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THE BIG CATS AT THE SHARJAH BREEDING CENTRE IELTS READING

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Reading passage 1

It is one of the few places where you will be able to spot them all at the same time… the Arabian wolf, an African cheetah, an Arabian leopard, an oryx, a gazelle. These are just some of the animals, which, on the brink of extinction, are now getting a new lease of life thanks to the exemplary work being done at the Breeding Centre for Endangered Arabian Wildlife in Sharjah.

Sharjah is one of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates. The Breeding Centre’s expertise and facilities have made it a prime destination for illegally imported animals confiscated by UAE and Sharjah authorities. In the last four years, more than 900 mammals and reptiles and 969 birds have arrived at the centre, including 25 North African cheetahs, Houbara bustard and falcons, lions, a baby Nile crocodile and a Burmese python that was left in a rental car at the airport.

The 25 cheetahs were all imported illegally into the UAE and were intercepted at the UAE harbour and airport entry points. They nearly all arrived malnourished, dehydrated and highly stressed after long voyages stuffed into boxes, crates and suitcases. Now they are bright and full of energy. The Centre’s efforts have also been rewarded when the first cheetah mating took place at the end of 2002. Playing matchmaker with these beautiful creatures is no easy task – successful breeding requires considerable patience and intimate knowledge of each animal’s personality, and it is the result of intensive and expert management of each animal within the group as well as of the group as a whole.

Because this group was still young and inexperienced in courtship matters, the keepers had to make the introductions only after careful planning and management, much like the lead role in a Jane Austen novel. The female cheetahs were initially intimidated by the presence of the male; however, as they advance to oestrus, the roles are reversed and the male cheetah becomes too wary to approach during the female’s most receptive phase of the cycle. It is the responsibility of the keeper therefore to monitor each individual and to be able to respond to any indication from the cheetahs that the time is right for introducing a pair. The close bond that invariably develops between the keeper and the cheetahs enables the keeper to spot even the most subtle signs from the animals in their care. The trust between keeper and animal has also allowed the opportunity to study cellular changes in the sexual organs of the females during the hormonal cycles that occur prior to reproduction.

The Breeding Centre’s cheetahs are also participants in the European breeding programme, which aims to ensure that the genetic diversity of this endangered species is maintained and expanded by breeding as many founder animals as possible to introduce new bloodlines into the captive population. In this way, the group held at the centre plays a very important role in the future health of the international captive population, as they are potentially all new founders. Also very important for the Sharjah Breeding Centre is the leopard-breeding programme.

The Arabian leopard, Panthera pardus nimr, is critically endangered around the world and particularly in the Arabian peninsula, where it was once found throughout the coastal mountain ranges. Activities like hunting, trapping and habitat destruction has reduced their range to a few isolated and fragmented populations in Oman, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

In the 1980s, a captive breeding programme was established near Muscat with the capture of three leopards in southwestern Oman. The breeding programme in the UAE was initiated by the Arabian Leopard Trust and started with the arrival of two mature specimens: a male Arabian leopard from Yemen and a female on breeding loan from Oman in 1995. The arrival of these two animals led to the construction of the Breeding Centre in which the leopard has played the role of flagship species.

Today there are twelve leopards at the Breeding centre, eight of which have been born at the centre since the first cub in 1998. Once more, the secret to the centre’s success is the close relationship between animal and keeper. The leopard is usually shy and secretive with people around, but here they react positively to the presence of their keepers, approaching the fence so they can be talked to or scratched behind an ear.

The bond is particularly important during breeding season, when keepers decide to introduce pairs to each other. Male leopards are known to have killed their partners on introduction, so it is essential for the keeper to understand the leopards’ behaviour to decide when it is safe to do so. The trust is also important if keepers need to enter dens to check on and monitor the cub’s growth. Leopard females have been known to kill their cubs if the dens have been disturbed, but the centre’s leopards are quite comfortable with the staff handling the new generation of cubs.



Questions 1-8
Use the information in the text to match the statements (1 – 8) with the animals (A – D). Write the appropriate letter (A – D) in boxes 1 – 8 on your answer sheet. Write:

A if the statement refers to cheetahs at the Breeding Centre.
B if the statement refers to leopards at the Breeding Centre.
C if the statement refers to both cheetahs and leopards at the Breeding Centre.
D If the statement refers to neither cheetahs nor leopards at the Breeding Centre.

Example : These animals are endangered Answer: C

1 These animals were smuggled into the UAE.
2 At first these animals did not adapt to life at the Sharjah Breeding Centre
3 These animals are regarded as the most important animal at the Centre.
4 Half of these animals were born at the Breeding centre.
5 These animals can be dangerous to one another.
6 The role of the keeper is vital in the breeding programme of these animals.
7 The first of these animals at the Breeding Centre were relatively young.
8 It is normally difficult for humans to approach these animals.



Questions 9-13
Complete the summary below. Choose your answers from the box below the summary and write them in boxes 9- 12 on your answer sheet. NB There are more words than spaces, so you will not use them at all.


SUMMARY
The Sharjah Breeding Centre now has a variety of animals including birds, mammals and (9)………………… As its name suggests, the Centre is primarily involved in breeding and (10)………………… the numbers of the species housed there whilst still maintaining the (11)………………… of bloodlines in order to retain genetic health. In spite of problems involving the complex (12)……………………………… of the animals, a fair amount of (13) ………………has been achieved with North African cheetahs and Arabian leopards.


reptilesvarietybehavioursuccesscreating
expandingdifficultydiversityactionhabitat
seasonfishchangeworkingprogramme

Reading passage 2

Insomnia – The Enemy of Sleep

A It is not unusual to have sleep troubles from time to time. But, if you feel you do not get enough sleep or satisfying sleep, you may have insomnia, a sleep disorder. People with insomnia have one or more of the following: difficulty falling asleep, waking up often during the night and having trouble going back to sleep, waking up too early in the morning and unrefreshing sleep. Insomnia is not defined by the number of hours you sleep every night. The amount of sleep a person needs varies. While most people need between 7 and 8 hours of sleep a night, some people do well with less, and some need more.

B Insomnia occurs most frequently in people over age 60, in people with a history of depression, and in women, especially after menopause. Severe emotional trauma can also cause insomnia with divorced, widowed and separated people being the most likely to suffer from this sleep disorder. Stress, anxiety, illness and other sleep disorders such as restless legs syndrome are the most common causes of insomnia. An irregular work schedule, jet lag or brain damage from a stroke or Alzeimer’s disease can also cause insomnia as well as excessive use of alcohol or illicit drugs. It can also accompany a variety of mental illnesses.

C The mechanism that induces sleep is not known. When it becomes dark, the pineal gland in the brain secretes a hormone called melatonin, which is thought to induce sleep. Exactly why sleep is necessary for good health and efficient mental functioning is unknown. We do know that sleep consists of two very different states: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-REM sleep. In REM sleep, dreams occur, the eyes move under the closed lids and there is an increase in oxygen consumption, blood flow and neural activity. REM sleep occurs four or five times during a night. Beginning periods last about ten to fifteen minutes but the periods get longer as the night goes on. The periods of REM sleep alternate with longer periods of non-REM sleep, when body functions slow. Non-REM sleep has four stages. During the deepest stages (3 and 4) it is hard to rouse a sleeper. As the night goes on, the periods of non-REM sleep become progressively lighter. Sleep in stages 1 and 2 are felt to be restorative as during this time the body repairs itself utilising a hormone called somatostatin. Lack of stage 4 sleep is believed to be important in chronically painful conditions such as fibromyalgia.

D Healthcare providers diagnose insomnia in several ways. One way is to categorize insomnia by how often it occurs. Another way is to identify the insomnia by what is causing the sleep deprivation. The two main types of insomnia have been described as Primary Insomnia and Secondary Insomnia. Primary Insomnia is a chronic condition with little apparent association with stress or a medical problem. The most common form of primary insomnia is psychophysiological insomnia. Secondary insomnia is caused by symptoms that accompany a medical condition such as anxiety, depression or pain.

E Improving one’s sleep hygiene helps improve insomnia in all patients. Relaxing during the hour before you go to sleep and creating a comfortable environment suited for sleep can be helpful. Older people who wake up earlier than normal or have trouble falling asleep may need less sleep than they used to. Changing one’s sleep pattern, either by going to bed later or waking up earlier, can be effective in dealing with insomnia in older people. Therapy also depends on the cause and severity of the insomnia. Transient and intermittent insomnia may not require any direct action since these conditions last only a few days at a time. However, if insomnia interferes with a person’s daily activities, something should be done. Usually the best method of dealing with insomnia is by attacking the underlying cause. For example, people who are depressed often have insomnia and looking at this problem may eliminate it.

F Not getting enough sleep can make you less productive, irritable and unable to concentrate. Lack of sleep can make it seem as if you “got up out of the wrong side of the bed.” Early morning headaches and waking up feeling as if you never went to sleep can result in frustration. Stress can cause insomnia but insomnia also increases stress. Insomnia can make driving unsafe as well. Insomnia can result in missed work, which can cause you to become less productive and miss promotions. It can leave you feeling as if you just can’t get enough done. Insomnia can also mask serious mental disorders. People with insomnia may think that not getting enough sleep is their only problem, but the insomnia may actually be one symptom of a larger disorder, such as depression. Studies show that people with insomnia are four times more likely to be depressed than people with a healthy sleeping pattern. In addition, lack of sleep can tax the heart and lead to serious conditions like heart disease. All of these are important problems that can affect every part of your life.

G Establishing certain set routines can help insomniacs get better sleep. Examples of these routines include: going to bed and getting up at the same time every day, avoiding napping, avoiding caffeine, nicotine, alcohol and eating heavily late in the day, exercising regularly and making your bedroom comfortable in terms of the bed, noise and temperature. Insomniacs should also only use their bedroom for sleep so that their bodies associate the room with sleep. Finally, if you can’t get to sleep, don’t toss and turn all night. Get up and read or do something that is not overly stimulating until you feel really sleepy again.



Questions 14-19
The reading passage on Insomnia has 7 paragraphs (A – G). From the list of headings below choose the most suitable headings for paragraphs B – G. Write the appropriate number (i – xi) in boxes 14 – 19 on your answer sheet.
NB There are more headings than paragraphs, so you will not use them all. Example: Paragraph A iv


List of headings
i. The Role of Sleep
ii. Insomnia Medication
iii. Habits to Promote a Good Night’s Sleep
iv. What is Insomnia
v. Complications for Insomniacs
vi. Government Action
vii. Available Treatment for Insomnia
viii. The Causes of Insomnia
ix. Therapy Solutions
x. Types of Insomnia
xi. Current Research

14 Paragraph B
15 Paragraph C
16 Paragraph D
17 Paragraph E
18 Paragraph F
19 Paragraph G

Questions 20-27
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer of the reading passage on Insomnia? In Boxes 20 – 27 write:
YES if the statement agrees with the writer
NO if the statement doesn’t agree with the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

20 Someone who only gets four hours of sleep a night must be suffering from insomnia.
21 Travelling can cause insomnia.
22 REM sleep is felt to be the most important for the body’s rest.
23 Secondary insomnia is far more common than primary insomnia.
24 Sufferers of insomnia can attend specialist sleep clinics.
25 Many people suffering from insomnia don’t realise that they suffer from it.
26 There is no actual correlation linking insomnia and depression.
27 Sleeping during the day can make insomnia worse.



Reading passage 3

Alternative Farming Methods in Oregon

Onion growers in eastern Oregon are adopting a system that saves water and keeps topsoil in place, while producing the highest quality “super colossal” onions. Pear growers in southern Oregon have reduced their use of some of the most toxic pesticides by up to two-thirds, and are still producing top-quality pears. Range managers throughout the state have controlled the poisonous weed tansy ragwort with insect predators and saved the Oregon livestock industry up to $4.8 million a year.

These are some of the results Oregon growers have achieved in collaboration with Oregon State University (OSU) researchers as they test new farming methods including integrated pest management (IPM). Nationwide, however, IPM has not delivered results comparable to those in Oregon. A recent U.S General Accounting Office (GAO) report indicates that while integrated pest management can result in dramatically reduced pesticide use, the federal government has been lacking in effectively promoting that goal and implementing IPM. Farmers also blame the government for not making the new options of pest management attractive. “Wholesale changes in the way that farmers control the pests on their farms is an expensive business.” Tony Brown, of the National Farmers Association says. “If the farmers are given tax breaks to offset the expenditure, then they would willingly accept the new practices.” The report goes on to note that even though the use of the riskiest pesticides has declined nationwide, they still make up more than 40 percent of all pesticides used today; and national pesticide use has risen by 40 million kilograms since 1992. “Our food supply remains the safest and highest quality on Earth but we continue to overdose our farmland with powerful and toxic pesticides and to under-use the safe and effective alternatives,” charged Patrick Leahy, who commissioned the report. Green action groups disagree about the safety issue. “There is no way that habitual consumption of foodstuffs grown using toxic chemicals of the nature found on today’s farms can be healthy for consumers,” noted Bill Bowler, spokesman for Green Action, one of many lobbyists interested in this issue.

The GAO report singles out Oregon’s apple and pear producers who have used the new IPM techniques with growing success. Although Oregon is clearly ahead of the nation, scientists at OSU are taking the Government Accounting Office criticisms seriously. “We must continue to develop effective alternative practices that will reduce environmental hazards and produce high quality products,” said Paul Jepson, a professor of entomology at OSU and new director of OSU’s Integrated Plant Protection Centre (IPPC). The IPPC brings together scientists from OSU’s Agricultural Experiment Station, OSU Extension service, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Oregon farmers to help develop agricultural systems that will save water and soil, and reduce pesticides. In response to the GAO report, the Centre is putting even more emphasis on integrating research and farming practices to improve Oregon agriculture environmentally and economically.

“The GAO report criticizes agencies for not clearly communicating the goals of IPM,” said Jepson. “Our challenge is to greatly improve the communication to and from growers, to learn what works and what doesn’t. The work coming from OSU researchers must be adopted in the field and not simply languish in scientific journals.”

In Oregon, growers and scientists are working together to instigate new practices. For example, a few years ago scientists at OSU’s Malheur Experiment Station began testing a new drip irrigation system to replace old ditches that wasted water and washed soil and fertilizer into streams. The new system cut water and fertilizer use by half,
kept topsoil in place and protected water quality. In addition, the new system produced crops of very large onions, rated “super colossal” and highly valued by the restaurant industry and food processors. Art Pimms, one of the researchers at Malheur comments: “Growers are finding that when they adopt more environmentally benign practices, they can have excellent results. The new practices benefit the environment and give the growers their success.”

OSU researchers in Malheur next tested straw mulch and found that it successfully held soil in place and kept the ground moist with less irrigation. In addition, and unexpectedly, the scientists found that the mulched soil created a home for beneficial beetles and spiders that prey on onion thrips – a notorious pest in commercial onion fields – a discovery that could reduce the need for pesticides. “I would never have believed that we could replace the artificial pest controls that we had before and still keep our good results,” commented Steve Black, a commercial onion farmer in Oregon, “but instead we have actually surpassed expectations.”

OSU researchers throughout the state have been working to reduce dependence on broad- spectrum chemical sprays that are toxic to many kind of organisms, including humans. “Consumers are rightly putting more and more pressure on the industry to change its reliance on chemical pesticides, but they still want a picture-perfect product,” said Rick Hilton, entomologist at OSU’s Southern Oregon Research and Extension Centre, where researchers help pear growers reduce the need for highly toxic pesticides. Picture perfect pears are an important product in Oregon and traditionally they have required lots of chemicals. In recent years, the industry has faced stiff competition from overseas producers, so any new methods that growers adopt must make sense economically as well as environmentally. Hilton is testing a growth regulator that interferes with the molting of codling moth larvae. Another study used pheromone dispensers to disrupt codling moth mating. These and other methods of integrated pest management have allowed pear growers to reduce their use of organophosphates by two-thirds and reduce all other synthetic pesticides by even more and still produce top-quality pears. These and other studies around the state are part of the effort of the IPPC to find alternative farming practices that benefit both the economy and the environment.



Questions 28-35
Match the views (28 – 35) with the people listed below.

28 There is a double advantage to the new techniques.
29 Expectations of end users of agricultural products affect the products.
30 The work on developing these alternative techniques is not finished.
31 Eating food that has had chemicals used in its production is dangerous to our health.
32 Changing current farming methods is not a cheap process.
33 Results have exceeded anticipations.
34 The research done should be translated into practical projects.
35 The U.S. produces the best food in the world.

Questions 36-40
Read the passage about alternative farming methods in Oregon again and look at the statements below. In boxes 36 – 40 on your answer sheet write:
TRUE if the statement is true
FALSE if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the advertisement

36 Integrated Pest Management has generally been regarded as a success in the US.
37 Oregon farmers of apples and pears have been promoted as successful examples of Integrated Pest Management.
38 The IPPC uses scientists from different organisations.
39 Straw mulch experiments produced unplanned benefits.
40 The apple industry is now facing a lot of competition from abroad.

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SHEET GLASS MANUFACTURE IELTS READING : THE FLOAT PROCESS

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Reading passage 1

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, 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 net 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 per cent 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.

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

9 The metal used in the float process had to have specific properties.
10 Pilkington invested some of his own money in his float plant.
11 Pilkington’s first full-scale plant was an instant commercial success.
12 The process invented by Pilkington has now been improved.
13 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 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.

