noted German chemist August Wilhelm Hofmann. Perkin’s scientific gifts soon caught Hofmann’s attention and within two years, he became Hofmann’s youngest assistant. Not long after that, Perkin made the scientific breakthrough that would bring him both fame and fortune.

    At the time, quinine was the only viable medical treatment for malaria. The drug is derived from the bark of the cinchona tree, native to South America and by 1856 demand for the drug was surpassing the available supply. Thus, when Hofmann made some passing comments about the desirability of a synthetic substitute for quinine, it was unsurprising that his star pupil was moved to take up the challenge. 

    During his vacation in 1856, Perkin spent his time in the laboratory on the top floor of his family’s house. He was attempting to manufacture quinine from aniline, an inexpensive and readily available coal tar waste product. Despite his best efforts, however, he did not end up with quinine. Instead, he produced a mysterious dark sludge. Luckily, Perkins’s scientific training and nature prompted him to investigate the substance further. Incorporating potassium dichromate and alcohol into the aniline at various stages of the experimental process, he finally produced a deep purple solution. And, proving the truth of the famous scientist Louis Pasteur’s words ‘chance favors only the prepared mind’. Perkin saw the potential of his unexpected find.

    Historically, textile dyes were made from such natural sources as plants and animal excretions. Some of these, such as the glandular mucus of snails, were difficult to obtain and outrageously expensive. Indeed, the purple colour extracted from a snail was once so costly that in society at the time only the rich could afford it. Further, natural dyes tended to be muddy in hue and fade quickly. It was against this backdrop that Perkin‘s discovery was made.

    Perkin quickly grasped that his purple solution could be used to colour fabric, thus making it the world’s first synthetic dye. Realising the importance of this breakthrough, he lost no time in patenting it. But perhaps the most fascinating of all Perkin`s reactions to his find was his nearly instant recognition that the new dye had commercial possibilities.

    Perkin originally named his dye Tyrian Purple, but it later became commonly known as mauve (from the French for the plant used to make the colour violet). He asked advice of Scottish dye works owner Robert Pullar, who assured him that manufacturing the dye would be well worth it if the colour remained fast (i.e. would not fade) and the cost was relatively low. So, over the fierce objections of his mentor Hofmann, he left college to give birth to the modern chemical industry.

    With the help of his father and brother, Perkin set up a factory not far from London. Utilizing the cheap and plentiful coal tar that was an almost unlimited byproduct of London’s gas street lighting, the dye works began producing the world’s first synthetically dyed material in 1857. The company received a commercial boost from the Empress Eugenio of France, when she decided the new color flattered her. Very soon, mauve was the necessary shade for all the fashionable ladies in that country. Not to be outdone, England`s Queen Victoria also appeared in public wearing a mauve gown, thus making it all the rage in England as well. The dye was bold and fast, and the public clamoured for more. Perkin went back to the drawing board.

    Although Perkins fame was achieved and fortune assured by his first discovery, the chemist continued his research. Among other dyes he developed and introduced were aniline red (1859) and aniline black (1863) and in the late 1860s, Perkin’s green. It is important to note that Perkin’s synthetic dye discoveries had outcomes far beyond the merely decorative. The dyes also became vital to medical research in many ways. For instance, they were used to stain previously invisible microbes and bacteria,  allowing researchers to identify such bacilli as tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax. Artificial dyes continue to play a crucial role today. And, in what would have been particularly pleasing to Perkin, their current use is in the search for a vaccine against malaria.

    Question 1-7

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

    In boxes 1-7 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. Michael Faraday was the first person to recognize Perkin’s ability as a student of chemistry.
    2. Michael Faraday suggested Perkin should enroll in the Royal College of Chemistry.
    3. Perkin employed August Wilhelm Hofmann as his assistant.
    4. Perkin was still young when he made the discovery that made him rich and famous.
    5. The trees from which quinine is derived grow only in South America.
    6. Perkin hoped to manufacture a drug from a coal tar waste product.
    7. Perkin was inspired by the discoveries of the famous scientist Louis Pasteur.
    Question 8-13

    Answer the Questions below:

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

    Write your answers in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet.

    1. Before Perkin’s discovery, with what group in society was the colour purple associated?
    2. What potential did Perkin immediately understand that his new dye had?
    3. What was the name finally used to refer to the first color Perkin invented?
    4. What was the name of the person Perkin consulted before setting up his own dye works?
    5. In what country did Perkins newly invented colour first become fashionable?
    6. According to the passage, which disease is now being targeted by researchers using synthetic dyes?

    Reading Passage 2

    Is there anybody out there?

    The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence

    The question of whether we are alone in the Universe has haunted humanity for centuries, but we may now stand poised on the brink of the answer to that question, as we search for radio signals from other intelligent civilizations. This search is often known by the acronym SETI [search for extraterrestrial intelligence], is a difficult one. Although groups around the world have been searching intermittently for three decades, it is only now that we have reached the level of technology where we can make a determined attempt to search all nearby stars for any sign of life.

    A The primary reason for the search is basic curiosity – the same curiosity about the natural world that drives all pure science. We want to know whether we are alone in the Universe. We want to know whether life evolves naturally if given the right conditions, or whether there is something very special about the Earth to have fostered the variety of life forms that we see around us on the planet. The simple detection of a radio signal will be sufficient to answer this most basic of all questions. In this sense, SETI is another cog in the machinery of pure science which is continually pushing out the horizon of our knowledge. However, there are other reasons for being interested in whether life exists elsewhere. For example, we have had civilization on Earth for perhaps only a few thousand years, and the threats of nuclear war and pollution over the last few decades have told us that our survival may be tenuous. Will we last another two thousand years or will we wipe ourselves out? Since the lifetime of a planet like ours is several billion years, we can expect that if other civilizations do survive in our galaxy, their ages will range from zero to several billion years. Thus any other civilization that we hear from is likely to be far older on average than ourselves. The mere existence of such a civilization will tell of that long-term survival is possible, and gives us some cause for optimism. It is even possible that the older civilization may pass on the benefits of their experience in dealing with threats to survival such as nuclear war and global pollution, and other threats that we haven’t yet discovered.

    B In discussing whether we are alone, most SETI scientists adopt two ground rules. First. UFOs [Unidentified Flying objects] are generally ignored since most scientists don`t consider the evidence for them to be strong enough to bear serious consideration (although it is also important to keep an open mind in case any really convincing evidence emerges in the future). Second, we make a very conservative assumption that we are looking for a life form that is pretty well like us, since if it differs radically from us we may well not recognize it as a life form, quite apart from whatever  we are able to communicate with it. In other words, the life form we are looking for may well have two green heads and seven fingers, but it will nevertheless resemble us in that it should communicate with its fellows. Be interested in the Universe, Live on a planet orbiting a star like our Sun, and perhaps most restrictively have chemistry, like us, based on carbon and water.

    C Even when we make these assumptions. our understanding of other life forms is still severely limited. We do not even know. for example, how many stars have planets, and we certainly do not know how likely it is that life will arise naturally,  given the right conditions. However, when we look at the 100 billion stars in our galaxy [the Milky Way], and 100 billion galaxies. In the observable Universe, It seems inconceivable that at least one of these planets does not have a life form on it; in fact, the best educated guess we can make using the little that we do know about the conditions for carbon-based life, leads us to estimate that perhaps one in 100,000 stars might have a life-bearing planet orbiting it. That means that our nearest neighbors are perhaps 1000 light years away. which is almost next door in astronomical terms.

    D An alien civilization could choose many different ways of sending information across the galaxy, but many of these either require too much energy. or else are severely attenuated while traversing the vast distances across the galaxy. It bums out that. for a given amount of transmitted power: radio waves in the frequency range 1000 to 3000 MHz travel the greatest distance. and so all searches to date have concentrated on looking for radio waves in this frequency range. So far there have been a number of searches by various groups around the world, including Australian searches using the radio telescope at Parkes, New South Wales. Until now there have not been any detections from the few hundred stars which have been searched. The scale of the searches has been increased dramatically since 1992, when the US Congress voted NASA $10 million per year for ten years to conduct a thorough search for extra-terrestrial life. Much of the money in this project is being spent on developing the special hardware needed to search many frequencies at once. The project has two parts. One part is a targeted search using the world’s largest radio telescopes. The American-operated telescope in Arecibo. Puerto Rico and the French telescope in Nancy in France. This part of the project is searching the nearest 1000 likely stars with a high sensibility for signals in the frequency range 1000 to 3000 MHz. The other parts of the project is an undirected search which is monitoring all of the space with a lower using the smaller antennas of NASA`s Deep Space Network.


    E There is considerable debate over how we should react if we detect a signal from an alien civilization. Everybody agrees that we should not reply immediately. Quite apart from the impracticality of sending e reply over such large distances at short notice, it raises a host of ethical questions that would have to be addressed by the global community before any reply could be sent. Would the human race face the culture shock if faced with a superior and much older civilization? Luckily, there is no urgency about this. The stars being searched are hundreds of light years away. so it takes hundreds of years for their signal to reach us, and a further few hundred years for our reply to reach them. It is not important, then, if there`s a delay of a few years, or decades, while the human race debates the question of whether to reply and perhaps carefully drafts a reply.

    Questions 14—17

    Reading Passage 2 has five paragraphs, A-E.

    Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B-E from the headings below.

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

    List of Headings

    1. Seeking the transmission of radio signals from planets
    2. Appropriate responses to signals from other civilizations
    3. Vast distances to Earth’s closest neighbors
    4. Assumptions underlying the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence
    5. Reasons for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence
    6. Knowledge of extra-terrestrial life forms
    7. Likelihood of life on other planets

    Example Answer

    Paragraph A answer V
    1. Paragraph B
    2. Paragraph C
    3. Paragraph D
    4. Paragraph E
    Question 18-20

    Answer the Questions Below.

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

    Write your answers in boxes 18-20 on your answer sheet.

    1. What is the life expectancy of Earth?
    2. What kind of signals from other intelligent civilizations are SETI scientists searching for?
    3. How many stars are the world’s most powerful radio telescopes searching?
    Questions 22-26
    • 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. Alien civilizations may be able to help the human race to overcome serious problems
    2. SETI scientists are trying to find a life form that resembles humans in many ways.
    3. The Americans and Australians have co-operated on joint research projects.
    4. So far SETI scientists have picked up radio signals from several stars.
    5. The NASA project attracted criticism from some members of Congress.
    6. If a signal from outer space is received, it will be important to respond promptly.

    Reading Passage 3

    The History of The Tortoise

    If you go back far enough, everything lived in the sea. At various points in evolutionary history, enterprising individuals within many different animal groups moved out onto the land, sometimes even to the most parched deserts, taking their own private seawater with them in blood and cellular fluids. In addition to the reptiles, birds, mammals and insects which we see all around us, other groups that have succeeded out of water include scorpions, snails, crustaceans such as woodlice and land crabs, millipedes and centipedes, spiders and various worms. And we mustn’t forget the plants, without whose prior invasion of the land none of the other migrations could have happened.

    Moving from water to land involved a major redesign of every aspect of life, including breathing and reproduction. Nevertheless, a good number of thoroughgoing land animals later turned around, abandoned their hard-earned terrestrial re-tooling, and returned to the water again. Seals have only gone part way back. They show us what the intermediates might have been like, on the way to extreme cases such as whales and dugongs. Whales (including the small whales we call dolphins) and dugongs, with their close cousins the manatees, ceased to be land creatures altogether and reverted to the full marine habits of their remote ancestors. They don’t even come ashore to breed. They do, however, still breathe air, having never developed anything equivalent to the gills of their earlier marine incarnation. Turtles went back to the sea a very long time ago and, like all vertebrate returnees to the water, they breathe air. However, they are, in one respect, less fully given back to the water than whales or dugongs, for turtles still lay their eggs on beaches. 

    There is evidence that all modem turtles are descended from a terrestrial ancestor which lived before most of the dinosaurs. There are two key fossils called Progaochelys quenstedtiand Palaeochersis talampayensis dating from early dinosaur times, which appear to be close to the ancestry of all modem turtles and tortoises. You might wonder how we can tell whether fossil animals lived on land or in water, especially if only fragments are found. Sometimes it`s obvious. Ichthyosarus were reptilian contemporaries of the dinosaurs, with fins and streamlined bodies. The fossils look like dolphins and they surely lived like dolphins, in the water. With turtles it is a little less obvious. One way to tell is by measuring the bones of their forelimbs.

    Walter Joyce and Jacques Gauthier, at Yale University, obtained three measurements in these particular bones of 71 species of living turtles and tortoises. They used a kind of triangular graph paper to plot the three measurements against one another. All the land tortoise species formed a tight cluster of points in the upper part of the triangle; all the water turtles cluster in the lower part of the triangular graph. There was no overlap, except when they added some species that spend time both in water and on land. Sure enough, these amphibious species show up on the triangular graph approximately half way between the ‘wet cluster’ of sea turtles and the ‘dry cluster’ of land tortoises. ‘The next step was to determine where the fossil fell. The bones of P quenstedti and P. talampayensis leave us in no doubt. Their points on the graph are right in the thick of the dry cluster. Both these fossils were dry-land tortoises. They come from the era before our turtles returned to the water.

    You might think, therefore, that modem land tortoises have probably stayed on land ever since those early terrestrial times, as most mammals did after a few of them went back to the sea. But apparently not. If you draw out the family tree of all modern turtles and tortoises, nearly all the branches are aquatic. Today’s land tortoises constitute a single branch, deeply nested among branches consisting of aquatic turtles. This suggests that modern land tortoises have not stayed on land continuously since the time of P. quenstedti and P. talampayensis. Rather, their ancestors were among those who went back to the water, and they then re-emerged back onto the land in (relatively) more recent times.

    Tortoises therefore represent a remarkable double return. In common with all mammals, reptiles and birds, their remote ancestors were marine fish and before that various more or less worm-like creatures stretching back, still in the sea, to the primeval bacteria. Later ancestors lived on land and stayed there for a very large number of generations. Later ancestors still evolved back into the water and became sea turtles. And finally, they returned yet again to the land as tortoises, some of which now live in the driest of deserts.

    Questions 27-30

    Answer the questions below.

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

    Write your answers in boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet.

    1. What had to transfer from sea to land before any animals could migrate?
    2. Which TWO processes are mentioned as those in which animals had to make big changes as they moved onto land?
    3. Which physical feature possessed by their ancestors, do whales lack?
    4. Which animals might ichthyosaurs have resembled?
    Questions 31-33

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

    In boxes 31-33 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. Turtles were among the first group of animals to migrate back to the sea.
    2. It is always difficult to determine where an animal lived when its fossilized remains are incomplete.
    3. The habitat of ichthyosaurs can be determined by the appearance of their fossilized remains.
    Questions 34-39

    Complete the flow-chart  below

    Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

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

    Method of determining where the ancestors of turtles and tortoises come from

    Step 1: 7 species of living turtles and tortoises were examined and a total of (34)…………….were taken from the bones of their forelimbs.

    Arrow Down

    Step 2: The data was recorded on a (35)………………. (necessary for comparing the information). Outcome: Land tortoises were represented by a dense (36)……………… of points towards the top. Sea turtles were grouped together in the bottom part.

    Arrow Down

    Step 3: The same data was collected from some living (37)……………… species and added to the other results. Outcome: The points for these species turned out to be positioned about (38)……………… up the triangle between the land tortoises and the sea turtles.

    Arrow Down

    Step 4: Bones of R quenstedti and P talampayensis were examined in a similar way and the results added.Outcome: The position of the points indicated that both these ancient creatures were (39)………………….

    Questions 40

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

    Write the correct letter in box 40 on your answer sheet.

    According to the writer, the most significant thing about tortoises is that

    1. they are able to adapt to life in extremely dry environments.
    2. their original life form was a kind of primeval bacteria,
    3. they have so much in common with sea turtles.
    4. they have made the transition from sea to land more than once.
    Reading Passage 1 William Henry Perkin Answers
    1. false
    2. not given
    3. false
    4. true
    5. not given
    6. true
    7. not given
    8. rich
    9. commercial
    10. mauve
    11. Robert Pullar
    12. France
    13. malaria
    Reading Passage 2 Is there anybody out there? Answers
    1. iv
    2. vii
    3. i
    4. ii
    5. several billion years
    6. radio (waves)
    7. 1000 (stars)
    8. true
    9. true
    10. not given
    11. false
    12. not given
    13. false
    Reading Passage 3 The History of The Tortoise Answers
    1. plants
    2. breathing and reproduction
    3. gills
    4. dolphins
    5. not given
    6. false
    7. true
    8. 3 measurements
    9. (triangular) graph
    10. cluster
    11. amphibious
    12. half way
    13. dry land tortoises
    14. D

  • Cambridge IELTS 8 Academic Reading Test 4

    Reading Passage 1

    Land of the rising sum

    A Japan has a significantly better record in terms of average mathematical attainment than England and Wales. Large sample international comparisons of pupils’ attainments since the 1960s have established that not only did Japanese pupils at age 13 have better scores of average attainment, but there was also a larger proportion of ‘low’ attainers in England, where, incidentally, the variation in attainment scores was much greater. The percentage of Gross National Product spent on education is reasonably similar in the two countries, so how is this higher and more consistent attainment in maths achieved?

    B Lower secondary schools in Japan cover three school years, from the seventh grade (age 13) to the ninth grade (age 15). Virtually all pupils at this stage attend state schools: only 3 per cent are in the private sector. Schools are usually modern in design, set well back from the road and spacious inside. Classrooms are large and pupils sit at single desks in rows. Lessons last for a standardised 50 minutes and are always followed by a 10-minute break, which gives the pupils a chance to let off steam. Teachers begin with a formal address and mutual bowing, and then concentrate on whole-class teaching.

    Classes are large — usually, about 40 — and are unstreamed. Pupils stay in the same class for all lessons throughout the school and develop considerable class identity and loyalty. Pupils attend the school in their own neighbourhood, which in theory removes ranking by school. In practice in Tokyo, because of the concentration of schools, there is some competition to get into the ‘better’ school in a particular area.

    C Traditional ways of teaching form the basis of the lesson and the remarkably quiet classes take their own notes of the points made and the examples demonstrated. Everyone has their own copy of the textbook supplied by the central education authority, Monbusho, as part of the concept of free compulsory education up to the age of 15. 

    These textbooks are, on the whole, small, presumably inexpensive to produce, but well set out and logically developed. (One teacher was particularly keen to introduce colour and pictures into maths textbooks: he felt this would make them more accessible to pupils brought up in a cartoon culture). Besides approving textbooks, Monbusho also decides the highly centralised national curriculum and how it is to be delivered.

    D Lessons all follow the same pattern. At the beginning, the pupils put solutions to the homework on the board, then the teachers comment, correct or elaborate as necessary. Pupils mark their own homework: this is an important principle in Japanese schooling as it enables pupils to see where and why they made a mistake, so that these can be avoided in future. No one minds mistakes or ignorance as long as you are prepared to learn from them. After the homework has been discussed, the teacher explains the topic of the lesson, slowly and with a lot of repetition and elaboration. Examples are demonstrated on the board; questions from the textbook are worked through first with the class, and then the class is set questions from the textbook to do individually. Only rarely are supplementary worksheets distributed in a maths class. The impression is that the logical nature of the textbooks and their comprehensive coverage of different types of examples, combined with the relative homogeneity of the class, renders worksheets unnecessary. At this point, the teacher would circulate and make sure that all the pupils were coping well.

    E It is remarkable that large, mixed-ability classes could be kept together for maths throughout all their compulsory schooling from 6 to 15. Teachers say that they give individual help at the end of a lesson or after school, setting extra work if necessary. In observed lessons, any strugglers would be assisted by the teacher or quietly seek help from their neighbour. Carefully fostered class identity makes pupils keen to help each other — anyway, it is in their interests since the class progresses together.

    This scarcely seems adequate help to enable slow learners to keep up. However, the Japanese attitude towards education runs along the lines of ‘if you work hard enough, you can do almost anything’. Parents are kept closely informed of their children’s progress and will play a part in helping their children to keep up with dass, sending them to ‘Juku’ (private evening tuition) if extra help is needed and encouraging them to work harder. It seems to work, at least for 95 per cent of the school population.

