Tag: Environment (IELTS)

Cambridge IELTS 6 Academic Reading Test 1
Reading Passage 1

Australia’s Sporting Success

Part of the image by: pixabay.com
1. They play hard, they play often, and they play to win. Australian sports teams win more than their fair share of titles, demolishing rivals with seeming ease. How do they do it? A big part of the secret is an extensive and expensive network of sporting academies underpinned by science and medicine. At the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), hundreds of youngsters and pros live and train under the eyes of coaches. Another body, the Australian Sports Commission (ASC), finances programmes of excellence in a total of 96 sports for thousands of sportsmen and women. Both provide intensive coaching, training facilities and nutritional advice.
2. Inside the academies, science takes centre stage. The AIS employs more than 100 sports scientists and doctors, and collaborates with scores of others in universities and research centres. AIS scientists work across a number of sports, applying skills learned in one – such as building muscle strength in golfers – to others, such as swimming and squash. They are backed up by technicians who design instruments to collect data from athletes. They all focus on one aim: winning. ‘We can’t waste our time looking at ethereal scientific questions that don’t help the coach work with an athlete and improve performance.’ says Peter Fricker, chief of science at AIS.
3. A lot of their work comes down to measurement – everything from the exact angle of a swimmer’s dive to the second-by-second power output of a cyclist. This data is used to wring improvements out of athletes. The focus is on individuals, tweaking performances to squeeze an extra hundredth of a second here, an extra millimetre there. No gain is too slight to bother with. It’s the tiny, gradual improvements that add up to world-beating results. To demonstrate how the system works, Bruce Mason at AIS shows off the prototype of a 3D analysis tool for studying swimmers. A wire-frame model of a champion swimmer slices through the water, her arms moving in slow motion. Looking side-on, Mason measures the distance between strokes. From above, he analyses how her spine swivels. When fully developed, this system will enable him to build a biomechanical profile for coaches to use to help budding swimmers. Mason’s contribution to sport also includes the development of the SWAN (SWimming ANalysis) system now used in Australian national competitions. It collects images from digital cameras running at 50 frames a second and breaks down each part of a swimmer’s performance into factors that can be analysed individually – stroke length, stroke frequency, the average duration of each stroke, velocity, start, lap and finish times, and so on. At the end of each race, SWAN spits out data on each swimmer.
4. ‘Take a look.’ says Mason, pulling out a sheet of data. He points out the data on the swimmers in second and third place, which shows that the one who finished third actually swam faster. So why did he finish 35 hundredths of a second down? ‘His turn times were 44 hundredths of a second behind the other guy.’ says Mason. ‘If he can improve on his turns, he can do much better.’ This is the kind of accuracy that AIS scientists’ research is bringing to a range of sports. With the Cooperative Research Centre for Micro Technology in Melbourne, they are developing unobtrusive sensors that will be embedded in an athlete’s clothes or running shoes to monitor heart rate, sweating, heat production or any other factor that might have an impact on an athlete’s ability to run. There’s more to it than simply measuring performance. Fricker gives the example of athletes who may be down with coughs and colds 11 or 12 times a year. After years of experimentation, AIS and the University of Newcastle in New South Wales developed a test that measures how much of the immune-system protein immunoglobulin A is present in athletes’ saliva. If IgA levels suddenly fall below a certain level, training is eased or dropped altogether. Soon, IgA levels start rising again, and the danger passes. Since the tests were introduced, AIS athletes in all sports have been remarkably successful at staying healthy
5. Using data is a complex business. Well before a championship, sports scientists and coaches start to prepare the athlete by developing a ‘competition model’, based on what they expect will be the winning times. ‘You design the model to make that time.’ says Mason. ‘A start of this much, each free-swimming period has to be this fast, with a certain stroke frequency and stroke length, with turns done in these times’. All the training is then geared towards making the athlete hit those targets, both overall and for each segment of the race. Techniques like these have transformed Australia into arguably the world’s most successful sporting nation.
6. Of course, there’s nothing to stop other countries copying – and many have tried. Some years ago, the AIS unveiled coolant-lined jackets for endurance athletes. At the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996, these sliced as much as two per cent off cyclists’ and rowers times. Now everyone uses them. The same has happened to the altitude tent’, developed by AIS to replicate the effect of altitude training at sea level. But Australia’s success story is about more than easily copied technological fixes, and up to now no nation has replicated its all-encompassing system.
Questions 1-7

Reading Passage 1 has six paragraphs, A-F.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-F in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once
1. a reference to the exchange of expertise between different sports
2. an explanation of how visual imaging is employed in investigations
3. a reason for narrowing the scope of research activity
4. how some AIS ideas have been reproduced
5. how obstacles to optimum achievement can be investigated
6. an overview of the funded support of athletes
7. how performance requirements are calculated before an event
Questions 8-11

Classify the following techniques according to whether the writer states they –
1. are currently exclusively used by Australians
2. will be used in the future by Australians
3. are currently used by both Australians and their rivals
Write the correct letter A, B, C or D in boxes 8-11 on your answer sheet.
1. cameras
2. sensors
3. protein tests
4. altitude tents
Questions 12 and 13

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from Reading Passage 1 for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 12 and 13 on your answer sheet.
1. What is produced to help an athlete plan their performance in an event?
2. By how much did some cyclists’ performance improve at the 1996 Olympic Games?
Reading Passage 2