List of Headings

i Predicting climatic changes
ii The relevance of the Little Ice Age today
iii How cities contribute to climate change
iv Human impact on the climate
v How past climatic conditions can be determined
vi A growing need for weather records
vii A study covering a thousand years
viii People have always responded to climate change
ix Enough food at last

Example Answer
Paragraph A. Answer: viii
Paragraph C. Answer: v

14. Paragraph B
15 Paragraph D
16 Paragraph E
17 Paragraph F

Questions 18-22
Complete the summary using the list of words, A—I, below. Write the correct letter, A—I, in boxes 18-22 on your answer sheet.
Weather during the Little Ice Age

Documentation of past weather condition is limited: our main sources of knowledge of conditions in the distant past are (18)………………. and (19)………………… . We can deduce that the Little Ice Age was a time of (20)………………..… , rather than of consistent freezing. Within it there were some periods of very cold winters, others of (21)…………. and heavy rain, and yet others that saw (22)……………………. with no rain at all.

A. climatic shift
D. glaciers
G. heat waves		B. ice cores
E. interaction
H. storms		C. tree rings
F. weather observations
I. written accounts

Questions 23-26
Classify the following events as occurring during the

A Medieval Warm Period
B Little Ice Age
C Modem Warm Period

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

23 Many Europeans started farming abroad.
24 The cutting down of trees began to affect the climate.
25 Europeans discovered other lands.
26 Changes took place in fishing patterns.



Reading passage 3. The meaning and power of smell

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 proper 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.



Questions 27-32
Reading Passage 3 has six paragraphs, A—F. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, i—viii, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i The difficulties of talking about smells
ii The role of smell in personal relationships
iii Future studies into smell
iv The relationship between the brain and the nose
v The interpretation of smells as a factor in defining groups
vi Why our sense of smell is not appreciated
vii Smell is our superior sense
viii The relationship between smell and feelings

27 Paragraph A
28 Paragraph B
29 Paragraph C
30 Paragraph D
31 Paragraph E
32 Paragraph F

Questions 33-36
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in boxes 33-36 on your answer sheet.

33 According to the introduction, we become aware of the importance of smell when
A we discover a new smell
B we experience a powerful smell
C our ability to smell is damaged
D we are surrounded by odours

34 The experiment described in paragraph B
A shows how we make use of smell without realising it
B demonstrates that family members have a similar smell
C proves that a sense of smell is learnt
D compares the sense of smell in males and females

35 What is the writer doing in paragraph C?
A supporting other research
B making a proposal
C rejecting a common belief
D describing limitations

36 What does the writer suggest about the study of smell in the atmosphere in paragraph E?
A The measurement of smell is becoming more accurate
B Researchers believe smell is a purely physical reaction
C Most smells are inoffensive
D Smell is yet to be defined

Questions 37-40
Complete the sentences below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. 37 Tests have shown that odours can help people recognise the… belonging to their husbands and wives.

38 Certain linguistic groups may have difficulty describing smell because they lack the appropriate……………

39 The sense of smell may involve response to… which do not smell, in addition to obvious odours.

40 Odours regarded as unpleasant in certain are not regarded as unpleasant in others.

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SENDING MONEY HOME IELTS READING

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Reading passage 1
The economics of migrant remittances

A. Every year millions of migrants travel vast distances using borrowed money for their airfares and taking little or no cash with them. They seek a decent job to support themselves with money left over that they can send home to their families in developing countries. These remittances exceeded $400 billion last year. It is true that the actual rate per person is only about $200 per month but it all adds up to about triple the amount officially spent on development aid.

B. In some of the poorer, unstable or conflict-torn countries, these sums of money are a lifeline – the only salvation for those left behind. The decision to send money home is often inspired by altruism – an unselfish desire to help others. Then again, the cash might simply be an exchange for earlier services rendered by the recipients or it could be intended for investment by the recipients. Often it will be repayment of a loan used to finance the migrant’s travel and resettlement.

C. At the first sign of trouble, political or financial upheaval, these personal sources of support do not suddenly dry up like official investment monies. Actually, they increase in order to ease the hardship and suffering of the migrants’ families and, unlike development aid, which is channelled through government or other official agencies, remittances go straight to those in need. Thus, they serve an insurance role, responding in a countercyclical way to political and economic crises.

D. This flow of migrant money has a huge economic and social impact on the receiving countries. It provides cash for food, housing and necessities. It funds education and healthcare and contributes towards the upkeep of the elderly. Extra money is sent for special events such as weddings, funerals or urgent medical procedures and other emergencies. Occasionally it becomes the capital for starting up a small enterprise.

E. Unfortunately, recipients hardly ever receive the full value of the money sent back home because of exorbitant transfer fees. Many money transfer companies and banks operate on a fixed fee, which is unduly harsh for those sending small sums at a time. Others charge a percentage, which varies from around 8% to 20% or more dependent on the recipient country. There are some countries where there is a low fixed charge per transaction; however, these cheaper fees are not applied internationally because of widespread concern over money laundering. Whether this is a genuine fear or just an excuse is hard to say. If the recipients live in a small village somewhere, usually the only option is to obtain their money through the local post office. Regrettably, many governments allow post offices to have an exclusive affiliation with one particular money transfer operator so there is no alternative but to pay the extortionate charge.

F. The sums of money being discussed here might seem negligible on an individual basis but they are substantial in totality. If the transfer cost could be reduced to no more than one per cent, that would release another $30 billion dollars annually – approximately the total aid budget of the USA, the largest donor worldwide – directly into the hands of the world’s poorest. If this is not practicable, governments could at least acknowledge that small remittances do not come from organised crime networks, and ease regulations accordingly. They should put an end to restrictive alliances between post offices and money transfer operators or at least open up the system to competition. Alternately, a non-government humanitarian organisation, which would have the expertise to navigate the elaborate red tape, could set up a non-profit remittance platform for migrants to send money home for little or no cost.

G. Whilst contemplating the best system for transmission of migrant earnings to the home country, one should consider the fact that migrants often manage to save reasonable amounts of money in their adopted country. More often than not, that money is in the form of bank deposits earning a tiny percentage of interest, none at all or even a negative rate of interest.

H. If a developing country or a large charitable society could sell bonds with a guaranteed return of three or four per cent on the premise that the invested money would be used to build infrastructure in that country, there would be a twofold benefit. Migrants would make a financial gain and see their savings put to work in the development of their country of origin. The ideal point of sale for these bonds would be the channel used for money transfers so that, when migrants show up to make their monthly remittance, they could buy bonds as well. Advancing the idea one step further, why not make this transmission hub the conduit for affluent migrants to donate to worthy causes in their homeland so they may share their prosperity with their compatriots on a larger scale?

Questions 1-7. Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A–G.Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B– H from the list of headings below. Write the correct number, i–x, in boxes 1–7 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i Stability of remittances in difficult times
ii Effect of cutback in transaction fees
iii Targeted investments and contributions
iv Remittances for business investment
v How to lower transmission fees
vi Motivations behind remittances
vii Losses incurred during transmission
viii Remittances worth more than official aid
ix How recipients utilise remittances
x Frequency and size of remittances
xi Poor returns on migrant savings



Example: Paragraph G xi

1 Paragraph A
2 Paragraph B
3 Paragraph C
4 Paragraph D
5 Paragraph E
6 Paragraph F
7 Paragraph H

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.

Countries are unwilling to enforce lower transaction fees as they are worried about 8……………….. , and villagers lose out when post offices have a special relationship with one particular money transfer agency. Each remittance might be small but the total cost of remittance fees is huge. Governments should 9……………….. on small amounts and end the current post office system or make it more competitive. Another idea would be for a large non-profit association, capable of handling complicated 10……………….. to take charge of migrant remittances. Migrants who send money home are able to save money, too, but it receives little or no interest from 11………………….. If a country or organisation sold bonds that earned a reasonable rate of interest for the investor, that money could fund the development of homeland 12…………….. The bonds could be sold at the remittance centre, which could also take donations from 13..……………….. to fund charitable projects in their home country.



Reading passage 2.


ANGELO MOSSO’S PIONEERING WORK IN THE STUDY OF HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY

A. Scientists in the late nineteenth century were beginning to investigate the functions of blood circulation, trying to tease out the reasons for variations in pulse and pressure and to understand the delivery of energy to the functioning parts of our bodies. Angelo Mosso (1846–1910) was one such pioneer, an Italian physiologist who progressed to become a professor of both pharmacology and physiology at the University of Turin. As was true of many of his enlightened, well-educated contemporaries, Mosso was concerned about the effect of the industrial revolution on the poorer working classes. Hard physical labour and an excessively long working day shortened lives, created conditions conducive to accidents, and crippled the children who were forced into such work at a very early age. One of his most influential contributions to society came from his work and writings on fatigue.

B. Early experimenters in any field find themselves having to construct previously unknown equipment to investigate fields of study as yet unexplored. Mosso had reviewed the work of fellow scientists who had worked on isolated muscles, such as those extracted from frogs, and who had observed movement and fatigue when these were stimulated electrically. He found two major issues with their methodolgy: there was a lack of evidence both that the findings would be relevant to the human body, and that the dynamometers used to measure the strength of movement could give accurate results. He therefore became determined to construct an instrument to measure human muscular effort and record the effects of fatigue with greater precision.

C. His device was named an ergograph, meaning “work recorder”. To modern eyes it seems remarkably simple, but such is true of many inventions when viewed with hindsight. It allowed the measurement of the work done by a finger as it was repetitively curled up and straightened. There were basically two parts. One held the hand in position, palm up, by strapping down the arm to a wooden base; this was important to prevent any unintentional movement of the hand while the experiment was taking place. The other part was a recording device that drew the movements of the finger vertically on a paper cylinder which revolved by tiny increments as the experiment proceeded. The index and ring fingers of the hand were each inserted into a brass tube to hold them still. The middle finger was encircled with a leather ring tied to a wire which was connected to a weight after passing through a pulley. The finger had to raise and lower the weight, with the length and speed of these flexions recorded on the paper by a stylus. In this way, he not only learned the fatigue profiles of his subjects but could observe a relationship between performance, tiredness and the emotional state of his subjects.

D. Mosso’s interest in the interaction between psychology and physiology led to another machine and further groundbreaking research. He was intrigued to observe the pulsing of circulating blood in patients who had suffered traumatic damage to the skull, or cranium. In these patients, a lack of bone covering the brain allowed the strength of the heart’s pumping to be seen beneath the skin. He carried out experiments to see whether certain intellectual activities, such as reading or solving a problem, or emotional responses, such as to a sudden noise, would affect the supply of blood to the brain. He detected some changes in blood supply, and then wanted to find out if the same would be true of individuals with no cranial damage.

E. His solution was to design another instrument to measure brain activity in uninjured subjects. He designed a wooden table-top for the human subject to lie on, which was placed over another table, balanced on a fulcrum (rather like a seesaw) that would allow the subject to tilt, with head a little higher than feet, or vice versa. Heavy weights beneath the table maintained the stability of the whole unit as the intention was to measure very tiny variations in the balance of the person. Once the upper table was adjusted to be perfectly horizontal, only the breathing created a slight regular oscillation. This breathing and pulses measured in the hands and feet were also recorded.

F. Once all was in equilibrium, Mosso would ring a bell, while out of sight of the subject. His hypothesis was that this aural stimulus would have to be interpreted by the brain, and that an increased blood flow would result in a slight head-down tilt of the table. Mosso followed the bell-ringing with a wide range of intellectual stimuli, such as reading from a newspaper, a novel, or a university text. He was no doubt well satisfied to observe that the tilting of the table increased proportionately to the difficulty of the subject matter and the intellectual requirements of the task. Mosso’s experiments indicated a direct link between mental effort and an increased volume of blood in the brain. This research was one of the first attempts to ‘image’ the brain, which is now performed by technology such as MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), commonly used in making medical diagnoses today.



Questions 14-19. Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A–F. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A– F from the list of headings below.Write the correct number, i–ix, in boxes 14–19 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i A finely balanced measuring machine
ii Head injuries are a window into the brain
iii Measuring changes in body weight
iv Measuring fatigue through finger movements
v Reasons for the development of the ergograph
vi Effects of fatigue on young factory workers
vii Reasons behind early physiological research
viii Estimating the difficulty of reading tasks
ix Mosso’s theory supported by experimental results

14 Paragraph A
15 Paragraph B
16 Paragraph C
17 Paragraph D
18 Paragraph E
19 Paragraph F

Question 20. Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in box 20 on your answer sheet. The text suggests that Mosso undertook his original research because he wanted to

A support previous researchers’ results.
B make a more accurate measuring device.
C rebuild an existing machine.
D study the movement of frog muscles.

Questions 21–25. Label the diagram below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 21–25 on your answer sheet.

Question 26. Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in box 26 on your answer sheet.
What is the writer’s overall purpose in writing this article?

A to describe Mosso’s early research into human physiology
B to argue that Angelo Mosso was an original designer
C to discuss differences between Mosso and other early researchers
D to link Mosso’s experiments to modern brain imaging technology



Reading passage 3.

WHO WROTE SHAKESPEARE?

William Shakespeare is the Western world’s most famous playwright – but did he really write the plays and poems that are attributed to him?

There has been controversy over the authorship of the works of Shakespeare since the nineteenth century. The initial impetus for this debate came from the fact that nineteenth century critics, poets and readers were puzzled and displeased when they were presented with the few remaining scraps of evidence about the life of “Shakspere”, as his name was most commonly spelled. The author they admired and loved must have been scholarly and intellectual, linguistically gifted, knowledgeable about the lifestyle of those who lived in royal courts, and he appeared to have travelled in Europe.

These critics felt that the son of a Stratford glove-maker, whose only definite recorded dealings concerned buying property, some minor legal action over a debt, tax records, and the usual entries for birth, marriage and death, could not possibly have written poetry based on Classical models. Nor could he have been responsible for the wide-ranging intellectually and emotionally challenging plays for which he is so famous, because, in the nineteenth century world-view, writers inevitably called upon their own experiences for the content of their work.

By compiling the various bits and pieces of surviving evidence, most Shakespearian scholars have satisfied themselves that the man from Stratford is indeed the legitimate author of all the works published under his name. A man called William Shakespeare did become a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the dramatic company that owned the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres, and he enjoyed exclusive rights to the publication and performance of the dramatic works. There are 23 extant contemporary documents that indicate that he was a well-known poet or playwright. Publication and even production of plays had to be approved by government officials, who are recorded as having met with Shakespeare to discuss authorship and licensing of some of the plays, for example, ‘King Lear’.

However, two Elizabethans who are still strongly defended as the true Shakespeare are Christopher Marlowe and Edward de Vere, both of whom would have benefited from writing under the secrecy of an assumed name. Marlowe’s writing is acknowledged by all as the precursor of Shakespeare’s dramatic verse style: declamatory blank verse that lifted and ennobled the content of the plays. The records indicate that he was accused of being an atheist: denying the existence of God would have been punishable by the death penalty. He is recorded as having ‘died’ in a street fight before Shakespeare’s greatest works were written, and therefore it is suggested that he may have continued producing literary works while in hiding from the authorities.

De Vere was Earl of Oxford and an outstanding Classical scholar as a child. He was a strong supporter of the arts, including literature, music and acting. He is also recorded as being a playwright, although no works bearing his name still exist. However, in 16th century England it was not acceptable for an aristocrat to publish verse for ordinary people, nor to have any personal dealings with the low-class denizens of popular theatre.

To strengthen the case for their respective alternatives, literary detectives have looked for relationships between the biographies of their chosen authors and the published works of Shakespeare. However, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there was no tradition of basing plays on the author’s own life experiences, and therefore, the focus of this part of the debate has shifted to the sonnets. These individual poems of sixteen lines are sincerely felt reactions to emotionally charged situations such as love and death, a goldmine for the biographically inclined researcher.

The largest group of these poems express love and admiration and, interestingly, they are written to a “Mr W.H.” This person is clearly a nobleman, yet he is sometimes given forthright advice by the poet, suggesting that the writing comes from a mature father figure. How can de Vere or Marlowe be established as the author of the sonnets?

As the son of a tradesman, Marlowe had no aristocratic status; unlike Shakespeare, however, he did attend and excel at Cambridge University where he mingled with the wealthy. Any low-born artist needed a rich patron, and such is the argument for his authorship of the sonnets. The possible recipient of these sonnets is Will Hatfield, a minor noble who was wealthy and could afford to contribute to the arts; this young man’s friendship would have assisted a budding poet and playwright. Marlowe’s defenders contend that expressions of love between men were common at this time and had none of the homosexual connotations that Westerners of the twenty-first century may ascribe to them.

The Earl of Oxford had no need of a wealthy patron. The object of De Vere’s sonnets, it is suggested, is Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, whose name only fits the situation if one accepts that it is not uncommon to reverse the first and surnames on formal occasions. De Vere was a rash and careless man and, because of his foolish behaviour, he fell out of favour with Queen Elizabeth herself. He needed, not an artistic patron, but someone like Henry to put in a good word for him in the complex world of the royal court. This, coupled with a genuine affection for the young man, may have inspired the continuing creation of poems addressed to him. Some even postulate that the mix of love and stern advice may stem from the fact that Henry was de Vere’s illegitimate son, though there is no convincing evidence of this fact.

Questions 27-29. Choose THREE letters A – G. Write the correct letters A – G, in boxes 27–29 on your answer sheet.
Which THREE of the following are given as reasons for the arguments that someone else wrote Shakespeare’s works?

A Shakespeare did not come from Stratford.
B We have little information about Shakespeare’s life.
C We know that Shakespeare did not go overseas.
D Shakespeare went to prison for owing money.
E Shakespeare spoke only the English language.
F Shakespeare’s life appears to have been limited.
G The plays suggest that the writer was familiar with a high-class lifestyle.