    F So what are the major contributing factors in the success of maths teaching? Clearly, attitudes are important. Education is valued greatly in Japanese culture; maths is recognised as an important compulsory subject throughout schooling; and the emphasis is on hard work coupled with a focus on accuracy.

    Other relevant points relate to the supportive attitude of a class towards slower pupils, the lack of competition within a class, and the positive emphasis on learning for oneself and improving one’s own standard. And the view of repetitively boring lessons and learning the facts by heart, which is sometimes quoted in relation to Japanese classes, may be unfair and unjustified. No poor maths lessons were observed. They were mainly good and one or two were inspirational.

    Questions 1-5

    Reading Passage 1 has six sections, A-F.

    Choose the correct heading for sections B-F from the list of headings below.

    Write the correct number, i-ix, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

    List of Headings

    1. The influence of Monbusho
    2. Helping less successful students
    3. The success of compulsory education
    4. Research findings concerning achievements in maths
    5. The typical format of a maths lesson
    6. Comparative expenditure on maths education
    7. Background to middle-years education in Japanv
    8. The key to Japanese successes in maths educationix The role of homework correction

    Example Answer

    Section A (answer) iv
    1. Section B
    2. Section C
    3. Section D
    4. Section E
    5. Section F
    Questions 6-9

    DO the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 1?

    In boxes 6-9 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. There is a wider range of achievement amongst English pupils studying maths than amongst their Japanese counterparts.
    2. The percentage of Gross National Product spent on education generally reflects the level of attainment in mathematics.
    3. Private schools in Japan are more modern and spacious than state-run lower secondary schools.
    4. Teachers mark homework in Japanese schools.
    Questions 10-13

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

    Write the correct letter in boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet.

    1. Maths textbooks in Japanese schools are
      1. cheap for pupils to buy.
      2. well organised and adapted to the needs of the pupils.
      3. written to be used in conjunction with TV programmes.
      4. not very popular with many Japanese teachers.
    2. When a new maths topic is introduced,
      1. students answer questions on the board.
      2. students rely entirely on the textbook.
      3. it is carefully and patiently explained to the students.
      4. it is usual for students to use extra worksheets.
    3. How do schools deal with students who experience difficulties?
      1. They are given appropriate supplementary tuition.
      2. They are encouraged to copy from other pupils.
      3. They are forced to explain their slow progress.
      4. They are placed in a mixed-ability class.
    4. Why do Japanese students tend to achieve relatively high rates of success in maths?
      1. It is a compulsory subject in Japan.
      2. They are used to working without help from others.
      3. Much effort is made and correct answers are emphasised.
      4. There is a strong emphasis on repetitive learning

    Reading Passage 2

    Biological Control of Pests

    The continuous and reckless use of synthetic chemicals for the control of pests which pose a threat to agricultural crops and human health is proving to be counter-productive. Apart from engendering widespread ecological disorders, pesticides have contributed to the emergence of a new breed of chemical-resistant, highly lethal superbugs.

    According to a recent study by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), more than 300 species of agricultural pests have developed resistance to a wide range of potent chemicals. Not to be left behind are the disease-spreading pests, about 100 species of which have become immune to a variety of insecticides now in use.

    One glaring disadvantage of pesticides’ application is that, while destroying harmful pests, they also wipe out many useful non-targeted organisms, which keep the growth of the pest population in check. This results in what agro-ecologists call the ‘treadmill syndrome’. Because of their tremendous breeding potential and genetic diversity, many pests are known to withstand synthetic chemicals and bear offspring with a built-in resistance to pesticides. 

    The havoc that the `treadmill syndrome’ can bring about is well illustrated by what happened to cotton farmers in Central America. In the early 1940s, basking in the glory of chemical-based intensive agriculture, the farmers avidly took to pesticides as a sure measure to boost crop yield. The insecticide was applied eight times a year in the mid-1940s, rising to 28 in a season in the mid-1950s, following the sudden proliferation of three new varieties of chemical-resistant pests. 

    By the mid-1960s, the situation took an alarming turn with the outbreak of four more new pests, necessitating pesticide spraying to such an extent that 50% of the financial outlay on cotton production was accounted for by pesticides. In the early 1970s, the spraying frequently reached 70 times a season as the farmers were pushed to the wall by the invasion of genetically stronger insect species.

    Most of the pesticides in the market today remain inadequately tested for properties that cause cancer and mutations as well as for other adverse effects on health, says a study by United States environmental agencies. The United States National Resource Defense Council has found that DDT was the most popular of a long list of dangerous chemicals in use.

    In the face of the escalating perils from indiscriminate applications of pesticides, a more effective and ecologically sound strategy of biological control, involving the selective use of natural enemies of the pest population, is fast gaining popularity — though, as yet, it is a new field with limited potential. The advantage of biological control in contrast to other methods is that it provides a relatively low-cost, perpetual control system with a minimum of detrimental side-effects. When handled by experts, bio-control is safe, non-polluting and self-dispersing. 

    The Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control (CIBC) in Bangalore, with its global network of research laboratories and field stations, is one of the most active, non-commercial research agencies engaged in pest control by setting natural predators against parasites. CIBC also serves as a clearing-house for the export and import of biological agents for pest control worldwide.

    CIBC successfully used a seed-feeding weevil, native to Mexico, to control the obnoxious parthenium weed, known to exert devious influence on agriculture and human health in both India and Australia. Similarly, the Hyderabad-based Regional Research Laboratory (RRL), supported by CIBC, is now trying out an Argentinian weevil for the eradication of water hyacinth, another dangerous weed, which has become a nuisance in many parts of the world. According to Mrs Kaiser Jamil of RRL, `The Argentinian weevil does not attack any other plant and a pair of adult bugs could destroy the weed in 4-5 days.’ CIBC is also perfecting the technique for breeding parasites that prey on ‘disapene scale’ insects — notorious defoliants of fruit trees in the US and India.

    How effectively biological control can be pressed into service is proved by the following examples. In the late 1960s, when Sri Lanka’s flourishing coconut groves were plagued by leaf-mining hispides, a larval parasite imported from Singapore brought the pest under control. A natural predator indigenous to India, Neodumetia sangawani, was found useful in controlling the Rhodes grass-scale insect that was devouring forage grass in many parts of the US. By using Neochetina bruci, a beetle native to Brazil, scientists at Kerala Agricultural University freed a 12-kilometre long canal from the clutches of the weed Salvinia molesta, popularly called `African Payal’ in Kerala. About 30,000 hectares of rice fields in Kerala are infested by this weed.

    Questions 14-17

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

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

    1. The use of pesticides has contributed to
      1. a change in the way ecologies are classified by agroecologists.
      2. an imbalance in many ecologies around the world.
      3. the prevention of ecological disasters in some parts of the world.
      4. an increase in the range of ecologies which can be usefully farmed.
    2. The Food and Agriculture Organisation has counted more than 300 agricultural pests which
      1. are no longer responding to most pesticides in use
      2. can be easily controlled through the use of pesticides.
      3. continue to spread disease in a wide range of crops.
      4. may be used as part of bio-control’s replacement of pesticides.
    3. Cotton farmers in Central America began to use pesticides
      1. because of an intensive government advertising campaign.
      2. in response to the appearance of new varieties of pest.
      3. as a result of changes in the seasons and the climate.
      4. to ensure more cotton was harvested from each crop.
    4. By the mid-1960s, cotton farmers in Central America found that pesticides
      1. were wiping out 50% of the pests plaguing the crops.
      2. were destroying 50% of the crops they were meant to protect.
      3. were causing a 50% increase in the number of new pests reported.
      4. were costing 50% of the total amount they spent on their crops.
    Questions 18-21

    Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 2?

    In boxes 18-21 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. Disease-spreading pests respond more quickly to pesticides than agricultural pests do.
    2. A number of pests are now born with an innate immunity to some pesticides.
    3. Biological control entails using synthetic chemicals to try and change thff genetic make-up of the pests’ offspring.
    4. Bio-control is free from danger under certain circumstances.
    Questions 22-26

    Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A—I, below.

    Write the correct letter, A—I, in boxes 22-26 on your answer sheet.

    1. Disapene scale insects feed on
    2. Neodumetia sangawani ate
    3. Leaf-mining hispides blighted
    4. An Argentinian weevil may be successful in wiping out
    5. Salvinia molesta plagues
    1. forage grass.
    2. rice fields.
    3. coconut trees.
    4. fruit trees.
    5. water hyacinth.
    6. parthenium weed.
    7. Brazilian beetles.
    8. grass-scale insects.
    9. larval parasites.

    Reading Passage 3

    Collecting Ant Specimens

    Collecting ants can be as simple as picking up stray ones and placing them in a glass jar, or as complicated as completing an exhaustive survey of all species present in an area and estimating their relative abundances. The exact method used will depend on the final purpose of the collections. For taxonomy or classification, long series, from a single nest, which contain all castes (workers, including majors and minors, and, if present, queens and males) are desirable, to allow the determination of variation within species. For ecological studies, the most important factor is collecting identifiable samples of as many of the different species present as possible. Unfortunately, these methods are not always compatible. The taxonomist sometimes overlooks whole species in favour of those groups currently under study, while the ecologist often collects only a limited number of specimens of each species, thus reducing their value for taxonomic investigations. 

    To collect as wide a range of species as possible, several methods must be used. These include hand collecting, using baits to attract the ants, ground litter sampling, and the use of pitfall traps. Hand collecting consists of searching for ants everywhere they are likely to occur. This includes on the ground, under rocks, logs or other objects on the ground, in rotten wood on the ground or on trees, in vegetation, on tree trunks and under bark. When possible, collections should be made from nests or foraging columns, and at least 20 to 25 individuals collected. This will ensure that all individuals are of the same species, and so increase their value for detailed studies. Since some species are largely nocturnal, collecting should not be confined to daytime. Specimens are collected using an aspirator (often called a pooter), forceps, a fine, moistened paint brush, or fingers, if the ants are known not to sting. Individual insects are placed in plastic or glass tubes (1.5-3.0 ml capacity for small ants, 5-8 ml for larger ants) containing 75% to 95% ethanol. Plastic tubes with secure tops are better than glass because they are lighter, and do not break as easily if mishandled.

    Baits can be used to attract and concentrate foragers. This often increases the number of individuals collected and attracts species that are otherwise elusive. Sugars and meats or oils will attract different species and a range should be utilised. These baits can be placed either on the ground or on the trunks of trees or large shrubs. When placed on the ground, baits should be situated on small paper cards or other flat, light-coloured surfaces, or in test-tubes or vials. This makes it easier to spot ants and to capture them before they can escape into the surrounding leaf litter.

    Many ants are small and forage primarily in the layer of leaves and other debris on the ground. Collecting these species by hand can be difficult. One of the most successful ways to collect them is to gather the leaf litter in which they are foraging and extract the ants from it. This is most commonly done by placing leaf litter on a screen over a large funnel, often under some heat. As the leaf litter dries from above, ants (and other animals) move downward and eventually fall out the bottom and are collected in alcohol placed below the funnel. This method works especially well in rainforests and marshy areas. A method of improving the catch when using a funnel is to sift the leaf litter through a coarse screen before placing it above the funnel. This will concentrate the litter and remove larger leaves and twigs. It will also allow more litter to be sampled when using a limited number of funnels.

    The pitfall trap is another commonly used tool for collecting ants. A pitfall trap can be any small container placed on the ground with the top level with the surrounding surface and filled with a preservative. Ants are collected when they fall into the trap while foraging. The diameter of the traps can vary from about 18 mm to 10 cm and the number used can vary from a few to several hundred. The size of the traps used is influenced largely by personal preference (although larger sizes are generally better), while the number will be determined by the study being undertaken. The preservative used is usually ethylene glycol or propylene glycol, as alcohol will evaporate quickly and the traps will dry out. One advantage of pitfall traps is that they can be used to collect over a period of time with minimal maintenance and intervention. One disadvantage is that some species are not collected as they either avoid the traps or do not commonly encounter them while foraging. 

    Questions 27-30

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

    In boxes 27-30 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. Taxonomic research involves comparing members of one group of ants.
    2. New species of ant are frequently identified by taxonomists.
    3. Range is the key criterion for ecological collections.
    4. A single collection of ants can generally be used for both taxonomic and ecological purposes.
    Questions 31-36

    Classify the following statements as referring to

    1. hand collecting
    2. using bait
    3. sampling ground litter
    4. using a pitfall trap

    Write the correct letter, A, B, C or D, in boxes 31-36 on your answer sheet.

    1. It is preferable to take specimens from groups of ants.
    2. It is particularly effective for wet habitats.
    3. It is a good method for species which are hard to find.
    4. Little time and effort is required.
    5. Separate containers are used for individual specimens.
    6. Non-alcoholic preservative should be used.
    Questions 37-40

    Label the diagram below.

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

    Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

    Collecting Ant Specimens Question 37-40. A figure for one method of collecting ants.
    Reading Passage 1 Land of the rising sum Answers
    1. vii
    2. i
    3. v
    4. iii
    5. viii
    6. YES
    7. NO
    8. NOT GIVEN
    9. NO
    10. B
    11. C
    12. A
    13. C
    Reading Passage 2 Biological Control of Pests Answers
    1. B
    2. A
    3. D
    4. D
    5. NOT GIVEN
    6. YES
    7. NO
    8. YES
    9. D
    10. H
    11. C
    12. E
    13. B
    Reading Passage 3 Collecting Ant Specimens Answers
    1. TRUE
    2. NOT GIVEN
    3. TRUE
    4. FALSE
    5. A
    6. C
    7. B
    8. D
    9. A
    10. D
    11. heat
    12. leaf litter
    13. screen
    14. alcohol

  • Cambridge IELTS 8 Academic Reading Test 3

    Cambridge IELTS 8 Academic Reading Test 3

    Reading Passage 1

    Striking Back at Lightning With Lasers

    Part of the Image by pexels.com

    Seldom is the weather more dramatic than when thunderstorms strike. Their electrical fury inflicts death or serious injury on around 500 people each year in the United States alone. As the clouds roll in, a leisurely round of golf can become a terrifying dice with death – out in the open, a lone golfer maybe a lightning bolt’s most inviting target. And there is damage to property too. Lightning damage costs American power companies more than $100 million a year.

    But researchers in the United States and Japan are planning to hit back. Already in laboratory trials they have tested strategies for neutralising the power of thunderstorms, and this winter they will brave real storms, equipped with an armoury of lasers that they will be pointing towards the heavens to discharge thunderclouds before lightning can strike.

    The idea of forcing storm clouds to discharge their lightning on command is not new. In the early 1960s, researchers tried firing rockets trailing wires into thunderclouds to set up an easy discharge path for the huge electric charges that these clouds generate. The technique survives to this day at a test site in Florida run by the University of Florida, with support from the Electrical Power Research Institute (EPRI), based in California. EPRI, which is funded by power companies, is looking at ways to protect the United States’ power grid from lightning strikes. ‘We can cause the lightning to strike where we want it by using rockets’: says Ralph Bernstein, manager of lightning projects at EPRI. The rocket site is providing precise measurements of lightning voltages and allowing engineers to check how electrical equipment bears up. 

    Bad behaviour

    But while rockets are fine for research, they cannot provide the protection from lightning strikes that everyone is looking for. The rockets cost around $1,200 each, can only be fired at a limited frequency and their failure rate is about 40 per cent. And even when they do trigger lightning, things still do not always go according to plan. ‘Lightning is not perfectly well behaved: says Bernstein. ‘Occasionally, it will take a branch and go someplace it wasn’t supposed to go.’

    And anyway, who would want to fire streams of rockets in a populated area? ‘What goes up must come down,’ points out Jean-Claude Diels of the University of New Mexico. Diels is leading a project, which is backed by EPRI, to try to use lasers to discharge lightning safely — and safety is a basic requirement since no one wants to put themselves or their expensive equipment at risk. With around $500,000 invested so far, a promising system is just emerging from the laboratory. 

    The idea began some 20 years ago, when high-powered lasers were revealing their ability to extract electrons out of atoms and create ions. If a laser could generate a line of ionisation in the air all the way up to a storm cloud, this conducting path could be used to guide lightning to Earth, before the electric field becomes strong enough to break down the air in an uncontrollable surge. To stop the laser itself from being struck, it would not be pointed straight at the clouds. Instead, it would be directed at a mirror, and from there into the sky. The mirror would be protected by placing lightning conductors dose by. Ideally, the cloud-zapper (gun) would be cheap enough to be installed around all key power installations, and portable enough to be taken to international sporting events to beam up at brewing storm clouds. 

    A stumbling blockHowever, there is still a big stumbling block. The laser is no nifty portable: it’s a monster that takes up a whole room. Diels is trying to cut down the size and says that a laser around the size of a small table is in the offing. He plans to test this more manageable system on live thunderclouds next summer.

    Bernstein says that Diels’s system is attracting lots of interest from the power companies. But they have not yet come up with the $5 million that EPRI says will be needed to develop a commercial system, by making the lasers yet smaller and cheaper. `I cannot say I have money yet, but I’m working on it,’ says Bernstein. He reckons that the forthcoming field tests will be the turning point — and he’s hoping for good news. Bernstein predicts ‘an avalanche of interest and support’ if all goes well. He expects to see cloud-zappers eventually costing $50,000 to $100,000 each.

    Other scientists could also benefit. With a lightning `switch’ at their fingertips, materials scientists could find out what happens when mighty currents meet matter. Diels also hopes to see the birth of ‘interactive meteorology’ — not just forecasting the weather but controlling it. `If we could discharge clouds, we might affect the weather,’ he says.

    And perhaps, says Diels, we’ll be able to confront some other meteorological menaces. `We think we could prevent hail by inducing lightning,’ he says. Thunder, the shock wave that comes from a lightning flash, is thought to be the trigger for the torrential rain that is typical of storms. A laser thunder factory could shake the moisture out of clouds, perhaps preventing the formation of the giant hailstones that threaten crops. With luck, as the storm clouds gather this winter, laser-toting researchers could, for the first time, strike back.

    Questions 1-3

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

    Write the correct letter in boxes 1-3 on your answer sheet.

    1. The main topic discussed in the text is
      1. the damage caused to US golf courses and golf players by lightning strikes.
      2. the effect of lightning on power supplies in the US and in Japan.
      3. a variety of methods used in trying to control lightning strikes.
      4. a laser technique used in trying to control lightning strikes.
    2. According to the text, every year lightning
      1. does considerable damage to buildings during thunderstorms.
      2. kills or injures mainly golfers in the United States.
      3. kills or injures around 500 people throughout the world.
      4. damages more than 100 American power companies.
    3. Researchers at the University of Florida and at the University of New Mexico
      1. receive funds from the same source.
      2. are using the same techniques.
      3. are employed by commercial companies.
      4. are in opposition to each other.
    Questions 4-6

    Complete the sentences below.

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

    Write your answers in boxes 4-6 on your answer sheet.

    1. EPRI receives financial support from ………………………….
    2. The advantage of the technique being developed by Diets is that it can be used ………………………..
    3. The main difficulty associated with using the laser equipment is related to its ……………………………
    Questions 7-10

    Complete the summary using the list of words, A-I, below.

    Write the correct letter, A-I, in boxes 7-10 on your answer sheet.

    In this method, a laser is used to create a line of ionisation by removing electrons from (7) ………………. This laser is then directed at (8) ………………….. in order to control electrical charges, a method which is less dangerous than using (9) ………………….. As a protection for the lasers, the beams are aimed firstly at (10) …………………..

    A cloud-zappersB atomsC storm clouds
    D mirrors E technique F ions
    G rocketsH conductors I thunder
    Questions 11-13

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

    In boxes 11-13 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. Power companies have given Diels enough money to develop his laser.
    2. Obtaining money to improve the lasers will depend on tests in real storms.
    3. Weather forecasters are intensely interested in Diels’s system.