Delivering The Goods

Part of the image by: pixabay.com
1. The vast expansion in international trade owes much to a revolution in the business of moving freight. International trade is growing at a startling pace. While the global economy has been expanding at a bit over 3% a year, the volume of trade has been rising at a compound annual rate of about twice that.Foreign products, from meat to machinery, play a more important role in almost every economy in the world, and foreign markets now tempt businesses that never much worried about sales beyond their nation’s borders.
2. What lies behind this explosion in international commerce? The general worldwide decline in trade barriers, such as customs duties and import quotas, is surely one explanation. The economic opening of countries that have traditionally been minor players is another. But one force behind the import-export boom has passed all but unnoticed: the rapidly falling cost of getting goods to market. But one force behind the import-export boom has passed all but unnoticed: the rapidly falling cost of getting goods to market. Theoretically, in the world of trade, shipping costs do not matter. Goods, once they have been made, are assumed to move instantly and at no cost from place to place. The real world, however, is full of frictions. Cheap labour may make Chinese clothing competitive in America, but if delays in shipment tie up working capital and cause winter coats to arrive in spring, trade may lose its advantages.
3. At the turn of the 20th century, agriculture and manufacturing were the two most important sectors almost everywhere, accounting for about 70% of total output in Germany, Italy and France, and 40-50% in America, Britain and Japan. International commerce was therefore dominated by raw materials, such as wheat, wood and iron ore, or processed commodities, such as meat and steel. But these sorts of products are heavy and bulky and the cost of transporting them relatively high.
4. Countries still trade disproportionately with their geographic neighbours. Over time, however, world output has shitted into goods whose worth is unrelated to their size and weight. Today, it is finished manufactured products that dominate the flow of trade, and, thanks to technological advances such as lightweight components, manufactured goods themselves have tended to become lighter and less bulky. As a result, less transportation is required for every dollar’s worth of imports or exports.
5. To see how this influences trade, consider the business of making disk drives for computers. Most of the world’s disk-drive manufacturing is concentrated in South-east Asia. This is possible only because disk drives, while valuable, are small and light and so cost little to ship. Computer manufacturers in Japan or Texas will not face hugely bigger freight bills if they import drives from Singapore rather than purchasing them on the domestic market. Distance therefore poses no obstacle to the globalisation of the disk-drive industry.
6. This is even more true of the fast-growing information industries. Films and compact discs cost little to transport, even by aeroplane. Computer software can be ‘exported’ without ever loading it onto a ship, simply by transmitting it over telephone lines from one country to another, so freight rates and cargo-handling schedules become insignificant factors in deciding where to make the product. Businesses can locate based on other considerations, such as the availability of labour, while worrying less about the cost of delivering their output.
7. In many countries deregulation has helped to drive the process along. But, behind the scenes, a series of technological innovations known broadly as containerisation and intermodal transportation has led to swift productivity improvements in cargo-handling. Forty years ago, the process of exporting or importing involved a great many stages of handling, which risked portions of the shipment being damaged or stolen along the way. The invention of the container crane made it possible to load and unload containers without capsizing the ship and the adoption of standard container sizes allowed almost any box to be transported on any ship. By 1967, dual-purpose ships, carrying loose cargo in the hold* and containers on the deck, were giving way to all-container vessels that moved thousands of boxes at a time.
8. The shipping container transformed ocean shipping into a highly efficient, intensely competitive business.But getting the cargo to and from the dock was a different story. National governments, by and large, kept firmer hand on truck and railroad tariffs than on charges for ocean freight. This started changing, however, in the mid-1970s, when America began to deregulate its transportation industry. First airlines, then road hauliers and railways, were freed from restrictions on what they could carry, where they could haul it and what price they could charge. Big productivity gains resulted. Between 1985 and 1996, for example, America’s freight railways dramatically reduced their employment, trackage, and their fleets of locomotives – while increasing the amount of cargo they hauled. Europe’s railways have also shown marked, albeit smaller, productivity improvements.
9. In America the period of huge productivity gains in transportation may be almost over, but in most countries the process still has far to go. State ownership of railways and airlines, regulation of freight rates and toleration of anti-competitive practices, such as cargo-handling monopolies, all keep the cost of shipping unnecessarily high and deter international trade. Bringing these barriers down would help the world’s economies grow even closer.
Questions 14-17

Reading Passage 2 has six sections, A-I.

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

Which paragraph contains the following information?
1. a suggestion for improving trade in the future
2. the effects of the introduction of electronic delivery
3. the similar cost involved in transporting a product from abroad or from a local supplier
4. the weakening relationship between the value of goods and the cost of their delivery
Questions 18-22

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

In boxes 18-22 on your answer sheet, write –
- TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
- FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
- NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
1. International trade is increasing at a greater rate than the world economy.
2. Cheap labour guarantees effective trade conditions.
3. Japan imports more meat and steel than France.
4. Most countries continue to prefer to trade with nearby nations.
5. Small computer components are manufactured in Germany.
Questions 23-26

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

Write the correct letter, A-K, in boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet.

THE TRANSPORT REVOLUTION

Modern cargo-handling methods have had a significant effect on (23)………………….. as the business of moving freight around the world becomes increasingly streamlined.Manufacturers of computers, for instance, are able to import (24)………………….. from overseas, rather than having to rely on a local supplier. The introduction of (25) ………………….. has meant that bulk cargo can be safely and efficiently moved over long distances. While international shipping is now efficient, there is still a need for governments to reduce (26)………………….. in order to free up the domestic cargo sector.