Questions 30–35. Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 30–35 on your answer sheet

Evidence for Different Authors
 
Shakespeae 		He was an actor. He had 30……………….. for printing and putting on the plays.
31……………… consulted Shakespeare before approving performance of the plays.
 
Marlowe		The plays use his writing style. He was in trouble because some people said he was an 32………………
He may have faked his own death in a 33……………… He needed to write in secrecy.
 
De Vere		He was an excellent student. He supported other writers, musicians and actors. He may have been a 34………………   As a member of the upper class he could not write for 35………………

Question 36. Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in box 36 on your answer sheet.
The sonnets are useful for researchers because they are
A shorter and easier than the plays.
B all written to the same person.
C more personal than the plays.
D addressed to a lower-class person.

Questions 37–40. Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A–G, below. Write the correct letter, A–G, in boxes 37–40 on your answer sheet.

A W.H. had some influence with important people.
B the poems are addressed to the writer’s child.
C the content of the poems strongly suggests this.
D W.H. was able to provide financial support.
E W.H. had been to Cambridge University.
F W.H. had a lot of high-class enemies.
G the poet may have changed the order of his initials

37 W.H. was probably a young man because

38 W.H. could have been Marlowe’s friend because

39 W.H.’s name could have been Henry Wriothesley because

40 W.H. could have been De Vere’s friend because

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TEA AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IELTS READING

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Reading passage 1

A Alan Macfarlane, professor of anthropological science at King’s College, Cambridge, has, like other historians, spent decades wrestling with the enigma of the Industrial Revolution. Why did this particular Big Bang – the world- changing birth of industry – happen in Britain? And why did it strike at the end of the 18th century?

B Macfarlane compares the puzzle to a combination lock. ‘There are about 20 different factors and all of them need to be present before the revolution can happen,’ he says. For industry to take off, there needs to be the technology and power to drive factories, large urban populations to provide cheap labour, easy transport to move goods around, an affluent middle-class willing to buy mass-produced objects, a market-driven economy and a political system that allows this to happen. While this was the case for England, other ‘ nations, such as Japan, the Netherlands and France also met some of these criteria but were not industrialising. All these factors must have been necessary but not sufficient to cause the revolution,’ says Macfarlane. After all, Holland had everything except coal, while China also had many of these factors. Most historians are convinced there are one or two missing factors that you need to open the lock.’

C The missing factors, he proposes, are to be found in almost every kitchen cupboard. Tea and beer, two of the nation’s favourite drinks, fuelled the revolution. The antiseptic properties of tannin, the active ingredient in tea, and of hops in beer – plus the fact that both are made with boiled water – allowed urban communities to flourish at close quarters without succumbing to water-borne diseases such as dysentery. The theory sounds eccentric but once he starts to explain the detective work that went into his deduction, the scepticism gives way to wary admiration. Macfarlane’s case has been strengthened by support from notable quarters — Roy Porter, the distinguished medical historian, recently wrote a favourable appraisal of his research.

D Macfarlane had wondered for a long time how the Industrial Revolution came about. Historians had alighted on one interesting factor around the mid-18th century that required explanation. Between about 1650 and 1740, the population in Britain was static. But then there was a burst in population growth. Macfarlane says: ‘The infant mortality rate halved in the space of 20 years, and this happened in both rural areas and cities, and across all classes. People suggested four possible causes. Was there a sudden change in the viruses and bacteria around? Unlikely. Was there a revolution in medical science? But this was a century before Lister’s revolution . Was there a change in environmental conditions? There were improvements in agriculture that wiped out malaria, but these were small gains. Sanitation did not become widespread until the 19th century. The only option left is food. But the height and weight statistics show a decline. So the food must have got worse. Efforts to explain this sudden reduction in child deaths appeared to draw a blank.’

E This population burst seemed to happen at just the right time to provide labour for the Industrial Revolution. ‘When you start moving towards an industrial revolution, it is economically efficient to have people living close together/ says Macfarlane. ‘But then you get disease, particularly from human waste.’ Some digging around in historical records revealed that there was a change in the incidence of water-borne disease at that time, especially dysentery. Macfarlane deduced that whatever the British were drinking must have been important in regulating disease. He says, ‘We drank beer. For a long time, the English were protected by the strong antibacterial agent in hops, which were added to help preserve the beer. But in the late 17th century a tax was introduced on malt, the basic ingredient of beer. The poor turned to water and gin and in the 1720s the mortality rate began to rise again. 7ben it suddenly dropped again. What caused this?’

F Macfarlane looked to Japan, which was also developing large cities about the same time, and also had no sanitation. Water-borne diseases had a much looser grip on the Japanese population than those in Britain. Could it be the prevalence of tea in their culture? Macfarlane then noted that the history of tea in Britain provided an extraordinary coincidence of dates. Tea was relatively expensive until Britain started a direct clipper trade with China in the early 18th century. By the 1740s, about the time that infant mortality was dipping, the drink was common. Macfarlane guessed that the fact that water had to be boiled, together with the stomach-purifying properties of tea meant that the breast milk provided by mothers was healthier than it had ever been. No other European nation sipped tea like the British, which, by Macfarlane’s logic, pushed these other countries out of contention for the revolution.

G But, if tea is a factor in the combination lock, why didn’t Japan forge ahead in a tea-soaked industrial revolution of its own? Macfarlane notes that even though 17th-century Japan had large cities, high literacy rates, even a futures market, it had turned its back on the essence of any work-based revolution by giving up labour-saving devices such as animals, afraid that they would put people out of work. So, the nation that we now think of as one of the most technologically advanced entered the 19th century having ‘abandoned the wheel’.

Questions 1-7
Reading passage 1 has 7 paragraphs A-G. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.



List of headings

i The search for the reasons for an increase in population
ii Industrialisation and the fear of unemployment
iii The development of cities in Japan
iv The time and place of the Industrial Revolution
v The cases of Holland, France and China
vi Changes in drinking habits in Britain
vii Two keys to Britain’s industrial revolution
viii Conditions required for industrialization
ix Comparisons with Japan lead to the answer

1 Paragraph A
2 Paragraph B
3 Paragraph C
4 Paragraph D
5 Paragraph E
6 Paragraph F
7 Paragraph G
Questions 8-13

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

8 China’s transport system was not suitable for industry in the 18th century.
9 Tea and beer both helped to prevent dysentery in Britain.
10 Roy Porter disagrees with Professor Macfarlane’s findings.
11 After 1740, there was a reduction in population in Britain.
12 People in Britain used to make beer at home.
13 The tax on malt indirectly caused a rise in the death rate.


Reading passage 2

Gifted Children and Learning

A Internationally, ‘giftedness’ is most frequently determined by a score on a general intelligence test, known as an IQ test, which is above a chosen cutoff point, usually at around the top 2-5%. Children’s educational environment contributes to the IQ score and the way intelligence is used. For example, a very close positive relationship was found when children’s IQ scores were compared with their home educational provision (Freeman, 2010). The higher the children’s IQ scores, especially over IQ 130, the better the quality of their educational backup, measured in terms of reported verbal interactions with parents, number of books and activities in their home etc. Because IQ tests are decidedly influenced by what the child has learned, they are to some extent measures of current achievement based on age-norms; that is, how well the children have learned to manipulate their knowledge and know-how within the terms of the test. The vocabulary aspect, for example, is dependent on having heard those words. But IQ tests can neither identify the processes of learning and thinking nor predict creativity.

B Excellence does not emerge without appropriate help. To reach an exceptionally high standard in any area very able children need the means to learn, which includes material to work with and focused challenging tuition – and the encouragement to follow their dream. There appears to be a qualitative difference in the way the intellectually highly able think, compared with more average-ability or older pupils, for whom external regulation by the teacher often compensates for lack of internal regulation. To be at their most effective in their self-regulation, all children can be helped to identify their own ways of learning – metacognition – which will include strategies of planning, monitoring, evaluation, and choice of what to learn. Emotional awareness is also part of metacognition, so children should be helped to be aware of their feelings around the area to be learned, feelings of curiosity or confidence, for example.

C High achievers have been found to use self-regulatory learning strategies more often and more effectively than lower achievers, and are better able to transfer these strategies to deal with unfamiliar tasks. This happens to such a high degree in some children that they appear to be demonstrating talent in particular areas. Overviewing research on the thinking process of highly able children, (Shore and Kanevsky, 1993) put the instructor’s problem succinctly: ‘If they *the gifted+ merely think more quickly, then we need only teach more quickly. If they merely make fewer errors, then we can shorten the practice’. But of course, this is not entirely the case; adjustments have to be made in methods of learning and teaching, to take account of the many ways individuals think.

D Yet in order to learn by themselves, the gifted do need some support from their teachers. Conversely, teachers who have a tendency to ‘overdirect’ can diminish their gifted pupils’ learning autonomy. Although ‘spoon-feeding’ can produce extremely high examination results, these are not always followed by equally impressive life successes. Too much dependence on the teacher risks loss of autonomy and motivation to discover. However, when teachers help pupils to reflect on their own learning and thinking activities, they increase their pupils’ self-
regulation. For a young child, it may be just the simple question ‘What have you learned today?’ which helps them to recognise what they are doing. Given that a fundamental goal of education is to transfer the control of learning from teachers to pupils, improving pupils’ learning to learn techniques should be a major outcome of the school experience, especially for the highly competent. There are quite a number of new methods which can help, such as child- initiated learning, ability-peer tutoring, etc. Such practices have been found to be particularly useful for bright children from deprived areas.

E But scientific progress is not all theoretical, knowledge is also vital to outstanding performance: individuals who know a great deal about a specific domain will achieve at a higher level than those who do not (Elshout, 1995). Research with creative scientists by Simonton (1988) brought him to the conclusion that above a certain high level, characteristics such as independence seemed to contribute more to reaching the highest levels of expertise than intellectual skills, due to the great demands of effort and time needed for learning and practice. Creativity in all forms can be seen as expertise mixed with a high level of motivation (Weisberg, 1993).

F To sum up, learning is affected by emotions of both the individual and significant others. Positive emotions facilitate the creative aspects of learning and negative emotions inhibit it. Fear, for example, can limit the development of curiosity, which is a strong force in scientific advance, because it motivates problem-solving behaviour. In Boekaerts’ (1991) review of emotion in the learning of very high IQ and highly achieving children, she found emotional forces in harness. They were not only curious, but often had a strong desire to control their environment, improve their learning efficiency, and increase their own learning resources.

Questions 14-17
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Which paragraph contains the following information? NB You may use any letter more than once.

14 a reference to the influence of the domestic background on the gifted child
15 reference to what can be lost if learners are given too much guidance
16 a reference to the damaging effects of anxiety
17 examples of classroom techniques which favour socially-disadvantaged children



Questions 18-22
Look at the following statements (Questions 18-22) and the list of people below. Match each statement with the correct person or people, A-E.

18 Less time can be spent on exercises with gifted pupils who produce accurate work.

19 Self-reliance is a valuable tool that helps gifted students reach their goals.

20 Gifted children know how to channel their feelings to assist their learning.

21 The very gifted child benefits from appropriate support from close relatives.

22 Really successful students have learnt a considerable amount about their subject.

List of people

A Freeman
B Shore and Kanevsky
C Elshout
D Simonton
E Boekaerts

Questions 23-26
Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

23. One study found a strong connection between children’s IQ and the availability of………………………….. and at home.
24. Children of average ability seem to need more direction from teachers because they do not have………………..
25. Metacognition involves children understanding their own learning strategies, as well as developing………………
26. Teachers who rely on what is known as often produce sets of impressive grades in class tests.


Reading passage 3

Museum of Fine Art and their Public

One of the most famous works of art in the world is Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Nearly everyone who goes to see the original will already be familiar with it from reproductions, but they accept that fine art is more rewardingly viewed in its original form.

However, if Mona Lisa was a famous novel, few people would bother to go to a museum to read the writer’s actual manuscript rather than a printed reproduction. This might be explained by the fact that the novel has evolved precisely because of technological developments that made it possible to print out huge numbers of texts, whereas oil paintings have always been produced as unique objects. In addition, it could be argued that the practice of interpreting or ‘reading’ each medium follows different conventions. With novels, the reader attends mainly to the meaning of words rather than the way they are printed on the page, whereas the ‘reader’ of a painting must attend just as closely to the material form of marks and shapes in the picture as to any ideas they may signify.

Yet it has always been possible to make very accurate facsimiles of pretty well any fine art work. The seven surviving versions of Mona Lisa bear witness to the fact that in the 16th century, artists seemed content to assign the reproduction of their creations to their workshop apprentices as regular ‘bread and butter’ work. And today the task of reproducing pictures is incomparably more simple and reliable, with reprographic techniques that allow the production of high-quality prints made exactly to the original scale, with faithful colour values, and even with duplication of the surface relief of the painting.

But despite an implicit recognition that the spread of good reproductions can be culturally valuable, museums continue to promote the special status of original work. Unfortunately, this seems to place severe limitations on the kind of experience offered to visitors. One limitation is related to the way the museum presents its exhibits. As repositories of unique historical objects, art museums are often called ‘treasure houses’. We are reminded of this even before we view a collection by the presence of security guards, attendants, ropes and display cases to keep us away from the exhibits. In many cases, the architectural style of the building further reinforces that notion. In addition, a major collection like that of London’s National Gallery is housed in numerous rooms, each with dozens of works, any one of which is likely to be worth more than all the average visitor possesses. In a society that judges the personal status of the individual so much by their material worth, it is therefore difficult not to be impressed by one’s own relative ‘worthlessness’ in such an environment.

Furthermore, consideration of the ‘value’ of the original work in its treasure house setting impresses upon the viewer that, since these works were originally produced, they have been assigned a huge monetary value by some person or institution more powerful than themselves. Evidently, nothing the viewer thinks about the work is going to alter that value, and so today’s viewer is deterred from trying to extend that spontaneous, immediate, self- reliant kind of reading which would originally have met the work.

The visitor may then be struck by the strangeness of seeing such diverse paintings, drawings and sculptures brought together in an environment for which they were not originally created. This ‘displacement effect’ is further heightened by the sheer volume of exhibits. In the case of a major collection, there are probably more works on display than we could realistically view in weeks or even months.

This is particularly distressing because time seems to be a vital factor in the appreciation of all art forms. A fundamental difference between paintings and other art forms is that there is no prescribed time over which a painting is viewed. By contrast, the audience encounters an opera or a play over a specific time, which is the duration of the performance. Similarly, novels and poems are read in a prescribed temporal sequence, whereas a picture has no clear place at which to start viewing, or at which to finish. Thus art works themselves encourage us to view them superficially, without appreciating the richness of detail and labour that is involved.

Consequently, the dominant critical approach becomes that of the art historian, a specialised academic approach devoted to ‘discovering the meaning’ of art within the cultural context of its time. This is in perfect harmony with the museum’s function, since the approach is dedicated to seeking out and conserving ‘authentic’, ‘original’ readings of the exhibits. Again, this seems to put paid to that spontaneous, participatory criticism which can be found in abundance in criticism of classic works of literature, but is absent from most art history.

The displays of art museums serve as a warning of what critical practices can emerge when spontaneous criticism is suppressed. The museum public, like any other audience, experience art more rewardingly when given the confidence to express their views. If appropriate works of fine art could be rendered permanently accessible to the public by means of high-fidelity reproductions, as literature and music already are, the public may feel somewhat less in awe of them. Unfortunately, that may be too much to ask from those who seek to maintain and control the art establishment.

Questions 27-31
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-L, below.



The value attached to original works of art

People go to art museums because they accept the value of seeing an original work of art. But they do not go to museums to read original manuscripts of novels, perhaps because the availability of novels has depended on (27)……………………….for so long, and also because with novels, the (28)……………. are the most important thing. However, in historical times artists such as Leonardo were happy to instruct (29)………….… to produce copies of their work and these days new methods of reproduction allow excellent replication of surface relief features as well as colour and (30)…………… It is regrettable that museums still promote the superiority of original works of art, since this may not be in the interests of the (31)………………….

A institution
B mass production
C mechanical processes
D public
E paints
F artist
G size
H underlying ideas I basic technology
J readers
K picture frames
L assistants

Questions 32-35
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

32 The writer mentions London’s National Gallery to illustrate
A the undesirable cost to a nation of maintaining a huge collection of art
B the conflict that may arise in society between financial and artistic values
C the negative effect a museum can have on visitors’ opinions of themselves
D the need to put individual well-being above large-scale artistic schemes.

33 The writer says that today, viewers may be unwilling to criticise a work because
A they lack the knowledge needed to support an opinion
B they fear it may have financial implications
C they have no real concept of the work’s value
D they feel their personal reaction is of no significance

34 According to the writer, the ‘displacement effect’ on the visitor is caused by
A the variety of works on display and the way they are arranged
B the impossibility of viewing particular works of art over a long period
C the similar nature of the paintings and the lack of great works
D the inappropriate nature of the individual works selected for exhibition

35 The writer says that unlike other forms of art, a painting does not
A involve direct contact with an audience
B require a specific location for a performance
C need the involvement of other professionals
D have a specific beginning or end

Questions 36-40
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 36-40 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

36 Art history should focus on discovering the meaning of art using a range of media.

37 The approach of art historians conflicts with that of art museums.

38 People should be encouraged to give their opinions openly on works of art.

39 Reproductions of fine art should only be sold to the public if they are of high quality.

40 In the future, those with power are likely to encourage more people to enjoy art.

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SPOKEN CORPUS IELTS READING

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Reading passage 1

A The compiling of dictionaries has been historically the provenance of studious professorial types – usually bespectacled – who love to pore over weighty tomes and make pronouncements on the finer nuances of meaning. They were probably good at crosswords and definitely knew a lot of words, but the image was always rather dry and dusty. The latest technology, and simple technology at that, is revolutionising the content of dictionaries and the way they are put together.

