Ielts Essentials - Reading Skills - 25.05.2019 [PDF]

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IELTS Essentials Student’s Book



The Reading Module



INTRODUCTION TO THE IELTS TEST



Background If you’re preparing to take the IELTS test, you’re not alone. Over two million people all over the world take the test each year. A knowledge of English is increasingly important for people who want to study abroad, or work in countries where English is the first language, and IELTS is widely recognised by universities and colleges, professional bodies, employers, immigration authorities and other government agencies. You can find a list of over 9,000 organisations which recognise the test on the IELTS website at www.ielts.org.



Academic and General Training tests There are two versions of IELTS, Academic and General Training (or GT). When you enrol, you can choose which version you want to take. You should take IELTS Academic if you want to study abroad, for example an undergraduate or postgraduate course at a university where the teaching is in English. You should take the General Training version if you intend to live and work in an English-speaking country and need to show the migration authorities that you have the required level of English. Your teacher can advise you on the version which is appropriate for you, or you can contact the organisation you intend to apply to and find out which one they require.



The Test There are four parts to the test: Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking, and you must take them all. The total test time is two hours and 45 minutes The tests of Listening and Speaking are the same for all candidates, but the tests of Reading and Writing are different depending on whether you chose the Academic or General Training versions. You do the Listening, Reading and Writing tests on the same day, and usually the Speaking test is done a few days before or after the other components. The test is administered very frequently, typically once or twice each month, and you can find your local centre and information about how to register for the test on the IELTS website at www.ielts. org.



Scoring IELTS assesses your language knowledge and skills and gives you a Band Score from 1 to 9 in each of the four parts of the test, and also an overall Band Score from 1 to 9 for the whole exam, which is an average of the scores for each part. There is no pass or fail in IELTS because the college, university or organisation you’re applying to will tell you the Band Score you need to achieve.



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IELTS BAND SCORES Band 9: Expert user Has fully operational command of the language: appropriate, accurate and fluent with complete understanding. Band 8: Very good user Has fully operational command of the language with only occasional unsystematic inaccuracies and inappropriacies. Misunderstandings may occur in unfamiliar situations. Handles complex detailed argumentation well. Band 7: Good user Has operational command of the language, though with occasional inaccuracies, inappropriaces and misunderstandings in some situations. Generally handles complex language well and understands detailed reasoning. Band 6: Competent user Has generally effective command of the language despite some inaccuracies, inappropriacies and misunderstandings. Can use and understand fairly complex language, particularly in familiar situations. Band 5: Modest user Has partial command of the language, coping with overall meaning in most situations, though is likely to make many mistakes. Should be able to handle basic communication in own field. Band 4: Limited user Basic competence is limited to familiar situations. Has frequent problems in understanding and expression. Is not able to use complex language. Band 3: Extremely limited user Conveys and understands only general meaning in very familiar situations. Frequent breakdowns in communication occur. Band 2: Intermittent user No real communication is possible except for the most basic information using isolated words or short formulae in familiar situations and to meet immediate needs. Has great difficulty understanding spoken and written English. Band 1: Non-user Essentially has no ability to use the language beyond possibly a few isolated words. Band 0: Did not attempt the test No assessable information provided.



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The Reading Module



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ABOUT THE READING TEST



A The Test Reading



Description



Suggested time



Length



Passage 1



13 questions



20 minutes



about 950 words



Passage 2



13 questions



20 minutes



about 950 words



Passage 3



14 questions



20 minutes



about 950 words



In order to answer the questions, you need to use the skills of skimming and scanning to locate specific information and then to answer detailed questions relating to that information. For example, you may be asked to read statements about the passage and decide if they are true, false or if no information is given about them. Alternatively, you may be asked to write the missing information in gaps in a table or a set of notes.



Passage 2 The IELTS Academic Reading Test is designed to test you; ability to read and understand passages on academic topics front journals, books, newspapers and magazines. The test lasts for 60 minutes and there are 40 questions to answer on three separate passages. There are two or three different tasks on each passage, and these test a range of different reading skills. As you can see from the lessons in this book, there are 13 main types of reaping task in IELTS (e.g. multiple choice, sentence completion, etc.), and you may find any of these tasks in any part of the exam. Passage 1 tends to include simpler language and ideas than the other two passages, whereas Passage 3 tends to include the most complex language and ideas. The tasks and questions also tend to become more challenging as you work through the test. The tasks and questions mostly follow the order of information m the passages. Some of the tasks require you to look at visual information, such as a diagram or flow-chart, and relate the information in the reading passage to this. The instructions advise you to spend about 20 minutes on each Reading Passage. All your answers have to be copied on to the answer sheet within the 60 minutes of the test. You do not have extra time at the end of the test to transfer your answers.



Passage 1 In this part of the test, you read a passage that contains mostly factual information about a topic. There are two or three tasks and a total of 13 questions for you to answer.



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In this part of the test, you read a passage that contains mostly factual information about a topic, but may also contain some opinions and arguments. There are two or three tasks and a total of 13 questions for you to answer. In order to answer the questions, you need to use global reading skills in addition to the skills of skimming and scanning to locate specific information. Tasks in this part of the test often test your ability to match information in the questions with the relevant section or feature of the passage. There are also often tasks where you have to complete the missing information in a set of sentences or notes, for example when the ideas from one section of the passage are summarised.



Passage 3 In this part of the test, you read a passage that contains mostly detailed information and arguments about a topic where the writer may be expressing an opinion or reporting and commenting on the opinions of others. There are two or three tasks and a total of 14 questions. In order to answer the questions, you need to use a wide range of reading skills including skimming and scanning to locate specific ideas and information, global reading skills and reading to understand detailed arguments. Tasks in this part of the test often ask you to choose the correct answer from a list of alternatives (A. B. C, etc.). You may have to answer multiple-choice questions for example, or match the ideas and information you read to one answer in a list of options.



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Often there are questions which require you to read statements and decide whether they agree with the views of the writer or not, or whether there is no information about this in the passage. There are thirteen Academic Reading lessons, which deal one by one with the different task types in the Reading paper.



B Marking Each numbered question in the Academic Reading test is worth one mark. If you write the correct answer, then you get the mark. If your answer is wrong for any reason, you don’t get the mark. No marks are taken off for wrong answers, however so it’s always a good idea to write an answer, even if you’re not sure whether it’s correct or not In questions where you have to write a word, a number or a short phrase, it’s important to read the instructions carefully. The instructions tell you how many words you can write. If the instructions say Write ONE WORD for each answer, then you must write only one word. If you write two words, you don’t get the mark, even if the information is correct. The words you write must be spelled correctly. Most of the words you have to write are taken directly from the passage, so you only have to copy the spelling correctly. Both UK and US spellings are accepted as correct. Remember to write clearly so that your answers can be read easily. If your handwriting is unclear, or if individual letters are not clearly written, you don’t get the mark. You can write your answers in either UPPER CASE or lower case — both are marked correct, and you don’t need to worry about punctuation. For example, if the answer to the question is ‘online’ and you write ‘on-line’, you still get the mark. In questions where the answer is a letter or a Roman numeral, you only write the correct letter or numeral next to the number on the answer sheet. Never write the words next to the letters In a set of options.



C Strategies Before the test • It’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with the format of the Reading test. Make sure you know exactly what you have to do in each of the different task types — then you can feel confident and prepared on the day of the test. • Practise doing the tasks within the time limit. You can see how long it takes you to complete each of the passages and the different task types. Use the practice tests in the book and the tasks on the DVD-ROM to help you with your timing. • If you’re finding one of the task types particularly difficult - you’re taking too long, or getting the answers wrong — go back to the tips and tactics section and check that you’re using the right approach. • Try to make the most of every opportunity to practise your reading. For example, read newspaper and magazine articles in English as often as you can and use the Internet to keep up with the latest news and current affairs in English. • While you’re reading articles, think about the type of language the writers are using to make their points, how the writing is organised into paragraphs, and how the ideas in the passages are developed and linked together. • Practise skimming and scanning skills. Don’t try to understand every word the first time you read something. Read quickly to find out how the writer has organised the information, then decide which sections you need to read in more detail.



During the test • It’s best to read the passages in order. Remember Passage 1 is the least complicated, so don’t spend more than 20 minutes on it. If you can finish the questions on Passage 1 in less than 20 minutes, you’ll have more time for Passage 3, which is more complex. • Remember that the tasks follow the order of information in the passage, so it’s best to answer the questions in numerical order. • Most tasks refer to a specific part of a passage. Your first job is to make sure you’ve located the correct part.



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• Remember to use the most appropriate reading skills for the type of task you’re doing. • Most tasks involve different reading skills: skimming and scanning to find the relevant part of the passage, then reading that part carefully to answer the detailed questions.



At the end of the test • At the end of the test the question paper and the answer sheet are both collected in. • Only the answers on the answer sheet count; the question paper is destroyed.



• It’s OK to write on the question paper. In fact, it’s a good idea to write question numbers in the margin and mark the text to show which sections are relevant to each task and each question. • Each part of the passage is usually only tested once, so when you move on to a new task, you usually need to look at the next section of the passage. (Some matching tasks are the exception here.) • Use the words and information in the questions and the task to help you locate the relevant information • Remember you have to write one answer. If you’re not sure, don’t write two answers. If you do that, you don’t get the mark. • Remember that you have to enter all your answers onto the answer sheet within the 60 minutes. There is no extra time to copy your answers in the Reading test. • You can write your answers on the question paper, but it’s best to copy them on to the answer sheet as you complete each task. If you leave all the copying until the end, you may run out of time or make a mistake if you’re under time pressure. • Check very carefully that you put your answers next to the correct number on the answer sheet, and keep checking that you haven’t made a mistake in the numbering. • If you don’t know the right answer to a question, always write something. You never know, you may have understood more than you think. • Only write in the column to the right of the numbers — don’t write anything in the columns marked /x. • If you finish before the 60 minutes is up, go back and double-check that you have put your answers in the correct boxes.



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Reading Strategies - In Class Activity



Choosing headings for paragraphs 1. Read the title and subheading of the passage below and decide what it is about. 2. Read the article and underline the sentence which contains the main idea(s) in each paragraph. 3. The reading passage below has seven paragraphs A-G.



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



List of Headings



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Increasing customer confidence



ii



A benefit to retailers



iii



The bigger picture of how Internet use changes consumer behaviour.



iv



Introducing a novel approach to purchasing



v



The dangers for retailers



vi



Retraining staff



vii



Changing the face of the shop and the Internet site



viii



A look at the sales figures



ix



Encouraging online feedback from consumers



1



Paragraph A .............



5



Paragraph E .............



2



Paragraph B .............



6



Paragraph F .............



3



Paragraph C .............



7



Paragraph G .............



4



Paragraph D .............



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Wily, wired consumers The Internet has empowered shoppers both online and offline



A The amount of time people spend researching, checking prices, visiting stores and seeking advice from friends tends to rise in proportion to the value of the product they are thinking of buying. A new car is one of the biggest purchases people make, and buyers typically spend four to six weeks mulling over their choices. So why are some people now walking into car showrooms and ordering a vehicle without even asking for a test drive? Or turning up at an electrical store and pointing out the washing machine they want without seeking advice from a sales assistant? Welcome to a new style of shopping shaped by the Internet. B More people are buying products online, especially at peak buying periods. The total value of e-commerce transactions in the United States in the fourth quarter of 2004 reached $18 billion, a 22% increase over the same period in 2003, according to the Department of Commerce in Washington DC. But that just represents 2% of America’s total retail market and excludes services, such as online travel, the value of goods auctioned on the Internet, and the $34 billionworth of goods that individuals trade on eBay. C If you consider the internet’s wider influence over what people spend their money on, then the figures escalate out of sight. Some carmakers in America now find that eight out of ten of their buyers have logged on to the Internet to gather information about not just the exact vehicle they want, but also the price they are going to pay. Similarly with consumer electronics, nowadays if a customer wants to know which flat-screen TV they should buy, they are likely to start their shopping online — even though the vast majority will not complete the transaction there. D The Internet is moving the world closer to perfect product and price information. The additional knowledge it can provide makes consumers more self-assured and bold enough to go into a car dealership and refuse to bargain. As a result, the process of shopping is increasingly being divorced from the transaction itself. Consumers might surf the web at night and hit the shops during the day. Visiting bricks-and-mortar stores can provide the final confirmation that the item or group of items that they are interested in is right for them. E Far from losing trade to online merchants, stores that offer the sorts of goods people find out about online can gain from this new form of consumer behaviour. This is provided they offer attractive facilities, good guarantees and low prices. F Merchants who charge too much and offer poor service, however, should beware. The same, too, for shaky manufacturers: smarter consumers know which products have a good reputation and which do not, because online they now read not only the sales blurb but also reviews from previous purchasers. And if customers are disappointed, a few clicks of the mouse will take them to places where they can let the world know. G Some companies are already adjusting their business models to take account of these trends. The stores run by Sony and Apple, for instance, are more like brand showrooms than shops. They are there for people to try out devices and to ask questions of knowledgeable staff. Whether the products are ultimately bought online or offline is of secondary importance. Online traders must also adjust. Amazon, for one, is rapidly turning from being primarily a bookseller to becoming a mass retailer, by letting other companies sell products on its site, rather like a marketplace. Other transformations in the retail business are bound to follow.