    Reading Passage 2

    The Nature of Genius

    There has always been an interest in geniuses and prodigies. The word ‘genius’, from the Latin gens (= family) and the term ‘genius’, meaning ‘begetter’, comes from the early Roman cult of a divinity as the head of the family. In its earliest form, genius was concerned with the ability of the head of the family, the paterfamilias, to perpetuate himself. Gradually, genius came to represent a person’s characteristics and thence an individual’s highest attributes derived from his ‘genius’ or guiding spirit. Today, people still look to stars or genes, astrology or genetics, in the hope of finding the source of exceptional abilities or personal characteristics. 

    The concept of genius and of gifts has become part of our folk culture, and attitudes are ambivalent towards them. We envy the gifted and mistrust them. In the mythology of giftedness, it is popularly believed that if people are talented in one area, they must be defective in another, that intellectuals are impractical, that prodigies burn too brightly too soon and burn out, that gifted people are eccentric, that they are physical weaklings, that there’s a thin line between genius and madness, that genius runs in families, that the gifted are so clever they don’t need special help, that giftedness is the same as having a high IQ, that some races are more intelligent or musical or mathematical than others, that genius goes unrecognised and unrewarded, that adversity makes men wise or that people with gifts have a responsibility to use them. Language has been enriched with such terms as ‘highbrow’, ‘egghead’, ‘blue-stocking’, ‘wiseacre’, ‘know-all’, ‘boffin’ and, for many, ‘intellectual’ is a term of denigration. 

    The nineteenth-century saw considerable interest in the nature of genius, and produced not a few studies of famous prodigies. Perhaps for us today, two of the most significant aspects of most of these studies of genius are the frequency with which early encouragement and teaching by parents and tutors had beneficial effects on the intellectual, artistic or musical development of the children but caused great difficulties of adjustment later in their lives, and the frequency with which abilities went unrecognised by teachers and schools. However, the difficulty with the evidence produced by these studies, fascinating as they are in collecting together anecdotes and apparent similarities and exceptions, is that they are not what we would today call norm-referenced. In other words, when, for instance, information is collated about early illnesses, methods of upbringing, schooling, etc., we must also take into account information from other historical sources about how common or exceptional these were at the time. For instance, infant mortality was high and life expectancy much shorter than today, home tutoring was common in the families of the nobility and wealthy, bullying and corporal punishment were common at the best independent schools and, for the most part, the cases studied were members of the privileged classes. It was only with the growth of paediatrics and psychology in the twentieth century that studies could be carried out on a more objective, if still not always very scientific, basis.

    Geniuses, however, they are defined, are but the peaks which stand out through the mist of history and are visible to the particular observer from his or her particular vantage point. Change the observers and the vantage points, clear away some of the mist, and a different lot of peaks appear. Genius is a term we apply to those whom we recognise for their outstanding achievements and who stand near the end of the continuum of human abilities which reaches back through the mundane and mediocre to the incapable. There is still much truth in Dr Samuel Johnson’s observation. The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction’. We may disagree with the ‘general’, for we doubt if all musicians of genius could have become scientists of genius or vice versa, but there is no doubting the accidental determination which nurtured or triggered their gifts into those channels into which they have poured their powers so successfully. Along the continuum of abilities are hundreds of thousands of gifted men and women, boys and girls.

    What we appreciate, enjoy or marvel at in the works of genius or the achievements of prodigies are the manifestations of skills or abilities which are similar to, but so much superior to, our own. But that their minds are not different from our own is demonstrated by the fact that the hard-won discoveries of scientists like Kepler or Einstein become the commonplace knowledge of schoolchildren and the once outrageous shapes and colours of an artist like Paul Klee so soon appear on the fabrics we wear. This does not minimise the supremacy of their achievements, which outstrip our own as the sub-four-minute milers outstrip our jogging. 

    To think of geniuses and the gifted as having uniquely different brains is only reasonable if we accept that each human brain is uniquely different. The purpose of instruction is to make us even more different from one another, and in the process of being educated, we can learn from the achievements of those more gifted than ourselves. But before we try to emulate geniuses or encourage our children to do so we should note that some of the things we learn from them may prove unpalatable. We may envy their achievements and fame, but we should also recognise the price they may have paid in terms of perseverance, single-mindedness, dedication, restrictions on their personal lives, the demands upon their energies and time, and how often they had to display great courage to preserve their integrity or to make their way to the top.

    Genius and giftedness are relative descriptive terms of no real substance. We may, at best, give them some precision by defining them and placing them in a context but, whatever we do, we should never delude ourselves into believing that gifted children or geniuses are different from the rest of humanity, save in the degree to which they have developed the performance of their abilities.

    Questions 14-18

    Choose FIVE letters, A—K.

    Write the correct letters in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

    NB. Your answers maybe given in any order.

    Below are listed some popular beliefs about genius and giftedness.

    Which FIVE of these beliefs are reported by the writer of the text?

    1. Truly gifted people are talented in all areas.
    2. The talents of geniuses are soon exhausted.
    3. Gifted people should use their gifts.
    4. A genius appears once in every generation.
    5. Genius can be easily destroyed by discouragement.
    6. Genius is inherited.
    7. Gifted people are very hard to live with.
    8. People never appreciate true genius.I. Geniuses are natural leaders.
    9. Gifted people develop their greatness through difficulties.
    10. Genius will always reveal itself.

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

    In boxes 19-26 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. Nineteenth-century studies of the nature of genius failed to take into account the uniqueness of the person’s upbringing.
    2. Nineteenth-century studies of genius lacked both objectivity and a proper scientific approach.
    3. A true genius has general powers capable of excellence in any area
    4. The skills of ordinary individuals are in essence the same as the skills of prodigies.
    5. The ease with which truly great ideas are accepted and taken for granted fails to lessen their significance.
    6. Giftedness and genius deserve proper scientific research into their true nature so that all talent may be retained for the human race.
    7. Geniuses often pay a high price to achieve greatness.
    8. To be a genius is worth the high personal cost.


    Reading Passage 3

    How Does The Biological Clock Tick?

    A Our life span is restricted. Everyone accepts this as ‘biologically’ obvious. ‘Nothing lives forever!’ However, in this statement, we think of artificially produced, technical objects, products which are subjected to natural wear and tear during use. This leads to the result that at some time or other, the object stops working and is unusable (‘death’ in the biological sense). But are the wear and tear and loss of function of technical objects and the death of living organisms really similar or comparable.

    B Our ‘dead’ products are ‘static’, closed systems. It is always the basic material which constitutes the object and which, in the natural course of things, is worn down and becomes ‘older’. Age, in this case, must occur according to the laws of physical chemistry and of thermodynamics. Although the same law holds for a living organism, the result of this law is not inexorable in the same way. At least as long as a biological system has the ability to renew itself it could actually become older without ageing; an organism is an open, dynamic system through which new material continuously flows. Destruction of old material and formation of new material are thus in permanent dynamic equilibrium. The material of which the organism is formed changes continuously. Thus our bodies continuously exchange old substance for new, just like a spring which more or less maintains its form and movement, but in which the water molecules are always different.

    C Thus ageing and death should not be seen as inevitable, particularly as the organism possesses many mechanisms for repair. It is not, in principle, necessary for a biological system to age and die. Nevertheless, a restricted life span, ageing, and then death are basic characteristics of life. The reason for this is easy to recognise: in nature, the existent organisms either adapt or are regularly replaced by new types. Because of changes in the genetic material (mutations), these have new characteristics and in the course of their individual lives, they are tested for optimal or better adaptation to the environmental conditions. Immortality would disturb this system — it needs room for new and better life. This is the basic problem of evolution.

    D Every organism has a life span which is highly characteristic. There are striking differences in life span between different species, but within one species the parameter is relatively constant. For example, the average duration of human life has hardly changed in thousands of years. Although more and more people attain an advanced age as a result of developments in medical care and better nutrition, the characteristic upper limit for most remains 80 years. A further argument against the simple wear and tear theory is the observation that the time within which organisms age lies between a few days (even a few hours for unicellular organisms) and several thousand years, as with mammoth trees.

    E If a life span is a genetically determined biological characteristic, it is logically necessary to propose the existence of an internal clock, which in some way measures and controls the ageing process and which finally determines death as the last step in a fixed programme. Like the life span, the metabolic rate has for different organisms a fixed mathematical relationship to the body mass. In comparison to the life span this relationship is ‘inverted’: the larger the organism the lower its metabolic rate. Again this relationship is valid not only for birds, but also, similarly on average within the systematic unit, for all other organisms (plants, animals, unicellular organisms).

    F Animals which behave ‘frugally’ with energy become particularly old, for example, crocodiles and tortoises. Parrots and birds of prey are often held chained up. Thus they are not able to ‘experience life’ and so they attain a high life pan in captivity. Animals which save energy by hibernation or lethargy (e.g. bats or hedgehogs) live much longer than those which are always active. The metabolic rate of mice can be reduced by a very low consumption of food (hunger diet). They then may live twice as long as their well-fed comrades. Women become distinctly (about 10 per cent) older than men. If you examine the metabolic rates of the two sexes you establish that the higher male metabolic rate roughly accounts for the lower male life span. That means that they live life ‘energetically’ — more intensively, but not for as long.

    G It follows from the above that sparing use of energy reserves should tend to extend life. Extreme high-performance sports may lead to optimal cardiovascular performance, but they quite certainly do not prolong life. Relaxation lowers metabolic rate, as does adequate sleep and in general an equable and balanced personality. Each of us can develop his or her own ‘energy saving programme’ with a little self-observation, critical self-control and, above all, logical consistency. Experience will show that to live in this way not only increases the lifespan but is also very healthy. This final aspect should not be forgotten.

    Questions 27-32

    Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A—G.

    Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B—G from the list of headings below.

    Write the correct number, i—x, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.

    List of Headings

    1. The biological clock
    2. Why dying is beneficial
    3. The ageing process of men and women
    4. Prolonging your life
    5. Limitations of life span
    6. Modes of development of different species
    7. A stable lifespan despite improvements
    8. Energy consumption
    9. Fundamental differences in ageing of objects and organisms
    10. Repair of genetic material

    Example Answer

    Paragraph A v

    1. Paragraph B
    2. Paragraph C
    3. Paragraph D
    4. Paragraph E
    5. Paragraph F
    6. Paragraph G
    Questions 33-36

    Complete the notes below.

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

    Write your answers in boxes 33-36 on your answer sheet.

    • Objects age in accordance with principles of (33) ………………….. and of (34) ……………………………..
    • Through mutations, organisms can (35) …………………. better to the environment
    • (36) ………………… would pose a serious problem for the theory of evolution
    Questions 37-40

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

    In boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet, write:

    • 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. The wear and tear theory applies to both artificial objects and biological systems.
    2. In principle, it is possible for a biological system to become older without ageing.
    3. Within seven years, about 90 per cent of a human body is replaced as new.
    4. Conserving energy may help to extend a human’s life.
    Reading Passage 1 Striking Back at Lightning With Lasers Answers
    1. D
    2. A
    3. A
    4. power companies
    5. safely
    6. size
    7. B
    8. C
    9. G
    10. D
    11. no
    12. yes
    13. not given
    Reading Passage 2 The Nature of Genius Answers
    1. B
    2. C
    3. F
    4. H
    5. J
    6. true
    7. true
    8. false
    9. true
    10. true
    11. not given
    12. true
    13. not given
    Reading Passage 3 How Does The Biological Clock Tick? Answers
    1. ix
    2. ii
    3. vii
    4. i
    5. viii
    6. iv
    7. physical chemistry
    8. thermodynamics
    9. adapt
    10. immortality
    11. no
    12. yes
    13. not given
    14. yes
  • Cambridge IELTS 8 Academic Reading Test 2

    Cambridge IELTS 8 Academic Reading Test 2

    Reading Passage 1

    Sheet glass manufacture: the float process

    Sheet glass manufacture: the float process Cambridge IELTS book 8 Reading passage 1 Test 2 with answers, pdf download and online practice.
    Part of the Image by pexels.com

    Glass, which has been made since the time of the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, is little more than a mixture of sand, soda ash and lime. When heated to about 1500 degrees Celsius (°C) this becomes a molten mass that hardens when slowly cooled. The first successful method for making clear and flat glass involved spinning. This method was very effective as the glass had not touched any surfaces between being soft and becoming hard, so it stayed perfectly unblemished, with a ‘fire finish’. However, the process took a long time and was labour intensive.

    Nevertheless, demand for flat glass was very high and glassmakers across the world were looking for a method of making it continuously. The first continuous ribbon process involved squeezing molten glass through two hot rollers, similar to an old mangle. This allowed glass of virtually any thickness to be made non-stop, but the rollers would leave both sides of the glass marked, and these would then need to be ground and polished. This part of the process rubbed away around 20 per cent of the glass, and the machines were very expensive. 

    The float process for making flat glass was invented by Alistair Pilkington. This process allows the manufacture of clear, tinted and coated glass for buildings, and clear and tinted glass for vehicles. Pilkington had been experimenting with improving the melting process, and in 1952 he had the idea of using a bed of molten metal to form the flat glass, eliminating altogether the need for rollers within the float bath. The metal had to melt at a temperature less than the hardening point of glass (about 600°C), but could not boil at a temperature below the temperature of the molten glass (about 1500°C). The best metal for the job was tin. 

    The rest of the concept relied on gravity, which guaranteed that the surface of the molten metal was perfectly flat and horizontal. Consequently, when pouring molten glass onto the molten tin, the underside of the glass would also be perfectly flat. If the glass were kept hot enough, it would flow over the molten tin until the top surface was also flat, horizontal and perfectly parallel to the bottom surface. Once the glass cooled to 604°C or less it was too hard to mark and could be transported out of the cooling zone by rollers. The glass settled to a thickness of six millimetres because of surface tension interactions between the glass and the tin. By fortunate coincidence, 60 percent of the flat glass market at that time was for six millimetre glass.

    Pilkington built a pilot plant in 1953 and by 1955 he had convinced his company to build a full-scale plant. However, it took 14 months of non-stop production, costing the company £100,000 a month, before the plant produced any usable glass. Furthermore, once they succeeded in making marketable flat glass, the machine was turned off for a service to prepare it for years of continuous production. When it started up again it took another four months to get the process right again. They finally succeeded in 1959 and there are now float plants all over the world, with each able to produce around 1000 tons of glass every day, non-stop for around 15 years.

    Float plants today make glass of near optical quality. Several processes — melting, refining, homogenising — take place simultaneously in the 2000 tonnes of molten glass in the furnace. They occur in separate zones in a complex glass flow driven by high temperatures. It adds up to a continuous melting process, lasting as long as 50 hours, that delivers glass smoothly and continuously to the float bath, and from there to a coating zone and finally a heat treatment zone, where stresses formed during cooling are relieved. 

    The principle of float glass is unchanged since the 1950s. However, the product has changed dramatically, from a single thickness of 6.8 mm to a range from sub-millimetre to 25 mm, from a ribbon frequently marred by inclusions and bubbles to almost optical perfection. To ensure the highest quality, inspection takes place at every stage. Occasionally, a bubble is not removed during refining, a sand grain refuses to melt, a tremor in the tin puts ripples into the glass ribbon. Automated on-line inspection does two things. Firstly, it reveals process faults upstream that can be corrected. Inspection-technology allows more than 100 million measurements a second to be made across the ribbon, locating flaws the unaided eye would be unable to see. Secondly, it enables computers downstream to steer cutters around flaws

    Float glass is sold by the square metre, and at the final stage computers translate customer requirements into patterns of cuts designed to minimise waste.

    Questions 1-8

    Complete the table and diagram below.

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

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

    MethodAdvantagesDisadvantages
    (1)…………………Glass remained
      (2)………………………    		Slow
    • (3)……………………
    Ribbon• Could produce glass sheets of varying
    (4)………………………… • Non-stop process    		• Glass was (5)……………………….
    • 20% of glass rubbed away • Machines were expensive
    Pikington's float Process Questions 6 - 8 Sheet glass manufacture: the float process IELTS Reading Passage
    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 this
    1. The metal used in the float process had to have specific properties.
    2. Pilkington invested some of his own money in his float plant.
    3. Pilkington’s first full-scale plant was an instant commercial success.
    4. The process invented by Pilkington has now been improved.
    5. Computers are better than humans at detecting faults in glass.

    Reading Passage 2

    The Little Ice Age

    The Little Ice Age Cambridge IELTS book 8 Reading passage 2 Test 2 with answers, pdf download and online practice.
    Part of the Image by pexels.com

    A This book will provide a detailed examination of the Little Ice Age and other climatic shifts, but, before I embark on that, let me provide a historical context. We tend to think of climate – as opposed to weather – as something unchanging, yet humanity has been at the mercy of climate change for its entire existence, with at least eight glacial episodes in the past 730,000 years. Our ancestors adapted to the universal but irregular global warming since the end of the last great Ice Age, around 10,000 years ago, with dazzling opportunism. They developed strategies for surviving harsh drought cycles, decades of heavy rainfall or unaccustomed cold; adopted agriculture and stock-raising, which revolutionised human life; and founded the world’s first pre-industrial civilisations in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Americas. But the price of sudden climate change, in famine, disease and suffering, was often high.

    B The Little Ice Age lasted from roughly 1300 until the middle of the nineteenth century. Only two centuries ago, Europe experienced a cycle of bitterly cold winters; mountain glaciers in the Swiss Alps were the lowest in recorded memory, and pack ice surrounded Iceland for much of the year. The climatic events of the Little Ice Age did more than help shape the modern world. They are the deeply important context for the current unprecedented global warming. The Little Ice Age was far from a deep freeze, however; rather an irregular seesaw of rapid climatic shifts, few lasting more than a quarter-century, driven by complex and still little-understood interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean. The seesaw brought cycles of intensely cold winters and easterly winds, then switched abruptly to years of heavy spring and early summer rains, mild winters, and frequent Atlantic storms, or to periods of droughts, light northeasterly winds, and summer heat waves.

    C Reconstructing the climate changes of the past is extremely difficult, because systematic weather observations began only a few centuries ago, in Europe and North America. Records from India and tropical Africa are even more recent. For the time before records began, we have only ‘proxy records’ reconstructed largely from tree rings and ice cores, supplemented by a few incomplete written accounts. We now have hundreds of tree-ring records from throughout the northern hemisphere, and many from south of the equator, too, amplified with a growing body of temperature data from ice cores drilled in Antarctica, Greenland, the Peruvian Andes, and other locations. We are close to a knowledge of annual summer and winter temperature variations over much of the northern hemisphere going back 600 years.

    D This book is a narrative history of climatic shifts during the past ten centuries, and some of the ways in which people in Europe adapted to them. Part One describes the Medieval Warm Period, roughly 900 to 1200. During these three centuries, Norse voyagers from Northern Europe explored northern seas, settled Greenland, and visited North America. It was not a time of uniform warmth, for then, as always since the Great Ice Age, there were constant shifts in rainfall and temperature. Mean European temperatures were about the same as today, perhaps slightly cooler.

    E It is known that the Little Ice Age cooling began in Greenland and the Arctic in about 1200. As the Arctic ice pack spread southward, Norse voyages to the west were rerouted into the open Atlantic, then ended altogether. Storminess increased in the North Atlantic and the North Sea. Colder, much wetter weather descended on Europe between 1315 and 1319, when thousands perished in a continent-wide famine. By 1400, the weather had become decidedly more unpredictable and stormier, with sudden shifts and lower temperatures that culminated in the cold decades of the late sixteenth century. Fish were a vital commodity in growing towns and cities, where food supplies were a constant concern. Dried cod and herring were already the staples of the European fish trade, but changes in water temperatures forced fishing fleets to work further offshore. The Basques, Dutch, and English developed the first offshore fishing boats adapted to a colder and stormier Atlantic. A gradual agricultural revolution in northern Europe stemmed from concerns over food supplies at a time of rising populations. The revolution involved intensive commercial farming and the growing of animal fodder on land not previously used for crops. The increased productivity from farmland made some countries self-sufficient in grain and livestock and offered effective protection against famine.