B For the first time, dictionary publishers are incorporating real, spoken English into their data. It gives lexicographers (people who write dictionaries) access to a more vibrant, up-to-date vernacular language which has never really been studied before. In one project, 150 volunteers each agreed to discreetly tie a Walkman recorder to their waist and leave it running for anything up to two weeks. Every conversation they had was recorded. When the data was collected, the length of tapes was 35 times the depth of the Atlantic Ocean. Teams of audio typists transcribed the tapes to produce a computerised database of ten million words.

C This has been the basis – along with an existing written corpus – for the Language Activator dictionary, described by lexicographer Professor Randolph Quirk as “the book the world has been waiting for”. It shows advanced foreign learners of English how the language is really used. In the dictionary, key words such as “eat” are followed by related phrases such as “wolf down” or “be a picky eater”, allowing the student to choose the appropriate phrase.

D “This kind of research would be impossible without computers,” said Delia Summers, a director of dictionaries. “It has transformed the way lexicographers work. If you look at the word “like”, you may intuitively think that the first and most frequent meaning is the verb, as in “I like swimming”. It is not. It is the preposition, as in: “she walked like a duck”. Just because a word or phrase is used doesn’t mean it ends up in a dictionary. The sifting out process is as vital as ever. But the database does allow lexicographers to search for a word and find out how frequently it is used – something that could only be guessed at intuitively before.

E Researchers have found that written English works in a very different way to spoken English. The phrase “say what you like” literally means “feel free to say anything you want”, but in reality it is used, evidence shows, by someone to prevent the other person voicing disagreement. The phrase “it’s a question of crops up on the database over and over again. It has nothing to do with enquiry, but it’s one of the most frequent English phrases which has never been in a language learner’s dictionary before: it is now.

F The Spoken Corpus computer shows how inventive and humorous people are when they are using language by twisting familiar phrases for effect. It also reveals the power of the pauses and noises we use to play for time, convey emotion, doubt and irony.

G For the moment, those benefiting most from the Spoken Corpus are foreign learners. “Computers allow lexicographers to search quickly through more examples of real English,” said Professor Geoffrey Leech of
Lancaster University. “They allow dictionaries to be more accurate and give a feel for how language is being used.” The Spoken Corpus is part of the larger British National Corpus, an initiative carried out by several groups involved in the production of language learning materials: publishers, universities and the British Library.



Questions 1-6
Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs (A-G). Choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below. Write the appropriate numbers (i-xi) in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet. Paragraph C has been done for you as an example.
NB There are more headings than paragraphs so you will not use all of them. You may use any heading more than once.

List of Headings

i. Grammar is corrected
ii. New method of research
iii. Technology learns from dictionaries
iv. Non-verbal content
v. The first study of spoken language
vi. Traditional lexicographical methods
vii Written English tells the truth
viii New phrases enter dictionary
ix A cooperative research project
x Accurate word frequency counts
xi Alternative expressions provided

1 Paragraph A
2 Paragraph B
3 Paragraph D
4 Paragraph E
5 Paragraph F
6 Paragraph G

Questions 7-11. The diagram below illustrates the information provided in paragraphs B-F of Reading Passage 1 Complete the labels on the diagram with an appropriate word or words. Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each space.

Question 12. Choose the appropriate letter A-D and write it in box 12 on your answer sheet 12 Why was this article written?

A To give an example of a current dictionary
B To announce a new approach to dictionary writing
C To show how dictionaries have progressed over the years
D To compare the content of different dictionaries



Moles happy as homes go underground

A The first anybody knew about Dutchman Frank Siegmund and his family was when workmen tramping through a field found a narrow steel chimney protruding through the grass. Closer inspection revealed a chink of sky-light window among the thistles, and when amazed investigators moved down the side of the hill they came across a pine door complete with leaded diamond glass and a brass knocker set into an underground building. The Siegmunds had managed to live undetected for six years outside the border town of Breda, in Holland. They are the latest in a clutch of individualistic homemakers who have burrowed underground in search of tranquility.

B Most, falling foul of strict building regulations, have been forced to dismantle their individualistic homes and return to more conventional lifestyles. But subterranean suburbia, Dutch-style, is about to become respectable and chic. Seven luxury homes cosseted away inside a high earth-covered noise embankment next to the main Tilburg city road recently went on the market for $296,500 each. The foundations had yet to be dug, but customers queued up to buy the unusual part-submerged houses, whose back wall consists of a grassy mound and whose front is a long glass gallery.

C The Dutch are not the only would-be moles. Growing numbers of Europeans are burrowing below ground to create houses, offices, discos and shopping malls. It is already proving a way of life in extreme climates; in winter months in Montreal, Canada, for instance, citizens can escape the cold in an underground complex complete with shops and even health clinics. In Tokyo builders are planning a massive underground city to be begun in the next decade, and underground shopping malls are already common in Japan, where 90 percent of the population is squeezed into 20 percent of the land space.

D Building big commercial buildings underground can be a way to avoid disfiguring or threatening a beautiful or environmentally sensitive landscape. Indeed many of the buildings which consume most land -such as cinemas, supermarkets, theatres, warehouses or libraries -have no need to be on the surface since they do not need windows.

E There are big advantages, too, when it comes to private homes. A development of 194 houses which would take up 14 hectares of land above ground would occupy 2.7 hectares below it, while the number of roads would be halved. Under several metres of earth, noise is minimal and insulation is excellent. “We get 40 to 50 enquiries a week”, says Peter Carpenter, secretary of the British Earth Sheltering Association, which builds similar homes in Britain. “People see this as a way of building for the future.” An underground dweller himself, Carpenter has never paid a heating bill, thanks to solar panels and natural insulation.

F In Europe the obstacle has been conservative local authorities and developers who prefer to ensure quick sales with conventional mass produced housing. But the Dutch development was greeted with undisguised relief by South Limburg planners because of Holland’s chronic shortage of land. It was the Tilburg architect Jo Hurkmans who hit on the idea of making use of noise embankments on main roads. His twofloored, four-bedroomed, two- bathroomed detached homes are now taking shape. “They are not so much below the earth as in it,” he says. “All the light will come through the glass front, which runs from the second floor ceiling to the ground. Areas which do not need much natural lighting are at the back. The living accommodation is to the front so nobody notices that the back is dark.”

G In the US, where energy-efficient homes became popular after the oil crisis of 1973, 10,000 underground houses have been built. A terrace of five homes, Britain’s first subterranean development, is under way in Nottinghamshire. Italy’s outstanding example of subterranean architecture is the Olivetti residential centre in Ivrea. Commissioned by Roberto Olivetti in 1969, it comprises 82 one-bedroomed apartments and 12 maisonettes and forms a house/ hotel for Olivetti employees. It is built into a hill and little can be seen from outside except a glass facade. Patnzia Vallecchi, a resident since 1992, says it is little different from living in a conventional apartment.

H Not everyone adapts so well, and in Japan scientists at the Shimizu Corporation have developed “space creation” systems which mix light, sounds, breezes and scents to stimulate people who spend long periods below ground. Underground offices in Japan are being equipped with “virtual” windows and mirrors, while underground departments in the University of Minnesota have periscopes to reflect views and light.

I But Frank Siegmund and his family love their hobbit lifestyle. Their home evolved when he dug a cool room for his bakery business in a hill he had created. During a heatwave they took to sleeping there. “We felt at peace and so close to nature,” he says. “Gradually I began adding to the rooms. It sounds strange but we are so close to the earth we draw strength from its vibrations. Our children love it; not every child can boast of being watched through their playroom windows by rabbits.

Questions 13-20
Reading Passage 2 has nine paragraphs (A-I). Choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below. Write the appropriate numbers (i-xii) in boxes 13 20 on your answer sheet. Paragraph A has been done for you as an example. NB There are more headings than paragraphs so you will not use all of them.


List of Headings

i. A designer describes his houses
ii. Most people prefer conventional housing
iii. Simulating a natural environment
iv. How an underground family home developed
v. Demands on space and energy are reduced
vi. The plans for future homes
vii. Worldwide examples of underground living accommodation
viii. Some buildings do not require natural light
ix. Developing underground services around the world
x. Underground living improves health
xi. Homes sold before completion
xii. An underground home is discovered

13 Paragraph B
14 Paragraph C
15 Paragraph D
16 Paragraph E
17 Paragraph F
18 Paragraph G
19 Paragraph H
20 Paragraph I

Questions 21-26
Complete the sentences below after reading the passage. Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 21-26 on your answer sheet.

21 Many developers prefer mass-produced houses because they ……………
22 The Dutch development was welcomed by ……………
23 Hurkmans’ houses are built into ……………
24 The Ivrea centre was developed for ……………
25 Japanese scientists are helping people …………… underground life.
26 Frank Siegmund’s first underground room was used for ……………

A Workaholic Economy

FOR THE first century or so of the industrial revolution, increased productivity led to decreases in working hours. Employees who had been putting in 12-hour days, six days a week, found their time on the job shrinking to 10 hours daily, then, finally, to eight hours, five days a week. Only a generation ago social planners worried about what people would do with all this new-found free time. In the US, at least, it seems they need not have bothered. Although the output per hour of work has more than doubled since 1945, leisure seems reserved largely for the unemployed and underemployed. Those who work full-time spend as much time on the job as they did at the end of World War II. In fact, working hours have increased noticeably since 1970 — perhaps because real wages have stagnated since that year. Bookstores now abound with manuals describing how to manage time and cope with stress.

There are several reasons for lost leisure. Since 1979, companies have responded to improvements in the business climate by having employees work overtime rather than by hiring extra personnel, says economist Juliet B. Schor of Harvard University. Indeed, the current economic recovery has gained a certain amount of notoriety for its “jobless” nature: increased production has been almost entirely decoupled from employment. Some firms are even downsizing as their profits climb. “All things being equal, we’d be better off spreading around the work,’ observes labour economist Ronald G. Ehrenberg of Cornell University.

Yet a host of factors pushes employers to hire fewer workers for more hours and, at the same time, compels workers to spend more time on the job. Most of those incentives involve what Ehrenberg calls the structure of compensation: quirks in the way salaries and benefits are organised that make it more profitable to ask 40 employees to labour an extra hour each than to hire one more worker to do the same 40-hour job.

Professional and managerial employees supply the most obvious lesson along these lines. Once people are on salary, their cost to a firm is the same whether they spend 35 hours a week in the office or 70. Diminishing returns may eventually set in as overworked employees lose efficiency or leave for more arable pastures. But in the short run, the employer’s incentive is clear.

Even hourly employees receive benefits – such as pension contributions and medical insurance – that are not tied to the number of hours they work. Therefore, it is more profitable for employers to work their existing employees harder.

For all that employees complain about long hours, they, too, have reasons not to trade money for leisure. “People who work reduced hours pay a huge penalty in career terms,” Schor maintains. It’s taken as a negative signal about their commitment to the firm.’ [Lotte] Bailyn [of Massachusetts Institute of Technology] adds that many corporate managers find it difficult to measure the contribution of their underlings to a firm’s well-being, so they use the number of hours worked as a proxy for output. “Employees know this,” she says, and they adjust their behavior accordingly.

“Although the image of the good worker is the one whose life belongs to the company,” Bailyn says, “it doesn’t fit the facts.’ She cites both quantitative and qualitative studies that show increased productivity for part-time workers: they make better use of the time they have, and they are less likely to succumb to fatigue in stressful jobs. Companies that employ more workers for less time also gain from the resulting redundancy, she asserts. “The extra people can cover the contingencies that you know are going to happen, such as when crises take people away from the workplace.’ Positive experiences with reduced hours have begun to change the more-is-better culture at some companies, Schor reports.

Larger firms, in particular, appear to be more willing to experiment with flexible working arrangements… It may take even more than changes in the financial and cultural structures of employment for workers successfully to trade increased productivity and money for leisure time, Schor contends. She says the U.S. market for goods has become skewed by the assumption of full-time, two-career households. Automobile makers no longer manufacture cheap models, and developers do not build the tiny bungalows that served the first postwar generation of home buyers. Not even the humblest household object is made without a microprocessor. As Schor notes, the situation is a curious inversion of the “appropriate technology” vision that designers have had for developing countries: U.S. goods are appropriate only for high incomes and long hours.



Questions 27-32
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 27-32 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

27 Today, employees are facing a reduction in working hours.
28 Social planners have been consulted about US employment figures.
29 Salaries have not risen significantly since the 1970s.
30 The economic recovery created more jobs.
31 Bailyn’s research shows that part-time employees work more efficiently.
32 Increased leisure time would benefit two-career households.

Questions 33 and 34
Choose the appropriate letters A-D and write them in boxes 33 and 34 on your answer sheet.

33 Bailyn argues that it is better for a company to employ more workers because
A it is easy to make excess staff redundant.
B crises occur if you are under-staffed.
C people are available to substitute for absent staff.
D they can project a positive image at work.

34 Schor thinks it will be difficult for workers in the US to reduce their working hours because
A they would not be able to afford cars or homes.
B employers are offering high incomes for long hours.
C the future is dependent on technological advances.
D they do not wish to return to the humble post-war era.

Questions 35-38
The writer mentions a number of factors that have resulted, in employees working longer hours. Which FOUR of the following factors are mentioned? Write your answers (A-H) in boxes 35-38 on your answer sheet.



List of Factors

A Books are available to help employees cope with stress.
B Extra work is offered to existing employees.
C Increased production has led to joblessness.
D Benefits and hours spent on the job are not linked.
E Overworked employees require longer to do their work.
F Longer hours indicate greater commitment to the firm.
G Managers estimate staff productivity in terms of hours worked.
H Employees value a career more than a family.

Questions 39 and 40
Complete the sentences below with words from the reading passage. Write NO MORE THAN ONE WORD.

39 Returns from overburdened employees decreases with time because they lose……..
40 Employees give more work to their existing employees because for them it is……….

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SEED VAULT GUARDS RESOURCES FOR THE FUTURE IELTS READING

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Fiona Harvey paid a visit to a building whose contents are very precious

Reading passage 1

A. About 1,000 km from the North Pole, Svalbard is one of the most remote places on earth. For this reason, it is the site of a vault that will safeguard a priceless component of our common heritage – the seeds of our staple crops. Here, seeds from the world’s most vital food crops will be locked away for hundreds or even thousands of years. If something goes wrong in the world, the vault will provide the means to restore farming. We, or our descendants, will not have to retread thousands of years of agriculture from scratch.

B. Deep in the vault at the end of a long tunnel, are three storage vaults which are lined with insulated panels to help maintain the cold temperatures. Electronic transmitters linked to a satellite system monitor temperature, etc. and pass the information back to the appropriate authorities at Longycarbyen and the Nordic Gene Bank which provide the technical information for managing the seed vaults. The seeds are placed in sealed boxes and stored on shelves in the vaults. The minimal moisture level and low temperature ensure low metabolic activity. The remote location, as well as the rugged structure, provide unparalleled security for the world’s agricultural heritage.

C. The three vaults are buried deep in the hillside. To reach them, it is necessary to proceed down a long and surprisingly large corridor. At 93.3 metres in length, it connects the 26-metre long entrance building to the three vaults, each of which extends a further 27 metres into the mountain. Towards the end of this tunnel, after about 80 metres, there are several small rooms on the right-hand side. One is a transformer room to which only the power company officials have access – this houses the equipment needed to transform the incoming electrical current down to 220 volts. A second is an electrical room housing control for the compressor and other equipment. The boiler room is an office which can be heated to provide comfortable working conditions for those who will make an inventory of the samples in and out of the vault.

D. Anyone seeking access to the seeds has to pass through four locked doors: the heavy steel entrance doors, a second door approximately 90 metres down the tunnel and finally the two keyed doors separated by an airlock, from which it is possible to proceed directly into the seed vaults. Keys are coded to allow access to different levels of the facility. A work of art will make the vault visible for miles reflective sheets of steel and mirrors which form an installation acting as a beacon. It reflects polar light in the summer months, while in the winter, a network of 200 fibre-optic cables will give the piece a muted greenish-turquoise and white light. Cary Fowler, the mastermind behind the vault, stands inside the echoing cavern. For him, this is the culmination of nearly 30 years of work. ‘It’s an insurance policy,’ he explains, ‘very cheap insurance policy when you consider what we’re ensuring – the earth’s biological diversity.’

E. Seeds are being brought here from all over the world, from seed banks created by governments, universities and private institutions. Soon, there will be seed varieties from at least 100 crops in the Svalbard vault – extending to examples of all of the 1.5 million known crop seed varieties in the world. If any more are unearthed, either in the wild or found in obscure collections, they can be added, too – the vault has room for at least 4.5 million samples. Inside the entrance area, it is more than 10°C below freezing, but in the chambers where the seeds are kept, refrigerators push down the temperature even further, to -18°C. At this temperature, which will be kept constant to stop the seeds germinating or rotting, the wheat seeds will remain viable for an estimated 1,700 years.

F. Svalbard’s Arctic conditions will keep the seeds cold. In order to maintain the temperature at a constant -10° C to -20°C, the cold Arctic air will be drawn into the vault during the winter, automatically and without human intervention. The surrounding rock will maintain the temperature requirements during the extremely cold season and, during warmer periods, refrigeration equipment will engage. Looking out across the snow-covered mountains of Svalbard, it is hard not to feel respect for the 2,300 or so people who live here, mainly in Longyearbyen, a village a few miles away. There are three months without light in winter.