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Descriptive Passages - In Class Activity



Short-answer questions Sifting through the sands of time When you’re on the beach, you’re stepping on ancient mountains, skeletons of marine animals, even tiny diamonds. Sand provides a mineral treasure-trove, a record of geology’s earth-changing processes. Sand: as children we play on it and as adults we relax on it. It is something we complain about when it gets in our food, and praise when its moulded into castles. But we don’t often look at it. If we did, we would discover an account of a geological past and a history of marine life that goes back thousands and in some cases millions of years. Sand covers not just sea-shores, but also ocean beds, deserts and mountains. It is one of the most common substances on earth. And it is a major element in man-made items too - concrete is largely sand, while glass is made of little else. What exactly is sand? Well, it is larger than fine dust and smaller than shingle. In fact, according to the most generally accepted scheme of measurement, devised by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, grains qualify it their diameter is greater than 0.06 of a millimetre and less than 0.6 of a millimetre. Depending on its age and origin, a particular sand can consist of tiny pebbles or porous granules. Its grain may have the shape of stars or spirals, their edges jagged or smooth. They have come from the erosion of rocks, or from the skeletons of marine organisms which accumulate on the bottom ot the oceans, or even from volcanic eruptions. Colour is another clue to sands origins. If it is a dazzling white, its grains may be derived from nearby coral outcrops, from crystalline quartz rocks or from gypsum, like the white sands of New-Mexico. On Pacific islands jet black sands form from volcanic minerals. Other black beaches are magnetic. Some sand is very recent indeed, as is the case on the island of Kamoama in Hawaii, where a beach was created after a volcanic eruption in 1990. Molten lava spilled into the sea and exploded in glassv droplets. Usually, the older the granules, the finer they are and the smoother the edges. The fine, white beaches of northern Scotland, for instance, are recycled from sandstone several hundred million years old. Perhaps they will be stone once more, in another few hundred million. Sand is an irreplaceable industrial ingredient whose uses are legion: but it has one vital function you might never even notice. Sand cushions our land from the sea’s impact, and geologists say it often does a better job of protecting our shores than the most advanced coastal technology.



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



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What TWO materials made by humans are mentioned in the passage?



2



Which part of a grain of sand have scientists measured?



3



What TWO factors determine the size and shape of a piece of sand?



4



Which event produced the beach on Kamoama island?



5



Where, according to the passage, can beaches made of very ancient sand be found?



6



Who claims that sand can have a more efficient function than coastal technology?



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Vocabulary builder Now scan Effects on Salmon Biodiversity for words 1-9 and then match them to definitions A-I. 1



endangered



A



electricity produced from fast-flowing water



2



migrations



B



confuse someone or something about where it is going



3



mature



C



change the shape or appearance of something slightly



4



breeding



D



at risk of being harmed or destroyed



5



hydropower



E



continued existence of a species



6



survival



F



become adult



7



disorient



G



natural area in which an animal lives



8



modify



H



mass movement of a species



9



habitat



I



producing young



Effects on Salmon Biodiversity The number of Pacific salmon has declined dramatically but the loss of genetic diversity may be a bigger problem. Each year, countless salmon migrate from the rivers and streams along the western coasts of Canada and the US to the Pacific Ocean, while at the same time others leave the ocean and return to freshwater to spawn a new generation. This ritual has been going on for many millennia. But more than a century ago, the number of salmon returning from the sea began to fall dramatically in the Pacific Northwest. The decline accelerated in the 1970s and by the 1990s the US Endangered Species Act listed 26 kinds of salmon as endangered. In North America, there are five species of Pacific salmon: pink salmon, chum, sockeye, coho and Chinook. Most of these fish migrate to the sea and then return to freshwater to reproduce. They are also semelparous - they die after spawning once. The life cycle of a typical salmon begins with females depositing eggs in nests, or redds, on the gravel bottoms of rivers and lakes. There must be large quantities of gravel for this process to be successful. The young emerge from here and live in freshwater for periods ranging from a few days to several years. Then the juveniles undergo a physiological metamorphosis, called smoltification, and head towards the ocean. Once in the sea, the salmon often undertake extensive migrations of thousands of miles while they mature. After anywhere from a few months to a few years, adult salmon return - with high fidelity - to the river where they were born. There they spawn and the cycle begins again. Stream-type Chinook spend one or more years in freshwater before heading to sea; they also undertake extensive offshore voyages and return to their natal streams during the spring or summer, often holding in freshwater for several months before spawning. In contrast, oceantype chinook move out very early in life, before they reach one year of age. But once these salmon reach open water, they do not travel far offshore. They usually spend their entire ocean residence on the continental shelf and return to their natal streams immediately before spawning. Because salmon typically return to reproduce in the river where they were spawned, individual streams are home to local breeding populations that can have a unique genetic signature



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and the state of the oceans influences this. Also, salmon react in complex ways to human-induced changes to their environment. The extensive development of hydropower on the major rivers of the western US has clearly disrupted populations of salmon. Other problems come from the very engineering fixes made to protect these fish from harm. Dams on some rivers are equipped with submersible screens designed to divert migrating juveniles away from turbines. Unfortunately, these measures do not benefit all fish. These screens steer as many as 95 percent of the stream-type chinook around the turbines, but because of idiosyncrasies in behaviour these measures redirect as few as 15 percent of ocean-type chinook. One thus expects to see genetic shifts in favour of the stream types. Fish ladders too have drawbacks. Although these devices have helped to bring survival rates for mature fish closer to historic levels, dams have certainly altered their upstream journey. Rather than swimming against a flowing river, adults now pass through a series of reservoirs punctuated by dams, where discharge from the turbine can disorient the fish and make it hard for them to find ladders. Such impediments do not kill the fish, but they affect migration rates. Dams may also modify salmon habitat in more subtle ways. An indirect effect of the 92-metre Brownlee Dam on the Snake River provides a dramatic example. Historically, the upper Snake River produced some 25,000 to 30,000 chinook salmon that spawned during the early fall. The completion of the dam in the late 1950s not only rendered the vast majority of their habitat inaccessible, but also led to more extreme water temperatures downstream from the dam. These changes, in turn, altered the life cycle of the small population of Snake River chinook that remained. Today young chinook emerge from the gravel later than they did before the dam was built, and thus they migrate downstream later, when temperatures are higher and water levels lower.



Following referencing Writers avoid repetition by using reference words and phrases that refer back (or forwards) to a word or idea in the passage. Scan the text for the following reference words or phrases and then say what they refer to. this ritual (Para 1)



these measures (Para 5)



the decline (Para 1)



these devices (Para 6)



there they spawn (Para 2)



such impediments (Para 6)



these changes (Para 7)



influences this (Para 4)



other problems (Para 5)



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Completing a flowchart / diagram / table The information you need to complete a flowchart, diagram or table is usually based on one part of the passage. Use the title of the chart to help you find the right part. Use the words provided to help you predict the type of answer you need. NOTE: Unlike sentence completion tasks, in this type of task the answers are not always in passage order.



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Descriptive Passages - In Class Activity



The birth of our modern minds When did we begin to use symbols to communicate? Roger Highfield reports on a challenge to prevailing ideas. Anyone who doubts the importance of art need do no more than refer to the current account of human evolution, where the emergence of modern people is not so much marked by Stone Age technology as a creative explosion that rocked Europe 40,000 years ago. Our ancestors began to adorn their bodies with beads and pendants, even tattoos; they painted representations of animals, people and magical hybrids on cave walls in Lascaux, France and Altamira in Spain. They sculpted voluptuous stone figures, such as the Venus of Willendorf. This cultural Big Bang, which coincided with the period when modern humans reached Europe after they set out, via the Near East, from Africa, marked a decisive point in our story, when man took a critical step beyond the limitations of his hairy ancestors and began to use symbols. The modern mind was born. Or was it? Britain’s leading archaeologist questions the dogma that the modern human mind originated in Europe and, instead, argues that its birth was much more recent, around 10,000 years ago, and took place in the Middle East. Lord Renfrew, professor of archaeology at Cambridge University, is troubled by what he calls the ‘sapient behaviour paradox’: genetic findings, based on the diversity of modern humans, suggest that our big brains emerged 150,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens evolved from Homo erectus, and were fully developed about 60,000 years ago. But this hardware, though necessary, was not sufficient for modern behaviour: software (culture) is also required to run a mind and for this to be honed took tens of millennia. There is something unsatisfactory about the genetic argument that rests on the ‘potential’ for change emerging, he argues. Ultimately, little happened - or at least not for another 30,000 years. Although there is no doubt that genes shaped the hardware of the modern brain, genetics does not tell the whole story. ‘It is doubtful whether molecular sequences will give us any clear insights,’ said Lord Renfrew, adding that the current account of our origins has also become sidetracked by placing too much emphasis on one cultural event. Either side of the boundary between the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, 40,000 years ago, people lived much the same way. To the casual observer, the archaeological record for Homo sapiens does not look much different from Homo erectus’s, or even our beetle browed European cousins, the Neanderthals. There are detailed changes in tools and so on but the only one that really strikes you is cave art.’ And this artistic revolution was patchy: the best examples are in Spain and France. In Britain, the oldest known cave art consists of 12,000-year-old engravings in Creswell Crags. Indeed, was there an artistic revolution 40,000 years ago at all? Two pieces of ochre engraved with geometrical patterns 70,000 years ago were recently found at Blombos Cave, 180 miles east of Cape Town, South Africa. This means people were able to think abstractly and behave as modern humans much earlier than previously thought. Lord Renfrew argues that art, like genetics, does not tell the whole story of our origins. For him, the real revolution occurred 10,000 years ago with the first permanent villages. That is when the effects of new software kicked in, allowing our ancestors to work together in a more settled way. That is when plants and animals were domesticated and agriculture born. ‘First there were nests of skulls and unusual burial practices, cult centres and shrines. Then you have the first villages, the first towns, like Jericho in Jordan (around 8000 BC) and Çatalhöyük in



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Turkey (est 6500 BC), then the spread of farming to Europe. Before long, you are accelerating towards the first cities in Mesopotamia, and then other civilisations in Mexico, China and beyond.’ Living in timber and mud brick houses led to a very different engagement between our ancestors and the material world. ‘I don’t think it was until settled village communities developed that you had the concept of property, or that “I own these things that have been handed down to me”.’ This in turn could have introduced the need for mathematics, to keep a tally of possessions, and written language to describe them. In the Near East, primitive counters date back to the early farming period and this could have marked the first stages of writing, said Lord Renfrew. ‘We have not solved anything about the origins of modern humans until we understand what happened 10,000 years ago,’ he said. He is excited by excavations now under way in Anatolia, a potential birthplace of the modern mind, in Çatalhöyük, one of the earliest places where close-knit communities were born, and Göbekli Tepe, a shrine that predates village life. These spiritual sites may have seeded the first human settled communities by encouraging the domestication of plants and animals.