A tariffs B components C container ships
D output E employees F insurance costs
G trade H freightI fares J software
K international standards

Reading Passage 3

Climate change and the Inuit

Part of the image by: Pexels.com
1. Unusual incidents are being reported across the Arctic. Inuit families going off on snowmobiles to prepare their summer hunting camps have found themselves cut off from home by a sea of mud, following early thaws. There are reports of igloos losing their insulating properties as the snow drips and refreezes, of lakes draining into the sea as permafrost melts, and sea ice breaking up earlier than usual, carrying seals beyond the reach of hunters. Climate change may still be a rather abstract idea to most of us, but in the Arctic, it is already having dramatic effects – if summertime ice continues to shrink at its present rate, the Arctic Ocean could soon become virtually ice-free in summer. The knock-on effects are likely to include more warming, cloudier skies, increased precipitation and higher sea levels. Scientists are increasingly keen to find out what’s going on because they consider the Arctic the ‘canary in the mine’ for global warming – a warning of what’s in store for the rest of the world.
2. For the Inuit the problem is urgent. They live in precarious balance with one of the toughest environments on earth. Climate change, whatever its causes, is a direct threat to their way of life. Nobody knows the Arctic as well as the locals, which is why they are not content simply to stand back and let outside experts tell them what’s happening. In Canada, where the Inuit people are jealously guarding their hard-won autonomy in the country’s newest territory – Nunavut, they believe their best hope of survival in this changing environment lies in combining their ancestral knowledge with the best of modern science. This is a challenge in itself.
3. The Canadian Arctic is a vast, treeless polar desert that’s covered with snow for most of the year. Venture into this terrain and you get some idea of the hardships facing anyone who calls this home. Farming is out of the question and nature offers meagre pickings. Humans first settled in the Arctic a mere 4,500 years ago, surviving by exploiting sea mammals and fish. The environment tested them to the limits: sometimes the colonists were successful, sometimes they failed and vanished. But around a thousand years ago, one group emerged that was uniquely well adapted to cope with the Arctic environment. These Thule people moved in from Alaska, bringing kayaks, sleds, dogs, pottery and iron tools. They are the ancestors of today’s Inuit people.
4. Life for the descendants of the Thule people is still harsh. Nunavut is 1.9 million square kilometres of rock and ice, and a handful of islands around the North Pole. It’s currently home to 2,500 people, all but a handful of them indigenous Inuit. Over the past 40 years, most have abandoned their nomadic ways and settled in the territory’s 28 isolated communities, but they still rely heavily on nature to provide food and clothing. Provisions available in local shops have to be flown into Nunavut on one of the most costly air networks in the world, or brought by supply ship during the few ice-free weeks of summer. It would cost a family around £7,000 a year to replace meat they obtained themselves through hunting with imported meat. Economic opportunities are scarce, and for many people state benefits are their only income.
5. While the Inuit may not actually starve if hunting and trapping are curtailed by climate change, there has certainly been an impact on people’s health. Obesity, heart disease and diabetes are beginning to appear in a people for whom these have never before been problems. There has been a crisis of identity as the traditional skills of hunting, trapping and preparing skins have begun to disappear. In Nunavut’s ‘igloo and email’ society, where adults who were born in igloos have children who may never have been out on the land, there’s a high incidence of depression.
6. With so much at stake, the Inuit are determined to play a key role in teasing out the mysteries of climate change in the Arctic. Having survived there for centuries, they believe their wealth of traditional knowledge is vital to the task. And Western scientists are starting to draw on this wisdom, increasingly referred to as ‘Inuit Qaujimajatugangit’, or IQ. ‘In the early days, scientists ignored us when they came up here to study anything. They just figured these people don’t know very much so we won’t ask them,’ says John Amagoalik, an Inuit leader and politician. ‘But in recent years IQ has had much more credibility and weight.’ In fact it is now a requirement for anyone hoping to get permission to do research that they consult the communities, who are helping to set the research agenda to reflect their most important concerns. They can turn down applications from scientists they believe will work against their interests or research projects that will impinge too much on their daily lives and traditional activities.
7. Some scientists doubt the value of traditional knowledge because the occupation of the Arctic doesn’t go back far enough. Others, however, point out that the first weather stations in the far north date back just 50 years. There are still huge gaps in our environmental knowledge, and despite the scientific onslaught, many predictions are no more than best guesses. IQ could help to bridge the gap and resolve the tremendous uncertainty about how much of what we’re seeing is natural capriciousness and how much is the consequence of human activity.
Questions 27-32

Reading Passage has seven paragraphs, A-G.

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

Write the correct number, i-ix, in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings
1. The reaction of the limit community to climate change
2. Understanding of climate change remains limited
3. Alternative sources of essential supplies
4. Respect for limit opinion grows
5. A healthier choice of food
6. A difficult landscape
7. Negative effects on well-being
8. Alarm caused by unprecedented events in the Arctic
9. The benefits of an easier existence
Example Answer
Paragraph A (answer) viii
1. Paragraph B
2. Paragraph C
3. Paragraph D
4. Paragraph E
5. Paragraph F
6. Paragraph G
Questions 33-40

Complete the summary of paragraphs C and D below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from paragraphs C and D for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 33-40 on your answer sheet.

If you visit the Canadian Arctic, you immediately appreciate the problems faced by people for whom this is home. It would clearly be impossible for the people to engage in (33) ……………….. as a means of supporting themselves. For thousands of years they have had to rely on catching (34)……………….. and (35)……………….. as a means of sustenance. The harsh surroundings saw many who tried to settle there pushed to their limits, although some were successful. The (36) ……………….. people were an example of the latter and for them the environment did not prove unmanageable. For the present inhabitants, life continues to be a struggle. The territory of Nunavut consists of little more than ice, rock and a few (37) ……………….. . In recent years, many of them have been obliged to give up their (38) ……………….. lifestyle, but they continue to depend mainly on (39) ……………….. their food and clothes. (40) ……………….. produce is particularly expensive.
Reading Passage 1 Australia’s Sporting Success Answers
1. B
2. C
3. B
4. F
5. D
6. A
7. E
8. A
9. B
10. A
11. C
12. competition model
13. 2%
Reading Passage 2 Delivering The Goods Answers
1. I
2. F
3. E
4. D
5. true
6. false
7. not given
8. true
9. not given
10. trade
11. components
12. container ships
13. tariffs
Reading Passage 3 Climate change and the Inuit Answers
1. i
2. vi
3. iii
4. vii
5. iv
6. ii
7. farming
8. sea mammals
9. fish
10. thule
11. islands
12. nomadic
13. nature
14. imported
September 14, 2023
Cambridge IELTS 9 Academic Reading Test 2
Reading Passage 1