G. Svalbard is intended 3s the seed bank of last resort. Each sample is made up of a few hundred seeds, sealed inside a watertight package which will never be tampered with while it is in the vault. The packages of seeds remain the property of the collections they have come from. Svalbard will disburse samples ‘only if all the other seeds in other collections around the world are gone,’ explains Fowler. If seeds do have to be given out, those who receive them are expected to germinate them and generate new samples, to be returned to the vault.



Questions 1-6 Label the diagram below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.

Question 7-13. Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 7-13 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 given on this

7. The vault has the capacity to accommodate undiscovered types of seed at a later date.
8. There are different levels of refrigeration according to the kinds of seeds stored.
9. During winter, the flow of air entering the vault is regularly monitored by staff.
10. There is a back-up refrigeration system ready to be switched on if the present one fails.
11. The people who work at Svalbard are mainly locals.
12 Once a seed package Is In the vault, it remains unopened.
13. If seeds are sent from Svalbard to other banks, there is an obligation for the recipient to send replacements back.



Reading Passage 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

What cookbooks really teach us

A. Shelves bend under the weight of cookery books. Even a medium-sized bookshop contains many more recipes than one person could hope to take in a lifetime. Although the recipes in one book are often similar to those in another, their presentation varies wildly, from an array of vegetarian cookbooks to instructions on cooking the food that historical figures might have eaten. The reason for this abundance is chat cookbooks promise to bring about a kind of domestic transformation for the user. The daily routine can be put on one side and they liberate the user, if only temporarily. To follow their instructions is to turn a task which has to be performed every day into an engaging, romantic process. Cookbooks also provide an opportunity to delve into distant cultures without having to turn up at an airport to get there.

B. The first Western cookbook appeared just over 1,600 years ago. De re couquinara (it means ‘concerning cookery’) is attributed to Roman gourmet named Apicius. It is probably a compilation of Roman and Greek recipes, some or all of them drawn from manuscripts that were later loss. The editor was sloppy, allowing several duplicated recipes to sneak in. Yet Apicius’s book set the tone of cookery advice in Europe for more than a thousand years. As a cookbook, it is unsatisfactory with very basic instructions. Joseph Vehling, a chef who translated Apicius in the 1930s, suggested the author had been obscure on purpose, in ease his secrets leaked out.

C. But a more likely reason is that Apicius’s recipes were written by and for professional cooks, who could follow their shorthand. This situation continued for hundreds of years. There was no order to cookbooks: a cake recipe might be followed by a mutton one. But then, they were not written for careful study. Before the 19* century few educated people cooked for themselves. The wealthiest employed literate chefs; others presumably read recipes to their servants. Such cooks would have been capable of creating dishes from the vaguest of instructions.

D. The invention of printing might have been expected to lead to greater clarity but at first, the reverse was true. As words acquired commercial value, plagiarism exploded. Recipes were distorted through reproduction. A recipe for boiled capon in Vk Good Huswives Jewell, printed in 1596, advised the cook to add three or four dates. By 1653. when the recipe was given by a different author in A Book of Fruits & Flowers, the cook was told to see the dish aside for three or four days.

E. The dominant theme in 16th and 17th-century cookbooks was ordered. Books combined recipes and household advice, on the assumption that a well-made dish, a well-ordered larder and well-disciplined children were equally important. Cookbooks thus became a symbol of dependability in chaotic times. They hardly seem to have been affected by the English civil war or the revolutions in America and France.

F. In the 1850s, Isabella Becton published the Book of Household /Management. Like earlier cookery writers she plagiarized freely, lifting not just recipes bur philosophical observations from other books. If Becton’s recipes were not wholly new. though, the way in which she presented them certainly was. She explains when the chief ingredients arc most likely to be in season, how long the dish will take to prepare and even how much it is likely to cost. Bee ton’s recipes were well suited to her times. Two centuries earlier, an understanding of rural ways had been so widespread that one writer could advise cooks to heat water until it was a little hotter than milk comes from a cow. By the 1850s Britain was industrializing. The growing urban middle class needed details, and Becton provided them in the hill.

G. In France, cookbooks were fast becoming even more systematic. Compare with Britain, France had produced few books written for the ordinary householder by the end of the 19th century. The most celebrated French cookbooks were written by superstar chefs who had a clear sense of codifying a unified approach to sophisticated French cooking. The 5.000 recipes in Auguste Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire (The Culinary Guide), published in 1902, might as well have been written in stone, given the book’s reparation among French chefs, many of whom still consider it the definitive reference book.

H. What Escoffier did for French cooking. Fannie Farmer did for American home cooking. She not only synthesized American cuisine; she elevated it to the status of science. ‘Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery,’ she breezily announced in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, before launching into a collection of recipes that sometimes resembles a book of chemistry experiments. She was occasionally over-fussy. She explained that currants should be picked between June 28th and July 3rd, but not when it is raining. But in the main, her book is reassuringly authoritative. Its recipes arc short, with no unnecessary chat and no unnecessary spices.

I. In 1950, Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David launched a revolution in cooking advice in Britain. In some ways, Mediterranean Food recalled even older cookbooks but the smells and noises that filled Davids books were not mere decoration for her recipes. They were the point of her books. When she began to write, many ingredients were not widely available or affordable. She understood this, acknowledging in a later edition of one of her books that ‘even if people could not very often make the dishes here described, it was stimulating to think about them.’ Davids books were not so much cooking manuals as guides to the kind of food people might well wish to eat.



Questions 14-16. Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 14-16 on your answer sheet.

Why are there so many cookery books?

There are a great number more cookery books published than is really necessary and it is their 14……………………. which makes them differ from each other. There are such large numbers because they offer people an escape from their 15…………………… and some give the user the chance to inform themselves about other 16 …………………………

Questions 17-21 Reading Passage 2 has nine paragraphs, A-I.

Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-l, in boxes 17-21 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

17. cookery books providing a sense of stability during periods of unrest
18. details in recipes being altered as they were passed on
19. knowledge which was in danger of disappearing
20. the negative effect on cookery books of a new development
21. a period when there was no need for cookery books to be precise

Questions 22-26. Look at the following statements (Questions 22-26) and list of books (A-E) below. Match each statement with the correct book A-E.

Write the correct letter A-E. In boxes 22-26 on your answer sheet.

22. Its recipes were easy to follow despite the writer’s attention to detail.
23. Its writer may have deliberately avoided passing on details.
24. It appealed to ambitious ideas people have about cooking.
25. Its writer used ideas from other books but added additional related information.
26. It put into print ideas which are still respected today.

List of cookery books

A. De re couquinara
B. The Book of Household Management
C. Le Guide Culinaire
D. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
E. Mediterranean Food


Reading Passage 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 26-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below. Is there more to video games than people realize?

A. Many people who spend a lot of time playing video games insist that they have helped them in areas like confidence-building, presentation skills and debating. Yet this way of thinking about video games can be found almost nowhere within the mainstream media, which still tend to treat games as an odd mix of the slightly menacing and the alien. This lack of awareness has become increasingly inappropriate, as video games and the culture that surrounds them have become very big business indeed.

B. Recently, the British government released the Byron report into the effects of electronic media on children. Its conclusions set out a clear, rational basis for exploring the regulation of video games. The ensuing debate, however, has descended into the same old squabbling between partisan factions: the preachers of mental and moral decline, and the innovative game designers. In between are the gamers, busily buying and playing while nonsense is talked over their heads.

C. Susan Greenfield, a renowned neuroscientist, outlines her concerns in a new book. Every individual’s mind is the product of a brain that has been personalized by the sum total of their experiences; with an increasing quantity of our experiences from very early childhood taking place ‘on-screen’ rather than in the world, there is potentially a profound shift in the way children’s minds work. She suggests that the fast-paced, second-hand experiences created by video games and the Internet may inculcate a worldview that is less empathetic, more risk-taking and less contemplative than what we tend to think of as healthy.

D. Greenfield’s prose is full of mixed metaphors and self-contradictions and is perhaps the worst enemy of her attempts to persuade. This is unfortunate, because however many technophiles may snort, she is articulating widely held fears that have a basis in fact. Unlike even their immediate antecedents, the latest electronic media are at once domestic and work-related, their mobility blurring the boundaries between these spaces, and video games are at their forefront. A generational divide has opened that is in many ways more profound than the equivalent shifts associated with radio or television, more alienating for those unfamiliar with new’ technologies, more absorbing for those who are. So how do our lawmakers regulate something that is too fluid to be fully comprehended or controlled?

E. Adam Martin, a lead programmer for an online games developer, says: ‘Computer games teach and people don’t even notice they’re being taught.’ But isn’t the kind of learning that goes on in games rather narrow? ‘A large part of the addictiveness of games does come from the fact that as you play you are mastering a set of challenges. But humanity’s larger understanding of the world comes primarily through communication and experimentation, through answering the question “What if?’ Games excel at teaching this too.’

F. Steven Johnson’s thesis is not that electronic games constitute a great, popular art, but that the mean level of mass culture has been demanding steadily more intellectual engagement from consumers. Games, he points out, generate satisfaction via the complexity of their virtual worlds, not by their robotic predictability. Testing the nature and limits of the laws of such imaginary worlds has more in common with scientific methods than with a pointless addiction, while the complexity of the problems children encounter within games exceeds that of anything they might find at school.

G. Greenfield argues that there are ways of thinking that playing video games simply cannot teach. She has a point. We should never forget, for instance, the unique ability of books to engage and expand the human imagination, and to give us the means of more fully expressing our situations in the world. Intriguingly, the video games industry is now growing in ways that have more in common with an old- fashioned world of companionable pastimes than with a cyber future of lonely, isolated obsessives. Games in which friends and relations gather round a console to compete at activities are growing in popularity. The agenda is increasingly being set by the concerns of mainstream consumers – what they consider acceptable for their children, what they want to play at parties and across generations.

H. These trends embody a familiar but important truth: games are human products and lie within our control. This doesn’t mean we yet control or understand them fully, but it should remind us that there is nothing inevitable or incomprehensible about them. No matter how deeply it may be felt, instinctive fear is an inappropriate response to a technology of any kind. So far, the dire predictions many traditionalists have made about the ‘death’ of old-fashioned narratives and imaginative thought at the hands of video games cannot be upheld. Television and cinema may be suffering, economically, at the hands of interactive media. But literacy standards have failed to decline. Young people still enjoy sport, going out and listening to music And most research – including a recent $1.5m study funded by the US government suggests that even pre-teens are not in the habit of blurring game worlds and real worlds.

F. The sheer pace and scale of the changes we face, however, leave little room for complacency. Richard Battle, a British writer and game researcher, says Times change: accept it; embrace it.’ Just as, today, we have no living memories of a time before radio, we will soon live in a world in which no one living experienced growing up without computers. It is for this reason that we must try to examine what we stand to lose and gain before it is too late.



Questions 27-32. Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In the boxes 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

27. Much media comment ignores the impact that video games can have on many people’s lives.
28. The publication of the Byron Report was followed by a worthwhile discussion between those for and against video games.
29. Susan Greenfield’s way of writing has become more complex over the years.
30. It is likely that video games will take over the role of certain kinds of books in the future.
31. More sociable games are being brought out to satisfy the demands of the buying public.
32. Being afraid of technological advances is a justifiable reaction.

Questions 33-37. Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter A-D in boxes on your answer sheet.

33. According to the writer, what view about video games does Susan Greenfield put forward in tier new book?

A. They are exposing a child to an adult view of the world too soon.
B. Children become easily frightened by some of the situations in them.
C. They are changing the way children’s view of the world develops.
D. Children don’t learn from them because they are too repetitive.

34. According to the writer, what problems are faced when regulating video games?

A. The widespread and ever-changing use of games makes it difficult for lawmakers to control them.
B. The appeal of the games to a younger generation isn’t really understood by many lawmakers.
C. The lawmakers try to apply the same rules to the games as they did to radio and television.
D. Many lawmakers feel it is too late for the regulations to have much effect on the use of games.

35. What main point does Adam Martin make about video games?

A. People are learning how to avoid becoming addicted to them.
B. They enable people to learn without being aware of it happening.
C. They satisfy a need for people to compete with each other.
D. People learn a narrow range of skills but they are still useful.

36. Which of the following does Steven Johnson disagree with?

A. the opinion that video games offer educational benefits to the user
B. the attitude that video games are often labelled as predictable and undemanding
C. the idea that children’s logic is tested more by video games than at school
D. the suggestion that video games can be compared to scientific procedures

37. Which of the following is the most suitable subtitle for Reading Passage 3?

A. A debate about the effects of video games on other forms of technology.
B. An examination of the opinions of young people about video games.
C. A discussion of whether attitudes towards video games are outdated.
D. An analysis of the principles behind the historical development of video games.



Questions 38-40. Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-E, below.

Write the correct letter, A-E. on your answer sheet.

38. There is little evidence for the traditionalists’ prediction that ………………………….
39. A recent study by the US government found that ……………………………

40. Richard Battle suggests that it Is important for people to accept the fact that…………………………….
A. young people have no problem separating their own lives from the ones they play on the screen.
B. levels of reading ability will continue to drop significantly.
C. new advances in technology have to be absorbed into our lives.
D. games cannot provide preparation for the skills needed in real life.
E. young people will continue to play video games despite warnings against doing so.

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REIKI IELTS READING

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Reading Passage 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.


A. The spiritual practice of Reiki was first introduced in the early 20th century in Japan and continues to be used by its followers today with the intention of treating physical, emotional and mental imbalances and consequent ill- health. The principles of Reiki involve techniques employed by practitioners they say will channel healing energy through the subject’s body, and advocates hold that these techniques can also be used for self-healing. The name of the practice itself stems from two Japanese characters, pronounced ‘rei’ which translates to ‘unseen’ or ‘spiritual’ and ‘ki’ meaning ‘life force’ or ‘energy’.

B. According to Reiki philosophy, only by undergoing an attunement process performed by a Reiki Master is an individual able to access, then channel this positive energy within, this ability once established is considered to be enduring. Once attuned, it is said that an individual has the ability to allow energy to flow to weak or diseased
areas of the body, so activating a natural healing process. Reiki energy is considered to be ‘intelligent energy’ in that it automatically flows to such areas; for this reason, practitioners believe that diagnosis of a specific problem is unnecessary beforehand and that the practice can be used as preventative medicine and encourage healing prior to the onset of tangible symptoms. Since healing initiated by Reiki treatment is entirely natural, many practitioners are confident that it can be used alongside any other type of treatment without adverse effect; however, others recommend that since the patient may undergo significant internal improvement for certain ailments – diabetes, for example – careful monitoring is required since such improvements may establish a need for an alteration in medication requirements.

C. A ‘whole body’ Reiki treatment session typically lasts between to 90 minutes. The subject is required to lie down – often on a treatment table – clothed in comfortable and loose-fitting attire. Treatment may involve the practitioner placing their hands on the recipient in a variety of positions; however, some therapists take a non- touching approach, holding their hands a few centimetres away from the body. Hands are usually held in one position for up to 5 minutes before moving on to the next part of the body; between 12 and 20 hand positions are generally used. Those who have undergone a Reiki treatment session often state that they experienced a pleasant warmness in the area of focus and a feeling of contentment and relaxation throughout the session.

D. The healing energy is said to originate in the universe itself and is not the passing of personal energy from practitioner to the patient; it is therefore thought to be inexhaustible and the personal well-being of the practitioner uncompromised. While some masters and teachers hold that subjects must be receptive to the concept in order for energy to flow, others believe that the attitude of the patient is of no consequence and that benefits will follow regardless; for this reason, those following the latter school of thought say that since Reiki requires no conscious belief it can also benefit the well-being of animals and plant life.

E. Controversy surrounds the practice of Reiki, some in opposition as they say that Reiki may offer only a perceived improvement in health and therefore only a ‘placebo’ effect. Whilst the practice of Reiki itself is not necessarily considered potentially harmful, some medical practitioners are concerned that its benefits may be over-estimated by patients and that, as a result, they’ may ignore or Bandon conventional treatments. Others argue against the reliability of Reiki due to the lack of regulation of practitioners, holding that patients may be left vulnerable to illegitimate therapists who lack knowledge and skill. While Reiki is not connected to any particular religious doctrine, some religious leaders oppose the practice for spiritual reasons; however, others hold that the meditative principles involved in treatment have enhanced their own ability to explore and embrace their own particular religion.

F. Limited scientific studies in the authenticity of Reiki have been conducted. During research conducted by the Institute of Neurological Studies at South Glasgow University Hospital, it was observed that there was a significant decrease in heart rate and blood pressure amongst subjects receiving 30 minutes of Reiki treatment as opposed to a group receiving placebo treatment of 30 minutes rest. Since the test group consisted of a small number of subjects just 45 – the research recommendations concluded a requirement for further studies. A similarly small preliminary study into the potential effects of Reiki on patients suffering mild dementia, conducted in the USA, tentatively suggested that treatment had a positive effect on the subjects’ memory abilities; however, research limitations included insufficient analysis of potential placebo effects.

G. Other studies have also attempted to determine the correlation between Reiki treatment and improvement in cancer and stroke patients. Whilst investigations into the first condition indicated a seemingly positive effect on degrees of fatigue, pain, and stress experienced by sufferers, the second project failed to reveal a link between treatment and improvement in the subjects’ condition and rehabilitation. Theories have been put forward that the benefits of energy treatments such as Reiki may be scientifically attributed to the effect of electromagnetic fields; however, the majority of researchers agree that more extensive investigation is required.