Questions 1-6 Answer the questions below using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.



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1



According to the current view, what does NOT indicate the first appearance of the modern human?



2



What type of evidence does Lord Renfrew question in general?



3



What, apart from art, were the developments in the creation of 40,000 years ago?



4



What kind of cave art in Britain is referred to?



5



What TWO things does Lord Renfrew believe to have been established 10,000 years ago?



6



What TWO things did the notion of personal possessions lead to?



IELTS Essentials



Emigration to the US American history has been largely the story of migrations. That of the hundred years or so between the Battle of Waterloo and the outbreak of the First World War must certainly be reckoned the largest peaceful migration in recorded history; probably the largest of any kind, ever. It is reckoned that some thirty-five million persons entered the United States during that period, not to mention the large numbers who were also moving to Argentina and Australia. Historians may come to discern that in the twentieth and later centuries this movement was dwarfed when Africa, Asia and South America began to send out their peoples; but if so, they will be observing a pattern, of a whole continent in motion, that was first laid down in nineteenth-century Europe. Only the French seemed to be substantially immune to the virus. Otherwise, all caught it, and all travelled. English, Irish, Welsh, Scots, Germans, Scandinavians, Spaniards, Italians, Poles, Greeks, Jews, Portuguese, Dutch, Hungarians, Czechs, Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Russians, Basques. There were general and particular causes. As regards the general causes, the rise in population meant that more and more people were trying to earn their living on the same amount of land; inevitably, some were squeezed off it. The increasing cost of the huge armies and navies, with their need for up-to-date equipment, that every great European power maintained, implied heavier and heavier taxes which many found difficult or impossible to pay, and mass conscription, which quite as many naturally wanted to avoid. The opening up of new, superbly productive lands in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, coupled with the availability of steamers and steam trains to distribute their produce, meant that European peasants could not compete effectively in the world market: they would always be undersold, especially as the arrival of free trade was casting down the old mercantilist barriers everywhere. Steam was important in other ways too. It became a comparatively easy matter to cross land and sea, and to get news from distant parts. The invention of the electric telegraph also speeded up the diffusion of news, especially after a cable was successfully laid across the Atlantic in 1866. New printing and paper-making machines and a rapidly spreading literacy made large-circulation newspapers possible for the first time. In short, horizons widened, even for the stay-at-home. Most important of all, the dislocations in society brought about by the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the various wars and tumults of nineteenth-century Europe shattered the old ways. New states came into being, old ones disappeared, frontiers were recast, the laws of land-tenure were radically altered, internal customs barriers and feudal dues both disappeared, payment in money replaced payment in kind, new industries stimulated new wants and destroyed the selfsufficiency of peasant households and the saleability of peasant products. The basic structure of rural Europe was transformed. Bad times pushed, good times pulled (American factories were usually clamouring for workers): small wonder that the peoples moved. Particular reasons were just as important as these general ones. For example: between 1845 and 1848 Ireland suffered the terrible potato famine. A million people died of starvation or disease, a million more emigrated (1846-51). Matters were not much better when the Great Famine was over: it was followed by lesser ones, and the basic weaknesses of the Irish economy made the outlook hopeless anyway. Mass emigration was a natural resort, at first to America, then, in the twentieth century, increasingly, to England and Scotland. Emigration was encouraged, in the Irish case as in many others, by letters sent home and by remittances of money. The first adventurers thus helped to pay the expenses of their successors. Political reasons could sometimes drive Europeans across the Atlantic too. In 1848 some thousands of Germans fled the failure of the liberal revolution of that year (but many thousands emigrated for purely economic reasons).



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If such external stimuli faltered, American enterprise was more than willing to fill the gap. The high cost of labour had been a constant in American history since the first settlements; now, as the Industrial Revolution made itself felt, the need for workers was greater than ever. The supply of Americans was too small to meet the demand: while times were good on the family farm, as they were on the whole until the 1880s, or while there was new land to be taken up in the West, the drift out of agriculture (which was becoming a permanent feature of America, as of all industrialized, society) would not be large enough to fill the factories. So employers looked for the hands they needed in Europe, whether skilled, like Cornish miners, or unskilled, like Irish navvies. Then, the transcontinental railroads badly needed settlers on their Western land grants, as well as labourers: they could not make regular profits until the lands their tracks crossed were regularly producing crops that needed carrying to market. Soon every port in Europe knew the activities of American shipping lines and their agents, competing with each other to offer advantageous terms to possible emigrants. They stuck up posters, they advertised in the press, they patiently answered inquiries, and they shepherded their clients from their native villages, by train, to the dockside, and then made sure they were safely stowed in the steerage.



Question 1 Choose the correct letter A, B. C or D. Which of the following does the writer state in the first paragraph? A



The extent of emigration in the nineteenth century is unlikely to be repeated.



B



Doubts may be cast on how much emigration there really was in the nineteenth century.



C



It is possible that emigration from Europe may be exceeded by emigration from outside Europe.



D



Emigration can prove to be a better experience for some nationalities than for others.



Questions 2-9 Complete the sentences below with words taken from the Reading Passage. Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 2-9 on your answer sheet.



GENERAL CAUSES OF EMIGRATION TO THE US



18



•



Population increases made it impossible for some to live from agriculture.



•



In Europe, countries kept 2……………… that were both big, and this resulted in increases in 3………………and in 4………………, which a lot of people wanted to escape.



•



It became impossible for 5………………in Europe to earn a living because of developments in other countries and the introduction of 6………………



•



People knew more about the world beyond their own countries because there was greater 7………………



•



8………………had been formed because of major historical events.



•



The creation of 9………………caused changes in demand.



IELTS Essentials



The Dollar-a-Year Man How John Lomax set out to record American folk music



A



In the early 1930s, folklorist, platform lecturer, college professor and former banker John Avery Lomax was trying to recapture a sense of direction for his life. For two decades he had enjoyed a national reputation for his pioneering work in collecting and studying American folk songs; no less a figure than President Theodore Roosevelt had admired his work, and had written a letter of support for him as he sought grants for his research. He had always dreamed of finding a way of making a living by doing the thing he loved best, collecting folk songs, but he was now beginning to wonder if he would ever realise that dream.



B



Lomax wanted to embark on a nationwide collecting project, resulting in as many as four volumes, and ‘complete the rehabilitation of the American folk-song’. Eventually this was modified to where he envisioned a single book tentatively called American Ballads and Folk Songs, designed to survey the whole field. It called for first-hand field collecting, and would especially focus on the neglected area of black folk music.



C



In 1932, Lomax travelled to New York, and stopped in to see a man named H.S. Latham of the Macmillan Company. He informally outlined his plan to Latham, and read him the text of an earthy African American blues ballad called ‘Ida Red’. Latham was impressed, and two days later Lomax had a contract, a small check to bind it, and an agreement to deliver the manuscript about one year later. The spring of 1932 began to look more green, lush and full of promise.



D Lomax immediately set to work. He travelled to libraries at Harvard, the Library of Congress, Brown University and elsewhere in order to explore unpublished song collections and to canvas the folk song books published over the past ten years. During his stay in Washington, D.C., Lomax became friendly with Carl Engel, Music Division chief of the Library of Congress. Engel felt that Lomax had the necessary background and energy to someday direct the Archive of Folk Song. Through funds provided by the Council of Learned Societies and the Library of Congress, Lomax ordered a state-of-the-art portable recording machine. More importantly, the Library of Congress agreed to furnish blank records and to lend their name to his collecting; Lomax simply had to agree to deposit the completed records at the Library of Congress. He did so without hesitation. On July 15, 1933, Lomax was appointed an ‘honorary consultant’ for a dollar a year. E Together with his eighteen-year-old son Alan, he began a great adventure to collect songs for American Ballads and Folk Songs, a task that was to last for many months. Lomax’s library research had reinforced his belief that a dearth of black folk song material existed in printed collections. This fact, along with his early appreciation of African American folk culture, led Lomax to decide that black folk music from rural areas should be the primary focus. This bold determination resulted in the first major trip in the United States to capture black folk music in the field. In order to fulfill their quest, the two men concentrated on sections of the South with a high percentage of blacks. They also pinpointed laboring camps, particularly lumber camps, which employed blacks almost exclusively. But as they went along, prisons and penitentiaries also emerged as a focal point for research. F The recordings made by the Lomaxes had historical significance. The whole idea of using a phonograph to preserve authentic folk music was still fairly new. Most of John Lomax’s peers were involved in collecting songs the classic way: taking both words and melody down by hand, asking the singer to perform the song over and over until the collector had ‘caught’ it on paper. John Lomax sensed at once the limitations of this kind of method, especially when getting songs from African-American singers, whose quarter tones, blue notes and complex timing often frustrated white musicians trying to transcribe them with European notation systems.



IELTS Essentials



19



G



The whole concept of field recordings was, in 1933 and still is today, radically different from the popular notion of recording. Field recordings are not intended as commercial products, but as attempts at cultural preservation. There is no profit motive, nor any desire to make the singer a ‘star’. As have hundreds of folk song collectors after him, John Lomax had to persuade his singers to perform, to explain to them why their songs were important, and to convince the various authorities - the wardens, the trusties, the bureaucrats - that this was serious, worthwhile work. He faced the moral problem of how to safeguard the records and the rights of the singers - a problem he solved in this instance by donating the discs to the Library of Congress. He had to overcome the technical problems involved in recording outside a studio; one always hoped for quiet, with no doors slamming or alarms going off, but it was always a risk. His new state-of-the-art recording machine sported a new microphone designed by NBC, but there were no wind baffles to help reduce the noise when recording outside. Lomax learned how to balance sound, where to place microphones, how to work echoes and walls, and soon was a skilled recordist.



Questions 1-5 Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.



JOHN LOMAX’S PROJECT Lomax began the research for this project by looking at 1………………… that were not available in book form, as well as at certain books. While he was doing this research, he met someone who ran a department at the 2…………………in Washington. As a result of this contact, he was provided with the very latest kind of 3…………………for his project. Lomax believed that the places he should concentrate on were 4…………………in the South of the US. While he and his son were on their trip, they added 5…………………as places where they could find what they were looking for.



20



IELTS Essentials



Producing olive oil in traditional and commercial ways Olive trees can live to be hundreds of years old and produce large amounts of fruit in their lifetime. People have been making olive oil in countries around the Mediterranean Sea for many centuries, and this can be done by simply crushing the olives. Modern commercial extraction is a more complex process, although the same basic principle of crushing the fruit to release the oil is in play. The olive harvest is the first step in making olive oil. Traditional producers use a number of low-tech means to gather the olive crop. One common method is for workers on ladders to simply pick the olives by hand and put them into baskets tied around their waists. Or workers may beat the branches with broomsticks, collecting the olives on the ground. Commercial processors use electronic tongs to strip olives off the branches and drop them into large nets spread out below the trees, it is then important to get the olives to the mill as quickly as possible, before the level of acidity becomes too great, as this can spoil the flavour of the oil. After the harvested olives have been brought to the mill, traditional producers pick through the olives by hand to remove dirt, leaves and twigs. Commercial producers use cleaning machines to accomplish the same goal. Fans blow away the majority of smaller particles and another machine picks out any remaining larger bits. The olives are then turned into a paste as they pass through the mill. Large ‘millstones’ are used for this purpose by traditional makers, whereas commercial production involves the use of a mechanised alternative, known as a hammermill. Once milled, the olive paste is ready for a process called malaxation. In this stage of the process, the milled paste is stirred and mixed for 20 to 40 minutes. This is done with wooden spoons by traditional producers, while commercial producers use a mixing machine with a metal spiral blade. The stirring causes the smaller droplets of oil released by the milling process to form larger drops. The larger drops can be separated from the paste more easily. Heating the paste during the malaxation stage increases the yield of oil. However, the use of higher heat affects the taste and decreases shelf life. To compromise, commercial producers usually heat the paste to only about 27 degrees Centigrade. Oxidation also reduces the flavour, so commercial producers may fill the malaxation chamber with an inert gas such as nitrogen so the paste avoids contact with oxygen. Next, the oil must be separated from the paste. Traditionally, the paste is spread onto fibre discs that are stacked on top of each other in a cylindrical press. Heavy stones are placed on top of the discs, squeezing out the liquid. The oil thus produced is called first press or cold press oil. The paste is then mixed with hot water or steam and pressed once more. The second press oil doesn’t have such an intense flavour. The modern commercial method of olive oil extraction uses a machine called an industrial decanter to separate the oil from the paste. This machine spins at approximately 3000 revolutions per minute. The paste and oil are easily separated because of their different densities. This is essentially the same method that is used to separate milk from cream. After the separation process, the oil is bottled, and the bottle is capped and labelled. Small, traditional producers often do this by hand, while commercial producers use assembly line techniques. The leftover paste is sometimes used for animal feed or it can be further chemically processed to extract more olive oil, which is usually blended with other oils or used for processes such as soap making.