    F Global temperatures began to rise slowly after 1850, with the beginning of the Modern Warm Period. There was a vast migration from Europe by land-hungry farmers and others, to which the famine caused by the Irish potato blight contributed, to North America, Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa. Millions of hectares of forest and woodland fell before the newcomers’ axes between 1850 and 1890, as intensive European farming methods expanded across the world. The unprecedented land clearance released vast quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, triggering for the first time humanly caused global warming. Temperatures climbed more rapidly in the twentieth century as the use of fossil fuels proliferated and greenhouse gas levels continued to soar. The rise has been even steeper since the early 1980s. The Little Ice Age has given way to a new climatic regime, marked by prolonged and steady warming. At the same time, extreme weather events like Category 5 hurricanes are becoming more frequent.

    Questions 14-17

    Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.

    Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B and D-F from the list of headings below.

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

    A aphidsB agriculturalC celluloseD exchanging
    E energyF fertilizersG foodH Fungi
    I growingJ interbreedingK naturalL other species
    M secretionsN sustainableO environment

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

    List of Headings

    1. The results of the research into blood-variants
    2. Dental Evidence
    3. Greenberg’s analysis of the dental and linguistic evidence
    4. Developments in the methods used to study early population movements
    5. Indian migration from Canada to the U.S.A.
    6. Further genetic evidence relating to the three-wave theory
    7. Long-standing questions about prehistoric migration to America
    8. Conflicting views of the three-wave theory, based on non-genetic evidence
    9. Questions about the causes of prehistoric migration to America
    10. How analysis of blood-variants measures the closeness of the relationship between different populations
      1. Paragraph A
      2. Paragraph B
      3. Paragraph C
      4. Paragraph D
      5. Paragraph E
      6. Paragraph F

    Example Answer

    Section G Viii

    Questions 20 and 21

    The discussion of Williams’s research indicates the periods at which early people are thought to have migrated along certain routes.

    RoutePeriod (Number of years)
    20………………………..15,000 or more
    21………………………..600 to 700  
                          Early Population Movement to the Americas

    Questions 22-25

    Reading Passage 2 refers to the three-wave theory of early migration to the Americas.

    It also suggests in which of these three waves the ancestors of various groups of modern native Americans first reached the continent.

    Classify the groups named in the table below as originating from

    1. the first wave
    2. the second wave
    3. the third wave

    Write the correct letter. A, B or C. in boxes 22-25 on your answer sheet.

    Name of groupWave number
    Inuit22……………………………..
    Apache23……………………………..
    Prima-Papago24……………………………..
    Ticuna25……………………………..

    Questions 26

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

    Write the correct letter in box 26 on your answer sheet.

    1. Christy Turner’s research involved the examination of ….
      1. teeth from both prehistoric and modern Americans and Asians
      2. thousands of people who live in either the New or the Old World
      3. dental specimens from the majority of prehistoric Americans
      4. the eating habits of American and Asian populations

    Reading Passage 3

    The meaning and power of smell

    The meaning and power of smell Cambridge IELTS book 8 Reading passage 3 Test 2 with answers, pdf download and online practice.
    Part of the Image by pexels.com

    The sense of smell, or olfaction, is powerful. Odours affect us on a physical, psychological and social level. For the most part, however, we breathe in the aromas which surround us without being consciously aware of their importance to us. It is only when the faculty of smell is impaired for some reason that we begin to realise the essential role the sense of smell plays in our sense of well-being.

    A  A survey conducted by Anthony Synott at Montreal’s Concordia University asked participants to comment on how important smell was to them in their lives. It became apparent that smell can evoke strong emotional responses. A scent associated with a good experience can bring a rush of joy, while a foul odour or one associated with a bad memory may make us grimace with disgust. Respondents to the survey noted that many of their olfactory likes and dislikes were based on emotional associations. Such associations can be powerful enough so that odours that we would generally label unpleasant become agreeable, and those that we would generally consider fragrant become disagreeable for particular individuals. The perception of smell, therefore, consists not only of the sensation of the odours themselves, but of the experiences and emotions associated with them.

    B  Odours are also essential cues in social bonding. One respondent to the survey believed that there is no true emotional bonding without touching and smelling a loved one. In fact, infants recognise the odours of their mothers soon after birth and adults can often identify their children or spouses by scent. In one well-known test, women and men were able to distinguish by smell alone clothing worn by their marriage partners from similar clothing worn by other people. Most of the subjects would probably never have given much thought to odour as a cue for identifying family members before being involved in the test, but as the experiment revealed, even when not consciously considered, smells register.

    C  In spite of its importance to our emotional and sensory lives, smell is probably the most undervalued sense in many cultures. The reason often given for the low regard in which smell is held is that, in comparison with its importance among animals, the human sense of smell is feeble and undeveloped. While it is true that the olfactory powers of humans are nothing like as fine as those possessed by certain animals, they are still remarkably acute. Our noses are able to recognise thousands of smells, and to perceive odours which are present only in extremely small quantities.

    D  Smell, however, is a highly elusive phenomenon. Odours, unlike colours, for instance, cannot be named in many languages because the specific vocabulary simply doesn’t exist. ‘It smells like … ,’ we have to say when describing an odour, struggling to express our olfactory experience. Nor can odours be recorded: there is no effective way to either capture or store them over time. In the realm of olfaction, we must make do with descriptions and recollections. This has implications for olfactory research.

    E  Most of the research on smell undertaken to date has been of a physical scientific nature. Significant advances have been made in the understanding of the biological and chemical nature of olfaction, but many fundamental questions have yet to be answered. Researchers have still to decide whether smell is one sense or two – one responding to odours properly and the other registering odourless chemicals in the air. Other unanswered questions are whether the nose is the only part of the body affected by odours, and how smells can be measured objectively given the nonphysical components. Questions like these mean that interest in the psychology of smell is inevitably set to play an increasingly important role for researchers.

    F  However, smell is not simply a biological and psychological phenomenon. Smell is cultural, hence it is a social and historical phenomenon. Odours are invested with cultural values: smells that are considered to be offensive in some cultures may be perfectly acceptable in others. Therefore, our sense of smell is a means of, and model for, interacting with the world. Different smells can provide us with intimate and emotionally charged experiences and the value that we attach to these experiences is interiorised by the members of society in a deeply personal way. Importantly, our commonly held feelings about smells can help distinguish us from other cultures. The study of the cultural history of smell is, therefore, in a very real sense, an investigation into the essence of human culture.

    Unpredictable NoisePredictable NoiseAverage
    Loud Noise40.131.835.9
    Soft Noise36.727.432.1
    Average38.429.6
    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:

    • 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. Forest problems of Mediterranean countries are to be discussed at the next meeting of experts.
    2. Problems in Nordic countries were excluded because they are outside the European – Economic Community.
    3. Forests are a renewable source of raw material.
    4. The biological functions of forests were recognised only in the twentieth century.
    5. Natural forests still exist in parts of Europe.
    6. Forest policy should be limited by national boundaries.
    7. The Strasbourg conference decided that a forest policy must allow for the possibility of change.
    Questions 34-39

    Look at the following statements issued by the conference.

    Which six of the following statements. A-J, refer to the resolutions that were issued?

    Match the statements with the appropriate resolutions (Questions 34-39).

    Write the correct letter. A-J. in boxes 34-39 on your answer sheet.

    1. All kinds of species of trees should be preserved.
    2. Fragile mountain forests should be given priority in research programs.
    3. The surviving natural forests of Europe do not need priority treatment.
    4. Research is to be better co-ordinate throughout Europe:
    5. Information on forest fires should be collected and shared.
    6. Loss Of leaves from trees should be more extensively and carefully monitored
    7. Resources should be allocated to research into tree diseases.
    8. Skiing should be encouraged in thinly populated areas.
    9. Soil imbalances such as acidification should be treated with compounds of nitrogen and sulphur.
    10. Information is to be systematically gathered on any decline in the condition of forests.
    1. Resolution 1
    2. Resolution 2
    3. Resolution 3
    4. Resolution 4
    5. Resolution 5
    6. Resolution 6
    Questions 37-40

    Complete the summary using the list of words, A-K, below.

    Write the correct letter A-K in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

    Sugestopedia uses a less direct method of suggestion than other techniques such as hypnosis. However, Lozanov admits that a certain amount of (37)……………… is necessary in order to convince students, even if this is just a (38)……………………. Furthermore, if the method is to succeed, teachers must follow a set procedure. Although Lozanov’s method has become quite (39)………………., the result of most other teachers using this method have been (40)……………………

    A spectacular unpopularB teachingC lesson
    D authoritarianE unpopularF ritual
    G unspectacularH placebo I Involved
    J appropriateK well known
    Reading Passage 1 Sheet glass manufacture: the float process Answers
    1. spinning
    2. (perfectly) unblemished
    3. labour/labor-intensive
    4. thickness
    5. marked
    6. (molten) glass
    7. (molten) tin/metal
    8. rollers
    9. TRUE
    10. NOT GIVEN
    11. FALSE
    12. TRUE
    13. TRUE
    Reading Passage 2 The Little Ice Age Answers
    1. ii
    2. vii
    3. ix
    4. iv
    5. C
    6. B
    7. A
    8. H
    9. G
    10. C
    11. C
    12. A
    13. B
    Reading Passage 3 The meaning and power of smell Answers
    1. viii
    2. ii
    3. vi
    4. i
    5. iii
    6. v
    7. C
    8. A
    9. C
    10. D
    11. clothing
    12. vocabulary
    13. chemicals
    14. cultures
  • Cambridge IELTS 8 Academic Reading Test 1

    Cambridge IELTS 8 Academic Reading Test 1

    Reading Passage 1

    A Chronicle of Timekeeping

    A Chronicle of Timekeeping Cambridge IELTS 8 Test Academic Reading Passage 1 with answers, online practice and pdf download.
    Part of the Image by pexels.com

    A. According to archaeological evidence, at least 5, 000 years ago, and long before the advent of the Roman Empire, the Babylonians began to measure time, introducing calendars to coordinate communal activities, to plan the shipment of goods and, in particular, to regulate planting and harvesting. They based their calendars on three natural cycles: the solar day, marked by the successive periods of light and darkness as the earth rotates on its axis; the lunar month, following the phases of the moon as it orbits the earth; and the solar year, defined by the changing seasons that accompany our planet’s revolution around the sun.

    B. Before the invention of artificial light, the moon had greater social impact. And, for those living near the equator, in particular, its waxing and waning were more conspicuous than the passing of the seasons. Hence, the calendars that were developed at the lower latitudes were influenced more by the lunar cycle than by the solar year. In more northern climes, however, where seasonal agriculture was practised, the solar year became more crucial. As the Roman Empire expanded northward, it organised its activity chart for the most part around the solar year.

    C. Centuries before the Roman Empire, the Egyptians had formulated a municipal calendar having 12 months of 30 days, with five days added to approximate the solar year. Each period of ten days was marked by the appearance of special groups of stars called decans. At the rise of the star Sirius just before sunrise, which occurred around the all-important annual flooding of the Nile, 12 decans could be seen spanning the heavens. The cosmic significance the Egyptians placed in the 12 decans led them to develop a system in which each interval of darkness (and later, each interval of daylight) was divided into a dozen equal parts. These periods became known as temporal hours because their duration varied according to the changing length of days and nights with the passing of the seasons. Summer hours were long, winter ones short; only at the spring and autumn equinoxes were the hours of daylight and darkness equal. Temporal hours, which were first adopted by the Greeks and then the Romans, who disseminated them through Europe, remained in use for more than 2500 years.

    D. In order to track temporal hours during the day, inventors created sundials, which indicate time by the length or direction of the sun’s shadow. The sundial’s counterpart, the water clock, was designed to measure temporal hours at night. One of the first water clocks was a basin with a small hole near the bottom through which the water dripped out. The falling water level denoted the passing hour as it dipped below hour lines inscribed on the inner surface. Although these devices performed satisfactorily around the Mediterranean, they could not always be depended on in the cloudy and often freezing weather of northern Europe.

    E. The advent of the mechanical clock meant that although it could be adjusted to maintain temporal hours, it was naturally suited to keeping equal ones. With these, however, arose the question of when to begin counting, and so, in the early 14th century, a number of systems evolved. The schemes that divided the day into 24 equal parts varied according to the start of the count: Italian hours began at sunset, Babylonian hours at sunrise, astronomical hours at midday and ‘great clock’ hours, used for some large public clocks in Germany, at midnight. Eventually, these were superseded by ‘small clock’, or French hours, which split the day into two 12-hour periods commencing at midnight.

    F. The earliest recorded weight-driven mechanical clock was built in 1283 in Bedfordshire in England. The revolutionary aspect of this new timekeeper was neither the descending weight that provided its motive force nor the gear wheels (which had been around for at least 1, 300 years) that transferred the power; it was the part called the escapement. In the early 1400s came the invention of the coiled spring or fusee which maintained a constant force to the gear wheels of the timekeeper despite the changing tension of its mainspring. By the 16th century, a pendulum clock had been devised, but the pendulum swung in a large arc and thus was not very efficient.

    G. To address this, a variation on the original escapement was invented in 1670, in England. It was called the anchor escapement, which was a lever-based device shaped like a ship’s anchor. The motion of a pendulum rocks this device so that it catches and then releases each tooth of the escape wheel, in turn allowing it to turn a precise amount. Unlike the original form used in early pendulum clocks, the anchor escapement permitted the pendulum to travel in a very small arc. Moreover, this invention allowed the use of a long pendulum which could beat once a second and thus led to the development of a new floor-standing case design, which became known as the grandfather clock.

    H. Today, highly accurate timekeeping instruments set the beat for most electronic devices. Nearly all computers contain a quartz-crystal clock to regulate their operation. Moreover, not only do time signals beamed down from Global Positioning System satellites calibrate the functions of precision navigation equipment, they do so as well for mobile phones, instant stock-trading systems and nationwide power-distribution grids. So integral have these time-based technologies become to day-to-day existence that our dependency on them is recognised only when they fail to work.

    Questions 1-4

    Reading Passage 1 has eight paragraphs, A-H.

    Which paragraph contains the following information?

    Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 1- 4 on your answer sheet.

    1. a description of an early timekeeping invention affected by cold temperatures
    2. an explanation of the importance of geography in the development of the calendar in farming communities
    3. a description of the origins of the pendulum clock
    4. details of the simultaneous efforts of different societies to calculate time using uniform hours.
    Questions 5-8

    Look at the following events (Questions 5-8) and the list of nationalities below.

    Match each event with the correct nationality, A-F.

    Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 5-8 on your answer sheet.

    1. They devised a civil calendar in which the months were equal in length.
    2. They divided the day into two equal halves.
    3. They developed a new cabinet shape for a type of timekeeper.
    4. They created a calendar to organise public events and work schedules.

    List of Nationalities

    1. Babylonians
    2. Egyptians
    3. Greeks
    4. English
    5. Germans
    6. French
    Questions 9-13

    Label the diagram below.

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

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

    A Chronicle of Timekeeping reading passage device diagram Questions 9-13 with answers. How the 1670 level-based device worked.

    Reading Passage 2


    Air Traffic Control in The USA

    Air Traffic Control in The USA Cambridge IELTS 8 Test Academic Reading Passage 2 with answers.
    Image from Pexels.com

    A. An accident that occurred in the skies over the Grand Canyon in 1956 resulted in the establishment of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to regulate and oversee the operation of aircraft in the skies over the United States, which were becoming quite congested. The resulting structure of air traffic control has greatly increased the safety of flight in the United States, and similar air traffic control procedures are also in place over much of the rest of the world.

    B. Rudimentary air traffic control (АТС) existed well before the Grand Canyon disaster. As early as the 1920s, the earliest air traffic controllers manually guided aircraft in the vicinity of the airports, using lights and flags, while beacons and flashing lights were placed along cross-country routes to establish the earliest airways. However, this purely visual system was useless in bad weather, and, by the 1930s, radio communication was coming into use for АТС. The first region to have something approximating today’s АТС was New York City, with other major metropolitan areas following soon after.

    C  In the 1940s, АТС centres could and did take advantage of the newly developed radar and improved radio communication brought about by the Second World War, but the system remained rudimentary. It was only after the creation of the FAA that full-scale regulation of America’s airspace took place, and this was fortuitous, for the advent of the jet engine suddenly resulted in a large number of very fast planes, reducing pilots’ margin of error and practically demanding some set of rules to keep everyone well separated and operating safely in the air.

    D   Many people think that АТС consists of a row of controllers sitting in front of their radar screens at the nation’s airports, telling arriving and departing traffic what to do. This is a very incomplete part of the picture. The FAA realised that the airspace over the United States would at any time have many different kinds of planes, flying for many different purposes, in a variety of weather conditions, and the same kind of structure was needed to accommodate all of them.

    E  To meet this challenge, the following elements were put into effect. First, АТС extends over virtually the entire United States. In general, from 365m above the ground and higher, the entire country is blanketed by controlled airspace. In certain areas, mainly near airports, controlled airspace extends down to 215m above the ground, and, in the immediate vicinity of an airport, all the way down to the surface. Controlled airspace is that airspace in which FAA regulations apply. Elsewhere, in uncontrolled airspace, pilots are bound by fewer regulations. In this way, the recreational pilot who simply wishes to go flying for a while without all the restrictions imposed by the FAA has only to stay in uncontrolled airspace, below 365m, while the pilot who does want the protection afforded by АТС can easily enter the controlled airspace.

    F  The FAA then recognised two types of operating environments. In good meteorological conditions, flying would be permitted under Visual Flight Rules (VFR), which suggests a strong reliance on visual cues to maintain an acceptable level of safety. Poor visibility necessitated a set of Instrumental Flight Rules (IFR), under which the pilot relied on altitude and navigational information provided by the plane’s instrument panel to fly safely. On a clear day, a pilot in controlled airspace can choose a VFR or IFR flight plan, and the FAA regulations were devised in a way which accommodates both VFR and IFR operations in the same airspace. However, a pilot can only choose to fly IFR if they possess an instrument rating which is above and beyond the basic pilot’s license that must also be held.

    G   Controlled airspace is divided into several different types, designated by letters of the alphabet. Uncontrolled airspace is designated Class F, while controlled airspace below 5,490m above sea level and not in the vicinity of an airport is Class E. All airspace above 5,490m is designated Class A. The reason for the division of Class E and Class A airspace stems from the type of planes operating in them. Generally, Class E airspace is where one finds general aviation aircraft (few of which can climb above 5,490m anyway), and commercial turboprop aircraft. Above 5,490m is the realm of the heavy jets, since jet engines operate more efficiently at higher altitudes. The difference between Class E and A airspace is that in Class A, all operations are IFR, and pilots must be instrument-rated, that is, skilled and licensed in aircraft instrumentation. This is because АТС control of the entire space is essential. Three other types of airspace, Classes D, С and B, govern the vicinity of airports. These correspond roughly to small municipal, medium-sized metropolitan and major metropolitan airports respectively, and encompass an increasingly rigorous set of regulations. For example, all a VFR pilot has to do to enter Class С airspace is establish two-way radio contact with АТС. No explicit permission from АТС to enter is needed, although the pilot must continue to obey all regulations governing VFR flight. To enter Class В airspace, such as on approach to a major metropolitan airport, an explicit АТС clearance is required. The private pilot who cruises without permission into this airspace risks losing their license.

    Questions 14-19

    Reading passage 2 has seven paragraphs A-G.

    Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A and C-G from the list below.

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

    List of Headings

    1. Disobeying FAA Regulations
    2. Aviation disaster prompts action
    3. Two coincidental developments
    4. Setting Altitude Zones
    5. An oversimplified view
    6. Controlling pilots’ licence
    7. Defining airspace categories
    8. Setting rules to weather conditions
    9. Taking of Safety
    10. First step towards ATC
    1. Paragraph A

    Example Answer

    Paragraph B X
    1. Paragraph C
    2. Paragraph D
    3. Paragraph E
    4. Paragraph F
    5. Paragraph G

    Questions 20-26

    Do the following statements agree with the given information of the reading passage?