Children With Auditory Problems
1. Hearing impairment or other auditory function deficit in young children can have a major impact on their development of speech and communication, resulting in a detrimental effect on their ability to learn at school. This is likely to have major consequences for the individual and the population as a whole. The New Zealand Ministry of Health has found from research carried out over two decades that 6-10% of children in that country are affected by hearing loss.
2. A preliminary study in New Zealand has shown that classroom noise presents a major concern for teachers and pupils. Modern teaching practices, the organization of desks in the classroom, poor classroom acoustics, and mechanical means of ventilation such as air-conditioning units all contribute to the number of children unable to comprehend the teachers voice. Education researchers Nelson and Soli have also suggested that recent trends in learning often involve collaborative interactions of multiple minds and tools as much as individual possession of information. This all amounts to heightened activity and noise levels, which have the potential to be particularly serious for children experiencing auditory function deficit. Noise in classrooms can only exacerbate their difficulty in comprehending and processing verbal communication with other children and instructions from the teacher.
3. Children with auditory function deficit are potentially failing to learn to their maximum potential because of noise levels generated in classrooms. The effects of noise on the ability of children to team effectively in typical classroom environments are now the subject of increasing concern. The International Institute of Noise Control Engineering(I-INCE), on the advice of the World Health Organization, has established an international working party, which includes New Zealand, to evaluate noise and reverberation control for school rooms.
4. While the detrimental effects of noise in classroom situations are not limited to children experiencing disability, those with a disability that affects their processing of speech and verbal communication could be extremely vulnerable. The auditory function deficits in question include hearing impairment, autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) and attention deficit disorders MDD/ADHD).
5. Autism is considered a neurological and genetic life-long disorder that causes discrepancies in the way information is processed. This disorder is characterized by interlinking problems with social imaginations, social communication and social interaction. According to Jenzen, this affects the ability to understand and relate in typical ways to people, understand events and objects in the environment, and understand or respond to sensory stimuli. Autism does not allow learning or thinking in the same ways as in children who are developing normally. Autistic spectrum disorders often result in major difficulties in comprehending verbal information and speech processing. Those experiencing these disorders often find sounds such as crowd noise and the noise generated by machinery painful and distressing. This is difficult to scientifically quantify as such extra-sensory stimuli vary greatly from one autistic individual to another. But a child who finds any type of noise in their classroom or learning space intrusive is likely to be adversely affected in their ability to process information.
6. The attention deficit disorders are indicative of neurological and genetic disorders and are characterized by difficulties with sustaining attention, effort and persistence, organization skills and disinhibition. Children experiencing these disorders find it difficult to screen out unimportant information, and focus on everything in the environment rather than attending to a single activity. Background noise in the classroom becomes a major distraction, which can affect their ability to concentrate.
7. Children experiencing an auditory function deficit can often find speech and communication very difficult to isolate and process when set against high levels of background noise. These levels come from outside activities that penetrate the classroom structure, from teaching activities, and other noise generated inside, which can be exacerbated by room reverberation. Strategies are needed to obtain the optimum classroom construction and perhaps a change in classroom culture and methods of teaching. ln particular, the effects of noisy classrooms and activities on those experiencing disabilities in the form of auditory function deficit need thorough investigation. It is probable that many undiagnosed children exist in the education system with ‘invisible’ disabilities. Their needs are less likely to be met than those of children with known disabilities.
8. The New Zealand Government has developed a New Zealand Disability Strategy and has embarked on a wide-ranging consultation process. The strategy recognizes that people experiencing disability face significant barriers in achieving a full quality of life in areas such as attitude, education, employment and access to services. Objective 3 of the New Zealand Disability Strategy is to ’Provide the Best Education for Disabled People’ by improving education so that all children, youth learners and adult learners will have equal opportunities to learn and develop within their already existing local school. For a successful education, the learning environment is vitally significant, so any effort to improve this is likely to be of great benefit to all children, but especially to those with auditory function disabilities.
9. A number of countries are already in the process of formulating their own standards for the control and reduction of classroom noise. New Zealand will probably follow their example. The literature to date on noise in school rooms appears to focus on the effects on schoolchildren in general, their teachers and the hearing impaired. Only limited attention appears to have been given to those students experiencing the other disabilities involving auditory function deficit. It is imperative that the needs of these children are taken into account in the setting of appropriate international standards to be promulgated in future.
Questions 1-6

Reading Passage 1 has nine sections, A-I.

Which section contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-l, in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.
1. an account of a national policy initiative
2. a description of a global team effort
3. a hypothesis as to one reason behind the growth in classroom noise
4. a demand for suitable worldwide regulations
5. a list of medical conditions which place some children more at risk from noise than others
6. the estimated proportion of children in New Zealand with auditory problems.
Questions 7-10

Answer the questions below.

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

Write your answers in boxes 7-10 on your answer sheet.
1. For what period of time has hearing loss in schoolchildren been studied in New Zealand?
2. In addition to machinery noise, what other type of noise can upset children with autism?
3. What term is used to describe the hearing problems of schoolchildren which have not been diagnosed?
4. What part of the New Zealand Disability Strategy aims to give schoolchildren equal opportunity?
Questions 11-12

Choose TWO letters, A-E

Write the correct letters in boxes 11 and 12 on your answer sheet.

The list below includes factors contributing to classroom noise.