IELTS Essentials



21



1



Look at the flow-chart below. Choose the correct words to complete the notes.







Read the passage again to make sure you have reported the meaning exactly in the notes..



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



22



IELTS Essentials



How bugs hitch-hike across the galaxy Mankind’s search for alien life could be jeopardised by ultra-resilient bacteria from Earth. David Derbyshire reports What was the most important discovery of the Apollo programme? Some have argued that it was the rocks that explained how the Moon was formed. Others believe it was the technological spin-offs. But according to Captain Peter Conrad, who led the 1969 Apollo 12 mission, it was life. On the apparently dead lunar surface, a colony of bacteria was thriving. The organisms were not native to the Moon, but were visitors from Earth who had hitch-hiked a ride on board one of Nasa’s five Surveyor probes from the 1960s. To the astonishment of biologists, between 50 and 100 Streptococcus bacteria survived the journey across space, at an average temperature 20 degrees above absolute zero with no source of energy or water, and stayed alive on the Moon in a camera for three years. Captain Conrad, who returned the bacteria to Earth, was later to confess: I always thought the most significant thing we ever found on the whole Moon was the little bacteria that came back and lived.’ The ability of life to survive, adapt and evolve never fails to astonish. Over the past three decades, bacteria and archaea have been found in some of the most inhospitable places on Earth. Known as extremophiles, these organisms have coped with life in a vacuum, pressure as high as 70 tons per square inch, depths of four miles beneath the surface and scorching waters around deep-sea volcanic vents. They have also survived 25 million years inside a bee preserved in resin. Their resilience has renewed enthusiasm for the search for alien life - a quest that many had assumed had been banished to fantasy fiction. Mars and the moons Titan, Europa and Callisto are once again plausible candidates for extraterrestrials. As interest in alien life has grown, so have concerns that mankind could spread its own microscopic bugs, contaminating the places we want to explore. In 2003, Nasa ended the Galileo probe’s mission by smashing it into Jupiter. The fear was that it could be carrying bacteria that might contaminate Europa’s oceans. The team behind Beagle 2 - the British probe that went to search for life on Mars in 2003 - was forced to take contamination particularly seriously. If Beagle carried to Mars life or dead spores picked up during the manufacture of the spacecraft, its science would be jeopardised. Prof Colin Pillinger, the Open University scientist who headed the Beagle project, said: ‘What we’ve learnt since the Apollo missions and the Viking Mars missions of the 1970s is that bugs are far more tenacious than we ever imagined. They seem to be very tolerant of high temperatures, they lie dormant at low temperatures for long periods, they are immune to salt, acid and alkali, they seem to survive on substrate that are not what people expect. Extremophiles are extremely adapted to hanging on to life.’ Beagle had to be assembled in a ‘clean room’ - and one was specially put together in a converted BBC outside broadcast van garage in Milton Keynes. It had enough room to include an enormous set of fans that circulated and filtered the air 500 times an hour. Only a handful of trained researchers were allowed inside. ‘I wasn’t allowed in,’ says Prof Pillinger. ‘There was special training for people going in there and special conditions. There was a ban on beards and a limit of four people at any one time. The team kept samples of everything that could have contaminated the craft and monitored every stage of assembly.’ To reduce the workload, the idea was to build as much as possible before sterilising it and banishing it to the difficult working conditions inside the clean room. The easy stuff was heated to 115C for 52 hours, more than enough to kill off bugs. Electronic equipment can’t cope with those sorts of temperatures, so the team used a hydrogen peroxide plasma,



IELTS Essentials



23



created in a microwave, to kill off bugs at low temperatures. Parachutes and gas bags were zapped with gamma radiation. It wasn’t just facial hair that was banned. ‘You’ve heard of the paperless office,’ says Prof Pillinger. ‘We had the paperless assembly line. The guys normally go in armed with loads of papers and diagrams, but we didn’t allow any of that. They were given information through a glass wall, over mikes and monitors. And sometimes on a piece of paper stuck to the glass with sticky tape.’ Beagle’s heat shield doubled as its biological shield. So once the instruments were encased and sealed, the craft could be brought back into the real world. The shield heated up to 1,700 degrees on its descent through the Martian atmosphere, so bugs on the casing were not a worry. Mars Express - the craft carrying Beagle - did not need sterilising. Its trajectory was designed so that if something went wrong, the craft would not simply crash into the planet. Its course could be corrected en route. Eventually, space scientists hope to return samples of Mars to Earth. While the risks of alien bacteria proving hazardous on Earth may be remote, the rocks will still need to be quarantined. Moon rocks from Apollo were analysed in vacuum glove boxes for the first two missions. Later, researchers stored rocks in nitrogen. Prof Pillinger believed the first Mars rocks should be sterilised before they are studied on Earth. ‘For security purposes it would be the most sensible thing to do. You don’t have to sterilise it all, you can contain some of it and then sterilise the sample you want to look at, but it would lower the risk and make it easier to analyse.’



Questions 1-6 Label the diagram below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the reading passage for each answer.



THE ASSEMBLY OF BEAGLE 2



24



IELTS Essentials



Understanding the main idea - In Class Activity



How to run a... Publisher and author David Harvey on what makes a good management book



A Prior to the Second World War, all the management books ever written could be comfortably stacked on a couple of shelves. Today, you would need a sizeable library, with plenty of room for expansion, to house them. The last few decades have seen the stream of new titles swell into a flood. In 1975, 771 business books were published. By 2000, the total for the year had risen to 3,203, and the trend continues. B The growth in publishing activity has followed the rise and rise of management to the point where it constitutes a mini-industry in its own right. In the USA alone, the book market is worth over $ I bn. Management consultancies, professional bodies and business schools were part of this new phenomenon, all sharing at least one common need: to get into print. Nor were they the only aspiring authors. Inside stories by and about business leaders balanced the more straight-laced textbooks by academics. How-to books by practising managers and business writers appeared on everything from making a presentation to developing a business strategy. With this upsurge in output, it is not really surprising that the quality is uneven. C Few people are probably in a better position to evaluate the management canon than Carol Kennedy, a business journalist and author of Guide to the Management Gurus, an overview of the world’s most influential management thinkers and their works. She is also the books editor of The Director. Of course, it is normally the best of the bunch that are reviewed in the pages of The Director. But from time to time, Kennedy is moved to use The Director s precious column inches to warn readers off certain books. Her recent review of The Leader’s Edge summed up her irritation with authors who over-promise and under-deliver. The banality of the treatment of core competencies for leaders, including the ‘competency of paying attention’, was a conceit too far in the context of a leaden text. ‘Somewhere in this book,’ she wrote, ‘there may be an idea worth reading and taking note of, but my own competency of paying attention ran out on page 31.’ Her opinion of a good proportion of the other books that never make it to the review pages is even more terse. ‘Unreadable’ is her verdict. D Simon Caulkin, contributing editor of the Observer’s management page and former editor of Management Today, has formed a similar opinion. ‘A lot is pretty depressing, unimpressive stuff.’ Caulkin is philosophical about the inevitability of finding so much dross. Business books, he says, ‘range from total drivel to the ambitious stuff. Although the confusing thing is that the really ambitious stuff can sometimes be drivel.’ Which leaves the question open as to why the subject of management is such a literary wasteland. There are some possible explanations. E Despite the attempts of Frederick Taylor, the early twentieth-century founder of scientific management, to establish a solid, rule-based foundation for the practice, management has come to be seen as just as much an art as a science. Once psychologists like Abraham Maslow, behaviouralists and social anthropologists persuaded business to look at management from a human perspective, the topic became more multi-dimensional and complex. Add to that the requirement



IELTS Essentials



25



for management to reflect the changing demands of the times, the impact of information technology and other factors, and it is easy to understand why management is in a permanent state of confusion. There is a constant requirement for reinterpretation, innovation and creative thinking: Caulkin’s ambitious stuff. For their part, publishers continue to dream about finding the next big management idea, a topic given an airing in Kennedy’s book, The Next Big Idea. F Indirectly, it tracks one of the phenomena of the past 20 years or so: the management blockbusters which work wonders for publishers’ profits and transform authors’ careers. Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies achieved spectacular success. So did Michael Hammer and James Champy’s book, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution. Yet the early euphoria with which such books are greeted tends to wear off as the basis for the claims starts to look less than solid. In the case of In Search of Excellence, it was the rapid reversal of fortunes that turned several of the exemplar companies into basket cases. For Hammer’s and Champy’s readers, disillusion dawned with the realisation that their slashandburn prescription for reviving corporate fortunes caused more problems than it solved. G Yet one of the virtues of these books is that they could be understood. There is a whole class of management texts that fail this basic test. ‘Some management books are stuffed with jargon,’ says Kennedy. ‘Consultants are among the worst offenders.’ She believes there is a simple reason for this flight from plain English. ‘They all use this jargon because they can’t think clearly. It disguises the paucity of thought.’ H By contrast, the management thinkers who have stood the test of time articulate their ideas in plain English. Peter Drucker, widely regarded as the doyen of management thinkers, has written a steady stream of influential books over half a century. ‘Drucker writes beautiful, clear prose,’ says Kennedy, ‘and his thoughts come through.’ He is among the handful of writers whose work, she believes, transcends the specific interests of the management community. Caulkin also agrees that Drucker reaches out to a wider readership. ‘What you get is a sense of the larger cultural background,’ he says. ‘That’s what you miss in so much management writing.’ Charles Handy, perhaps the most successful UK business writer to command an international audience, is another rare example of a writer with a message for the wider world.



26



IELTS Essentials



Questions 1-2 Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. 1



What does the writer say about the increase in the number of management books published?







A It took the publishing industry by surprise.







B







C It has produced more profit than other areas of publishing.







D It could have been foreseen.



2



What does the writer say about the genre of management books?







A



It includes some books that cover topics of little relevance to anyone.







B



It contains a greater proportion of practical than theoretical books.







C



All sorts of people have felt that they should be represented in it.







D



The best books in the genre are written by business people.



It is likely to continue.



Questions 3-7 The Reading Passage has eight paragraphs A-H. Which paragraph contains the following information?