Questions 1-3
Choose THREE letters A-H.
Write your answers in boxes 1- 3 on your answer sheet NB. Your answers may be given in any order
Which THREE of the following statements are true of Reiki?

A. Principles for self-healing differ from those used on others.
B. Attunement is said to have a permanent effect on the recipient.
C. Its preventative properties are more significant than cure.
D. There are differences in opinion regarding its use with other therapies.
E. The treatment typically involves contact between the therapist and the patient.
F. The recipient’s own energy is the key to the philosophy.
G. Some therapists believe a pessimistic approach affects results.
H. It is only practised on human subjects.

Questions 4-9
Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs A-G.
Which paragraph contains the following information? You can use each paragraph more than once.

4. A scientific explanation of why Reiki may have positive effects.
5. An overview of the practicalities of how Reiki is performed.
6. The pre-requisite required to experience Reiki benefits.
7. When a patient’s faith and expectations cause concern.
8. The immediate effects that can be experienced by recipients.
9. The safety of conducting therapy for practitioners.

Questions 10-13
According to the information in Reading Passage 1,
Classify the following research findings into the benefits of Reiki as relating to

A.        The Institute of Neurological  Studies
B.        Research conducted in the USA
C.        Cancer research
D.        Stroke research

Write the correct letter A, B, C or D in boxes 10-13 your answer sheet

10. The groups’ comfort and quality of life appeared to improve.
11. No apparent links were identified.
12. Results were compared to a control group who did not receive Reiki treatment
13. Recollection ability seemed to be enhanced.



Reading Passage 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-27, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

SCULPTURE

A. Sculpture, the practice of creating a three-dimensional object for artistic and aesthetic purposes, dates back as far as prehistoric times. Since objects created are intended to be enduring, traditionally sculptures have been forged from durable materials such as bronze, stone, marble, and jade; however, some branches of the art also specialize in creating figurines of a more ephemeral nature, ice sculpture, for example. The practice of sculpting in many countries has traditionally been associated with religious philosophy; for example, in Asia, many famous sculptures are related to Hinduism or Buddhism.

B. In Africa, perhaps more than any other region in the world, three-dimensional artwork is favoured and given more emphasis than two-dimensional paintings. Whilst some experts hold that the art of sculpture in the continent dates back to the Nok civilization of Nigeria in 500 BC, this is disputed due to evidence of the art’s existence in Pharaonic Africa. To the expert eye, African art is clearly defined by the region from which it is from and easily identifiable from the differences in a technique used and material from which it is made. Figurines from the West African region are sculpted in two distinctly different forms. The first is characterized by angular forms and features with elongated bodies, such sculptures being traditionally used in religious rituals. Conversely, the traditional wood statues of the Mande speaking culture possess cylindrical arms and legs with broad, flat surfaces. Metal sculptures that hail from the eastern regions of West Africa are heralded by many as amongst the most superior art forms ever crafted.

C. Central African sculpture may be a little more difficult to identify for the novice observer as a wider variety of materials may be used, ranging from wood to ivory, stone or metal. However, despite tills, the distinct style of usage of smooth lines and circular forms still helps to define the origin of such works. In both Eastern and Southern Africa, typically, art depicts a mixture of human and animal features. Art from the former region Is usually created in the form of a pole carved in human shape and topped with a human or animal image which has a strong connection with the death, burial, and the spiritual world. Such creations are less recognized as art in the traditional sense than those from other parts of Africa. In Southern Africa, the human/animal hybrid representations are fashioned from clay, the oldest known examples dating back to from between 400 and 600 A.D.

D. Although these distinct and defining regional differences in artistic expression exist, there are also universal similarities that define African art as a whole. Primarily a common characteristic is that focus is predominantly on the representation of the human form. A second common trait of African art is that it is often inspired by a ceremonial or performance-related purpose; the meaning behind the art and its purpose often intended to be interpreted in a different way depending on an individual’s age, gender or even social and educational status.

E. Throughout the African continent, artworks tend to be more abstract in nature than intending to present a realistic and naturalistic portrayal of the subject in question. Artists such as Picasso, Van Gogh and Gauguin are said to have been influenced and inspired by African art. Its ability to stimulate emotional reaction and imagination generated a great deal of interest from western artists at the beginning of the 20th century. As a result, new European works began to emerge which were of a more abstract nature than previously conceived. More intellectually and emotionally stimulating art was born than had been seen before in a culture that had traditionally faithfully represented and depicted the true and exact form of its subjects.

F. The ‘Modernism’ movement of the 20th century embraced innovation in literature and art, its devotees wishing to move beyond realism in artistic expression. The sculptor Henry Spencer Moore, born in 1898 in Yorkshire, was one of the key players involved in introducing and developing his own particular style of modernism to the British art world. He is best known for his abstract bronze sculptures of the human form, many critics drawing parallels between the undulating landscapes and hills of his home county Yorkshire and the shapes and lines of his sculptures.

G. By the 1950s, Moore’s work was increasingly in demand and he began to secure high profile commissions including artwork for the UNESCO building in Paris. By the end of Moore’s career, due to his popularity and the scale of the projects he undertook, the sculptor was extremely affluent; however, a huge proportion of his wealth was donated to the Henry Moore Foundation established with the aim of supporting education and promotion of the arts. The foundation is a registered charity and has continued to offer to fund a wide range of projects including grants to arts institutions and bursaries and fellowships for students and artists since Moore’s death in 1986.



Questions 14-17. Complete the summary

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.

In Africa, sculpture is more predominant and more highly 14………………….. than canvas art, for example. In Asia, many prestigious works are connected to 15…………………… values. Sculpture is an ancient art in which figurines are created from materials which are, in the main, 16…………………… to ensure longevity of the art form; however, though more 17…………………… , materials such as ice are used in certain spheres.

Questions 18-22. Complete the table.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 18-22 on your answer sheet.

REGIONAL AFRICAN ART

RegionStyleAdditional Information
Eastern Africa
Subjects similar to the 18…………………………
area of the country. 		Less sought-after than other styles of African art.
Southern Africa Artwork representing human & animal formMade from 19………………………..
Western AfricaStyle 1
Sharp lines, long bodies





Style 2
Cylindrical, broad and flat lines crafted from
21………………………………

Conventionally made for the purpose of 20……………………






Made by Mande speakers
Central Africa
Smooth lines & circular forms Often more difficult to recognise due to the diversity of
22…………………… used.

Questions 23-27
Answer the questions below using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 23-27 on your answer sheet.

23. Verification of art in which civilization sheds doubt on the theory that African art dates back to the Nok period?

24. What material is used for the African sculptures many consider to be the best?

25. What ceremonial event are the creations from Eastern Africa connected with?

26. Due to African influence, what did Western art become that allowed it to be more intellectually and emotionally stimulating?

27. What did Moore most often depict which brought him the greatest recognition?



Reading Passage 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28 – 40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below. GENEALOGY

A. Genealogy, the study of tracing family connections and relationships through history – so building a cohesive family tree, has become an increasingly popular hobby from non-specialist enthusiasts over recent decades. The introduction of the Internet has, in many ways, spurred interest levels since historical information has been made far more accessible than previously. Experts warn, however, that sources obtained from the internet must be considered with caution as they may often contain inaccuracies, often advising novice genealogists to join a family history society where they are able to learn useful skills from experienced researchers.

B. Originally, prior to developing a more mainstream following, the practice of genealogy focused on establishing the ancestral links of rulers and noblemen often with the purpose of disputing or confirming the legitimacy of inherited rights to wealth or position. More recently, genealogists are often interested in not only where and when previous generations of families lived but also details of their lifestyle and motivations, interpreting the effects of the law, political restrictions, immigration and the social conditions on an individual’s or family’s behaviour at the given time. Genealogy searches may also result in the location of living relatives and consequently family reunions, in some cases helping to reunite family members who had been separated in the past due to fostering/adoption, migration or war.

C. In Australia, there has been a great deal of interest of late, from families wishing to trace their links to the early settlers. As a result of the loss of the American colonies in the 1700s, Britain was in need of an alternative destination for prisoners who could not be accommodated in the country’s overcrowded penal facilities. In 1787, the ‘First Fleet’ which consisted of a flotilla of ships carrying just over 1300 people (of which 753 were convicts or their children and the remainder marines, officers and their family members) left Britain’s shores for Australia. On January 26, 1788 – now celebrated as Australia Day – the fleet landed at Sydney Cove and the first steps to European settlement began.

D. Genealogy research has led to a shift in attitudes towards convict heritage amongst contemporary Australian society, as family members have been able to establish that their ancestors were, in fact, not hardened and dangerous criminals, but had, in most cases, been harshly punished for minor crimes inspired by desperation and dire economic circumstances. So dramatic has the shift in attitudes been that having family connections to passengers on the ‘First Fleet’ is considered nothing less than prestigious. Convicts Margaret Dawson and Elizabeth Thakery were amongst the first European women to ever set foot on Australian soil. Details about the former, whose initial death sentence passed for stealing clothes from her employer was commuted to deportation, and the latter expelled for stealing handkerchiefs along with others of similar fate are now available on the internet for eager descendants to track.

E. Although many of the deported convicts were forbidden to return to Britain, others such as Dawson, were, in theory, expelled for a given term. In reality, however, the costs of attempting to return to the mother country were well beyond the means of the majority. Genealogists now attribute the successful early development of Australia to such ex-convicts who decided to contribute fully to society once their sentence had been served. Many rewards were available to prisoners who displayed exemplary behaviour, including land grants of 30 acres or more, tools for developing and farming the land and access to convict labour. Genealogy studies also show that many former prisoners went on to hold powerful positions in the newly forming Australia society, examples being Francis Greenway – a British architect expelled on conviction of fraud – who went on to design many of Sydney’s most prominent colonial buildings, and Alexander Munro, transported after stealing cheese at the age of 15, who would later build Australia’s first gas works and hold the position of Town Mayor.

F. In North America, the Mormon Church, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, holds two major genealogical databases, the International Genealogical Index and the Ancestral File, which contain records of hundreds of million individuals who lived between 1500 and 1900 in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Resources available to genealogy enthusiasts include the Salt Lake City-based Family History Library and more than 4000 branches where microfilms and microfiches can be rented for research and the newer Family Search internet site which provides open access to numerous databases and research sources. Such data-sharing practices are central and crucial to genealogical research and the internet has proven to be a major tool in facilitating ease of transfer of information in formats suitable for use in forums and via email. The global level of interest in and demand for such information has proven so intense, that traffic load on the release of sources such as Family Search and the British Census for 1901 led to a temporary collapse of the host servers.

G. Experts advise that the reliability of sources used for genealogical research should be evaluated in light of four factors that may influence their accuracy, these being the knowledge of the informant, the bias and mental state of the informant, the passage of time and potential for a compilation error. First, genealogists should consider who the information was provided by and what he or she could be ascertained to have known. For example, a census record alone is considered unreliable as no named source for the information is likely to be found. A death certificate signed by an identified doctor, however, can be accepted as more reliable. In the case of bias or mental state, researchers are advised to consider that even when information is given by what could be considered a reliable source, that there may have been a motivation to be untruthful – continuing to claim a government benefit or avoidance of taxation, for example.

H. Generally, data recorded at the same time or close to the event being researched is considered to be more reliable than records written at a later point in time, as – while individuals may intend to give a true representation of events – factual information may be misrepresented due to lapses in memory and forgotten details. Finally, sources may be classified as either original or derivative. The latter refers to photocopies, transcriptions, abstracts, translations, extractions, and compilations and has more room for error due to possible misinterpretations, typing errors or loss of additional and crucial parts of the original documentation.



Questions 28-32
Reading Passage 3 has eight paragraphs A-H.
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B and D-G from the list of headings below. Write the correct number i to ix in boxes 28 – 32 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

An Embarrassing Heritage Assessing Validity Diversity of Application Interpretation Errors
Past Usage Useful Sources
Australasian Importance Changing Viewpoints Significant Roles
Example: Paragraph C; Answer: vii
28. Paragraph B
29. Paragraph D
30. Paragraph E
31. Paragraph F
32. Paragraph G

Questions 33-36
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 3334. -36 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

33. Early applications of genealogy focused on behaviour, movement, and settlement of populations.
34. The punishment of deportation was reserved for those who posed a serious threat to British society.
35. Some ex-convicts chose to stay in Australia due to the opportunities it presented.
36. Overwhelming interest in obtaining genealogical information has led to technological difficulties.



Questions 37-40
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D
Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

37. Why has recreational genealogy become more popular?
A. Because it is now a fashionable hobby.
B. Because more people wish to trace missing relatives.
C. Because there are fewer political barriers.
D. Because it is no longer requires so much effort.

38. Whose original sentence for breaking the law was reduced?
A. Francis Greenway.
B. Margaret Dawson.
C. Alexander Munro.
D. Elizabeth Thackery.

39. What is fundamental to genealogical research?
A. Original records.
B. Electronic transfer.
C. The pooling of information.
D. The IG Index.

40. Why does census information need to be approached with caution?
A. Because it cannot easily be attributed to a particular individual.
B. Because it is often not validated by a physician.
C. Because administration practices in the past were unreliable.
D. Because informants may not have been truthful due to financial motivations.


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OUR VANISHING NIGHT IELTS READING

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” Most city skies have become virtually empty of stars “

Reading passage 1. You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

A. If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, it would make no difference to us whether we were out and about at night or during the day, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, meaning our eyes are adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings any more than as primates or mammals or Earthlings. Yet it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: we’ve engineered it to meet our needs by filling it with light.

B. This kind of engineering is no different from damming a river. Its benefits come with consequences – called light pollution – whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky, where it is not wanted, instead of focusing it downward, where it is. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life – migration, reproduction, feeding – is affected. For most of human history, the phrase “light pollution” would have made no sense. Imagine walking toward London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was one of Earth’s most populous cities. Nearly a million people lived there, making do, as they always had, with candles and lanterns. There would be no gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years.

C. Now, most of humanity lives under reflected, refracted light from overlit cities and suburbs, from light-flooded roads and factories. Nearly all of night-time Europe is a bright patch of light, as is most of the United States and much of Japan. In the South Atlantic, the glow from a single fishing fleet – squid fishermen luring their prey with metal halide lamps – can be seen from space, burning brighter on occasions than Buenos Aires. In most cities, the sky looks as though it has been emptied of stars, and taking their place is a constant orange glow. We’ve become so used to this that the glory of an unlit night – dark enough for the planet Venus to throw shadows on Earth – is wholly beyond our experience, beyond memory almost. And yet above the city’s pale ceiling lies the rest of the universe, utterly undiminished by the light we waste.

D. We’ve lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied country when nothing could be further from the truth. Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species, it acts as a magnet. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being ‘captured’ by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms, circling and circling in the thousands until they drop. Migrating at night, birds are apt to collide with brightly lit buildings; immature birds suffer in much higher numbers than adults.

E. Insects, of course, cluster around streetlights, and feeding on those insects is a crucial means of survival for many bat species. In some Swiss valleys, the European lesser horseshoe bat began to vanish after streetlights were installed, perhaps because those valleys were suddenly filled with fight-feeding pipistrelle bats. Other nocturnal mammals, like desert rodents and badgers, are more cautious about searching for food under the permanent full moon of fight pollution because they’ve become easier targets for the predators who are hunting them.

F. Some birds – blackbirds and nightingales, among others-sing at unnatural hours in the presence of artificial light. Scientists have determined that long artificial days — and artificially short nights — induce early breeding in a wide range of birds. And because a longer day allows for longer feeding, it can also affect migration schedules. The problem, of course, is that migration, like most other aspects of bird behaviour, is a precisely timed biological behaviour. Leaving prematurely may mean reaching a destination too soon for nesting conditions to be right.

G. Nesting sea turtles, which seek out dark beaches, find fewer and fewer of them to bury their eggs on. When the baby sea turtles emerge from the eggs, they gravitate toward the brighter, more reflective sea horizon but find themselves confused by artificial lighting behind the beach. In Florida alone, hatching losses number in the hundreds of thousands every year. Frogs and toads living on the side of major highways suffer nocturnal fight levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, disturbing nearly every aspect of their behaviour, including their night-time breeding choruses.

H. It was once thought that light pollution only affected astronomers, who need to see the night sky in all its glorious clarity. And, in fact, some of the earliest civic efforts to control light pollution were made half a century ago to protect the view from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. In 2001 Flagstaff was declared the first International Dark Sky City. By now the effort to control light pollution has spread around the globe. More and more dues and even entire countries have committed themselves to reduce unwanted glare.



Questions 1-7:

Do the following statements agree 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

1. Few people recognise nowadays that human beings are designed to function best in daylight.

2. Most light pollution is caused by the direction of artificial lights rather than their intensity.

3. By 1800 the city of London had such a large population, it was already causing light pollution.

4. The fishermen of the South Atlantic are unaware of the light pollution they are causing.

5. Shadows from the planet Venus are more difficult to see at certain times of the year.

6. In some Swiss valleys, the total number of bats declined rapidly after the introduction of streetlights.

7. The first attempts to limit light pollution were carried out to help those studying the stars.



Questions 8-13: Complete the table below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet.

CREATURE
EFFECTS OF LIGHT

Songbirds and seabirds they bump into 9…………. 
The worst-affected birds are those which are seabirds 8………….. which stand out at night 

Desert rodents and badgers 
They are more at risk from 10…………… 

Migrating birds not suitable on arrival. 
Early migration may mean the 11……………. are 

Sea turtles 
They suffer from a decreasing number of 12……….. 

Frogs and toads 
If they are near 13……….. their routines will be upset 

Reading Passage 2

Is there a psychologist in the building?