Which TWO are mentioned by the writer of the passage?
1. current teaching methods
2. echoing corridors
3. cooling systems
4. large class sizes
5. loud-voiced teachers
6. playground games
Questions 13

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

Write the correct letter in box 13 on your answer sheet.
1. What is the writer‘s overall purpose in writing this article?
  1. to compare different methods oi dealing with auditory problems
  2. to provide solutions for overly noisy learning environments
  3. to increase awareness of the situation oi children with auditory problems
  4. to promote New Zealand as a model for other countries to follow
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
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

Venus in Transit

June 2004 saw the first passage., known as a ‘transit` of the planet Venus across the face of the Sun in 122 years. Transits have helped shape our view of the whole Universe, as Heather Cooper and Nigel Henbest explain.
1. On 8 June 2004, more than half the population of the world were treated to a rare astronomical event. For over six hours, the planet Venus steadily inched its way over the surface of the Sun. This “transit` of Venus was the first since 6 December 1882. On that occasion, the American astronomer Professor Simon Newcomb led a party to South Africa to observe the event. They were based at a girls’ school, where – if is alleged – the combined forces of three schoolmistresses outperformed the professionals with the accuracy of their observations.
2. For centuries, transits of Venus have drawn explorers and astronomers alike to the four corners of the globe. And you can put it all down to the extraordinary polymath Edmond Halley. In November 1677, Halley observed a transit of the innermost planet Mercury, from the desolate island of St Helena in the South Pacific. He realized that from different latitudes, the passage of the planet across the Sun’s disc would appear to differ. By timing the transit from two widely-separated locations, teams of astronomers could calculate the parallax angle – the apparent difference in position of an astronomical body due to a difference in the observer’s position. Calculating this angle would allow astronomers to measure what was then the ultimate goal; the distance of the Earth from the Sun. This distance is known as the ‘astronomical unit` or AU.
3. Halley was aware that the AU was one of the most fundamental of all astronomical measurements. Johannes Kepler, in the early 17th century, had shown that the distances of the planets from the Sun governed their orbital speeds, which were easily measurable. But no-one had found a way to calculate accurate distances to the planets from the Earth. The goal was to measure the AU; then, knowing the orbital speeds of all the other planets round the Sun, the scale of the Solar System would fall into place. However, Halley realized that Mercury was so far away that its parallax angle would be very difficult to determine. As Venus was closer to the Earth, its parallax angle would be larger and Halley worked out that by using Venus it would be possible to measure the Sun`s distance to 1 part in 500. But there was a problem: transits of Venus, unlike those of Mercury; are rare, occurring in pairs roughly eight years apart every hundred or so years. Nevertheless, he accurately predicted that Venus would cross the face of the Sun in both 1761 and 1769 – though he didn`t survive to see either.
4. Inspired by Halley’s suggestion of a way to pin down the scale of the Solar System, teams of British and French astronomers set out on expeditions to places as diverse as India and Siberia. But things weren’t helped by Britain and France being at war. The person who deserves most sympathy is the French astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil. He was thwarted by the fact that the British were besieging his observation site at Pondicherry in India. Fleeing on a French warship crossing the Indian Ocean, Le Gentil saw a wonderful transit – but the ship`s pitching and rolling ruled out any attempt at making accurate observations. Undaunted, he remained south of the equator, keeping himself busy by studying the islands of Mauritius and Madagascar before setting off to observe the next transit in the Philippines. Ironically after travelling nearly 50,000 kilometres, his view was clouded out at the last moment, a very dispiriting experience.
5. While the early transit timings were as precise as instruments would allow the measurements were dogged by the ‘black drop’ effect. When Venus begins to cross the Sun’s disc, it looks smeared not circular – which makes it difficult to establish timings. This is due to diffraction of light. The second problem is that Venus exhibits a halo of light when it is seen just outside the Sun’s disc. While this showed astronomers that Venus was surrounded by a thick layer of gases refracting sunlight around it, both effects made it impossible to obtain accurate timings.
6. But astronomers labored hard to analyze the results of these expeditions to observe Venus transits. Jonathan Franz Encke, Director of the Belin Observatory, finally determined a value for the AU based on all these parallax measurements: 153340,000 km. Reasonably accurate for the time, that is quite close to today’s value of 149,597,870 km, determined by radar, which has now superseded transits and all other methods in accuracy. The AU is a cosmic measuring rod, and the basis of how we scale the Universe today. The parallax principle can be extended to measure the distances to the stars. If we look at a star in January – when Earth is at one point in its orbit – it will seem to be in a different position from where it appears six months later. Knowing the width of Earth`s orbit, the parallax shift lets astronomers calculate the distance.
7. June 2004’s transit of Venus was thus more of an astronomical spectacle than a scientifically important event. But such transits have paved the way for what might prove to be one of the most vital breakthroughs in the cosmos – detecting Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars.
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.
1. examples of different ways in which the parallax principle has been applied
2. a description of an event which prevented a transit observation
3. a statement about potential future discoveries leading on from transit observations
4. a description of physical states connected with Venus which early astronomical instruments failed to overcome
Questions 18-21

Look at the following statements (Questions 18-21) and the list of people below.

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

Write the correct letter A, B, C or D. in boxes 18-21 on your answer sheet.
1. He calculated the distance of the Sun from the Earth based on observations of Venus with a fair degree of accuracy.
2. He understood that the distance of the Sun from the Earth could be worked out by comparing observations of a transit.
3. He realized that the time taken by a planet to go round the Sun depends on its distance from the Sun.
4. He witnessed a Venus transit but was unable to make any calculations.
List of People
1. Edmond Halley
2. Johannes Kepler
3. Guillaume Le Gentil
4. Johann Franz Encke
Questions 22-26

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

Write answers in boxes 22-26 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. Halley observed one transit of the planet Venus.
2. Le Gentil managed to observe a second Venus transit.
3. The shape of Venus appears distorted when it starts to pass in front of the Sun.
4. Early astronomers suspected that the atmosphere on Venus was toxic.
5. The parallax principle allows astronomers to work out how far away distant stars are from the Earth.
Reading Passage 3

A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently

In the last decade, a revolution has occurred in the way that scientists think about the brain. We now know that the decisions humans make can be traced to the firing patterns of neurons in specific parts of the brain. These discoveries have led to the field known as neuroeconomics, which studies the brain’s secrets to success in an economic environment that demands innovation and being able to do things differently from competitors. A brain that can do this is an iconoclastic one. Briefly, an iconociost is a person who does something that others say can’t be done.