IELTS Essentials



3



reasons for the deserved success of some books



4



reasons why managers feel the need for advice



5



a belief that management books are highly likely to be very poor



6



a reference to books not considered worth reviewing



7



an example of a group of people who write particularly poor books



27



EARLY MODERN ARCHITECTURE IN BRITAIN A Modern architecture is one aspect of Modernism, an umbrella term for a philosophical movement in the arts which arose during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected wide-scale and far-reaching changes in Western society. Among the factors that shaped Modernism was the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities. Modernism was also a response to the emphasis of previous centuries on rationalism. B Modern architecture was generally characterised by simplicity of form and an absence of applied decoration; there was often a visual emphasis on straight lines. In addition, there was a preference for industrially-produced materials, such as steel, concrete and sheet glass, and a tendency to reveal the structural elements of buildings, rather than to conceal them. In a broad sense, early modern architecture began at the turn of the 20th century, with efforts to reconcile the principles underlying architectural design with rapid technological advancement and the modernisation of society. C In 1931 Berthold Lubetkin, an architect born in Tbilisi, Georgia, travelled to London via Paris. At that time continental Europe sparkled with white concrete and flat roofs, buildings created by architects for whom form followed on from function. But Lubetkin searched in vain for modernist buildings in Britain; there classicism prevailed, interrupted by only an occasional example of art deco design. British architects did use the concrete and steel favoured by modernists, but they covered them over with blocks of limestone. According to Lubetkin, Britain was ‘about 50 years behind, as though locked in a deep, provincial sleep.’ D This was especially disappointing for Lubetkin, as he had previously been influenced by British notions of beauty and, like other modernist architects, he had admired the 20th-century English house. The British Arts and Crafts movement had been a catalyst for European modernism. French and German architects had adopted and developed the British emphasis on expressing the nature of materials in a very ambitious way. German architects regarded buildings as ‘the spirit of the epoch translated into form.’ The French architect, Le Corbusier, controversially insisted that humans needed space, light and order as much as they needed bread, or a place to sleep. In Britain, however, the more radical aims of the Arts and Crafts movement were forgotten after the First World War (1914-1918). Although art deco cinemas sprang up across the country in the 1920s, these frivolous entertainment palaces used modern design as decoration, rather than as a model for a new society. E It took the arrival of Lubetkin and other immigrants to wrench Britain into the future. For example, Lubetkin provided the country with several modernist masterpieces, including two innovative apartment blocks, and a zoo. Meanwhile Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff created the much admired De La Warr Pavilion, a public seaside building on the south coast. In the characteristically modernist style reminiscent of industrial architecture, the streamlined building was devoid of superficial decoration. It featured strong, horizontal lines, with protruding balconies, a curved entrance hall, and large metal-framed windows. The architects rejected traditional brick and stonework in favour of a whitewashed concrete and steel construction. Amongst the building’s most innovative features was its use of a welded steel frame construction.



28



IELTS Essentials



F Mass produced steel and concrete were quick to construct and economically attractive, and some British architects went further than their European counterparts, attempting to pour entire buildings from a single mould. But the British liked being cosy, which was hatd in modernist open-plan buildings with stark white fronts. As the 1930s progressed, all the arts retreated from the cold abstraction of pute modernism, to produce something more accessible and familiar. The white concrete boxes morphed into a mote British version of modernism, dressed in brick and timber. An example of such home-grown modernism are the curved brick tube stations of Amos Grove and South Wimbledon, designed by Charles Holden. After the Second World War (1939-1945), Britain’s version of modernist architecture found expression in a new wave of housing construction, when many people abandoned inner-city flats for suburban houses. For all the great dreams of two generations of imaginative architects and planners, much of Britain remained settled in street-level homes, burrowed in ‘provincial sleep’.



Questions 1-6 The Reading Passage has six paragraphs A-F. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below. Write the correct number i-viii . List of Headings i ii iii iv v vi vii viii 1



Paragraph A



2



Paragraph B



3



Paragraph C



4



Paragraph D



5



Paragraph E



6



Paragraph F



Modern buildings designed by newcomers An absence of modern architecture Britain’s modified version of modernism A supply of suitable building materials The context of modern architecture The public’s reaction to modern architecture A former source of inspiration for other countries The basic features of modern architecture



Questions 7-10 Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage



IELTS Essentials







TRUE



if the statement agrees with the information.







FALSE



if the statement contradicts the information.







NOT GIVEN



if there is no information on this.



7



Modernism was a trend associated with industrialisation and urbanisation.



8



At the start of the 20th century, the appearance of modern buildings was usually plainer than that of earlier buildings.



9



When he arrived in Britain, Berthold Lubetkin was favotirably impressed by the design of the buildings.



10



During the 1930s, Berthold Lubetkin visited all of Britain’s major cities to assess their architecture.



29



Reading - In Class Activity



The Dollar-a-Year Man How John Lomax set out to record American folk music



A



In the early 1930s, folklorist, platform lecturer, college professor and former banker John Avery Lomax was trying to recapture a sense of direction for his life. For two decades he had enjoyed a national reputation for his pioneering work in collecting and studying American folk songs; no less a figure than President Theodore Roosevelt had admired his work, and had written a letter of support for him as he sought grants for his research. He had always dreamed of finding a way of making a living by doing the thing he loved best, collecting folk songs, but he was now beginning to wonder if he would ever realise that dream.



B



Lomax wanted to embark on a nationwide collecting project, resulting in as many as four volumes, and ‘complete the rehabilitation of the American folk-song’. Eventually this was modified to where he envisioned a single book tentatively called American Ballads and Folk Songs, designed to survey the whole field. It called for first-hand field collecting, and would especially focus on the neglected area of black folk music.



C



In 1932, Lomax travelled to New York, and stopped in to see a man named H.S. Latham of the Macmillan Company. He informally outlined his plan to Latham, and read him the text of an earthy African American blues ballad called ‘Ida Red’. Latham was impressed, and two days later Lomax had a contract, a small check to bind it, and an agreement to deliver the manuscript about one year later. The spring of 1932 began to look more green, lush and full of promise.



D Lomax immediately set to work. He travelled to libraries at Harvard, the Library of Congress, Brown University and elsewhere in order to explore unpublished song collections and to canvas the folk song books published over the past ten years. During his stay in Washington, D.C., Lomax became friendly with Carl Engel, Music Division chief of the Library of Congress. Engel felt that Lomax had the necessary background and energy to someday direct the Archive of Folk Song. Through funds provided by the Council of Learned Societies and the Library of Congress, Lomax ordered a state-of-the-art portable recording machine. More importantly, the Library of Congress agreed to furnish blank records and to lend their name to his collecting; Lomax simply had to agree to deposit the completed records at the Library of Congress. He did so without hesitation. On July 15, 1933, Lomax was appointed an ‘honorary consultant’ for a dollar a year. E Together with his eighteen-year-old son Alan, he began a great adventure to collect songs for American Ballads and Folk Songs, a task that was to last for many months. Lomax’s library research had reinforced his belief that a dearth of black folk song material existed in printed collections. This fact, along with his early appreciation of African American folk culture, led Lomax to decide that black folk music from rural areas should be the primary focus. This bold determination resulted in the first major trip in the United States to capture black folk music in the field. In order to fulfill their quest, the two men concentrated on sections of the South with a high percentage of blacks. They also pinpointed laboring camps, particularly lumber camps, which employed blacks almost exclusively. But as they went along, prisons and penitentiaries also emerged as a focal point for research.



30



IELTS Essentials



F The recordings made by the Lomaxes had historical significance. The whole idea of using a phonograph to preserve authentic folk music was still fairly new. Most of John Lomax’s peers were involved in collecting songs the classic way: taking both words and melody down by hand, asking the singer to perform the song over and over until the collector had ‘caught’ it on paper. John Lomax sensed at once the limitations of this kind of method, especially when getting songs from African-American singers, whose quarter tones, blue notes and complex timing often frustrated white musicians trying to transcribe them with European notation systems. G



The whole concept of field recordings was, in 1933 and still is today, radically different from the popular notion of recording. Field recordings are not intended as commercial products, but as attempts at cultural preservation. There is no profit motive, nor any desire to make the singer a ‘star’. As have hundreds of folk song collectors after him, John Lomax had to persuade his singers to perform, to explain to them why their songs were important, and to convince the various authorities - the wardens, the trusties, the bureaucrats - that this was serious, worthwhile work. He faced the moral problem of how to safeguard the records and the rights of the singers - a problem he solved in this instance by donating the discs to the Library of Congress. He had to overcome the technical problems involved in recording outside a studio; one always hoped for quiet, with no doors slamming or alarms going off, but it was always a risk. His new state-of-the-art recording machine sported a new microphone designed by NBC, but there were no wind baffles to help reduce the noise when recording outside. Lomax learned how to balance sound, where to place microphones, how to work echoes and walls, and soon was a skilled recordist.



Questions 1-5 The Reading Passage has seven sections labelled A-Q. Which section contains the following information? NB You may use any letter more than once.



IELTS Essentials



1



a reference to the speed with which Lomax responded to a demand



2



a reason why Lomax doubted the effectiveness of a certain approach



3



reasons why Lomax was considered suitable for a particular official post



4



a reference to a change of plan on Lomax’s part



5



a reference to one of Lomax’s theories being confirmed



31



Finding out about the world from television news In The Ideological Octopus (1991), Justin Lewis points to an important issue concerning the formal structure of television news. As he notes, television news lacks the narrative element which, in other genres, serves to capture viewer interest and thus motivate viewing. Lewis posits this as one of the key reasons why television news often fails to interest people and why, when they do watch it, people often cannot understand it. Lewis argues that one fundamental problem with watching television news is that its narrative structure means that the viewer is offered the punchline before the joke - because the main point (the headline) comes right at the beginning, after which the programme, by definition, deals with less and less important things. Thus, in television news our interest is not awakened by an enigma which is then gradually solved, to provide a gratifying solution - as so often happens in fictional narratives. In Lewis’s terms, in television news there is no enigma, the solution of which will motivate the viewing process. As he baldly states, ‘If we decided to try to design a television programme with a structure that would completely fail to capture an audience’s interest, we might (finally) come up with the format of the average television news show’ (Lewis 1991). What Lewis also does is offer an interesting contrast, in this respect, between the highstatus phenomenon of television news and the low-status genre of soap opera. The latter, he observes, offers the most highly developed use of effective narrative codes. To that extent soap opera, with its multiple narratives, could be seen, in formal terms, as the most effective type of television for the cultivation of viewer interest, and certainly as a far more effective form than that of television news for this purpose, (dearly, some of Lewis’s speculation here is problematic. There are counter-examples of his arguments (e.g. instances of programmes such as sports news which share the problematic formal features he points to but which are nonetheless popular - at least among certain types of viewers). Moreover, he may perhaps overstress the importance of structure as against content relevance in providing the basis for programme appeal. Nonetheless, I would suggest that his argument, in this respect, is of considerable interest. Lewis argues not only that soap opera is more narratively interesting than television news, in formal terms, but, moreover, that the world of television fiction in general is much closer to most people’s lives than that presented in the news. This, he claims, is because the world of television fiction often feels to people like their own lives. They can, for example, readily identify with the moral issues and personal dilemmas faced by the characters in a favourite soap opera. Conversely, the world of television news is much more remote in all senses; it is a socially distant world populated by another race of special or ‘elite’ persons, the world of ‘them’ not ‘us’. This is also why ‘most people feel more able to evaluate TV fiction than TV news ... because it seems closer to their own lives and to the world they live in ... [whereas] the world of television news ... might almost be beamed in from another planet’ (Lewis 1991). It is as if the distant world of ‘the news’ is so disconnected from popular experience that it is beyond critical judgement for many viewers. Hence, however alienated they feel from it, they nonetheless lack any alternative perspective on the events it portrays. One consequence of this, Lewis argues, is that precisely, because of this distance, people who feel this kind of alienation from the ‘world of news’ nonetheless use frameworks to understand news items which come from within the news themselves. This, he argues, is because in the absence of any other source ol information or perspective they are forced back on using the media’s own framework. Many viewers are simply unable to place the media’s portrayal of events in any other critical framework (where would they get it from?).



32



IELTS Essentials



To this extent, Lewis argues, Gerbner and his colleagues (see Gerbner et al. 1986; Signorielli and Morgan 1990) may perhaps be right in thinking that the dominant perspectives and ‘associative logics’ offered by the media may often simply be soaked up by audiences by sheer dint of their repetition. This is not to suggest that such viewers necessarily believe, or explicitly accept, these perspectives, but simply to note that they have no other place to start from, however cynical they may be, at a general level, about ‘not believing what you see on television’, and they may thus tend, in the end, to fall back on ‘what it said on TV’. In one sense, this could be said to be the converse of Hall’s ‘negotiated code’ (1980), as taken over from Parkin (1973). Parkin had argued that many working-class people display a ‘split consciousness’, whereby they accept propositions from the ‘dominant ideology’ at an abstract level, but then ‘negotiate’ or ‘discount’ the application of these ideological propositions to the particular circumstances of their own situation. Here, by contrast, we confront a situation where people often express cynicism in general (so that ‘not believing what you see in the media’ is no more than common sense), but then in any particular case they often find themselves pushed back into reliance on the mainstream media’s account of anything beyond the realm of their direct personal experience, simply for lack of any alternative perspective.