— CHRISTIAN JARRETT reports on psychology’s place in new architectural development. —

A. The space around us affects us profoundly – rebuilding of one south London school as a striking emotionally, behaviorally, cognitively. In Britain, that example of how building design can affect human space is changing at a pace not seen for a generation. But is anyone listening?
‘This is a hugely recognised country’s psychology research that is not only relevant but improved schools. At the moment we’re talking to ourselves,’ says Chris Spencer, professor of environmental psychology at the University of Sheffield. Spencer recalls a recent talk he gave in which he called on fellow researchers to make a greater effort to communicate their findings to architects and planners. ‘I was amazed at the response of many of the senior researchers, who would say: “I’m doing my research for pure science, the industry can take it or leave it”. But there are models of how to apply environmental psychology to real problems if you know where to look Professor Frances Kuo is an example.

B. Kuo’s website provides pictures and plain English ” The collaborative project currently summaries of the research conducted by her Human stands as a one-off experiment. ” Among these is trainee architects will now go away with some a study using police records that found inner-city surrounded by more vegetation suffered 52 per cent fewer crimes than apartment blocks with little or no greenery. Frances Kuo and her co-researcher William Sullivan believe that greenery reduces crime – so long as visibility is preserved – because it reduces aggression, brings local residents together outdoors, and the conspicuous presence of people deters criminals.

C. ‘Environmental psychologists are increasingly in demand,’ says David Uzzell, professor of environmental psychology. ‘We’re asked to contribute to the planning, design and management of many different environments, ranging from neighbourhoods, offices, schools, health, transport, traffic and leisure environments for the purpose of improving quality of life and creating a better people-environment fit.’ Uzzell points to the rebuilding of one south London school as a striking example of how building design can affect human behaviour positively. Before its redesign, it was ranked as the worst school in the area – now it is
recognised as one of the country’s twenty most improved schools.

D. Uzzell has been involved in a pioneering project between M.Sc students in England and Scotland. Architecture students in Scotland acted as designers while environmental psychology students in England acted as consultants, as together they worked on a community project in a run-down area of Glasgow. The psychology students encouraged the architecture students to think about who their client group was, to consider issues of crowding and social cohesion, and they introduced them to psychological methodologies, for example, observation and interviewing local residents about their needs.’ The collaborative project currently stands as a one-off experiment. ‘Hopefully, these trainee architects will now go away with some understanding of the psychological issues involved in the design and will take into account people’s needs,’ says Uzzell.

E. Hilary Barker, a recent graduate in psychology, now works for a design consultancy. She’s part of a four-person research team that contributes to the overall work of the company in helping clients use their office space more productively. Her team all have backgrounds in psychology or social science, but the rest of the firm consists mainly of architects and interior designers. ‘What I do is pretty rare, to be honest,’ Barker says. ‘I feel very privileged to be able to use my degree in such a way.’ Barker explains that the team carries out observational studies on behalf of companies, to identify exactly how occupants are using their building. The companies are often surprised by the findings, for example, that staff use meeting rooms for quiet, individual work.

F. One area where the findings from the environment- behaviour research have certainly influenced building is in hospital design. The government has a checklist of criteria that must be met in the design of new hospitals, and these are derived largely from the work of the behavioural scientist Professor Roger Ulrich,’ Chris Spencer says. Ulrich’s work has shown, for example, how the view from a patient’s window can affect their recovery. Even a hospital’s layout can impact on people’s health, according to Dr John Zeisel. ‘If people get lost in hospitals, they get stressed, which lowers their immune system and means their medication works less well. You might think that way-finding around the hospital is the responsibility of the person who puts all the signs up, but the truth is that the basic layout of a building is what helps people find their way around,’ he says.

G. Zeisel also points to the need for a better balance between private and shared rooms in hospitals. ‘Falls are reduced and fewer medication errors occur’ in private rooms, he says. There’s also research showing how important it is that patients have access to the outdoors and that gardens in hospitals are a major contributor to well-being. However, more generally, Zeisel shares Chris Spencer’s concerns that the lessons from environmental psychology research are not getting through. ’There is certainly a gap between what we in social science knowledge and the world of designers and architects,’ says Zeisel. He believes that most industries, from sports to film- making, have now recognised the importance of an evidence-based approach and that the building trade needs to formulate itself more in that vein and to recognise that there is relevant research out there. ‘It would be outrageous, silly, to go ahead with huge building projects without learning the lessons from the new towns established between 30 and 40 years ago,’ he warns.



Questions 14-20:
Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs. A-G.

Choose the correct heading for A-G from the list of headings below. Write the correct number, h-x, in boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings

i. A comparison between similar buildings
ii. The negative reaction of local residents
iii. An unusual job for a psychologist
iv. A type of building benefiting from prescribed guidelines
v. The need for government action
vi. A failure to use available information in practical ways
vii. Academics with an unhelpful attitude
viii. A refusal by architects to accept criticism
ix. A unique co-operative scheme
x. The expanding scope of environmental psychology

14. Paragraph A
15. Paragraph B
16. Paragraph C
17. Paragraph D
18. Paragraph E
19. Paragraph F
20. Paragraph G

Questions 21-22:
Choose TWO letters, A-E
Write the correct letters in boxes 21 and 22 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following benefits are said to arise from the use of environmental psychology when planning buildings?
A. better relationships between staff
B. improved educational performance
C. reduction of environmental pollution
D. fewer mistakes made by medical staff E easier detection of crime

Questions 23-24:
Choose TWO letters, A-E

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

Which TWO of the following research methods are mentioned in the passage?

A. the use of existing data relating to a geographical area
B. measuring the space given to a variety of activities
C. watching what people do in different parts of a building
D. analyzing decisions made during the planning of a building
E. observing patients’ reactions to each other Questions 25-26:

Complete the sentences below

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 25 and 26 on your answer sheet.
25. The students from England suggested that the Scottish students should identify their ……………….
26. John Zeisel believes that if the of a building is clear, patient outcomes will improve ………………….



Reading Passage 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

A. Our ancestor, Homo erectus, may not have had culture or even language, but did they have teenagers? That question has been contested in the past few years, with some anthropologists claiming evidence of an adolescent phase in human fossil. This is not merely an academic debate. Humans today are the only animals on Earth to have a teenage phase, yet we have very little idea why. Establishing exactly when adolescence first evolved and finding out what sorts of changes in our bodies and lifestyles it was associated with could help us understand its purpose. Why do we, uniquely, have a growth spurt so late in life?

B. Until recently, the dominant explanation was that physical growth is delayed by our need to grow large brains and to learn all the behaviour patterns associated with humanity – speaking, social interaction and so on. While such behaviour is still developing, humans cannot easily fend for themselves, so it is best to stay small and look youthful. That way your parents and other members of the social group are motivated to continue looking after you. What’s more, studies of mammals show a strong relationship between brain size and the rate of development, with larger-brained animals taking longer to reach adulthood. Humans are at the far end of this spectrum. If this theory is correct, and the development of large brains accounts for the teenage growth spurt, the origin of adolescence should have been with the evolution of our own species (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals, starting almost 200,000 years ago. The trouble is, some of the fossil evidence seems to tell a different story.

C. The human fossil record is extremely sparse, and the number of fossilised children minuscule. Nevertheless, in the past few years, anthropologists have begun to look at what can be learned of the lives of our ancestors from these youngsters. One of the most studied is the famous Turkana boy, an almost complete skeleton of Homo erectus from 1.6 million years ago found in Kenya in 1984. Accurately assessing how old someone is from their skeleton is a tricky business. Even with a modern human, you can only make a rough estimate based on the developmental stage of teeth and bones and the skeleton’s general size.

D. You need as many developmental markers as possible to get an estimate of age. The Turkana boy’s teeth made him 10 or 11 years old. The features of his skeleton put him at 13, but he was as tall as a modern 15-year-old. Susan Anton of New York University points to research by Margaret Clegg who studied a collection of 18th- and 19th-century skeletons whose ages at death were known. When she tried to age the skeletons without checking the records, she found similar discrepancies to those of the Turkana boy. One 10-year-old boy, for example, had a dental age of 9, the skeleton of a 6-year-old but was tall enough to be 11. The Turkana kid still has a rounded skull, and needs more growth to reach the adult shape,’ Anton adds. She thinks that Homo erectus had already developed modern human patterns of growth, with a late, if not quite so extreme, adolescent spurt. She believes Turkana boy was just about to enter it.

E. If Anton is right, that theory contradicts the orthodox idea linking late growth with the development of a large brain. Anthropologist Steven Leigh from the University of Illinois goes further. He believes the idea of adolescence as catch-up growth does not explain why the growth rate increases so dramatically. He says that many apes have growth spurts in particular body regions that are associated with reaching maturity, and this makes sense because by timing the short but crucial spells of maturation to coincide with the seasons when food is plentiful, they minimise the risk of being without adequate food supplies while growing. What makes humans unique is that the whole skeleton is involved. For Leigh, this is the key.

F. According to his theory, adolescence evolved as an integral part of efficient upright locomotion, as well as to accommodate more complex brains. Fossil evidence suggests that our ancestors first walked on two legs six million years ago. If proficient walking was important for survival, perhaps the teenage growth spurt has very ancient origins. While many anthropologists will consider Leigh’s theory a step too far, he is not the only one with new ideas about the evolution of teenagers.

G. Another approach, which has produced a surprising result, relies on the minute analysis of tooth growth. Every nine days or so the growing teeth of both apes and humans acquire ridges on their enamel surface. These are like rings in a tree trunk: the number of them tells you how long the crown of a tooth took to form. Across mammals, the rate at which teeth develop is closely related to how fast the brain grows and the age you mature. Teeth are good indicators of life history because their growth is less related to the environment and nutrition than is the growth of the skeleton.

H. A more decisive piece of evidence came last year when researchers in France and Spain published their findings from a study of Neanderthal teeth. Neanderthals had much-festered tooth growth than Homo erectus who went before them, and hence, possibly, a shorter childhood. Lead researcher Fernando Ramirez-Rozzi thinks Neanderthals died young – about 25 years old — primarily because of the cold, harsh environment they had to endure in glacial Europe. They evolved to grow up quicker than their immediate ancestors. Neanderthals and Homo erectus probably had to reach adulthood fairly quickly, without delaying for an adolescent growth spurt. So it still looks as though we are the original teenagers.



Questions 27-30:
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D

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

27. In the first paragraph, why does the writer say ‘This is not merely an academic debate’?

A. Anthropologists’ theories need to be backed up by practical research.
B. There have been some important misunderstandings among anthropologists.
C. The attitudes of anthropologists towards adolescence are changing.
D. The work of anthropologists could inform our understanding of modem adolescence.

28. What was Susan Anton’s opinion of the Turkana boy?

A. He would have experienced an adolescent phase had he lived.
B. His skull showed he had already reached adulthood.
C. His skeleton and teeth could not be compared to those from a more modern age.
D. He must have grown much faster than others alive at the time.

29. What point does Steven Leigh make?

A. Different parts of the human skeleton develop at different speeds.
B. The growth period of many apes is confined to times when there is enough food.
C. Humans have different rates of development from each other depending on living conditions.
D. The growth phase in most apes lasts longer if more food is available.

30. What can we learn from a mammal’s teeth?

A. A poor diet will cause them to grow more slowly.
B. They are a better indication of a lifestyle than a skeleton.
C. Their growing period is difficult to predict accurately.
D. Their speed of growth is directly related to the body’s speed of development.

Questions 31-36:
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 31-36 on your answer sheet, write
YES, if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer NO, if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN, if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

31. It is difficult for anthropologists to do research on human fossils because they are so rare.
32. Modern methods mean it is possible to predict the age of a skeleton with accuracy.
33. Susan Anton’s conclusion about the Turkana boy reinforces an established idea.
34. Steven Leigh’s ideas are likely to be met with disbelief by many anthropologists.
35. Researchers in France and Spain developed a unique method of analysing teeth.
36. There has been too little research comparing the brains of Homo erectus and Neanderthals.



Questions 37-40:
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-G, below. Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

37. Until recently, delayed growth in humans until adolescence was felt to be due to …………….

38. In her research, Margaret Clegg discovered ……………….

39. Steven Leigh thought the existence of adolescence is connected to …………………

40. Research on Neanderthals suggests that they had short lives because of ………………….

A. inconsistencies between height, skeleton and dental evidence.
B. the fact that human beings walk on two legs.
C. the way teeth grew.
D. a need to be dependent on others for survival.
E. difficult climatic conditions.
F. increased quantities of food.
G. the existence of much larger brains than previously.

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NUTMEG – A VALUABLE SPICE IELTS READING

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Reading passage 1

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

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

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

In 1602, Dutch merchants founded the VOC, a trading corporation better known as the Dutch East India Company. By 1617, the VOC was the richest commercial operation in the world. The company had 50,000 employees worldwide, with a private army of 30,000 men and a fleet of 200 ships. At the same time, thousands of people across Europe were dying of the plague, a highly contagious and deadly disease. Doctors were desperate for a way to stop the spread of this disease, and they decided nutmeg held the cure.

Everybody wanted nutmeg, and many were willing to spare no expense to have it. Nutmeg bought for a few pennies in Indonesia could be sold for 68,000 times its original cost on the streets of London. The only problem was the short supply. And that’s where the Dutch found their opportunity

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

Then, in 1770, a Frenchman named Pierre Poivre successfully smuggled nutmeg plants to safety in Mauritius, an island off the coast of Africa. Some of these were later exported to the Caribbean where they thrived, especially on the island of Grenada. Next, in 1778, a volcanic eruption in the Banda region caused a tsunami that wiped out half the nutmeg groves. Finally, in 1809, the British returned to Indonesia and seized the Banda Islands by force. They returned the islands to the Dutch in 1817, but not before transplanting hundreds of nutmeg seedlings to plantations in several locations across southern Asia. The Dutch nutmeg monopoly was over. Today, nutmeg is grown in Indonesia, the Caribbean, India, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea and Sri Lanka, and world nutmeg production is estimated to average between 10,000 and 12,000 tonnes per year.

Questions 1-4

Complete the notes below. Write ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

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

Questions 5-7

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 5-7, write

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

5. In the Middle Ages, most Europeans knew where nutmeg was grown.

6. The VOC was the world’s first major trading company.

7. Following the Treaty of Breda, the Dutch had control of all the islands where nutmeg grew.

Questions 8-13

Complete the table below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage.

Middle agesNutmeg was brought to Europe by the (8)……………….
16th centuryEuropean nations took control of the nutmeg trade
17th centuryDemand for nutmeg grew, as it was believed to be effective against the disease known as the (9)……………
The Dutch
– Took control of the Banda Islands
– Restricted nutmeg production to a few areas
– Put (10)……………… on nutmeg to avoid it being cultivated outside the islands
– Finally obtained the island of (11)……………………from the British
Late 18th century1770 – nutmeg plants were secretly taken to (12) ………..
1778 – half the Banda Islands’ nutmeg plantations were destroyed by a (13)………………….

Reading passage 2

Driverless cars

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

Research projects on vehicle automation are not new. Vehicles with limited self-driving capabilities have been around for more than 50 years, resulting in significant contributions towards driver assistance systems. But since

Google announced in 2010 that it had been trialling self-driving cars on the streets of California, progress in this field has quickly gathered pace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions 14-18

Reading Passage 2 has seven sections, A-G. Which section contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 14-18.

14. reference to the amount of time when a car is not in use

15. mention of several advantages of driverless vehicles for individual road-users

16. reference to the opportunity of choosing the most appropriate vehicle for each trip

17. an estimate of how long it will take to overcome a number of problems

18. a suggestion that the use of driverless cars may have no effect on the number of vehicles manufactured

Questions 19-22. Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

The impact of driverless cars

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

Questions 23 and 24. Choose TWO letters, A-E.

Which TWO benefits of automated vehicles does the writer mention?

A Car travellers could enjoy considerable cost savings.

B It would be easier to find parking spaces in urban areas.

C Travellers could spend journeys doing something other than driving.

D People who find driving physically difficult could travel independently.

E A reduction in the number of cars would mean a reduction in pollution.

Questions 25 and 26. Choose TWO letters, A~E.

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

A making sure the general public has confidence in automated vehicles

B managing the pace of transition from conventional to automated vehicles

C deciding how to compensate professional drivers who become redundant

D setting up the infrastructure to make roads suitable for automated vehicles

E getting automated vehicles to adapt to various different driving conditions

Reading passage 3.

What is exploration?

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

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

Thomas Hardy set some of his novels in Egdon Heath, a fictional area of uncultivated land, and used the landscape to suggest the desires and fears of his characters. He is delving into matters we all recognise because they are common to humanity. This is surely an act of exploration, and into a world as remote as the author chooses.

Explorer and travel writer Peter Fleming talks of the moment when the explorer returns to the existence he has left behind with his loved ones. The traveller ‘who has for weeks or months seen himself only as a puny and irrelevant alien crawling laboriously over a country in which he has no roots and no background, suddenly encounters his other self, a relatively solid figure, with a place in the minds of certain people’.

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

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

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

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

However, this is to disregard the role the human mind has in conveying remote places; and this is what interests me: how a fresh interpretation, even of a well-travelled route, can give its readers new insights.

Questions 27-32. Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

27.   The writer refers to visitors to New York to illustrate the point that

A exploration is an intrinsic element of being human.

B most people are enthusiastic about exploring.

C exploration can lead to surprising results.

D most people find exploration daunting.

28.   According to the second paragraph, what is the writer’s view of explorers?

A Their discoveries have brought both benefits and disadvantages.

B Their main value is in teaching others.

C They act on an urge that is common to everyone.