    In boxes 20-26 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 FAA was created as a result of the introduction of the jet engine.
    2. Air traffic control started after the Grand Canyon crash in 1956.
    3. Beacons and flashing lights are still used by the ATC today.
    4. Some improvements were made in radio communication during World War II.
    5. Class F airspace is airspace which is below 365m and not near airports.
    6. All aircraft in class E airspace must use IFR.
    7. A pilot entering class C airspace is flying over an average-sized city.

    Reading Passage 3

    Telepathy

    Telepathy Cambridge IELTS 8 Test Academic Reading Passage 3on MSSLearning.com
    Part of the Image By pexels.com

    Can human beings communicate by thought alone? For more than a century the issue of telepathy has divided the scientific community, and even today it still sparks bitter controversy among top academics

    Since the 1970s, parapsychologists at leading universities and research institutes around the world have risked the derision of sceptical colleagues by putting the various claims for telepathy to the test in dozens of rigorous scientific studies. The results and their implications are dividing even the researchers who uncovered them.

    Some researchers say the results constitute compelling evidence that telepathy is genuine. Other parapsychologists believe the field is on the brink of collapse, having tried to produce definitive scientific proof and failed. Sceptics and advocates alike do concur on one issue, however, that the most impressive evidence so far has come from the so-called ‘ganzfeld’ experiments, a German term that means ‘whole field’. Reports of telepathic experiences had by people during meditation led parapsychologists to suspect that telepathy might involve ‘signals’ passing between people that were so faint that they were usually swamped by normal brain activity. In this case, such signals might be more easily detected by those experiencing meditation-like tranquillity in a relaxing ‘whole field’ of light, sound and warmth. 

    The ganzfeld experiment tries to recreate these conditions with participants sitting in soft reclining chairs in a sealed room, listening to relaxing sounds while their eyes are covered with special filters letting in only soft pink light. In early ganzfeld experiments, the telepathy test involved identification of a picture chosen from a random selection of four taken from a large image bank. The idea was that a person acting as a ‘sender’ would attempt to beam the image over to the ‘receiver’ relaxing in the sealed room. Once the session was over, this person was asked to identify which of the four images had been used. Random guessing would give a hit-rate of 25 per cent; if telepathy is real, however, the hit-rate would be higher. In 1982, the results from the first ganzfeld studies were analysed by one of its pioneers, the American parapsychologist Charles Honorton. They pointed to typical hit-rates of better than 30 per cent — a small effect, but one which statistical tests suggested could not be put down to chance. 

    The implication was that the ganzfeld method had revealed real evidence for telepathy. But there was a crucial flaw in this argument — one routinely overlooked in more conventional areas of science. Just because chance had been ruled out as an explanation did not prove telepathy must exist; there were many other ways of getting positive results. These ranged from ‘sensory leakage’ — where clues about the pictures accidentally reach the receiver — to outright fraud. In response, the researchers issued a review of all the ganzfeld studies done up to 1985 to show that 80 per cent had found statistically significant evidence. However, they also agreed that there were still too many problems in the experiments which could lead to positive results, and they drew up a list demanding new standards for future research. 

    After this, many researchers switched to autoganzfeld tests — an automated variant of the technique which used computers to perform many of the key tasks such as the random selection of images. By minimising human involvement, the idea was to minimise the risk of flawed results. In 1987, results from hundreds of autoganzfeld tests were studied by Honorton in a ‘meta-analysis’, a statistical technique for finding the overall results from a set of studies. Though less compelling than before, the outcome was still impressive. 

    Yet some parapsychologists remain disturbed by the lack of consistency between individual ganzfeld studies. Defenders of telepathy point out that demanding impressive evidence from every study ignores one basic statistical fact: it takes large samples to detect small effects. If, as current results suggest, telepathy produces hit-rates only marginally above the 25 per cent expected by chance, it’s unlikely to be detected by a typical ganzfeld study involving around 40 people: the group is just not big enough. Only when many studies are combined in a meta-analysis will the faint signal of telepathy really become apparent. And that is what researchers do seem to be finding. 

    What they are certainly not finding, however, is any change in attitude of mainstream scientists: most still totally reject the very idea of telepathy. The problem stems at least in part from the lack of any plausible mechanism for telepathy.

    Various theories have been put forward, many focusing on esoteric ideas from theoretical physics. They include ‘quantum entanglement’, in which events affecting one group of atoms instantly affect another group, no matter how far apart they may be. While physicists have demonstrated entanglement with specially prepared atoms, no-one knows if it also exists between atoms making up human minds. Answering such questions would transform parapsychology. This has prompted some researchers to argue that the future lies not in collecting more evidence for telepathy, but in probing possible mechanisms. Some work has begun already, with researchers trying to identify people who are particularly successful in autoganzfeld trials. Early results show that creative and artistic people do much better than average: in one study at the University of Edinburgh, musicians achieved a hit-rate of 56 per cent. Perhaps more tests like these will eventually give the researchers the evidence they are seeking and strengthen the case for the existence of telepathy.

    Questions 27-30

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

    Write the correct letter, A—G, in boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet.

    1. Researchers with differing attitudes towards telepathy agree on
    2. Reports of experiences during meditation indicated
    3. Attitudes to parapsychology would alter drastically with
    4. Recent autoganzfeld trials suggest that success rates will improve with
      1. the discovery of a mechanism for telepathy.
      2. the need to create a suitable environment for telepathy.
      3. their claims of a high success rate.
      4. a need to keep altering conditions.
      5. the significance of the ganzfeld experiments.
      6. a more careful selection of subjects.
      7. a need to keep altering conditions.
    Questions 31-40

    Complete the table below.

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

    Write your answers in boxes 31-40 on your answer sheet.

    Telepathy Experiments

    Name/ DateDescriptionResultFlas
    Ganzfeld studies 1982involved a person acting as a (31)……………….who picked out one (32)……………. from a random selection of four and a (33)………………. who then tried to identify ithit rates were higher than with random guessingpositive results could be produced by factors such as (34)…………. or (35)…………..
    Autoganzfeld studies 1987(36)…………….were used for key tasks to limit the amount of (37)…………. in carrying out the teststhe results were then subjected to a (38)………….the (39)………….. between different test results were put down to the fact that sample groups were not (40)…………. (as with most ganzfled studies)
    Telepathy Experiments Table

    Reading Passage 1 A Chronicle of Timekeeping Answers
    1. D
    2. B
    3. F
    4. E
    5. B
    6. F
    7. D
    8. A
    9. (ships’s) anchor
    10. (escape) wheel
    11. tooth
    12. (long) pendulum
    13. second
    Reading Passage 2 Air Traffic Control in The USA Answers
    1. ii
    2. iii
    3. v
    4. iv
    5. viii
    6. vii
    7. false
    8. false
    9. not given
    10. true
    11. true
    12. false
    13. true
    Reading Passage 3 Telepathy Answers
    1. E
    2. B
    3. A
    4. F
    5. sender
    6. picture/ image
    7. receiver
    8. sensory leakage
    9. fraud
    10. computers
    11. human involvement
    12. meta-analysis
    13. lack of consistency
    14. big/ large enough

  • Cambridge IELTS 7 Academic Reading Test 4

    Reading Passage 1

    Pulling Strings to Build Pyramids

    Part of the Image by pexels.com

    No one knows exactly how the pyramids were built. Marcus Chown reckons the answer could be ‘hanging in the air’.

    The pyramids of Egypt were built more than three thousand years ago, and no one knows how. The conventional picture is that tens of thousands of slaves dragged stones on sledges. But there is no evidence to back this up. Now a Californian software consultant called Maureen Clemmons has suggested that kites might have been involved. While perusing a book on the monuments of Egypt, she noticed a hieroglyph that showed a row of men standing in odd postures. They were holding what looked like ropes that led, via some kind of mechanical system, to a giant bird in the sky. She wondered if perhaps the bird was actually a giant kite, and the men were using it to lift a heavy object.

    Intrigued, Clemmons contacted Morteza Gharib, aeronautics professor at the California Institute of Technology. He was fascinated by the idea. ‘Coming from Iran, I have a keen interest in Middle Eastern science/ he says. He too was puzzled by the picture that had sparked Clemmons’s interest. The object in the sky apparently had wings far too short and wide for a bird. ‘The possibility certainly existed that it was a kite,’ he says. And since he needed a summer project for his student Emilio Graff, investigating the possibility of using kites as heavy lifters seemed like a good idea.

    Gharib and Graff set themselves the task of raising a 4.5-metre stone column from horizontal to vertical, using no source of energy except the wind. Their initial calculations and scale-model wind-tunnel experiments convinced them they wouldn’t need a strong wind to lift the 33.5-tonne column. Even a modest force, if sustained over a long time, would do. The key was to use a pulley system that would magnify the applied force. So they rigged up a tent-shaped scaffold directly above the tip of the horizontal column, with pulleys suspended from the scaffold’s apex. The idea was that as one end of the column rose, the base would roll across the ground on a trolley.

    Earlier this year, the team put Clemmons’s unlikely theory to the test, using a 40-square- metre rectangular nylon sail. The kite lifted the column clean off the ground. ‘We were absolutely stunned,’ Gharib says. The instant the sail opened into the wind, a huge force was generated and the column was raised to the vertical in a mere 40 seconds.’

    The wind was blowing at a gentle 16 to 20 kilometres an hour, little more than half what they thought would be needed. What they had failed to reckon with was what happened when the kite was opened. There was a huge initial force – five times larger than the steady state force,’ Gharib says. This jerk meant that kites could lift huge weights, Gharib realised. Even a 300-tonne column could have been lifted to the vertical with 40 or so men and four or five sails. So Clemmons was right: the pyramid, builders could have used kites to lift massive stones into place. Whether they actually did is another matter,’ Gharib says.

    There are no pictures showing the construction of the pyramids, so there is no way to tell what really happened. The evidence for using kites to move large stones is no better or worse than the evidence for the brute force method,’ Gharib says.

    Indeed, the experiments have left many specialists unconvinced. The evidence for kite-lifting is non-existent,’ says Willeke Wendrich, an associate professor of Egyptology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Others feel there is more of a case for the theory. Harnessing the wind would not have been a problem for accomplished sailors like the Egyptians. And they are known to have used wooden pulleys, which could have been made strong enough to bear the weight of massive blocks of stone. In addition, there is some physical evidence that the ancient Egyptians were interested in flight. A wooden artefact found on the step pyramid at Saqqara looks uncannily like a modem glider. Although it dates from several hundred years after the building of the pyramids, its sophistication suggests that the Egyptians might have been developing ideas of flight for a long time. And other ancient civilisations certainly knew about kites; as early as 1250 BC, the Chinese were using them to deliver messages and dump flaming debris on their foes.

    The experiments might even have practical uses nowadays. There are plenty of places around the globe where people have no access to heavy machinery, but do know how to deal with wind, sailing and basic mechanical principles. Gharib has already been contacted by a civil engineer in Nicaragua, who wants to put up buildings with adobe roofs supported by concrete arches on a site that heavy equipment can’t reach. His idea is to build the arcnes horizontally, then lift them into place using kites. We’ve given him some design hints,’ says Gharib. We’re just waiting for him to report back.’ So whether they were actually used to build the pyramids or not, it seems that kites may make sensible construction tools in the 21st century AD.

    Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in southern France and elsewhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in something like their present form more than seventy million years ago. Beside this, prehistoric man looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence, albeit of a different kind?

    Questions 1-7

    Do the following statement with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

    In boxes 1-7 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 this
    1. It is generally believed that large numbers of people were needed to build the pyramids.
    2. Clemmons found a strange hieroglyph on the wall of an Egyptian monument.
    3. Gharib had previously done experiments on bird flight.
    4. Gharib and Graff tested their theory before applying it.
    5. The success of the actual experiment was due to the high speed of the wind.
    6. They found that, as the kite flew higher, the wind force got stronger.
    7. The team decided that it was possible to use kites to raise very heavy stones.
    Questions 8-13

    Complete the summary below.

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

    Write your answers In boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet, write

    Addition evidence for theory of kite lifting

    The Egyptians had (8)………………, which could lift large pieces of (9)……………….., and they knew how to use the energy of the wind from their skill as (10)………………. The discovery on one pyramid of an object which resembled a (11)…………….. suggests they may have experimented with (12) …………… In addition, over two thousand years ago kites used in china as weapons, as well as for sending (13)………………

    Reading Passage 2

    Endless Harvest

    Part of the image by: pixabay.com

    More than two hundred years ago, Russian explorers and fur hunters landed on the Aleutian Islands, a volcanic archipelago in the North Pacific, and learned of a land mass that lay farther to the north. The islands’ native inhabitants called this land mass Aleyska, the ‘Great Land’; today, we know it as Alaska.

    The forty-ninth state to join the United States of America (in 1959), Alaska is fully one-fifth the size of the mainland 48 states combined. It shares, with Canada, the second longest river system in North America and has over half the coastline of the United States. The rivers feed into the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska -cold, nutrient-rich waters which support tens of millions of seabirds, and over 400 species of fish, shellfish, crustaceans, and molluscs. Taking advantage of this rich bounty, Alaska’s commercial fisheries have developed into some of the largest in the world.

    According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G), Alaska’s commercial fisheries landed hundreds of thousands of tonnes of shellfish and herring, and well over a million tonnes of groundfish (cod, sole, perch and pollack) in 2000. The true cultu,ral heart and soul of Alaska’s fisheries, however, is salmon. ‘Salmon,’ notes writer Susan Ewing in The Great Alaska Nature Factbook, ‘pump through Alaska like blood through a heart, bringing rhythmic, circulating nourishment to land, animals and people.’ The ‘predictable abundance of salmon allowed some native cultures to flourish,’ and ‘dying spawners* feed bears, eagles, other animals, and ultimately the soil itself.’ All five species of Pacific salmon -chinook, or king; chum, or dog; coho, or silver; sockeye, or red; and pink, or humpback -spawn** in Alaskan waters, and 90% of all Pacific salmon commercially caught in North America are produced there. Indeed, if Alaska was an independent nation, it would be the largest producer of wild salmon in the world. During 2000, commercial catches of Pacific salmon in Alaska exceeded 320,000 tonnes, with an ex-vessel value of over $US260 million.

    Catches have not always been so healthy. Between 1940 and 1959, overfishing led to crashes in salmon populations so severe that in 1953 Alaska was declared a federal disaster area. With the onset of statehood, however, the State of Alaska took over management of its own fisheries, guided by a state constitution which mandates that Alaska’s natural resources be managed on a sustainable basis. At that time, statewide harvests totalled around 25 million salmon. Over the next few decades average catches steadily increased as a result of this policy of sustainable management, until, during the 1990s, annual harvests were well in excess of 100 million, and on several occasions over 200 million fish.

    The primary reason for such increases is what is known as ‘In-Season Abundance-Based Management’. There are biologists throughout the state constantly monitoring adult fish as they show up to spawn. The biologists sit in streamside counting towers, study sonar, watch from aeroplanes, and talk to fishermen. The salmon season in Alaska is not pre-set. The fishermen know the approximate time of year when they will be allowed to fish, but on any given day, one or more field biologists in a particular area can put a halt to fishing. Even sport fishing can be brought to a halt. It is this management mechanism that has allowed Alaska salmon stocks -and, accordingly, Alaska salmon fisheries -to prosper, even as salmon populations in the rest of the United States are increasingly considered threatened or even endangered.

    In 1999, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC)*** commissioned a review of the Alaska salmon fishery. The Council, which was founded in 1996, certifies fisheries that meet high environmental standards, enabling them to use a label that recognises their environmental responsibility. The MSC has established a set of criteria by which commercial fisheries can be judged. Recognising the potential benefits of being identified as environmentally responsible, fisheries approach the Council requesting to undergo the certification process. The MSC then appoints a certification committee, composed of a panel of fisheries experts, which gathers information and opinions from fishermen, biologists, government officials, industry representatives, non-governmental organisations and others.

    Some observers thought the Alaska salmon fisheries would not have any chance of certification when, in the months leading up to MSC’s final decision, salmon runs throughout western Alaska completely collapsed. In the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, chinook and chum runs were probably the poorest since statehood; subsistence communities throughout the region, who normally have priority over commercial fishing, were devastated.

    The crisis was completely unexpected, but researchers believe it had nothing to do with impacts of fisheries. Rather, they contend, it was almost certainly the result of climatic shifts, prompted in part by cumulative effects of the el niiio/la niiia phenomenon on Pacific Ocean temperatures, culminating in a harsh winter in which huge numbers of salmon eggs were frozen. It could have meant the end as far as the certification process was concerned. However, the state reacted quickly, closing down all fisheries, even those necessary for subsistence purposes.

    In September 2000, MSC announced that the Alaska salmon fisheries qualified for certification. Seven companies producing Alaska salmon were immediately granted permission to display the MSC logo on their products. Certification is for an initial period of five years, with an annual review to ensure that the fishery is continuing to meet the required standards.

    Questions 14-20

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

    In boxes 14-20 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. The inhabitants of the Aleutian islands renamed their islands ‘Aleyska’.
    2. Alaska’s fisheries are owned by some of the world’s largest companies.
    3. Life in Alaska is dependent on salmon.
    4. Ninety per cent of all Pacific salmon caught are sockeye or pink salmon.
    5. More than 320,000 tonnes of salmon were caught in Alaska in 2000.
    6. Between 1940 and 1959, there was a sharp decrease in Alaska’s salmon population.
    7. During the 1990s, the average number of salmon caught each year was 100 million.

    Questions 21 and 26

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

    Write the correct letter, A-K, in boxes 21-26 on your answer sheet.

    1. to recognise fisheries that care for the environment.
    2. to be successful.
    3. to stop fish from spawning.
    4. to set up environmental protection laws.
    5. to stop people fishing for sports
    6. to label their products using the MSC logo.
    7. to ensure that fish numbers are sufficient to permit fishing.
    8. to assist the subsistence communities in the region.
    9. to freeze a huge number of salmon eggs.
    10. to deny certification to the Alaska fisheries.
    11. to close down all the fisheries
    1. In Alaska, biologists keep a check on adult fish …..
    2. Biologists have the authority …..
    3. In-Season Abundance-Based Management has allowed the Alaska salmon fisheries …..
    4. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) was established …..
    5. As a result of the collapse of the salmon runs in 1999, the state decided …..
    6. In September 2000, the MSC allowed seven Alaska salmon companies …..

    Reading Passage 3

    Effects Of Noise

    Part of the image by: pixabay.com

    In general, it is plausible to suppose that we should prefer peace and quiet to noise. And yet most of us have had the experience of having to adjust to sleeping in the mountains or the countryside because it was initially ‘too quiet’, an experience that suggests that humans are capable of adapting to a wide range of noise levels. Research supports this view. For example, Glass and Singer (1972) exposed people to short bursts of very loud noise and then measured their ability to work out problems and their physiological reactions to the noise. The noise was quite disruptive at first, but after about four minutes the subjects were doing just as well on their tasks as control subjects who were not exposed to noise. Their physiological arousal also declined quickly to the same levels as those of the control subjects.

    But there are limits to adaptation and loud noise becomes more troublesome if the person is required to concentrate on more than one task. For example, high noise levels interfered with the performance of subjects who were required to monitor three dials at a time, a task not unlike that of an aeroplane pilot or an air-traffic controller (Broadbent, 1957). Similarly, noise did not affect a subject’s ability to track a moving line with a steering wheel, but it did interfere with the subject’s ability to repeat numbers while tracking (Finkelman and Glass, 1970).

    Probably the most significant finding from research on noise is that its predictability is more important than how loud it is. We are much more able to ‘tune out’ chronic background noise, even if it is quite loud, than to work under circumstances with unexpected intrusions of noise. In the Glass and Singer study, in which subjects were exposed to bursts of noise as they worked on a task, some subjects heard loud bursts and others heard soft bursts. For some subjects, the bursts were spaced exactly one minute apart (predictable noise); others heard the same amount of noise overall, but the bursts

    Unpredictable NoisePredictable NoiseAverage
    Loud Noise40.131.835.9
    Soft Noise36.727.432.1
    Average38.429.6
    Table l: Proofreading Errors and Noise

    occurred at random intervals (unpredictable noise). Subjects reported finding the predictable and unpredictable noise equally annoying, and all subjects performed at about the same level during the noise portion of the experiment. But the different noise conditions had quite different after-effects when the subjects were required to proofread written material under conditions of no noise. As shown in Table I the unpredictable noise produced more errors in the later proofreading task than predictable noise; and soft, unpredictable noise actually produced slightly more errors on this task than the loud, predictable noise.