Questions 1-6 Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage



IELTS Essentials







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



Lewis concentrates more on the structure of programmes than on what is actually in them.



2



Lewis regrets viewers’ preference for soap operas over television news.



3



Lewis suggests that viewers sometimes find that television news contradicts their knowledge of the world.



4



Lewis believes that viewers have an inconsistent attitude towards the reliability of television news.



5



Parkin states that many working class people see themselves as exceptions to general beliefs.



6



The writer of the text believes that viewers should have a less passive attitude towards what they are told by the media.



33



Reading - Home Activity



Racy telenovelas inspire social change Brazil’s popular soap operas have done more than just entertain people - they have reduced the birth rate by three million and driven up the rate of divorce, a new report has found. Their colourful storylines of glamorous love triangles, paternity mysteries and rags-to-riches successes have long dominated Brazilian airwaves. Now the racy telenovelas that are the mainstays of the country’s powerful TV Globo network are being credited with more than just their audience pulling-power. A study of population data stretching back to 1971 has revealed that Brazil’s popular and often fanciful soap operas have had a direct impact on the nation’s divorce and birth rates, as the main channel that broadcast them gradually extended its reach across the country. According to the report, prepared for the Inter-American Development Bank, the rate of marriage breakup rose and the number of children born to each woman fell more quickly in areas receiving the TV Globo signal for the first time. Over the two decades that were studied, an estimated three million fewer Brazilian babies were born than would have been if telenovelas had never been broadcast, and 800,000 more couples separated or divorced. If the effect continued to the present day, the numbers would be even greater. ‘Exposure to modern lifestyles as portrayed on television, to emancipated women’s roles, and to a critique of traditional values, was associated with increases in the share of separated and divorced woman across Brazil’s municipal areas,’ the report’s authors said. Every Brazilian knows that what happens on TV Globo can affect the real world. Its schedules dictate kick-off times forfootball matches, its costumes influence design and fashion and the telenovelas’ plotlines have influenced the outcome of elections. However, the revelation that the cult of the telenovela has had such impact on the most intimate aspects of its viewers’ lives will startle Brazilians. Maria Immacolata Lopes, the coordinator of the Telenovela Centre at USP, one of Brazil’s leading universities, said it was the first time that research had been undertaken on such a wide scale. Alberto Chong, one of the study’s authors, said the reason for the change was the ‘aspirational ethos’ of the country’s soaps, which, unlike their grittier equivalents in Britain, tend to portray the upper levels of Brazilian society. That generally means characters are whiter, wealthier and better educated than most of Brazil’s 190 million people. They have fewer children and are more likely to be separated or divorced. Viewers instantly took to that image. ‘If the leading female character of a telenovela was divorced or separated, the divorce rate rose, by an average of 0.1 percentage point’, Mr Chong said. ‘At the same time, women in areas reached by the Globo signal had 0.6 per cent fewer children than those in areas with no signal.’ This may appear to be a small impact, but equates to millions fewer babies born over two decades. TV Globo reacted with hostility to the study, saying that it underestimated the intelligence of the channel’s viewers. A spokesman asserted that the soaps’ portrayal of divorce and smaller families reflected the trends of the time, rather than brought them about. ‘Our dramas are attuned to the questions being asked in society. While we don’t doubt the novelas make people think, we don’t believe they actually influence their opinions or choices,’ said Luis Erlanger, Globo’s communications director. Mr Chong rejected the view, pointing out that the chances of a new-born baby being named after a soap star were significantly higher in areas where the soaps were broadcast.



34



IELTS Essentials



Other international studies have shown that television can infuence behaviour and transform social mores, especially where the population does not have constant access to mixed media. In India, the arrival of cable television in remote areas caused pregnancy rates to fall and enrolment in education among girls to rise. Inhabitants of Lutsaan, a village in northern India, were passionate fans of the radio drama Tinka Tinka Sukh. The programme is claimed to have promoted gender equality and encouraged renouncement of the local custom of demanding a bridal dowry. Enrolment of girls in the local school rose by 25 per cent. In other parts of the country, soap viewers were more likely to refute the commonly held view that a husband was justified in beating his wife. A Rwandan radio serial Musekeweya has had an even more notable impact. Devised and broadcast by Radio La Benevolencija, a partner of Oxfam, the story centres on the conflict between two fictional tribes and the doomed romance between two of its characters. The project has the high hope of mending ethnic tension and encouraging reconciliation. This may be fiction, but the backdrop is very evidently the period just before the horrendous events of 1994. One of the earliest programmes to have a far-reaching impact on audiences was the Peruvian telenovela Simplemente Maria first aired in the late 1960s. The central character was a rural girl who escaped to the city to find work as a maid. She learnt to read and, more importantly, to sew, enabling her to become a successful fashion designer. The show was so popular that when Maria married her literacy teacher, thousands of avid viewers collected outside the church to bestow gifts on the happy couple. Across the country, increased enrolment in literacy classes coincided with the storyline. Back in Brazil, although they have lost viewers to the internet, the influence of the novelas remains evident. The increased presence of slender blondes is credited with driving a shift away from what was once a nationwide preference for guitar-shaped brunettes. ‘Novelas in Brazil take on a greater importance than a simple drama because they move people,’ said Mauro Alencar, the author of several books about the genre. ‘But the novela is above all a reflection of society. It feeds off what is exposed in day to day life and recreates a fictional version.’



IELTS Essentials



35



Questions 1—4 Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.



36



1



According to the text, which of the following features is typical of Brazilian telenovelas?







A There is a tendency to favour large families.







B Relationships are often unstable.







C Characters cannot escape their social class.







D Storylines are generally realistic.



2



TV Globo soap operas







A



are more popular than football matches.







B



are frequently set in the fashion industry.







C



have a degree of political content.







D



frequently shock the viewing public.



3



Viewers are attracted to Brazilian soap operas because







A they would like to be more like the characters in them.







B they reflect what happens in their own lives.







C the characters are excellent role models.







D they clearly show viewers how to behave.



4



What is the point made in the sixth paragraph.’







A



TV networks deserve criticism for their irresponsible storylines.







B



TV drama should be seen purely as entertainment.







C



People are behaving just like the characters they see in the telenovelas.







D



There is disagreement about how influential TV drama really is.



IELTS Essentials



Freerunning A Freerunning - or Parkour - is an acrobatic discipline which turns the city into a playground. It has been described as jogging meets gymnastics, as urban-steeplechase aerobics and as acrobatic performance art. B The discipline of Parkour-sport really is not an accurate way of describing it—was developed in the suburbs of Paris in the 1980s when a group of friends began to use the architectural landscape as their playground and gym. Fun was important for these founders, but for them Parkour was not just a leisure activity, it was a way of life. As in martial arts, Parkour involves mental discipline and self-improvement. It is not concerned solely with the acquisition of physical skills, but also with the improvement of one’s mental and spiritual wellbeing. As one runner comments, ‘It teaches me not to be scared in life, when new situations come to me, I deal with them calmly, like I would do before a new jump.’ C So, freerunning provides a philosophy for life: why walk when you could run, leap, vault and somersault? Why go round obstacles when you could go under, over and through them? Why use steps when there are handrails and sheer drops? The aim of a freerunner or traceur is to travel in an uninterrupted flow over the cityscape, incorporating any obstacles into the journey. ‘Flow’ is a key word here. Using fluid movements, which are both graceful and efficient, you try to flow like water through your surroundings. Freedom is another key aspect - the sense of escaping from the restrictions of your surroundings and routine. In attempting to become ‘fluid like water’, the traceur tries to use the body as efficiently as possible. At the same time, they have respect for their surroundings and disapprove of anything, such as the grinding and waxing done by skateboarders, which damages them. D This respect was not immediately evident to the people whose buildings they were using. Informal groups of young men testing their skills on public or other people’s property, naturally met with disapproval and even hostility - and for many traceurs this was the thrill or even the point of doing it. Knowing that it was an underground activity that belonged only to a select portion of urban youth was what made it special, what made it theirs. E The free, accessible nature of freerunning means it has the potential to engage groups of young people who are typically unmoved by traditional sports. Basically anyone can practise, anywhere - all you need is a decent pair of trainers,so the financial outlay is negligible.There are no joining fees, no forms to fill in and no rules and regulations. However, there is a shared attitude among the original traceurs, which they feel is being jeopardised by its rapidly increasing popularity. F The TV ads involving the early French founders of the discipline drew attention from all over the world. A British documentary showed the founders running over the rooftops of famous London landmarks, which encouraged many to start to practise themselves. Subsequently the French were joined by a group of English traceurs called Urban Freeflow demonstrating the rapid growth of Parkour. G But it is this growing popularity and the acrobatic and spectacular performances which have attracted so much attention, that may contain the very few elements which some feel will change the nature of Parkour. The public approval and corporate sponsorship which could popularise the sport could actually destroy it. Yet that is the direction in which even some early traceurs would like it to take - away from the founders’ original philosophy.



IELTS Essentials



37



H Media and big business have been attracted to the youthful appeal of the discipline. TV, which has done so much to popularise the activity, demands dramatic, showy visuals, including flips and somersaults.These daring embellishments are known as ‘tricking’, a term which, while it is an accurate description, might also suggest a false approach to the discipline. While the original traceurs might argue that true Parkour should not involve competition, there are forces pushing it in that direction. I



There are participants of course, for whom entertainment and showmanship are the point. Inspired by YouTube clips, young people across Britain are adopting a form of freerunning which includes competing to produce moves which are spectacular. Runners who want to display acrobatics to each other are also more likely to stay in one place, abandoning the physical journey and its random challenges.



J



The promoters of Parkour call it ‘the coolest way for young people to get fit and stay healthy’ and ‘a fitness regime designed by young people for young people’ and there are organisations where the words ‘cool’ and ‘young’ spark a great deal of interest. Councils, seeing this growing popularity, have started looking at ways to take the activity into schools or even to create ‘freerun parks’ and major companies, meanwhile, are keen to have their brands associated with the youthfulness of the activity.







Freerunners on the street seem to be particularly sceptical about commercialisation.’There are already special Freerunning trainers you can buy’ says a young traceur, who like most, wears a simple T-shirt, baggy tracksuit bottoms and unbranded trainers for the sport. Another neatly summed up the contradiction within the notion of this young, rebellious activity becoming mainstream,’I don’t think I would do it if it really took off.’



Questions 1-3 Choose THREE letters A-F. Which THREE of the following statements about the discipline of freerunning are true according to the passage?



38







A It only focusses on the development of physical capabilities.







B It is evolving into a competitive activity.







C It involves a personal choice of movements.







D It encourages dangerous behaviour.







E It requires the ability to look beyond the traditional use of objects.







F It is mainly performed in freerun parks.



IELTS Essentials



Questions 4-6 Choose THREE letters A-F. Which THREE movements are associated with freerunning according to the text?