D They tend to be more attracted to certain professions than to others.

29.   The writer refers to a description of Egdon Heath to suggest that

A Hardy was writing about his own experience of exploration.

B Hardy was mistaken about the nature of exploration.

C Hardy’s aim was to investigate people’s emotional states.

D Hardy’s aim was to show the attraction of isolation.

30.   In the fourth paragraph, the writer refers to ‘a golden age’ to suggest that

A the amount of useful information produced by exploration has decreased.

B fewer people are interested in exploring than in the 19th century.

C recent developments have made exploration less exciting.

D we are wrong to think that exploration is no longer necessary.

31.   In the sixth paragraph, when discussing the definition of exploration, the writer argues that

A people tend to relate exploration to their own professional interests.

B certain people are likely to misunderstand the nature of exploration.

C the generally accepted definition has changed over time.

D historians and scientists have more valid definitions than the general public.

32.   In the last paragraph, the writer explains that he is interested in

A how someone’s personality is reflected in their choice of places to visit.

B the human ability to cast new light on places that may be familiar.

C how travel writing has evolved to meet changing demands.

D the feelings that writers develop about the places that they explore.

Questions 33-37. Look at the following statements (Questions 33-37) and the list of explorers below. Match each statement with the correct explorer, A-E. Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 33-37. NB You may use any letter more than once.

33. He referred to the relevance of the form of transport used.

34. He described feelings on coming back home after a long journey.

35. He worked for the benefit of specific groups of people.

36. He did not consider learning about oneself an essential part of exploration.

37. He defined exploration as being both unique and of value to others.

List of Explorers

A Peter Fleming
B Ran Fiennes     
C Chris Bonington     
D Robin Hanbury-Tenison
E Wilfred Thesiger

Questions 38-40.

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

The writer’s own bias

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


How did it go? Please share your feedback in the comment section below:

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IELTS ACADEMIC READING IELTS GENERAL READING VOCABULARY COACH WRTING TASK 1 VOCAB IELTS AC WRITING TASK 1 IELTS GENERAL WRITING TASK 1 IELTS WRITING TASK 2 IELTS SPEAKING TASK 1 IELTS SPEAKING TASK 2 IELTS LISTENING TEST

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NOVELS IELTS READING

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Reading passage 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

A Recent years have seen a barrage of dystopian Young Adult novels grow in popularity almost overnigh t- from The Hunger Games to The Maze Runner, Divergent, and The Knife of Never Letting Go. These novels, set in postapocalyptic, totalitarian or otherwise ruthless and dehumanising worlds, have gained such momentum that the trend has seeped into the film and TV industry as well, with multimillion dollar movie adaptations and popular TV series gracing the big and small screen. But what is it about dystopian stories that makes them so appealing to readers and audiences alike?

B Dystopias are certainly nothing new. The word “dystopia” itself, meaning “bad place” (from the Greek dys and topos), has been around since at least the 19th century, and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Orwell’s 1984 (1949), commonly regarded as the first dystopian novels that fit firmly into the genre, were published more than 75 years ago. Even the first YA dystopian novel is older than 20 – Lois Lawry’s The Giver, which came out in 1993. While these are individual examples from previous decades, however, one would be hard-pressed to find a YA shelf in any bookstore nowadays that isn’t stocked with dozens of dystopian titles.

C According to film critic Dana Stevens, it is the similarities that can be drawn between dystopian settings and the daily lives of teenagers that make YA dystopian stories so captivating: the high school experience involves the same social structure as the Hunger Games arena, for example, or the faction-divided world of Divergent. Teenagers might not literally have to fight each other to the death or go through horrendous trials to join a virtue-based faction for the rest of their lives, but there’s something in each story that connects to their own backgrounds. The “cutthroat race for high school popularity” might feel like an “annual televised fight”, and the pressure to choose a clique at school bears a strong resemblance to Tris’s faction dilemma in Divergent.

D Justin Scholes’s and Jon Ostenson’s 2013 study reports similar findings, identifying themes such as “inhumanity and isolation”, the struggle to establish an identity and the development of platonic and romantic relationships as alluring agents. Deconstructing a score of popular YA dystopian novels released between 2007-2011, Scholes and Ostenson argue that the topics explored by dystopian literature are appealing to teenagers because they are “an appropriate fit with the intellectual changes that occur during adolescence”; as teenagers gradually grow into adults, they develop an interest in social issues and current affairs. Dystopian novels, according to author and book critic Dave Astor, feel honest in that regard as they do not patronise their readers, nor do they attempt to sugar-coat reality.
Novels

E All of this still does not explain why this upsurge in YA dystopian literature is happening now, though. Bestselling author Naomi Klein, offers a different explanation: the dystopian trend, she says, is a “worrying sign” of times to come. What all these dystopian stories have in common is that they all assume that “environmental catastrophe” is not only imminent, but also completely inevitable. Moral principles burgeon through these works of fiction, particularly for young people, as they are the ones who will bear the brunt of climate change. Young Adult author Todd Mitchell makes a similar point, suggesting that the bleak futures portrayed in modern YA literature are a response to “social anxiety” brought forth by pollution and over- consumption.

F The threat of natural disasters is not the only reason YA dystopian novels are so popular today, however. As author Claudia Gray notes, what has also changed in recent years is humanity’s approach to personal identity and young people’s roles in society. Adolescents, she says, are increasingly dragooned into rigid moulds through “increased standardised testing, increased homework levels, etc.” YA dystopian novels come into play because they present protagonists who refuse to be defined by someone else, role models who battle against the status quo.

G So, how long is this YA dystopian trend going to last? If The Guardian is to be believed, it’s already been replaced by a new wave of “gritty” realism as seen in the likes of The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green. Profits have certainly dwindled for dystopian film franchises such as Divergent. This hasn’t stopped film companies from scheduling new releases, however, and TV series such as The 100 are still on air. Perhaps the market for dystopian novels has stagnated – only time will tell. One thing is for certain, however: the changes the trend has effected on YA literature are here to stay.



Questions 1-7
Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs, labelled A-G. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-G from the list of headings below.

List of Headings

I Teens are increasingly urged to conform
II The dystopian model scrutinised
III Dystopian novels now focus on climate change
IV The original dystopias
V Dystopian literature’s accomplishments will outlive it
VI A score of dystopian novels has taken over YA shelves
VII The roots of dystopia can be found in teenage experiences
VIII Dystopia is already dead
IX Dystopias promote ethical thinking

1 Paragraph A
2 Paragraph B
3 Paragraph C
4 Paragraph D
5 Paragraph E
6 Paragraph F
7 Paragraph G



Questions 8-12
Answer the questions below with words taken from Reading Passage 1. Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.
8 According to the writer, what was the first dystopian novel?
9 According to the writer, which author initiated the YA dystopian genre?
10 How does Dave Astor describe dystopian novels?
11 According to Naomi Klein, which element is present in all dystopian novels?
12 According to Claudia Gray, things like increased standardised testing and homework levels are a threat to what?

Question 13
Choose the correct Letter, A, B, C or D.
13 Which is the best title for Reading Passage 1?
A A history of YA dystopian literature
B The wane of the dystopian phenomenon
C How dystopian fiction has shaped the world
D The draw of YA dystopian fiction


Reading Passage 2

Plant Wars
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-27,

Mention the words “chemical warfare” or “deployed armies” in any conversation, and your interlocutor might immediately assume you’re talking about wars between humans. In reality, however, there are other kinds of wars out there where these techniques are employed far more frequently and in a far more intricate manner: those waged in the plant kingdom.

We might not normally think of plants this way, but much like humans and animals, they too have to fight for survival on a daily basis. Nutrients, light and water are the three things any plant needs in order to grow; unfortunately, none of these is ample in supply, which means that the competition between plants can grow fierce. Some plants and trees are at an architectural advantage: taller trees have greater access to natural light, while plants with deeper roots have the ability to absorb more water and nutrients. Others, though, manage to defend their territory through “allelopathy”, or chemical warfare.

So how does this chemical warfare work exactly? As Dr Robin Andrews explains, plants convert the nutrients they absorb from the ground to energy with the aid of a type of organic compound known as metabolites. These metabolites can be divided into two categories: primary and secondary. Primary metabolites are what allows a plant to live, playing a direct role in its growth and development, and are thus present in every plant. Secondary metabolites, on the other hand, can vary from plant to plant and often play the role of a defence mechanism against neighbouring competitors.

Out of these secondary metabolites, there are two that are incredibly interesting: DIBOA and DIMBOA. These two cyclic hydroxamic acids were at the forefront of a study conducted by Sascha Venturelli and colleagues in 2015, which found that once they are released into the soil by the plants that produce them, they degenerate into toxic substances that have the power to inhibit growth in nearby plants once they soak them up. As Dr Claude Becker notes, “the phenomenon itself has been known for years”, but we now finally understand the “molecular mechanism” behind it – and its supreme intricacy would put to shame any chemical bombs created by humans.

But plants do not just fight wars against other plants; chemical warfare also comes into play in their defence against herbivores. As Brent Mortensen of Iowa State University describes, plants “actively resist” attacks made by herbivores through qualitative and quantitative chemical defences. What’s the difference? Qualitative defences can be lethal even in small doses, and are often employed to protect “young” or “tender leaves or seeds”. They can also be recycled when no longer necessary. Quantitative defences, in contrast, are only effective “in larger doses”, but unlike qualitative defences, can protect the plant against all herbivores.

Quantitative defences are also not as immediately lethal, as they usually lead to indigestion, pain, irritation of the mouth and throat, and inflammation or swelling in the skin. And what about the “deployed armies” I mentioned before? Well, chemical attacks are not the only way plants elect to defend themselves against herbivores. Some plants, such as the African acacia, also recruit armies to assist them in their war. As Angela White of the University of Sheffield explains, the acacia tree has “hollowed-out structures” which invite ant colonies to build a home in them by providing not just shelter, but also food in the form of a special nectar. In return, ants protect them against herbivores – and this includes not just the small ones like bugs, but also the ones as big as giraffes.

At this point, of course, you might be wondering what all this has to do with you. The territorial nature of plants might be fascinating in its own right, but what is its application in real life? Well, Dr Venturelli of the 2015 study mentioned before has an answer for you: apparently, certain allelochemicals – the aforementioned chemical compounds that are responsible for stunting growth in plants – have been found to have an effect on human cancer cells, too.

According to Michael Bitzer and Ulrich Lauer of the same study, “clinical trials at the University Clinics Tubingen currently assess the efficacy of these plant toxins in cancer patients”. This means that comprehending the way plants defend themselves against the enemies in their environment might not just be of interest to plant biologists alone, but to medical researchers as well.



Questions 14-20
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from Reading Passage 2 for each answer.

14 Plants are very similar to as they also struggle to stay alive every day.
15 The height of a tree or plant can affect how much it receives.
16 Chemical warfare in plants also goes by the name of .
17 Water and nutrients are both taken from the soil, and the latter is later turned into
.
18 Secondary metabolites are an that functions as a defence mechanism for plants.
19 DIBOA and DIMBOA are two types of secondary metabolites that can once absorbed by a plant.
20 The 2015 study by Sascha Venturelli and colleagues examined the of chemical warfare in plants.




Plant Defences Against Herbivores

Qualitative
# can kill a herbivore in 21…………………….
# can be recycled when no longer necessary

Secondary
# only works in larger doses
# effective against 22…………………….
# causes a variety of symptoms, none 23…………………….

Indirect
# uses the help of ant colonies that reside in its 24…………………….
# ants can protect it against herbivores of all sizes, even 25…………………….

Questions 26-27
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?
TRUE if the statement is true according to the passage
FALSE if the statement is false according to the passage
NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

26 Allelochemicals are secondary metabolites.
27 Plant biologists and medical researchers are currently cooperating to assess the efficacy of plant toxins in preventing the growth of cancer cells.


Deafhood Reading passage 3

A At this point you might be wondering: what does ‘deafhood’ mean? Is it a synonym for ‘deafness’? Is it a slightly more politically correct term to express the very same concept you’ve grown accustomed to – a person who lacks the power of hearing, or a person whose hearing is impaired? What’s wrong with terms like ‘hard of hearing’ or ‘deafness’? Have they not represented the deaf community just fine for the past few centuries? Who came up with the term ‘Deafhood’ anyway, and why?

B The term ‘Deafhood’ was first coined in 1993 by Dr Paddy Ladd, a deaf scholar in the Deaf Studies Department at the University of Bristol in England. First explored through his doctoral dissertation in 1998, and later elaborated on in his 2003 book, ‘Understanding Deaf Culture – In Search of Deafhood’, the idea behind Deafhood is twofold: first, it seeks to collect everything that is already known about the life, culture, politics, etc. of Sign Language Peoples (SLPs); secondly, it attempts to remove the limitations imposed on SLPs through their colonisation from hearing people.

C In order to understand what Deafhood represents, it’s first important to understand what is meant by colonisation. To do that, we need to examine two terms: Oralism and Audism. Oralism is a philosophy that first emerged in the late 19th century, and which suggests that a reduced use of sign language would be more beneficial to SLPs, as it would allow them to integrate better to the hearing world. In that respect, sign language is dismissively regarded as a mere obstacle to listening skills and acquisition of speech – treated, in effect, in the same manner as the languages of other peoples who were oppressed and colonised, e.g. the Maori in New Zealand, or the Aborigines in Australia. Audism, however, is an even more sinister ideology: first coined in 1975 by Dr Tom Humphries of the University of California in San Diego, it describes the belief that deaf people are somehow inferior to hearing people, and that deafhood – or, in this case, we should say ‘deafness’ – is a flaw, a terrible disability that needs to be eliminated. It is the effect of these two ideologies that Deafhood seeks to counter, by presenting SLPs in a positive light, not as patients who require treatment.

D But even if we understand the oppression that SLPs have suffered at the hands of hearing people since the late 1800s, and even if we acknowledge that ‘deafness’ is a medical term with negative connotations that needs to be replaced, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to explain what the term Deafhood represents exactly. This is because Deafhood is, as Dr Donald Grushkin puts it, a ‘physical, emotional, mental,
spiritual, cultural and linguistic’ journey that every deaf person is invited – but not obligated – to embark on.

E Deafhood is essentially a search for understanding: what does being ‘Deaf’ mean? How did deaf people in the past define themselves, and what did they believe to be their reasons for existing before Audism was conceived?

Why are some people born deaf? Are they biologically defective, or are there more positive reasons for their existence? What do terms like ‘Deaf Art’ or ‘Deaf Culture’ actually mean?
What is ‘the Deaf Way’ of doing things? True Deafhood is achieved when a deaf person feels comfortable with who they are and connected to the rest of the deaf community through use of their natural language, but the journey there might differ.

F Aside from all those questions, however, Deafhood also seeks to counter the effect of what is known as ‘neo-eugenics’. Neo-eugenics, as described by Patrick Boudreault at the 2005 California Association of the Deaf Conference, is a modern manifestation of what has traditionally been defined as ‘eugenics’, i.e. an attempt to eradicate any human characteristics which are perceived as negative. Deaf people have previously been a target of eugenicists through the aforementioned ideologies of Audism and Oralism, but recent developments in
science and society – such as cochlear implants or genetic engineering – mean that Deafhood is once again under threat, and needs to be protected. The only way to do this is by celebrating the community’s history, language, and countless contributions to the world, and confronting those who want to see it gone.

G So, how do we go forward? We should start by decolonising SLPs – by embracing Deafhood for what it is, removing all the negative connotations that surround it and accepting that deaf people are neither broken nor incomplete. This is a task not just for hearing people, but for deaf people as well, who have for decades internalised society’s unfavourable views of them. We should also seek recognition of the deaf community’s accomplishments, as well as official recognition of sign languages around the world by their respective governments. Effectively, what we should do is ask ourselves: how would the Deaf community be like, had it never been colonised by the mainstream world? And whatever it is it would be like, we should all together – hearing and Deaf alike – strive to achieve it.



Questions 28-34
The reading passage has seven paragraphs, A-G. Which paragraph contains the following information?

28 Examples of other groups treated the same way as deaf people
29 Why the word ‘deafness’ is no longer appropriate
30 The definition of the word ‘deaf’
31 Why deaf people might sometimes think negatively of themselves
32 How one can attain deafhood
33 Where the word ‘deafhood’ came from
34 Why deafhood is currently imperilled

Questions 35-37
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

35 According to Dr Paddy Ladd, Deafhood
A is a more appropriate term than ‘hard of hearing’.
B doesn’t colonise SLPs as much as ‘deafness’ does.
C strives to get rid of the effects of colonisation.
D contributes positively to the life and culture of deaf people.

36 Oralism suggests that
A SLPs have no use for sign language.
B SLPs don’t belong in the hearing world.
C hearing people are superior to SLPs.
D SLPs are unable to acquire speech.

37 Aborigines in Australia are similar to deaf people because
A eugenicists also tried to eradicate them.
B they were also considered inferior by their oppressors.
C their languages were also disrespected.
D their languages were also colonised.



Questions 38-40
Answer the questions below with words taken from Reading Passage 3. Use NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS for each answer.

38 What should deaf people use to communicate with each other, according to deafhood?

39 Who has used oralism and audism to attack the deaf community?

40 What does the deaf community strive to achieve for sign language worldwide?

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IELTS ACADEMIC READING IELTS GENERAL READING VOCABULARY COACH WRTING TASK 1 VOCAB IELTS AC WRITING TASK 1 IELTS GENERAL WRITING TASK 1 IELTS WRITING TASK 2 IELTS SPEAKING TASK 1 IELTS SPEAKING TASK 2 IELTS LISTENING TEST

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