    Apparently, unpredictable noise produces more fatigue than predictable noise, but it takes a while for this fatigue to take its toll on performance.

    Predictability is not the only variable that reduces or eliminates the negative effects of noise. Another is control. If the individual knows that he or she can control the noise, this seems to eliminate both its negative effects at the time and its after-effects. This is true even if the individual never actually exercises his or her option to turn the noise off (Glass and Singer, 1972). Just the knowledge that one has control is sufficient.

    The studies discussed so far exposed people to noise for only short periods and only transient effects were studied. But the major worry about noisy environments is that living day after day with chronic noise may produce serious, lasting effects. One study, suggesting that this worry is a realistic one, compared elementary school pupils who attended schools near Los Angeles’s busiest airport with students who attended schools in quiet neighbourhoods (Cohen et al., 1980). It was found that children from the noisy schools had higher blood pressure and were more easily distracted than those who attended the quiet schools. Moreover, there was no evidence of adaptability to the noise. In fact, the longer the children had attended the noisy schools, the more distractible they became. The effects also seem to be long lasting. A follow-up study showed that children who were moved to less noisy classrooms still showed greater distractibility one year later than students who had always been in the quiet schools (Cohen et al, 1981 ). It should be noted that the two groups of children had been carefully matched by the investigators so that they were comparable in age, ethnicity, race, and social class.

    Questions 27-29

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

    Write the correct letter in boxes 27-29 on your answer sheet

    1. The writer suggests that people may have difficulty sleeping in the mountains because
      1. humans do not prefer peace and quiet to noise.
      2. they may be exposed to short bursts of very strange sounds.
      3. humans prefer to hear a certain amount of noise while they sleep.
      4. they may have adapted to a higher noise level in the city.
    2. In noise experiments, Glass and Singer found that
      1. problem-solving is much easier under quiet conditions.
      2. physiological arousal prevents the ability to work.
      3. bursts of noise do not seriously disrupt problem-solving in the long term.
      4. the physiological arousal of control subjects declined quickly.
    3. Researchers discovered that high noise levels are not likely to interfere with the
      1. successful performance of a single task.
      2. tasks of pilots or air traffic controllers.
      3. ability to repeal numbers while tracking moving lines.
      4. ability to monitor three dials at once.
    Questions 30-34

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

    Write the correct letter  A-J in boxes 30-34 on your answer sheet.

    NB You may use any letter more than once.et.

    Glass and Singer (1972) showed that situations in which there is intense noise have less effect on performance than circumstances in which (30) ……………………….. noise occurs. Subjects were divided into groups to perform a task. Some heard loud bursts of noise, others sort. For some subjects, the noise was predictable, while for others its occurrence was random. All groups were exposed to (31) ……………………. noise. The predictable noise group (32) ……………………. the unpredictable noise group on this task. In the second part of the experiment, the four groups were given a proofreading task to complete under conditions of no noise. They were required to check written material for errors. The group which had been exposed to unpredictable noise (33) ……………… the group which had been exposed to predictable noise. The group which had been exposed to loud predictable noise performed better than those who” had heard soft, unpredictable bursts. The results suggest that (34) ………………………… noise produces fatigue but that this manifests itself later.

    A  no control overB  unexpectedC  intenseD  the same amount ofE  performed better than
    F  performed at about the same level asG  noH  showed more irritation thanI  made more mistakes thanJ  different types of
    Questions 35-40

    Look at the following statements (Questions 35-40) and the lust of researchers below.

    Match each statement with the correct researcher(s), A-E.

    Write the correct letter A-E, in boxes 35-40 on your answer sheet.

    NB You may use any letter more than once.

    1. Subjects exposed to noise find it difficult at first to concentrate on problem-solving tasks.
    2. Long-term exposure to noise can produce changes in behavior which can still be observed a year later.
    3. The problems associated with exposure to noise do not arise if the subject knows they can make it stop.
    4. Exposure to high-pitched noise results in more errors than exposure to low-pitched noise
    5. Subjects find it difficult to perform three tasks at the same time when exposed to noise
    6. Noise affects a subject’s capacity to repeat numbers while carrying out another task.

    List of Researchers

    1. Glass and Singer
    2. Broadbent
    3. Finke man and Glass
    4. Cohen et al.
    5. None of the above
    Reading Passage 1 Pulling Strings to Build Pyramids Answers
    1. true
    2. false
    3. not given
    4. true
    5. false
    6. not given
    7. true
    8. (wooden) pulleys
    9. stone
    10. (accomplished) sailors
    11. (modern) glider
    12. flight
    13. messages
    Reading Passage 2 Endless Harvest Answers
    1. false
    2. not given
    3. true
    4. not given
    5. true
    6. true
    7. false
    8. G
    9. E
    10. B
    11. A
    12. K
    13. F
    Reading Passage 3 Effects of Noise Answers
    1. D
    2. C
    3. A
    4. B
    5. D
    6. F
    7. I
    8. B
    9. A
    10. D
    11. A
    12. E
    13. B
    14. C

  • Cambridge IELTS 7 Academic Reading Test 3

    Reading Passage 1

      Ant Intelligence

    Part of the image by: pixabay.com

    When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact, the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among these, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the idea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by those involved in these investigations.

    Ants store food, repel attackers and use chemical signals to contact one another in case of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared to the human use of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising images and jingles, political slogans and martial music) to arouse and propagate moods and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies to war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.

    However, in ants there is no cultural transmission – everything must be encoded in the genes – whereas In humans the opposite is true. Only basic instincts are carried in the genes of a newborn baby, other skills being learned from others in the community as the child grows up. It may seem that this cultural continuity gives us a huge advantage over ants. They have never mastered fire nor progressed. Their fungus farming and aphid herding crafts are sophisticated when compared to the agricultural skills of humans five thousand years ago but have been totally overtaken by modem human agribusiness.

    Or have they? The farming methods of ants are at least sustainable. They do not ruin environments or use enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the crop farming of ants may be more sophisticated and adaptable than was thought.

    Ants were farmers fifty million years before humans were. Ants can’t digest the cellulose in leaves – but some fungi can. The ants, therefore, cultivate these fungi in their nests, bringing them leaves to feed on, and then use them as a source of food. Farmer ants secrete antibiotics to control other fungi that might act as ‘weeds’, and spread waste to fertilise the crop.

    It was once thought that the fungus that ants cultivate was a single type that they had propagated, essentially unchanged from the distant past. Not so. Ulrich Mueller of Maryland and his colleagues genetically screened 862 different types of fungi taken from ants’ nests. These turned out to be highly diverse: it seems that ants are continually domesticating new species. Even more impressively, DNA analysis of the fungi suggests that the ants improve or modify the fungi by regularly swapping and sharing strains with neighboring ant colonies. 

    Whereas prehistoric man had no exposure to urban lifestyles – the forcing house, of intelligence – the evidence suggests that ants have lived in urban settings for close on a hundred million years, developing and maintaining underground cities of specialised chambers and tunnels.

    When we survey Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles, we are amazed at what has been accomplished by humans. Yet Hoelldobler and Wilson’s magnificent work for ant lovers, the Ants, describes a supercolony of the ant Formica yessensis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. This ‘megalopolis’ was reported to be composed of 360 million workers and a million queens living in 4,500 interconnected nests across a territory of 2.7 square kilometers.

    Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in southern France and elsewhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in something like their present form more than seventy million years ago. Beside this, prehistoric man looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence, albeit of a different kind?

    Research conducted at Oxford, Sussex and Zurich Universities has shown that when; desert ants return from a foraging trip, they navigate by integrating bearings and distances, which they continuously update their heads. They combine the evidence of visual landmarks with a mental library of local directions, all within a framework which is consulted and updated. So ants can learn too.

    And in a twelve-year programme of work, Ryabko and Reznikova have found evidence that ants can transmit very complex messages. Scouts who had located food in a maze returned to mobilise their foraging teams. They engaged in contact sessions, at the end of which the scout was removed in order to observe what her team might do. Often the foragers proceeded to the exact spot in the maze where the food had been Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent the foraging team using odour clues. Discussion now centers on whether the route through the maze is communicated as a ‘left- right sequence of turns or as a ‘compass bearing and distance’ message.

    During the course of this exhaustive study, Reznikova has grown so attached to her laboratory ants that she feels she knows them as individuals – even without the paint spots used to mark them. It’s no surprise that Edward Wilson, in his essay, ‘In the company of ants’, advises readers who ask what to do with the ants in their kitchen to: ‘Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives.’

    Questions 1-6

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

    In boxes 1-6 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. Ants use the same channels of communication as humans do.
    2. City life is one factor that encourages the development of intelligence.
    3. Ants can build large cities more quickly than humans do.
    4. Some ants can find their way by making calculations based on distance and position.
    5. In one experiment, foraging teams were able to use their sense of smell to find food.
    6. The essay. ‘In the company of ants’ explores ant communication.
    Questions 7-13

    Complete the summary using the list of words, A-O, below.

    Write the correct letter, A-O, in boxes 7-13 on your answer sheet.

    Ants as farmers
    Ants have sophisticated methods of farming, including herding livestock and growing crops, which are in many ways similar to those used in human agriculture. The ants cultivate a large number of different species. of edible fungi which convert (7)………………… into a form which they can digest. They use their own natall (8)………………… as weed-killers and also use unwanted materials as (9)…………………… Genetic analysis shows they constantly upgrade these fungi by developing new species and by (10)………………… species with neighboring ant colonies. In fact, the farming methods of ants could be said to be more advanced than human agribusiness, since they use (11)………………… methods, they do not affect the (12)……………… and do not waste.

    A aphidsB agriculturalC celluloseD exchanging
    E energyF fertilizersG foodH Fungi
    I growingJ interbreedingK naturalL other species
    M secretionsN sustainableO environment

    Reading Passage 2

    Population Movement and Genetics

    part of the image by: pixabay.com

    A Study of the origins and distribution of human populations used to be based on archaeological and fossil evidence. A number of techniques developed since the 1950s, however, have placed the study of these subjects on a sounder and more objective footing. The best information on early population movements is now being obtained from the ‘archaeology of the living body’, the clues to be found in genetic material.

    B Recent work on the problem of when people first entered the Americas is an example of the value of these new techniques. North-east Asia and Siberia have long been accepted as the launching ground for the first human colonisers of the New World’. But was there one major wave of migration across the Bering Strait into the Americas, or several? And when did this event, or events, take place? In recent years, new clues have come from research into genetics, including the distribution of genetic markers in modern Native Americans 1 2.

    C An important project, led by the biological anthropologist Robert Williams, focused on the variants (called Gm allotypes) of one particular protein -immunoglobulin G – found in the fluid portion of human blood. All proteins ‘drift’, or produce variants, over the generations, and members of an interbreeding human population will share a set of such variants. Thus, by comparing the Gm allotypes of two different populations (e.g. two Indian tribes), one can establish their genetic ‘distance’, which itself can be calibrated to give an indication of the length of time since these populations last interbred.

    D Williams and his colleagues sampled the blood of over 5,000 American Indians in western North America during a twenty-year period. They found that their Gm allotypes could be divided into two groups, one of which also corresponded to the genetic typing of Central and South American Indians. Other tests showed that the Inuit (or Eskimo) and Aleut3 formed a third group. From this evidence it was deduced that there had been three major waves of migration across the Bering Strait. The first, Paleo-indian, wave more than 15,000 years ago was ancestral to all Central and South American Indians. The second wave, about 14,000-12,000 years ago, brought Na-Dene hunters, ancestors of the Navajo and Apache (who only migrated south from Canada about 600 or 700 years ago). The third wave, perhaps 10,000 or 9,000 years ago, saw the migration from North-east Asia of groups ancestral to the modern Eskimo and Aleut.

    E How far does other research support these conclusions? Geneticist Douglas Wallace has studied mitochondrial DNA4 in blood samples from three widely separated Native American groups: Pima-Papago Indians in Arizona, Maya Indians on the Yucatán peninsula, Mexico, and Ticuna Indians in the Upper Amazon region of Brazil. As would have been predicted by Robert Williams’s work, all three groups appear to be descended from the same ancestral (Paleo-indian) population.

    F There are two other kinds of research that have thrown some light on the origins of the Native American population; they involve the study of teeth and of languages. The biological anthropologist Christy Turner is an expert in the analysis of changing physical characteristics in human teeth. He argues that tooth crowns and roots5 have a high genetic component, minimally affected by environmental and other factors. Studies carried out by Turner of many thousands of New and Old World specimens, both ancient and modern, suggest that the majority of prehistoric Americans are linked to Northern Asian populations by crown and root traits such as incisor shoveling (a scooping out on one or both surfaces of the tooth), single-rooted upper first premolars and triple-rooted lower first molars.

    According to Turner, this ties in with the idea of a single Paleo-indian migration out of North Asia, which he sets at before 14,000 years ago by calibrating rates of dental micro-evolution. Tooth analyses also suggest that there were two later migrations of Na-Denes and Eskimo-Aleut.

    G The linguist Joseph Greenberg has, since the 1950s, argued that all Native American languages belong to a single ‘Amerind’ family, except for Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut – a view that gives credence to the idea of three main migrations. Greenberg is in a minority among fellow linguists, most of whom favour the notion of a great many waves of migration to account for the more than 1,000 languages spoken at one time by American Indians. But there is no doubt that the new genetic and dental evidence provides strong backing for Greenberg’s view. Dates given for the migrations should nevertheless be treated with caution, except where supported by hard archaeological evidence.

    Questions 14-19

    Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G.

    Choose the correct heading for Sections A-f from the list of headings below.

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

    List of Headings

    1. The results of the research into blood-variants
    2. Dental Evidence
    3. Greenberg’s analysis of the dental and linguistic evidence
    4. Developments in the methods used to study early population movements
    5. Indian migration from Canada to the U.S.A.
    6. Further genetic evidence relating to the three-wave theory
    7. Long-standing questions about prehistoric migration to America
    8. Conflicting views of the three-wave theory, based on non-genetic evidence
    9. Questions about the causes of prehistoric migration to America
    10. How analysis of blood-variants measures the closeness of the relationship between different populations
    1. Paragraph A
    2. Paragraph B
    3. Paragraph C
    4. Paragraph D
    5. Paragraph E
    6. Paragraph F

    Example Answer

    Section G Viii

    Questions 20 and 21

    The discussion of Williams’s research indicates the periods at which early people are thought to have migrated along certain routes.

    RoutePeriod (Number of years)
    20………………………..15,000 or more
    21………………………..600 to 700  

    Early Population Movement to the Americas

    Early Population Movement to the Americas From Asia, Part of population movement and genetics reading passage.

    Questions 22-25

    Reading Passage 2 refers to the three-wave theory of early migration to the Americas.

    It also suggests in which of these three waves the ancestors of various groups of modern native Americans first reached the continent.

    Classify the groups named in the table below as originating from

    1. the first wave
    2. the second wave
    3. the third wave

    Write the correct letter. A. B or C. in boxes 22-25 on your answer sheet.

    Name of groupWave number
    Inuit22……………………………..
    Apache23……………………………..
    Prima-Papago24……………………………..
    Ticuna25……………………………..

    Questions 26

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

    Write the correct letter in box 26 on your answer sheet.

    1. Christy Turner’s research involved the examination of ….
      1. teeth from both prehistoric and modern Americans and Asians
      2. thousands of people who live in either the New or the Old World
      3. dental specimens from the majority of prehistoric Americans
      4. the eating habits of American and Asian populations


    Reading Passage 3

    Plans to protect the forests of Europe

    Part of the Image by: Pixabay.com

    Forests are one of the main elements of our natural heritage. The decline of Europe’s forests over the last decade and a half has led to an increasing awareness and understanding of the serious imbalances which threaten them. European countries are becoming increasingly concerned by major threats to European forests, threats which know no frontiers other than those of geography or climate: air pollution, soil deterioration, the increasing number of forest fires and sometimes even the mismanagement of our woodland and forest heritage. There has been a growing awareness of the need for countries to get together to co-ordinate their policies. In December 1990, Strasbourg hosted the first Ministerial Conference on the protection of Europe’s forests. The conference brought together 31 countries from both Western and Eastern Europe. The topics discussed included the coordinated study of the destruction of forests, as well as how to combat forest fires and the extension of European research programs on the forest ecosystem. The preparatory work for the conference had been undertaken at two meetings of experts. Their initial task was to decide which of the many forest problems of concern to Europe involved the largest number of countries and might be the subject of joint action. Those confined to particular geographical areas, such as countries bordering the Mediterranean or the Nordic countries, therefore, had to be discarded. However, this does not mean that in future they will be ignored.

    As a whole, European countries see forests as performing a triple function: biological, economic and recreational. The first is to act as a ‘green lung’ for our planet; by means of photosynthesis, forests produce oxygen through the transformation of solar energy, thus fulfilling what for humans is the essential role of an immense, non-polluting power plant. At the same time, forests provide raw materials for human activities through their constantly renewed production of wood. Finally, they offer those condemned to spend five days a week in an urban environment an unrivalled area of freedom to unwind and take part in a range of leisure activities, such as hunting, riding and hiking. The economic importance of forests has been understood since the dawn of man – wood was the first fuel. The other aspects have been recognised only for a few centuries but they are becoming more and more important. Hence, there is a real concern throughout Europe about the damage to the forest environment which threatens these three basic roles. 

    The myth of the ‘natural’ forest has survived, yet there are effectively no remaining ‘primary’ forests in Europe. All European forests are artificial, having been adapted and exploited by man for thousands of years. This means that a forest policy is vital, that it must transcend national frontiers and generations of people, and that it must allow for the inevitable changes that take place in the forests, in needs, and hence in policy. The Strasbourg conference was one of the first events on such a scale to reach this conclusion. A general declaration was made that a central place in any ecologically coherent forest policy must be given to continuity over time and to the possible effects of unforeseen events, to ensure that the full potential of these forests is maintained’.

    That general declaration was accompanied by six detailed resolutions to assist national policy­making. The first proposes the extension and systematic sitting of surveillance sites to monitor forest decline. Forest decline is still poorly understood but leads to the loss of a high proportion of a tree’s needles or leaves. The entire continent and the majority of species are now affected: between 30% and 50% of the tree population. The condition appears to result from the cumulative effect of a number of factors, with atmospheric pollutants the principal culprits. Compounds of nitrogen and sulphur dioxide should be particularly closely watched. However, their effects are probably accentuated by climatic factors, such as drought and hard winters, or soil imbalances such as soil acidification, which damages to roots. The second resolution concentrates on the need to preserve the genetic diversity of European forests. The aim is to reverse the decline in the number of tree species or at least to preserve the ‘genetic material’ of all of them. Although forest fires do not affect all of Europe to the same extent the amount of damage caused the experts to propose as the third resolution that the Strasbourg conference considers the establishment of a European databank on the subject. All information used in the development of national preventative policies would become generally available. The subject of the fourth resolution discussed by the ministers was mountain forests. 

    In Europe, it is undoubtedly the mountain ecosystem which has changed most rapidly and is most at risk. A thinly scattered permanent population and development of leisure activities, particularly skiing, have resulted in significant long-term changes to the local ecosystems. Proposed developments include a preferential research program on mountain forests. The fifth resolution relented the European research network on the physiology of trees, called  Euro Silva should support joint European research on tree diseases and their physiological and biochemical aspects. Each country concerned could increase “the number of scholarships and other financial support for doctoral theses and research projects in this area. Finally, the conference established the framework for a European research network on forest ecosystems. This would also involve harmonizing activities in individual countries as well as identifying a number of priority research topics relating to the protection of forests. The Strasbourg conference’s main concern was to provide for the future. This was the initial motivation, one now shared by all 31 participants representing 31 European countries. Their final text commits them to on-going discussion between government representatives with responsibility for forests. 