This definition implies that iconoclasts are different from other people, but more precisely, it is their brains that are different in three distinct ways: perception, fear response, and social intelligence. Each of these three functions utilizes a different circuit in the brain. Naysayers might suggest that the brain is irrelevant, that thinking in an original, even revolutionary way is more a matter of personality than brain function. But the field of neuroeconomics was born out of the realization that the physical workings of the brain place limitations on the way we make decisions. By understanding these constraints, we begin to understand why some people march to a different drumbeat.

The first thing to realize is that the brain suffers from limited resources. It has a fixed energy budget, about the same as a 40 watt light bulb, so it has evolved to work as efficiently as possible. This is where most people are impeded from being an iconoclast. For example, when confronted with information streaming from the eyes, the brain will interpret this information in the quickest way possible. Thus it will draw on both past experience and any other source of information, such as what other people say, to make sense of what it is seeing. This happens all the time. The brain takes shortcuts that work so well we are hardly ever aware of them. We think our perceptions of the world are real, but they are only biological and electrical rumblings. Perception is not simply a product of what your eyes or ears transmit to your brain. More than the physical reality of photons or sound waves, perception is a product of the brain.

Perception is central to iconoclasm. Iconoclasts see things differently to other people. Their brains do not fall into efficiency pitfalls as much as the average person’s brain. Iconoclasts, either because they were born that way or through learning, have found ways to work around the perceptual shortcuts that plague most people. Perception is not something that is hardwired into the brain. It is a learned process, which is both a curse and an opportunity for change. The brain faces the fundamental problem of interpreting physical stimuli from the senses.

Everything the brain sees, hears, or touches has multiple interpretations. The one that is ultimately chosen is simply the brain’s best theory. ln technical terms, these conjectures have their basis in the statistical likelihood of one interpretation over another and are heavily influenced by past experience and, importantly for potential iconoclasts what other people say.

The best way to see things differently to other people is to bombard the brain with things it has never encountered before. Novelty releases the perceptual process from the chains of past experience and forces the brain to make new judgments. Successful iconoclasts have an extraordinary willingness to be exposed to what is fresh and different. Observation of iconoclasts shows that they embrace novelty while most people avoid things that are different.

The problem with novelty, however, is that it tends to trigger the brain’s fear system. Fear is a major impediment to thinking like an iconoclast and stops the average person in his tracks. There are many types of fear, but the two that inhibit iconoclastic thinking and people generally find difficult to deal with are fear of uncertainty and fear of public ridicule. These may seem like trivial phobias. But fear of public speaking, which everyone must do from time to time, afflicts one-third of the population. This makes it too common to be considered a mental disorder. It is simply a common variant of human nature, one which iconoclasts do not let inhibit their reactions.

Finally, to be successful iconoclasts, individuals must sell their ideas to other people. This is where social intelligence comes in. Social intelligence is the ability to understand and manage people in a business setting. ln the last decade, there has been an explosion of knowledge about the social brain and how the brain works when groups coordinate decision making. Neuroscience has revealed which brain circuits are responsible for functions like understanding what other people think, empathy, fairness, and social identity. These brain regions play key roles in whether people convince others of their ideas. Perception is important in social cognition too. The perception of someone’s enthusiasm, or reputation, can make or break a deal. Understanding how perception becomes intertwined with social decision making shows why successful iconoclasts are so rare.

Iconoclasts create new opportunities in every area from artistic expression to technology to business They supply creativity and innovation not easily accomplished by committees. Rules aren’t important to them. Iconoclasts face alienation and failure, but can also be a major asset to any organization. It is crucial for success in any field to understand how the iconoclastic mind works.

Questions 27-31

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

Write the correct letter in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.
1. Neuroeconomics is a field of study which seeks to
  1. cause a change in how scientists understand brain chemistry.
  2. understand how good decisions are made in the brain.
  3. understand how the brain is linked to achievement in competitive fields.
  4. trace the specific firing patterns of neurones in different areas of the brain.
2. According to the writer, iconoclasts are distinctive because
  1. they create unusual brain circuits.
  2. their brains function differently.
  3. their personalities are distinctive.
  4. they make decisions easily.
3. According to the writer, the brain works efficiently because
  1. it uses the eyes quickly.
  2. it interprets data logically.
  3. it generates its own energy.
  4. it relies on previous events.
4. The writer says that perception is
  1. combination of photons and sound waves.
  2. reliable product of what your senses transmit.
  3. result of brain processes.
  4. process we are usually conscious of.
5. According to the writer an iconoclastic thinker
  1. centralizes perceptual thinking in one part of the brain.
  2. avoids cognitive traps.
  3. has a brain that is hardwired for learning.
  4. has more opportunities than the average person.
Questions 32-37

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

In boxes 32-37 on your answer sheet, write:
- YES. if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
- NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
- NOT GIVEN if is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
1. Exposure to different events forces the brain to think differently.
2. iconoclasts are unusually receptive to new experiences.
3. Most people are too shy to try different things.
4. If you think in an iconoclastic way, you can easily overcome fear.
5. When concern about embarrassment matters less, other fears become irrelevant.
6. Fear of public speaking is a psychological illness.
Questions 38-40

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

Write the correct letter A-E, in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.
1. Thinking like a successful iconoclast is demanding because it.
2. The concept of the social brain is useful to iconoclasts because it.
3. Iconoclasts are generally an asset because their way of thinking.
  1. requires both perceptual and social intelligence skills.
  2. focuses on how groups decide on an action.
  3. works in many fields, both artistic and scientific.
  4. eaves one open to criticism and rejection.
  5. involves understanding how organizations manage people.
Reading Passage 1 Children With Auditory Problems Answers
1. H
2. C
3. B
4. I
5. D
6. A
7. two decades
8. crowd (noise)
9. invisible (disabilities)
10. objective 3
11. A
12. C
13. C
Reading Passage 2 Venus in Transit Answers
1. F
2. D
3. G
4. E
5. D
6. A
7. B
8. C
9. false
10. false
11. true
12. not given
13. true
Reading Passage 3 A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently Answers
1. C
2. B
3. D
4. C
5. B
6. yes
7. yes
8. not given
9. no
10. not given
11. no
12. A
13. B
14. C
August 31, 2023
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.