IELTS Essentials



A



flipping



B



hopping



C



jumping



D



rolling



E



squatting



F



walking



39



Locating and matching information - In Class Activity



How bugs hitch-hike across the galaxy? Mankind’s search for alien life could be jeopardised by ultra-resilient bacteria from Earth. David Derbyshire reports What was the most important discovery of the Apollo programme? Some have argued that it was the rocks that explained how the Moon was formed. Others believe it was the technological spin-offs. But according to Captain Peter Conrad, who led the 1969 Apollo 12 mission, it was life. On the apparently dead lunar surface, a colony of bacteria was thriving. The organisms were not native to the Moon, but were visitors from Earth who had hitch-hiked a ride on board one of Nasa’s five Surveyor probes from the 1960s. To the astonishment of biologists, between 50 and 100 Streptococcus bacteria survived the journey across space, at an average temperature 20 degrees above absolute zero with no source of energy or water, and stayed alive on the Moon in a camera for three years. Captain Conrad, who returned the bacteria to Earth, was later to confess: 1 always thought the most significant thing we ever found on the whole Moon was the little bacteria that came back and lived.’ The ability of life to survive, adapt and evolve never fails to astonish. Over the past three decades, bacteria and archaea have been found in some of the most inhospitable places on Earth. Known as extremophiles, these organisms have coped with life in a vacuum, pressure as high as 70 tons per square inch, depths of four miles beneath the surface and scorching waters around deep-sea volcanic vents. They have also survived 25 million years inside a bee preserved in resin. Their resilience has renewed enthusiasm for the search for alien life - a quest that many had assumed had been banished to fantasy fiction. Mars and the moons Titan, Europa and Callisto are once again plausible candidates for extraterrestrials. As interest in alien life has grown, so have concerns that mankind could spread its own microscopic bugs, contaminating the places we want to explore. In 2003, Nasa ended the Galileo probe’s mission by smashing it into Jupiter. The fear was that it could be carrying bacteria that might contaminate Europa’s oceans. The team behind Beagle 2 - the British probe that went to search for life on Mars in 2003 - was forced to take contamination particularly seriously. If Beagle carried to Mars life or dead spores picked up during the manufacture of the spacecraft, its science would be jeopardised. Prof Colin Pillinger, the Open University scientist who headed the Beagle project, said: ‘What we’ve learnt since the Apollo missions and the Viking Mars missions of the 1970s is that bugs are far more tenacious than we ever imagined. They seem to be very tolerant of high temperatures, they lie dormant at low temperatures for long periods, they are immune to salt, acid and alkali, they seem to survive on substrate that are not what people expect. Extremophiles are extremely adapted to hanging on to life.’ Beagle had to be assembled in a ‘clean room’ - and one was specially put together in a converted BBC outside broadcast van garage in Milton Keynes. It had enough room to include an enormous set of fans that circulated and filtered the air 500 times an hour. Only a handful of trained researchers were allowed inside. ‘I wasn’t allowed in,’ says Prof Pillinger. ‘There was special training for people going in there and special conditions. There was a ban on beards and a limit of four people at any one time. The team kept samples of everything that could have contaminated the craft and monitored every stage of assembly.’



40



IELTS Essentials



To reduce the workload, the idea was to build as much as possible before sterilising it and banishing it to the difficult working conditions inside the clean room. The easy stuff was heated to 115C for 52 hours, more than enough to kill off bugs. Electronic equipment can’t cope with those sorts of temperatures, so the team used a hydrogen peroxide plasma, created in a microwave, to kill off bugs at low temperatures. Parachutes and gas bags were zapped with gamma radiation. It wasn’t just facial hair that was banned. ‘You’ve heard of the paperless office,’ says Prof Pillinger. ‘We had the paperless assembly line. The guys normally go in armed with loads of papers and diagrams, but we didn’t allow any of that. They were given information through a glass wall, over mikes and monitors. And sometimes on a piece of paper stuck to the glass with sticky tape.’ Beagle’s heat shield doubled as its biological shield. So once the instruments were encased and sealed, the craft could be brought back into the real world. The shield heated up to 1,700 degrees on its descent through the Martian atmosphere, so bugs on the casing were not a worry. Mars Express - the craft carrying Beagle - did not need sterilising. Its trajectory was designed so that if something went wrong, the craft would not simply crash into the planet. Its course could be corrected en route. Eventually, space scientists hope to return samples of Mars to Earth. While the risks of alien bacteria proving hazardous on Earth may be remote, the rocks will still need to be quarantined. Moon rocks from Apollo were analysed in vacuum glove boxes for the first two missions. Later, researchers stored rocks in nitrogen. Prof Pillinger believed the first Mars rocks should be sterilised before they are studied on Earth. ‘For security purposes it would be the most sensible thing to do. You don’t have to sterilise it all, you can contain some of it and then sterilise the sample you want to look at, but it would lower the risk and make it easier to analyse.’



Questions 1-7 Look at the statements (Questions 1-7) and the list of spacecraft below. Match each statement with the spacecraft it applies to.



IELTS Essentials



1.



Provided transport from Earth for bacteria.



2.



Led to realisation of how tenacious bacteria on the outer structure.



3.



Was created so that there could be no bacteria on the outer structure



4.



Was capable of changing direction in the event of a problem.



5.



Brought material which was kept in more than one kind of container.



6.



Required action because of the possibility of the introduction of harmful bacteria.



7.



Resulted in disagreement as to the relative value of what was found.



List of Spacecraft



A



Apollo craft



B



Surveyor probe



C



Galileo probe



D



Beagle 2



E



Mars Express



41



Complementary and alternative medicine WHAT DO SCIENTISTS IN BRITAIN THINK ABOUT ‘ALTERNATIVE’ THERAPIES? ORLA KENNEDY READS A SURPRISING SURVEY Is complementary medicine hocus-pocus or does it warrant large-scale scientific investigation? Should science range beyond conventional medicine and conduct research on alternative medicine and the supposed growing links between mind and body? This will be hotly debated at the British Association for the Advancement of Science. One Briton in five uses complementary medicine, and according to the most recent Mintel survey, one in ten uses herbalism or homoeopathy. Around £130 million is spent on oils, potions and pills every year in Britain, and the complementary and alternative medicine industry is estimated to be worth £1.6 billion. With the help of Professor Edzard Ernst, Laing, chair of complementary medicine at The Peninsula Medical School, Universities of Exeter and Plymouth, we asked scientists their views on complementary and alternative medicine. Seventy-five scientists, in fields ranging from molecular biology to neuroscience, replied. Surprisingly, our sample of scientists was twice as likely as the public to use some form of complementary medicine, at around four in 10 compared with two in 1 0 of the general population. Three quarters of scientific users believed they were effective. Acupuncture, chiropractic and osteopathy were the most commonly used complementary treatments among scientists and more than 55 per cent believed these were more effective than a placebo and should be available to all on the National Health Service. Scientists appear to place more trust in the more established areas of complementary and alternative medicine, such as acupuncture, chiropractic and osteopathy, for which there are professional bodies and recognised training, than therapies such as aroma therapy and spiritual healing. ‘Osteopathy is now a registered profession requiring a certified four-year degree before you can advertise and practise,’ said one neuroscientist who used the therapy. Nearly two thirds of the scientists who replied to our survey believed that aromatherapy and homoeopathy were no better than placebos, with almost a half thinking the same of herbalism and spiritual thinking. Some of the comments we received were scathing, even though one in ten of our respondents had used homoeopathy. ‘Aromatherapy and homoeopathy are scientifically nonsensical,’ said one molecular biologist from the University of Bristol. Dr Romke Bron, a molecular biologist at the Medical Research Council Centre at King’s College London, added: ‘Homoeopathy is a big scam and I am convinced that if someone sneaked into a homoeopathic pharmacy and swapped labels, nobody would notice anything.’ Two centuries after homeopathy was introduced, it still lacks a watertight demonstration that it works. Scientists are happy that the resulting solutions and sugar pills have no side effects, but are baffled by how they can do anything. Both complementary and conventional medicine should be used in routine health care, according to followers of the ‘integrated health approach’, who want to treat an individual ‘as a whole’. But the scientists who responded to our survey expressed serious concerns about this approach, with more than half believing that integrated medicine was an attempt to bypass rigorous scientific testing. Dr Bron said: ‘There is an awful lot of bad science going on in alternative medicine and the general public has a hard time to distinguish between scientific myth and fact. It is absolutely paramount to maintain rigorous quality control in health care. Although the majority of alternative health workers mean well, there are just too many frauds out there preying on vulnerable people.’



42



IELTS Essentials



One molecular biologist from the University of Warwick admitted that ‘by doing this poll I have realised how shamefully little I understand about alternative therapy. Not enough scientific research has been performed. There is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that at least some of the alternative therapies are effective for some people, suggesting this is an area ripe for research.’ When asked if complementary and alternative medicine should get more research funding, scientists believed the top three (acupuncture, chiropractic and osteopathy) should get money, as should herbalism. It seems that therapies based on physical manipulation or a known action - like the active ingredients in a herb on a receptor in the body - are the ones that the scientific community has faith in. Less than a quarter thought that therapies such as aromatherapy, homoeopathy and spiritual healing should get any funding. Scientists believed that the ‘feelgood’ counselling effect of complementary medicine and the time taken to listen to patients’ problems was what worked, rather than any medicina I effect. In contrast, the average visit to the doctor lasts only eight minutes, says the British Medical Association. Dr Stephen Nurrish, a molecular biologist at University College London, said: ‘Much of the benefit people get from complementary medicine is the time to talk to someone and be listened to sympathetically, something that is now lacking from medicine in general.’ But an anonymous neuroscientist at King’s College London had a more withering view of this benefit: ‘On the validity of complementary and alternative medicines, no one would dispute that ‘feeling good’ is good for your health, but why discriminate between museum-trip therapy, patting-a-dog therapy and aromatherapy? Is it because only the latter has a cadre of professional ‘practitioners’?’ There are other hardline scientists who argue that there should be no such thing as complementary and alternative medicine. As Professor David Moore, director of the Medical Research Council’s Institute for Hearing Research, said: ‘Either a treatment works or it doesn’t. The only way to determine if it works is to test it against appropriate controls (that is, scientifically).’



IELTS Essentials



43



Questions 1-6 Look at the following views (Questions 1-6) and the list of people below them. Match each view with the person expressing it in the passage. NB You may use any letter more than once. 1



Complementary medicine provides something that conventional medicine no longer does.



2



It is hard for people to know whether they are being told the truth or not.



3



Certain kinds of complementary and alternative medicine are taken seriously because of the number of people making money from them.



4



Nothing can be considered a form of medicine unless it has been proved effective.



5



It seems likely that some forms of alternative medicine do work.



6



One particular kind of alternative medicine is a deliberate attempt to cheat the public. List of People







A



Dr Romke Rron







B



a molecular biologist from the University of Warwick







C



Dr Stephen Nurrish







D



a neuroscientist at King’s College London







E



Professor David Moore



Questions 7-9 Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-F from the box below.



44



7



The British Association for the Advancement of Science will be discussing the issue of



8



A recent survey conducted by a certain organisation addressed the issue of



9



The survey in which the writer of the article was involved gave information on







A what makes people use complementary rather than conventional medicine.







B how many scientists themselves use complementary and alternative medicine.







C whether alternative medicine should be investigated scientifically.







D research into the use of complementary and conventional medicine together.







E



how many people use various kinds of complementary medicine.







F



the extent to which attitudes to alternative medicine are changing.



IELTS Essentials



Questions 10-13 Classify the following information as being given about A



acupuncture



B



aromatherapy



C



herbalism



D



homoeopathy



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



IELTS Essentials



10



Scientists believe that it is ineffective but harmless.



11



Scientists felt that it could be added to the group of therapies that deserved to be provided with resources for further investigation.



12



Scientists felt that it deserved to be taken seriously because of the organised way in which it has developed.



13



A number of scientists had used it, but harsh criticism was expressed about it.