    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:

    • 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. Forest problems of Mediterranean countries are to be discussed at the next meeting of experts.
    2. Problems in Nordic countries were excluded because they are outside the European – Economic Community.
    3. Forests are a renewable source of raw material.
    4. The biological functions of forests were recognised only in the twentieth century.
    5. Natural forests still exist in parts of Europe.
    6. Forest policy should be limited by national boundaries.
    7. The Strasbourg conference decided that a forest policy must allow for the possibility of change.
    Questions 34-39

    Look at the following statements issued by the conference.

    Which six of the following statements. A-J, refer to the resolutions that were issued?

    Match the statements with the appropriate resolutions (Questions 34-39).

    Write the correct letter. A-J. in boxes 34-39 on your answer sheet.

    A  All kinds of species of trees should be preserved.
    B  Fragile mountain forests should be given priority in research programs.
    C  The surviving natural forests of Europe do not need priority treatment.
    D  Research is to be better co-ordinate throughout Europe:
    E  Information on forest fires should be collected and shared.
    F  Loss Of leaves from trees should be more extensively and carefully monitored
    G  Resources should be allocated to research into tree diseases.
    H  Skiing should be encouraged in thinly populated areas.
    I  Soil imbalances such as acidification should be treated with compounds of nitrogen and sulphur.
    J  Information is to be systematically gathered on any decline in the condition of forests.

    1. Resolution 1
    2. Resolution 2
    3. Resolution 3
    4. Resolution 4
    5. Resolution 5
    6. Resolution 6
    Questions 37-40

    Complete the summary using the list of words, A-K, below. Write the correct letter A-K in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

    Sugestopedia uses a less direct method of suggestion than other techniques such as hypnosis. However, Lozanov admits that a certain amount of (37)……………… is necessary in order to convince students, even if this is just a (38)……………………. Furthermore, if the method is to succeed, teachers must follow a set procedure. Although Lozanov’s method has become quite (39)………………., the result of most other teachers using this method have been (40)……………………

    A spectacular unpopularB teachingC lesson
    D authoritarianE unpopularF ritual
    G unspectacularH placebo I Involved
    J appropriateK well known
    Reading Passage 1 Ant Intelligence Answers
    1. FALSE
    2. TRUE
    3. NOT GIVEN
    4. TRUE
    5. FALSE
    6. NOT GIVEN
    7. C
    8. M
    9. F
    10. D
    11. N
    12. O
    13. E
    Reading Passage 2 Population Movement and Genetics Answers
    1. iv
    2. vii
    3. x
    4. i
    5. vi
    6. ii
    7. E
    8. D
    9. C
    10. B
    11. A
    12. A
    13. A
    Reading Passage 3 Plans to protect the forests of Europe Answers
    1. not given
    2. false
    3. true
    4. false
    5. false
    6. false
    7. true
    8. J
    9. A
    10. E
    11. B
    12. G
    13. D
    14. B

  • Cambridge IELTS 7 Academic Reading Test 2

    Reading Passage 1

    Why pagodas don’t fall down

    Part of the image by: pixabay.com

    In a land swept by typhoons and shaken by earthquakes, how have Japan’s tallest and seemingly flimsiest old buildings – 500 or so wooden pagodas – remained standing for centuries? Records show that only two have collapsed during the past 1400 years. Those that have disappeared were destroyed by fire as a result of lightning or civil war. The disastrous Hanshin earthquake in 1995 killed 6,400 people, toppled elevated highways, flattened office blocks and devastated the port area of Kobe. Yet it left the magnificent five-storey pagoda at the Toji temple in nearby Kyoto unscathed, though it levelled a number of buildings in the neighbourhood.

    Japanese scholars have been mystified for ages about why these tall, slender buildings are so stable. It was only thirty years ago that the building industry felt confident enough to erect office blocks of steel and reinforced concrete that had more than a dozen floors. With its special shock absorbers to dampen the effect of sudden sideways movements from an earthquake, the thirty-six-storey Kasumigaseki building in central Tokyo – Japan’s first skyscraper – was considered a masterpiece of modern engineering when it was built in 1968.

    Yet in 826, with only pegs and wedges to keep his wooden structure upright, the master builder Kobodaishi had no hesitation in sending his majestic Toji pagoda soaring fifty-five metres into the sky – nearly half as high as the Kasumigaseki skyscraper built some eleven centuries later. Clearly, Japanese carpenters of the day knew a few tricks about allowing a building to sway and settle itself rather than fight nature’s forces. But what sort of tricks?

    The multi-storey pagoda came to Japan from China in the sixth century. As in China, they were first introduced with Buddhism and were attached to important temples. The Chinese built their pagodas in brick or stone, with inner staircases, and used them in later centuries mainly as watchtowers. When the pagoda reached Japan, however, its architecture was freely adapted to local conditions – they were built less high, typically five rather than nine storeys, made mainly of wood and the staircase was dispensed with because the Japanese pagoda did not have any practical use but became more of an art object. Because of the typhoons that batter Japan in the summer, Japanese builders learned to extend the eaves of buildings further beyond the walls. This prevents rainwater gushing down the walls. Pagodas in China and Korea have nothing like the overhang that is found on pagodas in Japan.

    The roof of a Japanese temple building can be made to overhang the sides of the structure by fifty per cent or more of the building’s overall width. For the same reason, the builders of Japanese pagodas seem to have further increased their weight by choosing to cover these extended eaves not with the porcelain tiles of many Chinese pagodas but with much heavier earthenware tiles.

    But this does not totally explain the great resilience of Japanese pagodas. Is the answer that, like a tall pine tree, the Japanese pagoda – with its massive trunk-like central pillar known as shinbashira – simply flexes and sways during a typhoon or earthquake? For centuries, many thought so. But the answer is not so simple because the startling thing is that the shinbashira actually carries no load at all. In fact, in some pagoda designs, it does not even rest on the ground, but is suspended from the top of the pagoda – hanging loosely down through the middle of the building. The weight of the building is supported entirely by twelve outer and four inner columns.

    And what is the role of the shinbashira, the central pillar? The best way to understand the shinbashira’s role is to watch a video made by Shuzo Ishida, a structural engineer at Kyoto Institute of Technology. Mr Ishida, known to his students as ‘Professor Pagoda’ because of his passion to understand the pagoda, has built a series of models and tested them on a ‘shake- table’ in his laboratory. In short, the shinbashira was acting like an enormous stationary pendulum. The ancient craftsmen, apparently without the assistance of very advanced mathematics, seemed to grasp the principles that were, more than a thousand years later, applied in the construction of Japan’s first skyscraper. What those early craftsmen had found by trial and error was that under pressure a pagoda’s loose stack of floors could be made to slither to and fro independent of one another. Viewed from the side, the pagoda seemed to be doing a snake dance – with each consecutive floor moving in the opposite direction to its neighbours above and below. The shinbashira, running up through a hole in the centre of the building, constrained individual storeys from moving too far because, after moving a certain distance, they banged into it, transmitting energy away along the column.

    Another strange feature of the Japanese pagoda is that, because the building tapers, with each successive floor plan being smaller than the one below, none of the vertical pillars that carry the weight of the building is connected to its corresponding pillar above. In other words, a five- storey pagoda contains not even one pillar that travels right up through the building to carry the structural loads from the top to the bottom. More surprising is the fact that the individual storeys of a Japanese pagoda, unlike their counterparts elsewhere, are not actually connected to each other. They are simply stacked one on top of another like a pile of hats. Interestingly, such a design would not be permitted under current Japanese building regulations.

    And the extra-wide eaves? Think of them as a tightrope walker’s balancing pole. The bigger the mass at each end of the pole, the easier it is for the tightrope walker to maintain his or her balance. The same holds true for a pagoda. ‘With the eaves extending out on all sides like balancing poles,’ says Mr Ishida, ‘the building responds to even the most powerful jolt of an earthquake with a graceful swaying, never an abrupt shaking.’ Here again, Japanese master builders of a thousand years ago anticipated concepts of modern structural engineering.

    Questions 1-4

    Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 1?

    In boxes 1-4 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. Only two Japanese pagodas have collapsed in 1400 years.
    2. The Hanshin earthquake of 1995 destroyed the pagoda at the Toji temple.
    3. The other buildings near the Toji pagoda had been built in the last 30 years.
    4. The builders of pagodas knew how to absorb some of the power produced by severe weather conditions.
    Questions 5-10

    Classify the following as typical of

    1. both Chinese and Japanese pagodas
    2. only Chinese pagodas
    3. only Japanese pagodas

    Write the correct letter, A, B or C, in boxes 5-10 on your answer sheet.

    1. easy interior access to top
    2. tiles on eaves
    3. use as observation post
    4. size of eaves up to half the width of the building
    5. original religious purpose
    6. floors fitting loosely over each other

    Questions 11-13

    Choose the correct letter, A, B or C.

    Write the correct letter in boxes11-13 on your answer sheet.

    1. In a Japanese pagoda, the shinbashira
      1. bears the full weight of the building
      2. bends under pressure like a tree
      3. connects the floors with the foundations
      4. stops the floors moving too far
    2. Shuzo Ishida performs experiments in order to
      1. improve skyscraper design
      2. be able to build new pagodas
      3. learn about the dynamics of pagodas
      4. understand ancient mathematics
    3. The storeys of a Japanese pagoda are
      1. linked only by wood
      2. fastened only to the central pillar
      3. fitted loosely on top of each other
      4. joined by special weights

    Reading Passage 2

    The True Cost of Food

    Part of the image by: pixabay.com

    A For more than forty years the cost of food has been rising. It has now reached a point where a growing number of people believe that it is far too high, and that bringing it down will be one of the great challenges of the twenty first century. That cost, however, is not in immediate cash. In the West at least, most food is now far cheaper to buy in relative terms than it was in 1960. The cost is in the collateral damage of the very methods of food production that have made the food cheaper: in the pollution of water, the enervation of soil, the destruction of wildlife, the harm to animal welfare and the threat to human health caused by modern industrial agriculture.

    B First mechanisation, then mass use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, then monocultures, then battery rearing of livestock, and now genetic engineering – the onward march of intensive farming has seemed unstoppable in the last half-century, as the yields of produce have soared. But the damage it has caused has been colossal. In Britain, for example, many of our best-loved farmland birds, such as the skylark, the grey partridge, the lapwing and the corn bunting, have vanished from huge stretches of countryside, as have even more wild flowers and insects. This is a direct result of the way we have produced our food in the last four decades. Thousands of miles of hedgerows, thousands of ponds, have disappeared from the landscape. The faecal filth of salmon farming has driven wild salmon from many of the sea lochs and rivers of Scotland. Natural soil fertility is dropping in many areas because of continuous industrial fertiliser and pesticide use, while the growth of algae is increasing in lakes because of the fertiliser run-off.

    C Put it all together and it looks like a battlefield, but consumers rarely make the connection at the dinner table. That is mainly because the costs of all this damage are what economists refer to as externalities: they are outside the main transaction, which is for example producing and selling a field of wheat, and are borne directly by neither producers nor consumers. To many, the costs may not even appear to be financial at all, but merely aesthetic – a terrible shame, but nothing to do with money. And anyway they, as consumers of food, certainly aren’t paying for it, are they?

    D But the costs to society can actually be quantified and, when added up, can amount to staggering sums. A remarkable exercise in doing this has been carried out by one of the world’s leading thinkers on the future of agriculture, Professor Jules Pretty, Director of the Centre for Environment and Society at the University of Essex. Professor Pretty and his colleagues calculated the externalities of British agriculture for one particular year. They added up the costs of repairing the damage it caused, and came up with a total figure of £2,343m. This is equivalent to £208 for every hectare of arable land and permanent pasture, almost as much again as the total government and EU spend on British farming in that year. And according to Professor Pretty, it was a conservative estimate.

    E The costs included: £120m for removal of pesticides; £16m for removal of nitrates; £55m for removal of phosphates and soil; £23m for the removal of the bug Cryptosporidium from drinking water by water companies; £125m for damage to wildlife habitats, hedgerows and dry stone walls; £1,113m from emissions of gases likely to contribute to climate change; £106m from soil erosion and organic carbon losses; £169m from food poisoning; and £607m from cattle disease. Professor Pretty draws a simple but memorable conclusion from all this: our food bills are actually threefold. We are paying for our supposedly cheaper food in three separate ways: once over the counter, secondly through our taxes, which provide the enormous subsidies propping up modern intensive farming, and thirdly to clean up the mess that modern farming leaves behind.

    F So can the true cost of food be brought down? Breaking away from industrial agriculture as the solution to hunger may be very hard for some countries, but in Britain, where the immediate need to supply food is less urgent, and the costs and the damage of intensive farming have been clearly seen, it may be more feasible. The government needs to create sustainable, competitive and diverse farming and food sectors, which will contribute to a thriving and sustainable rural economy, and advance environmental, economic, health, and animal welfare goals.

    G But if industrial agriculture is to be replaced, what is a viable alternative? Professor Pretty feels that organic farming would be too big a jump in thinking and in practices for many farmers. Furthermore, the price premium would put the produce out of reach of many poorer consumers. He is recommending the immediate introduction of a ‘Greener Food Standard’, which would push the market towards more sustainable environmental practices than the current norm, while not requiring the full commitment to organic production. Such a standard would comprise agreed practices for different kinds of farming, covering agrochemical use, soil health, land management, water and energy use, food safety and animal health. It could go a long way, he says, to shifting consumers as well as farmers towards a more sustainable system of agriculture.

    Questions 14-17

    Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G.

    Which paragraph contains the following information?

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

    NB You may use any letter more than once.

    1. a cost involved in purifying domestic water
    2. the stages in the development of the farming industry
    3. the term used to describe hidden costs
    4. one effect of chemicals on water sources
    Questions 18-21

    Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 2?

    In boxes 18-21 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. Several species of wildlife in the British countryside are declining.
    2. The taste of food has deteriorated in recent years.
    3. The financial costs of environmental damage are widely recognised.
    4. One of the costs calculated by Professor Pretty was illness caused by food.
    Questions 22-26

    Complete the summary below.

    Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage.

    Professor Pretty concludes that our (22)……………….. are higher than most people realise, because we make three different types of payment. He feels it is realistic to suggest that Britain should reduce its reliance on (23)………………..
    Although most farmers would be unable to adapt to (24)…………………….Professor Pretty wants the government to initiate change by establishing what he refers to as a (25)………………He feels this would help to change the attitudes of both (26)………………….and ………………………..

    Reading Passage 3

    Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project

    Part of the image by: pixabay.com

    Section A
    The disappointing results of many conventional road transport projects in Africa led some experts to rethink the strategy by which rural transport problems were to be tackled at the beginning of the 1980s. A request for help in improving the availability of transport within the remote Makete District of south-western Tanzania presented the opportunity to try a new approach.

    The concept of ‘integrated rural transport’ was adopted in the task of examining the transport needs of the rural households in the district. The objective was to reduce the time and effort needed to obtain access to essential goods and services through an improved rural transport system. The underlying assumption was that the time saved would be used instead for activities that would improve the social and economic development of the communities. The Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project (MIRTP) started in 1985 with financial support from the Swiss Development Corporation and was coordinated with the help of the Tanzanian government.

    Section B
    When the project began, Makete District was virtually totally isolated during the rainy season. The regional road was in such bad shape that access to the main towns was impossible for about three months of the year. Road traffic was extremely rare within the district, and alternative means of transport were restricted to donkeys in the north of the district. People relied primarily on the paths, which were slippery and dangerous during the rains.

    Before solutions could be proposed, the problems had to be understood. Little was known about the transport demands of the rural households, so Phase I, between December 1985 and December 1987, focused on research. The socio-economic survey of more than 400 households in the district indicated that a household in Makete spent, on average, seven hours a day on transporting themselves and their goods, a figure which seemed extreme but which has also been obtained in surveys in other rural areas in Africa. Interesting facts regarding transport were found: 95% was on foot; 80% was within the locality; and 70% was related to the collection of water and firewood and travelling to grinding mills.

    Section C
    Having determined the main transport needs, possible solutions were identified which might reduce the time and burden. During Phase II, from January to February 1991, a number of approaches were implemented in an effort to improve mobility and access to transport.

    An improvement of the road network was considered necessary to ensure the import and export of goods to the district. These improvements were carried out using methods that were heavily dependent on labour.

    In addition to the improvement of roads, these methods provided training in the operation of a mechanical workshop and bus and truck services. However, the difference from the conventional approach was that this time consideration was given to local transport needs outside the road network.

    Most goods were transported along the paths that provide short-cuts up and down the hillsides, but the paths were a real safety risk and made the journey on foot even more arduous. It made sense to improve the paths by building steps, handrails and footbridges.

    It was uncommon to find means of transport that were more efficient than walking but less technologically advanced than motor vehicles. The use of bicycles was constrained by their high cost and the lack of available spare parts. Oxen were not used at all but donkeys were used by a few households in the northern part of the district. MIRTP focused on what would be most appropriate for the inhabitants of Makete in terms of what was available, how much they could afford and what they were willing to accept. After careful consideration, the project chose the promotion of donkeys – a donkey costs less than a bicycle – and the introduction of a locally manufacturable wheelbarrow.

    Section D
    At the end of Phase II, it was clear that the selected approaches to Makete’s transport problems had had different degrees of success. Phase III, from March 1991 to March 1993, focused on the refinement and institutionalisation of these activities. The road improvements and accompanying maintenance system had helped make the district centre accessible throughout the year. Essential goods from outside the district had become more readily available at the market, and prices did not fluctuate as much as they had done before.

    Paths and secondary roads were improved only at the request of communities who were willing to participate in construction and maintenance. However, the improved paths impressed the inhabitants, and requests for assistance greatly increased soon after only a few improvements had been completed.

    The efforts to improve the efficiency of the existing transport services were not very successful because most of the motorised vehicles in the district broke down and there were no resources to repair them. Even the introduction of low-cost means of transport was difficult because of the general poverty of the district. The locally manufactured wheelbarrows were still too expensive for all but a few of the households. Modifications to the original design by local carpenters cut production time and costs. Other local carpenters have been trained in the new design so that they can respond to requests. Nevertheless, a locally produced wooden wheelbarrow which costs around 5000 Tanzanian shillings (less than US$20) in Makete, and is about one quarter the cost of a metal wheelbarrow, is still too expensive for most people.

    Donkeys, which were imported to the district, have become more common and contribute, in particular, to the transportation of crops and goods to market. Those who have bought donkeys are mainly from richer households but with an increased supply through local breeding, donkeys should become more affordable. Meanwhile, local initiatives are promoting the renting out of the existing donkeys. It should be noted, however that a donkey, which at 20,000 Tanzanian shillings costs less than a bicycle, is still an investment equal to an average household’s income over half a year This clearly illustrates the need for supplementary measures if one wants to assist the rural poor.

    Section E
    It would have been easy to criticise the MIRTP for using in the early phases a ‘top-down’ approach, in which decisions were made by experts and officials before being handed down to communities, but it was necessary to start the process from the level of the governmental authorities of the district. It would have been difficult to respond to the requests of villagers and other rural inhabitants without the support and understanding of district authorities.

    Section F
    Today, nobody in the district argues about the importance of improved paths and inexpensive means of transport. But this is the result of dedicated work over a long period, particularly from the officers in charge of community development. They played an essential role in raising awareness and interest among the rural communities. The concept of integrated rural transport is now well established in Tanzania, where a major program of rural transport is just about to start. The experiences from Makete will help in this initiative, and Makete District will act as a reference for future work.

    Questions 27-30

    Reading Passage 3 has six sections, A-F.

    Choose the correct heading for sections B, C, E and F from the list of headings below.