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.

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.

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
August 31, 2023
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.
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
August 31, 2023
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-zappers B atoms C storm clouds
D mirrors E technique F ions
G rockets H 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
August 31, 2023

Cambridge IELTS 8 Academic Reading Test 2

Reading Passage 1

Sheet glass manufacture: the float process

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.

Method	Advantages	Disadvantages

(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

The metal used in the float process had to have specific properties.
Pilkington invested some of his own money in his float plant.
Pilkington’s first full-scale plant was an instant commercial success.
The process invented by Pilkington has now been improved.
Computers are better than humans at detecting faults in glass.

Reading Passage 2

The Little Ice Age

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 aphids	B agricultural	C cellulose	D exchanging
E energy	F fertilizers	G food	H Fungi
I growing	J interbreeding	K natural	L other species
M secretions	N sustainable	O environment

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

List of Headings

The results of the research into blood-variants
Dental Evidence
Greenberg’s analysis of the dental and linguistic evidence
Developments in the methods used to study early population movements
Indian migration from Canada to the U.S.A.
Further genetic evidence relating to the three-wave theory
Long-standing questions about prehistoric migration to America
Conflicting views of the three-wave theory, based on non-genetic evidence
Questions about the causes of prehistoric migration to America
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.

Route	Period (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

the first wave
the second wave
the third wave

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

Name of group	Wave number
Inuit	22……………………………..
Apache	23……………………………..
Prima-Papago	24……………………………..
Ticuna	25……………………………..

Questions 26

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

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

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 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 Noise	Predictable Noise	Average
Loud Noise	40.1	31.8	35.9
Soft Noise	36.7	27.4	32.1
Average	38.4	29.6

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

Forest problems of Mediterranean countries are to be discussed at the next meeting of experts.
Problems in Nordic countries were excluded because they are outside the European – Economic Community.
Forests are a renewable source of raw material.
The biological functions of forests were recognised only in the twentieth century.
Natural forests still exist in parts of Europe.
Forest policy should be limited by national boundaries.
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.

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

Resolution 1
Resolution 2
Resolution 3
Resolution 4
Resolution 5
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 unpopular	B teaching	C lesson
D authoritarian	E unpopular	F ritual
G unspectacular	H placebo	I Involved
J appropriate	K well known

Reading Passage 1 Sheet glass manufacture: the float process Answers

spinning
(perfectly) unblemished
labour/labor-intensive
thickness
marked
(molten) glass
(molten) tin/metal
rollers
TRUE
NOT GIVEN
FALSE
TRUE
TRUE

Reading Passage 2 The Little Ice Age Answers

Reading Passage 3 The meaning and power of smell Answers

viii
ii
vi
i
iii
v
C
A
C
D
clothing
vocabulary
chemicals
cultures

August 29, 2023

Cambridge IELTS 8 Academic Reading Test 1

Reading Passage 1

A Chronicle of Timekeeping

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.

a description of an early timekeeping invention affected by cold temperatures
an explanation of the importance of geography in the development of the calendar in farming communities
a description of the origins of the pendulum clock
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.

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

List of Nationalities

Babylonians
Egyptians
Greeks
English
Germans
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

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

Disobeying FAA Regulations
Aviation disaster prompts action
Two coincidental developments
Setting Altitude Zones
An oversimplified view
Controlling pilots’ licence
Defining airspace categories
Setting rules to weather conditions
Taking of Safety
First step towards ATC

Paragraph A

Example Answer
Paragraph B X

Paragraph C
Paragraph D
Paragraph E
Paragraph F
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

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

Reading Passage 3

Telepathy

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.

Researchers with differing attitudes towards telepathy agree on
Reports of experiences during meditation indicated
Attitudes to parapsychology would alter drastically with
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/ Date	Description	Result	Flas
Ganzfeld studies 1982	involved 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 it	hit rates were higher than with random guessing	positive 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 tests	the 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

D
B
F
E
B
F
D
A
(ships’s) anchor
(escape) wheel
tooth
(long) pendulum
second

Reading Passage 2 Air Traffic Control in The USA Answers

ii
iii
v
iv
viii
vii
false
false
not given
true
true
false
true

Reading Passage 3 Telepathy Answers

E
B
A
F
sender
picture/ image
receiver
sensory leakage
fraud
computers
human involvement
meta-analysis
lack of consistency
big/ large enough

August 27, 2023

Cambridge IELTS 7 Academic Reading Test 4

Reading Passage 1

Pulling Strings to Build Pyramids

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

It is generally believed that large numbers of people were needed to build the pyramids.
Clemmons found a strange hieroglyph on the wall of an Egyptian monument.
Gharib had previously done experiments on bird flight.
Gharib and Graff tested their theory before applying it.
The success of the actual experiment was due to the high speed of the wind.
They found that, as the kite flew higher, the wind force got stronger.
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

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

The inhabitants of the Aleutian islands renamed their islands ‘Aleyska’.
Alaska’s fisheries are owned by some of the world’s largest companies.
Life in Alaska is dependent on salmon.
Ninety per cent of all Pacific salmon caught are sockeye or pink salmon.
More than 320,000 tonnes of salmon were caught in Alaska in 2000.
Between 1940 and 1959, there was a sharp decrease in Alaska’s salmon population.
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.

to recognise fisheries that care for the environment.
to be successful.
to stop fish from spawning.
to set up environmental protection laws.
to stop people fishing for sports
to label their products using the MSC logo.
to ensure that fish numbers are sufficient to permit fishing.
to assist the subsistence communities in the region.
to freeze a huge number of salmon eggs.
to deny certification to the Alaska fisheries.
to close down all the fisheries

In Alaska, biologists keep a check on adult fish …..
Biologists have the authority …..
In-Season Abundance-Based Management has allowed the Alaska salmon fisheries …..
The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) was established …..
As a result of the collapse of the salmon runs in 1999, the state decided …..
In September 2000, the MSC allowed seven Alaska salmon companies …..