    List of Headings

    1. MIRTP as a future model
    2. Identifying the main transport problems
    3. Preference for motorised vehicles
    4. Government Authrities’ instructions
    5. Initial improvements in mobility and transport modes
    6. Request for improves transport in Makete
    7. Transport improvements in the northern part of the district
    8. Improvements in the rail network
    9. Effects of initial MIRTP measures
    10. Co-operation of district officials
    11. Role of wheelbarrows and donkeys

    Example Answer

    Section A vi
    1. Section B
    2. Section C

    Example Answer

    Section D ix
    1. Section E
    2. Section F
    Questions 31-35

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

    In boxes 21-26 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. MIRTP was divided into five phases.
    2. Prior to the start of the MIRTP the Makete district was almost inaccessible during the rainy reason.
    3. Phase I of MIRTP consisted of a survey of household expenditure on transport.
    4. The survey concluded that one-fifth or 20% of the household transport requirement as outside the local area.
    5. MIRTP hopes to improve the movements of goods from Makete district to the country’s capital.
    6. MIRTP hopes to improve the movements of goods from Makete district to the country’s capital.
    Questions 36-39

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

    Write the correct letter, A-J in boxes 36-39 on your answer sheet.

    1. Construction of footbridges, steps and handrails
    2. Frequent breakdown of buses and trucks in Makete
    3. The improvement of secondary roads and paths
    4. The isolation of Makete for part of the year
      1. provided the people of Makete with experience in running bus and truck services.
      2. was especially successful in the northern part of the district.
      3. differed from earlier phases in that the community became less actively involved.
      4. improved paths used for transport up and down hillsides.
      5. was no longer a problem once the roads had been improved.
      6. cost less than locally made wheelbarrows.
      7. was done only at the request of local people who were willing to lend a hand.
      8. was at first considered by MIRTP to be affordable for the people of the district.
      9. hindered attempts to make the existing transport services more efficient.
      10. was thought to be the most important objective of Phase III.
    Questions 40

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

    Write the correct letter in box 40 on your answer sheet.

    Which of the following phrases best describes the main aim of Reading Passage 3?

    1. to suggest that projects such as MIRTP are needed in other countries
    2. to describe how MIRTP was implemented and how successful it was
    3. to examine how MIRTP promoted the use of donkeys
    4. to warn that projects such as MIRTP are likely to have serious problems
    Reading Passage 1 Why pagodas don’t fall down Answers
    1. yes
    2. no
    3. not given
    4. yes
    5. B
    6. A
    7. B
    8. C
    9. A
    10. C
    11. D
    12. C
    13. C
    Reading Passage 2 The True Cost of Food Answers
    1. E
    2. B
    3. C
    4. B
    5. yes
    6. not given
    7. no
    8. yes
    9. food bills
    10. intensive farming
    11. organic farming
    12. greener food standard
    13. farmers and consumers
    Reading Passage 3 Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project Answers
    1. ii
    2. v
    3. x
    4. 1
    5. no
    6. yes
    7. no
    8. yes
    9. not given
    10. D
    11. I
    12. G
    13. E
    14. B

  • Cambridge IELTS 7 Academic Reading Test 1

    Reading Passage 1

    Let’s Go Bats

    Image of a flying bat By Pixabay.com

    A Bats have a problem: how to find their way around in the dark. They hunt at night, and cannot use light to help them find prey and avoid obstacles. You might say that this is a problem of their own making, one that they could avoid simply by changing their habits and hunting by day. But the daytime economy is already heavily exploited by other creatures such as birds. Given that there is a living to be made at night, and given that alternative daytime trades are thoroughly occupied, natural selection has favoured bats that make a go of the night-hunting trade. It is probable that the nocturnal trades go way back in the ancestry of all mammals. In the time when the dinosaurs dominated the daytime economy, our mammalian ancestors probably only managed to survive at all because they found ways of scraping a living at night. Only after the mysterious mass extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago were our ancestors able to emerge into the daylight in any substantial numbers.

    B Bats have an engineering problem: how to find their way and find their prey in the absence of light. Bats are not the only creatures to face this difficulty today. Obviously the night-flying insects that they prey on must find their way about somehow. Deep-sea fish and whales have little or no light by day or by night. Fish and dolphins that live in extremely muddy water cannot see because, although there is light, it is obstructed and scattered by the dirt in the water. Plenty of other modern animals make their living in conditions where seeing is difficult or impossible.

    C Given the questions of how to manoeuvre in the dark, what solutions might an engineer consider? The first one that might occur to him is to manufacture light, to use a lantern or a searchlight. Fireflies and some fish (usually with the help of bacteria) have the power to manufacture their own light, but the process seems to consume a large amount of energy. Fireflies use their light for attracting mates. This doesn’t require a prohibitive amount of energy: a male’s tiny pinprick of light can be seen by a female from some distance on a dark night, since her eyes are exposed directly to the light source itself. However using light to find one’s own way around requires vastly more energy, since the eyes have to detect the tiny fraction of the light that bounces off each part of the scene. The light source must therefore be immensely brighter if it is to be used as a headlight to illuminate the path, than if it is to be used as a signal to others. In any event, whether or not the reason is the energy expense, it seems to be the case that, with the possible exception of some weird deep-sea fish, no animal apart from man uses manufactured light to find its way about.

    D What else might the engineer think of? Well, blind humans sometimes seem to have an uncanny sense of obstacles in their path. It has been given the name ‘facial vision’, because blind people have reported that it feels a bit like the sense of touch, on the face. One report tells of a totally blind boy who could ride his tricycle at good speed round the block near his home, using facial vision. Experiments showed that, in fact, facial vision is nothing to do with touch or the front of the face, although the sensation may be referred to the front of the face, like the referred pain in a phantom limb. The sensation of facial vision, it turns out, really goes in through the ears. Blind people, without even being aware of the fact, are actually using echoes of their own footsteps and of other sounds, to sense the presence of obstacles. Before this was discovered, engineers had already built instruments to exploit the principle, for example to measure the depth of the sea under a ship. After this technique had been invented, it was only a matter of time before weapons designers adapted it for the detection of submarines. Both sides in the Second World War relied heavily on these devices, under such codenames as Asdic (British) and Sonar (American), as well as Radar (American) or RDF (British), which uses radio echoes rather than sound echoes.

    E The Sonar and Radar pioneers didn’t know it then, but all the world now knows that bats, or rather natural selection working on bats, had perfected the system tens of millions of years earlier, and their radar achieves feats of detection and navigation that would strike an engineer dumb with admiration. It is technically incorrect to talk about bat ‘radar’, since they do not use radio waves. It is sonar but the underlying mathematical theories of radar and sonar are very similar and much of our scientific understanding of the details of what bats are doing has come from applying radar theory to them. The American zoologist Donald Griffin, who was largely responsible for the discovery of sonar in bats, coined the term ‘echolocation’ to cover both sonar and radar, whether used by animals or by human instruments.

    Questions 1-5

    Reading Passage 1 has five paragraphs, A-E.

    Which paragraph contains the following information?

    Write the correct letter. A-E, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

    NB You may use any letter more than once.

    1. Examples of wildlife other than bats which do not rely on vision to navigate by
    2. How early mammals avoided dying out
    3. Why bats hunt in the dark
    4. How a particular discovery has helped our understanding of bats
    5. Early military uses of echolocation
    Questions 6-9

    Complete the summary below.

    Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

    Facial Vision

    Blind people report that so-called ‘facial vision’ is comparable to the sensation of touch on the face. In fact, the sensation is more similar to the way in which pain from a (6)……………………arm or leg might be felt. The ability actually comes from perceiving (7)………..…………..through the ears. However, even before this was understood, the principle had been applied in the design of instruments which calculated the (8)……….…………..of the seabed. This was followed by a wartime application in devices for finding (9)………………

    Questions 10-13

    Complete the sentences below.

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

    1. Long before the invention of radar,…………… had resulted in a sophisticated radar-like system in bats.
    2. Radar is an inaccurate term when referring to bats because………………are not used in their navigation system.
    3. Radar and sonar are based on similar…………………….
    4. The word ‘echolocation’ was first used by someone working as a………………….

    Reading Passage 2

    Making Every Drop Count

    Part of the image by: pixabay.com

    A The history of human civilisation is entwined with the history of the ways we have learned to manipulate water resources. As towns gradually expanded, water was brought from increasingly remote sources, leading to sophisticated engineering efforts such as dams and aqueducts. At the height of the Roman Empire, nine major systems, with an innovative layout of pipes and well-built sewers, supplied the occupants of Rome with as much water per person as is provided in many parts of the industrial world today

    B During the industrial revolution and population explosion of the 19th and 20th centuries, the demand for water rose dramatically. Unprecedented construction of tens of thousands of monumental engineering projects designed to control floods, protect clean water supplies, and provide water for irrigation and hydropower brought great benefits to hundreds of millions of people. Food production has kept pace with soaring populations mainly because of the expansion of artificial irrigation systems that make possible the growth of 40 % of the world’s food. Nearly one fifth of all the electricity generated worldwide is produced by turbines spun by the power of falling water.

    C Yet there is a dark side to this picture: despite our progress, half of the world’s population still suffers, with water services inferior to those available to the ancient Greeks and Romans. As the United Nations report on access to water reiterated in November 2001, more than one billion people lack access to clean drinking water; some two and a half billion do not have adequate sanitation services. Preventable water-related diseases kill an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 children every day, and the latest evidence suggests that we are falling behind in efforts to solve these problems.

    D The consequences of our water policies extend beyond jeopardising human health. Tens of millions of people have been forced to move from their homes – often with little warning or compensation – to make way for the reservoirs behind dams. More than 20 % of all freshwater fish species are now threatened or endangered because dams and water withdrawals have destroyed the free-flowing river ecosystems where they thrive. Certain irrigation practices degrade soil quality and reduce agricultural productivity. Groundwater aquifers are being pumped down faster than they are naturally replenished in parts of India, China, the USA and elsewhere. And disputes over shared water resources have led to violence and continue to raise local, national and even international tensions.

    E At the outset of the new millennium, however, the way resource planners think about water is beginning to change. The focus is slowly shifting back to the provision of basic human and environmental needs as top priority – ensuring ‘some for all,’ instead of ‘more for some’. Some water experts are now demanding that existing infrastructure be used in smarter ways rather than building new facilities, which is increasingly considered the option of last, not first, resort. This shift in philosophy has not been universally accepted, and it comes with strong opposition from some established water organisations. Nevertheless, it may be the only way to address successfully the pressing problems of providing everyone with clean water to drink, adequate water to grow food and a life free from preventable water-related illness.

    F Fortunately – and unexpectedly – the demand for water is not rising as rapidly as some predicted. As a result, the pressure to build new water infrastructures has diminished over the past two decades. Although population, industrial output and economic productivity have continued to soar in developed nations, the rate at which people withdraw water from aquifers, rivers and lakes has slowed. And in a few parts of the world, demand has actually fallen.

    G What explains this remarkable turn of events? Two factors: people have figured out how to use water more efficiently, and communities are rethinking their priorities for water use. Throughout the first three-quarters of the 20th century, the quantity of freshwater consumed per person doubled on average; in the USA, water withdrawals increased tenfold while the population quadrupled. But since 1980, the amount of water consumed per person has actually decreased, thanks to a range of new technologies that help to conserve water in homes and industry. In 1965, for instance, Japan used approximately 13 million gallons of water to produce $1 million of commercial output; by 1989 this had dropped to 3.5 million gallons (even accounting for inflation) – almost a quadrupling of water productivity. In the USA, water withdrawals have fallen by more than 20 % from their peak in 1980.

    H On the other hand, dams, aqueducts and other kinds of infrastructure will still have to be built, particularly in developing countries where basic human needs have not been met. But such projects must be built to higher specifications and with more accountability to local people and their environment than in the past. And even in regions where new projects seem warranted, we must find ways to meet demands with fewer resources, respecting ecological criteria and to a smaller budget.

    Questions 14-20

    Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-H.

    Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A and C-H from the list of headings below.

    Write the correct number, i-xi, in boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet.

    List of Headings

    1. Scientists’ call for revision of policy
    2. An explanation for reduced water use
    3. How a global challenge was met
    4. Irrigation systems fall into disuse
    5. Environmental effects
    6. The financial cost of recent technological improvements
    7. 1The relevance to health
    8. Addressing the concern over increasing populations
    9. A surprising downward trend in demand for water
    10. The need to raise standards
    11. A description of ancient water supplies

    Example Answer

    Paragraph B iii
    1. Paragraph A
    2. Paragraph C
    3. Paragraph D
    4. Paragraph E
    5. Paragraph F
    6. Paragraph G
    7. Paragraph H
    Questions 21-26

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

    In boxes 21-26 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. Water use per person is higher in the industrial world than it was in Ancient Rome.
    2. Feeding increasing populations is possible due primarily to improved irrigation systems.
    3. Modern water systems imitate those of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
    4. Industrial growth is increasing the overall demand for water.
    5. Modern technologies have led to reduction in the domestic water consumption.
    6. In the future, governments should maintain ownership of water infrastructures.

    Reading Passage 3

    Educating Psyche

    Part of the image by: pixabay.com

    Educating Psyche by Bernie Neville is a book which looks at radical new approaches to learning, describing the effects of emotion, imagination and the unconscious on learning. One theory discussed in the book is that proposed by George Lozanov, which focuses on the power of suggestion.

    Lozanov’s instructional technique is based on the evidence that the connections made in the brain through unconscious processing (which he calls non-specific mental reactivity) are more durable than those made through conscious processing. Besides the laboratory evidence for this, we know from our experience that we often remember what we have perceived peripherally, long after we have forgotten what we set out to learn. If we think of a book we studied months or years ago, we will find it easier to recall peripheral details – the colour, the binding, the typeface, the table at the library where we sat while studying it – than the content on which we were concentrating. If we think of a lecture we listened to with great concentration, we will recall the lecturer’s appearance and mannerisms, our place in the auditorium, the failure of the air-conditioning, much more easily than the ideas we went to learn. Even if these peripheral details are a bit elusive, they come back readily in hypnosis or when we relive the event imaginatively, as in psychodrama. The details of the content of the lecture, on the other hand, seem to have gone forever.

    This phenomenon can be partly attributed to the common counterproductive approach to study (making extreme efforts to memorise, tensing muscles, inducing fatigue), but it also simply reflects the way the brain functions. Lozanov therefore made indirect instruction (suggestion) central to his teaching system. In suggestopedia, as he called his method, consciousness is shifted away from the curriculum to focus on something peripheral. The curriculum then becomes peripheral and is dealt with by the reserve capacity of the brain.

    The suggestopedic approach to foreign language learning provides a good illustration. In its most recent variant (1980), it consists of the reading of vocabulary and text while the class is listening to music. The first session is in two parts. In the first part, the music is classical (Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms) and the teacher reads the text slowly and solemnly, with attention to the dynamics of the music. The students follow the text in their books. This is followed by several minutes of silence. In the second part, they listen to baroque music (Bach, Corelli, Handel) while the teacher reads the text in a normal speaking voice. During this time they have their books closed. During the whole of this session, their attention is passive; they listen to the music but make no attempt to learn the material.

    Beforehand, the students have been carefully prepared for the language learning experience. Through meeting with the staff and satisfied students they develop the expectation that learning will be easy and pleasant and that they will successfully learn several hundred words of the foreign language during the class. In a preliminary talk, the teacher introduces them to the material to be covered, but does not ‘teach’ it. Likewise, the students are instructed not to try to learn it during this introduction.

    Some hours after the two-part session, there is a follow-up class at which the students are stimulated to recall the material presented. Once again the approach is indirect. The students do not focus their attention on trying to remember the vocabulary, but focus on using the language to communicate (e.g. through games or improvised dramatisations). Such methods are not unusual in language teaching. What is distinctive in the suggestopedic method is that they are devoted entirely to assist recall. The ‘learning’ of the material is assumed to be automatic and effortless, accomplished while listening to music. The teacher’s task is to assist the students to apply what they have learned paraconsciously, and in doing so to make it easily accessible to consciousness. Another difference from conventional teaching is the evidence that students can regularly learn 1000 new words of a foreign language during a suggestopedic session, as well as grammar and idiom.

    Lozanov experimented with teaching by direct suggestion during sleep, hypnosis and trance states, but found such procedures unnecessary. Hypnosis, yoga, Silva mind-control, religious ceremonies and faith healing are all associated with successful suggestion, but none of their techniques seem to be essential to it. Such rituals may be seen as placebos. Lozanov acknowledges that the ritual surrounding suggestion in his own system is also a placebo, but maintains that without such a placebo people are unable or afraid to tap the reserve capacity of their brains. Like any placebo, it must be dispensed with authority to be effective. Just as a doctor calls on the full power of autocratic suggestion by insisting that the patient take precisely this white capsule precisely three times a day before meals, Lozanov is categoric in insisting that the suggestopedic session be conducted exactly in the manner designated, by trained and accredited suggestopedic teachers.

    While suggestopedia has gained some notoriety through success in the teaching of modern languages, few teachers are able to emulate the spectacular results of Lozanov and his associates. We can, perhaps, attribute mediocre results to an inadequate placebo effect. The students have not developed the appropriate mind set. They are often not motivated to learn through this method. They do not have enough ‘faith’. They do not see it as ‘real teaching’, especially as it does not seem to involve the ‘work’ they have learned to believe is essential to learning.

    Questions 27-30

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

    Write the correct letter in boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet.

    1. The book Educating Psyche is mainly concerned with
      1. the power of suggestion in learning
      2. a particular technique for leaning based on emotions
      3. the effects of emotion on the imagination and the unconscious
      4. ways of learning which are not traditional
    2. Lozanov’s theory claims that, when we try to remember things,
      1. unimportant details are the easiest to recall
      2. concentrating hard produces the best results
      3. the most significant facts are most easily recalled
      4. peripheral vision is not important
    3. In this passage, the author uses the examples of a book and a lecture to illustrate that
      1. both these are important for developing concentration
      2. his theory about methods of learning is valid
      3. reading is a better technique for learning than listening
      4. we can remember things more easily under hypnosis
    4. Lozanov claims that teachers should train students to
      1. memorise details of the curriculum
      2. develop their own sets of indirect instructions
      3. think about something other than the curriculum content
      4. avoid overloading the capacity of the brain
    Questions 31-36

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

    In boxes 31-36 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. In the example of suggestopedic teaching in the fourth paragraph, the only variable that changes is the music.
    2. Prior to the suggestopedia class, students are made aware that the language experience will be demanding.
    3. In the follow-up class, the teaching activities are similar to those used in conventional classes.
    4. As an indirect benefit, students notice improvements in their memory.
    5. Teachers say they prefer suggestopedia to traditional approaches to language teaching.
    6. Students in a suggestopedia class retain more new vocabulary than those in ordinary classes.
    Questions 37-40

    Complete the summary using the list of words, A-K, below.

    Write the correct letter A-K in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

    Sugestopedia uses a less direct method of suggestion than other techniques such as hypnosis. However, Lozanov admits that a certain amount of (37)……………… is necessary in order to convince students, even if this is just a (38)……………………. Furthermore, if the method is to succeed, teachers must follow a set procedure. Although Lozanov’s method has become quite (39)………………., the result of most other teachers using this method have been (40)……………………

    A spectacular unpopularB teachingC lesson
    D authoritarianE unpopularF ritual
    G unspectacularH placebo I Involved
    J appropriateK well known
    Cambridge IELTS 7 Academic Reading Test 1 Reading passage 1 Let’s Go Bats Answers
    1. B
    2. A
    3. A
    4. E
    5. D
    6. phantom
    7. echoes
    8. depth
    9. submarines
    10. natural selection
    11. radio waves
    12. mathematical theories
    13. zoologist
    Cambridge IELTS 7 Academic Reading Test 1 Reading Passage 2 Making Every Drop Count Reading Answers
    1. xi
    2. vii
    3. v
    4. i
    5. ix
    6. ii
    7. x
    8. no
    9. yes
    10. not given
    11. no
    12. yes
    13. not given
    Cambridge IELTS 7 Academic Reading Test 1 Reading Passage 3 Educating Psyche Reading Answers
    1. D
    2. A
    3. B
    4. C
    5. false
    6. false
    7. true
    8. not given
    9. not given
    10. true
    11. F
    12. H
    13. K
    14. G