Reading Passage 3

Effects Of Noise

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 Noise	Predictable Noise	Average
Loud Noise	40.1	31.8	35.9
Soft Noise	36.7	27.4	32.1
Average	38.4	29.6

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

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.
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.
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 over	B unexpected	C intense	D the same amount of	E performed better than
F performed at about the same level as	G no	H showed more irritation than	I made more mistakes than	J 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.

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

List of Researchers

Glass and Singer
Broadbent
Finke man and Glass
Cohen et al.
None of the above

Reading Passage 1 Pulling Strings to Build Pyramids Answers

true
false
not given
true
false
not given
true
(wooden) pulleys
stone
(accomplished) sailors
(modern) glider
flight
messages

Reading Passage 2 Endless Harvest Answers

false
not given
true
not given
true
true
false
G
E
B
A
K
F

Reading Passage 3 Effects of Noise Answers

August 25, 2023

Cambridge IELTS 7 Academic Reading Test 3

Reading Passage 1

Ant Intelligence

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.

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

Ants use the same channels of communication as humans do.
City life is one factor that encourages the development of intelligence.
Ants can build large cities more quickly than humans do.
Some ants can find their way by making calculations based on distance and position.
In one experiment, foraging teams were able to use their sense of smell to find food.
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 aphids	B agricultural	C cellulose	D exchanging
E energy	F fertilizers	G food	H Fungi
I growing	J interbreeding	K natural	L other species
M secretions	N sustainable	O environment

Reading Passage 2

Population Movement and Genetics

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

The results of the research into blood-variants
Dental Evidence
Greenberg’s analysis of the dental and linguistic evidence
Developments in the methods used to study early population movements
Indian migration from Canada to the U.S.A.
Further genetic evidence relating to the three-wave theory
Long-standing questions about prehistoric migration to America
Conflicting views of the three-wave theory, based on non-genetic evidence
Questions about the causes of prehistoric migration to America
How analysis of blood-variants measures the closeness of the relationship between different populations

Paragraph A
Paragraph B
Paragraph C
Paragraph D
Paragraph E
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.

Route	Period (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

the first wave
the second wave
the third wave

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

Name of group	Wave number
Inuit	22……………………………..
Apache	23……………………………..
Prima-Papago	24……………………………..
Ticuna	25……………………………..

Questions 26

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

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

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

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

Forest problems of Mediterranean countries are to be discussed at the next meeting of experts.
Problems in Nordic countries were excluded because they are outside the European – Economic Community.
Forests are a renewable source of raw material.
The biological functions of forests were recognised only in the twentieth century.
Natural forests still exist in parts of Europe.
Forest policy should be limited by national boundaries.
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.

Resolution 1
Resolution 2
Resolution 3
Resolution 4
Resolution 5
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.

A spectacular unpopular	B teaching	C lesson
D authoritarian	E unpopular	F ritual
G unspectacular	H placebo	I Involved
J appropriate	K well known

Reading Passage 1 Ant Intelligence Answers

FALSE
TRUE
NOT GIVEN
TRUE
FALSE
NOT GIVEN
C
M
F
D
N
O
E

Reading Passage 2 Population Movement and Genetics Answers

Reading Passage 3 Plans to protect the forests of Europe Answers

not given
false
true
false
false
false
true
J
A
E
B
G
D
B

August 24, 2023

A tariffs	B components	C container ships
D output	E employees	F insurance costs
G trade	H freightI fares	J software
K international standards

A cloud-zappers	B atoms	C storm clouds
D mirrors	E technique	F ions
G rockets	H conductors	I thunder

Tag: Environment (IELTS)

Reading Passage 1

Australia’s Sporting Success

Questions 1-7

Questions 8-11

Questions 12 and 13

Reading Passage 2

Delivering The Goods

Questions 14-17

Questions 18-22

Questions 23-26

THE TRANSPORT REVOLUTION

Reading Passage 3

Climate change and the Inuit

Questions 27-32

Questions 33-40

Reading Passage 1

Children With Auditory Problems

Questions 1-6

Questions 7-10

Questions 11-12

Questions 13

Question 8-13

Reading Passage 2

Venus in Transit

Questions 14-17

Questions 18-21

Questions 22-26

Reading Passage 3

A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently

Questions 27-31

Questions 32-37

Questions 38-40

Reading Passage 1

William Henry Perkin

Question 1-7

Question 8-13

Reading Passage 2

Is there anybody out there?

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence

Questions 14—17

Question 18-20

Questions 22-26

Reading Passage 3

The History of The Tortoise

Questions 27-30

Questions 31-33

Questions 34-39

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

Questions 40

Reading Passage 1

Land of the rising sum

Questions 1-5

Questions 6-9

Questions 10-13

Reading Passage 2

Biological Control of Pests

Questions 14-17

Questions 18-21

Questions 22-26

Reading Passage 3

Collecting Ant Specimens

Questions 27-30

Questions 31-36

Questions 37-40

Reading Passage 1

Striking Back at Lightning With Lasers

Questions 1-3

Questions 4-6

Questions 7-10

Questions 11-13

Reading Passage 2

The Nature of Genius

Questions 14-18

Reading Passage 3

How Does The Biological Clock Tick?

Questions 27-32

Questions 33-36

Questions 37-40

Reading Passage 1