45



Discursive passages - In Class Activity



Groucho Marx & Arthur Sheekman In a show-business career that spanned over seventy years, Groucho Marx successfully conquered every entertainment medium, becoming a star of the vaudeville stage, Broadway, motion pictures, radio and television. But, as the author of seven books, a play, two film screenplays and over one hundred magazine articles and essays, Groucho quietly conquered another medium, one in which he was as proud to work as any of the others. His writing is often overlooked in studies of his career, perhaps due to the quantity and variety of his other work. Throughout his literary career, Groucho was dogged by the incorrect and unfair assumption by many critics and even by his biographer that he used a ghost writer. Most Hollywood celebrities who wrote books had professional writers do the actual work. The fact that Groucho publicly stated on many occasions that he abhorred ghost writers is clouded by his relationship with Arthur Sheekman. Friends for many years, Groucho and Sheekman had an unusual literary relationship. They worked in collaboration and each offered the other editorial help. For a brief time in the early 1940s, Groucho fronted for Sheekman, who was having trouble selling his work. By thus lending his name to another writer’s work, Groucho subjected all of his literary endeavors to suspicion from critics who simply refused to believe that an entertainer could write. That some of Sheekman’s magazine pieces got into print under Groucho’s byline becomes apparent from reading the unedited correspondence between the two of them. The letters indicate that Groucho’s essays from this period fall into three categories: first, pieces written by Groucho with no input from Sheekman at all. In a July I, 1940, letter to Sheekman, Groucho asked, ‘Did you see that little piece I wrote for Reader’s Digest?’ On March 17, 1941, he wrote, ‘My drool is coming out in next week’s issue of This Week so cancel your subscription now.’ Clearly Sheekman could not have had anything to do with a piece that he was told to look for. The second and probably largest category of Groucho’s essays of this period consists of those written by Groucho and sent to Sheekman for editorial assistance. On July 20, 1940, Groucho wrote: ‘I’m enclosing a copy of the piece I wrote. Probably another page or so is needed to complete it, but our starting date [for filming Go West ] came and I just haven’t had time to finish it. Let me know what you think of it and be honest because any other kind of opinion would be of no value to me. I won’t attempt to influence you by telling you the reactions I’ve already had, so for the love of God tell me the truth.’ Shortly thereafter, on October 10, Groucho wrote: ‘I received your suggestions on my piece - I’m glad you liked it, if you did you’re probably right about the beginning. I’ll do it over again.’ By the time Groucho wrote to Sheekman on July 25, 1942, it appears that some sort of financial arrangement had been made regarding Sheekman’s suggestions. On that date Groucho also wrote: ‘I’m writing an unfunny piece on insomnia and I’ll send it in a week or so, I hope, for you to read - I’d like your opinion, proofread -correcting all the glaring illiteracies and, otherwise, do a fine polishing job.’ The remainder of Groucho’s essays from this period comprise the third category, Sheekman compositions with varying degrees of input from Groucho. The level of Groucho’s contributions to the articles in the third category ranges from actually suggesting the topic and drawing up an outline to simply rewriting a few paragraphs for the purpose of injecting his own style into the piece. In a July 10, 1940, letter Groucho wrote: ‘I think you ought to try another political piece - a campaign thing - for This Week or some other magazine.



46



IELTS Essentials



This will be an extremely hot topic for the next few months and I think you should take advantage of it. If you’ll write to me, I’ll try to jot down a few items that you could complain about.’ Presumably, the chain of events would continue with Sheekman sending an essay to Groucho for his approval and whatever rewrites were needed. On May 29, 1940, Groucho wrote, ‘Received your piece and looked it over.’ In these letters to Sheekman, Groucho always referred to a piece as either ‘my piece’ or ‘your piece’. The letter continued, ‘I thought the piece was good ... and I’ll send it to Bye and see if he can sell it... I’ll just rewrite a couple of paragraphs in your piece - not that I can improve them, but perhaps they’ll sound a little more like me.’ Groucho was concerned enough about this arrangement to take the care to at least make the piece somewhat his own. Groucho really had no need for this entire enterprise. He gave the money to Sheekman and had no trouble getting his own work published. The principal reason for him submitting Sheekman’s work to magazines as his own was that it made Sheekman’s material easily marketable based on Groucho’s celebrity. Sheekman couldn’t have been altogether happy with the arrangement, but the reality was that he was periodically unemployed and the use of Groucho’s name brought in occasional paychecks. So it is not quite fair to call Sheekman Groucho’s ghost writer. A more apt description of their literary relationship at this time is that Groucho occasionally fronted for Sheekman and offered him the services of his literary agent, while each offered the other editorial advice. The reasons for some of their collaborative efforts not being credited as such remain unexplained, but Groucho was never shy about crediting his collaborators, and in every other case he did so.



IELTS Essentials



47



Questions 1-4 Do the following statements reflect the claims of the writer of Reading Passage



YES



if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer.







NO



if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer.







NOT GIVEN



if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this.



1



Groucho’s work as a writer was sometimes better than his work in other media.



2



Groucho’s relationship with Sheekman cast doubt on his own abilities as a writer.



3



Money was occasionally a source of disagreement between Groucho and Sheekman.



4



Groucho occasionally regretted his involvement with Sheekman.



Questions 5-8 Complete the notes below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.



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IELTS Essentials



Questions 9-13 Look at the following statements (Questions 9-13) and the list of dates of letters sent by Groucho to Sheekman below. Match each statement with the letter it relates to. 9



Groucho referred to his own inadequacy with regard to use of language.



10



Groucho explained his reason for amending an essay.



11



Groucho agreed that part of an essay needed revising.



12



Groucho drew Sheekman’s attention to an essay soon to be published.



13



Groucho suggested that an essay should adopt a negative point of view. List of Letters Sent by Groucho to Sheekman



IELTS Essentials







A



July 1,1940







B



March 17, 1941







C



July 20, 1940







D



October 10, 1940







E



July 25, 1942







F



July 10, 1940







G



May 29, 1940



49



Multiple choice questions - In Class Activity



The Dollar-a-Year Man How John Lomax set out to record American folk music A



In the early 1930s, folklorist, platform lecturer, college professor and former banker John Avery Lomax was trying to recapture a sense of direction for his life. For two decades he had enjoyed a national reputation for his pioneering work in collecting and studying American folk songs; no less a figure than President Theodore Roosevelt had admired his work, and had written a letter of support for him as he sought grants for his research. He had always dreamed of finding a way of making a living by doing the thing he loved best, collecting folk songs, but he was now beginning to wonder if he would ever realise that dream.



B



Lomax wanted to embark on a nationwide collecting project, resulting in as many as four volumes, and ‘complete the rehabilitation of the American folk-song’. Eventually this was modified to where he envisioned a single book tentatively called American Ballads and Folk Songs, designed to survey the whole field. It called for first-hand field collecting, and would especially focus on the neglected area of black folk music.



C



In 1932, Lomax travelled to New York, and stopped in to see a man named H.S. Latham of the Macmillan Company. He informally outlined his plan to Latham, and read him the text of an earthy African American blues ballad called ‘Ida Red’. Latham was impressed, and two days later Lomax had a contract, a small check to bind it, and an agreement to deliver the manuscript about one year later. The spring of 1932 began to look more green, lush and full of promise.



D Lomax immediately set to work. He travelled to libraries at Harvard, the Library of Congress, Brown University and elsewhere in order to explore unpublished song collections and to canvas the folk song books published over the past ten years. During his stay in Washington, D.C., Lomax became friendly with Carl Engel, Music Division chief of the Library of Congress. Engel felt that Lomax had the necessary background and energy to someday direct the Archive of Folk Song. Through funds provided by the Council of Learned Societies and the Library of Congress, Lomax ordered a state-of-the-art portable recording machine. More importantly, the Library of Congress agreed to furnish blank records and to lend their name to his collecting; Lomax simply had to agree to deposit the completed records at the Library of Congress. He did so without hesitation. On July 15, 1933, Lomax was appointed an ‘honorary consultant’ for a dollar a year. E Together with his eighteen-year-old son Alan, he began a great adventure to collect songs for American Ballads and Folk Songs, a task that was to last for many months. Lomax’s library research had reinforced his belief that a dearth of black folk song material existed in printed collections. This fact, along with his early appreciation of African American folk culture, led Lomax to decide that black folk music from rural areas should be the primary focus. This bold determination resulted in the first major trip in the United States to capture black folk music in the field. In order to fulfill their quest, the two men concentrated on sections of the South with a high percentage of blacks. They also pinpointed laboring camps, particularly lumber camps, which employed blacks almost exclusively. But as they went along, prisons and penitentiaries also emerged as a focal point for research.



50



IELTS Essentials



F The recordings made by the Lomaxes had historical significance. The whole idea of using a phonograph to preserve authentic folk music was still fairly new. Most of John Lomax’s peers were involved in collecting songs the classic way: taking both words and melody down by hand, asking the singer to perform the song over and over until the collector had ‘caught’ it on paper. John Lomax sensed at once the limitations of this kind of method, especially when getting songs from African-American singers, whose quarter tones, blue notes and complex timing often frustrated white musicians trying to transcribe them with European notation systems. G



The whole concept of field recordings was, in 1933 and still is today, radically different from the popular notion of recording. Field recordings are not intended as commercial products, but as attempts at cultural preservation. There is no profit motive, nor any desire to make the singer a ‘star’. As have hundreds of folk song collectors after him, John Lomax had to persuade his singers to perform, to explain to them why their songs were important, and to convince the various authorities - the wardens, the trusties, the bureaucrats - that this was serious, worthwhile work. He faced the moral problem of how to safeguard the records and the rights of the singers - a problem he solved in this instance by donating the discs to the Library of Congress. He had to overcome the technical problems involved in recording outside a studio; one always hoped for quiet, with no doors slamming or alarms going off, but it was always a risk. His new state-of-the-art recording machine sported a new microphone designed by NBC, but there were no wind baffles to help reduce the noise when recording outside. Lomax learned how to balance sound, where to place microphones, how to work echoes and walls, and soon was a skilled recordist.



Questions 1-3 Choose THREE letters A-F. Which THREE of the following difficulties for Lomax are mentioned by the writer of the text?



IELTS Essentials



A



finding a publisher for his research



B



deciding exactly what kind of music to collect



C



the scepticism of others concerning his methods



D



the reluctance of people to participate in his project



E



making sure that participants in his project were not exploited



F



factors resulting from his choice of locations for recording



51



Psychology and personality ASSESSMENT A Our daily lives are largely made up of contacts with other people, during which we are constantly making judgments of their personalities and accommodating our behaviour to them in accordance with these judgments. A casual meeting of neighbours on the street, an employer giving instructions to an employee, a mother telling her children how to behave, a journey in a train where strangers eye one another without exchanging a word - all these involve mutual interpretations of personal qualities. B Success in many vocations largely depends on skill in sizing up people. It is important not only to such professionals as the clinical psychologist, the psychiatrist or the social worker, but also to the doctor or lawyer in dealing with their clients, the businessman trying to outwit his rivals, the salesman with potential customers, the teacher with his pupils, not to speak of the pupils judging their teacher. Social life, indeed, would be impossible if we did not, to some extent, understand, and react to the motives and qualities of those we meet; and clearly we are sufficiently accurate for most practical purposes, although we also recognize that misinterpretations easily arise -particularly on the part of others who judge us! C Errors can often be corrected as we go along. But whenever we are pinned down to a definite decision about a person, which cannot easily be revised through his ‘feedback’, the inadequacies of our judgments become apparent. The hostess who wrongly thinks that the Smiths and the Joneses will get on well together can do little to retrieve the success of her party. A school or a business may be saddled for years with an undesirable member of staff, because the selection committee which interviewed him for a quarter of an hour misjudged his personality. D Just because the process is so familiar and taken for granted, it has aroused little scientific curiosity until recently. Dramatists, writers and artists throughout the centuries have excelled in the portrayal of character, but have seldom stopped to ask how they, or we, get to know people, or how accurate is our knowledge. However, the popularity of such unscientific systems as Lavater’s physiognomy in the eighteenth century, Gall’s phrenology in the nineteenth, and of handwriting interpretations by graphologists, or palm-readings by gipsies, show that people are aware of weaknesses in their judgments and desirous of better methods of diagnosis. It is natural that they should turn to psychology for help, in the belief that psychologists are specialists in ‘human nature’. E This belief is hardly justified: for the primary aim of psychology had been to establish the general laws and principles underlying behaviour and thinking, rather than to apply these to concrete problems of the individual person. A great many professional psychologists still regard it as their main function to study the nature of learning, perception and motivation in the abstracted or average human being, or in lower organisms, and consider it premature to put so young a science to practical uses. They would disclaim the possession of any superior skill in judging their fellow-men. Indeed, being more aware of the difficulties than is the non-psychologist, they may be more reluctant to commit themselves to definite predictions or decisions about other people. Nevertheless, to an increasing extent psychologists are moving into educational, occupational, clinical and other applied fields, where they are called upon to use their expertise for such purposes as fitting the education or job to the child or adult, and the person to the job. Thus a considerable proportion of their activities consists of personality assessment.



52



IELTS Essentials



F The success of psychologists in personality assessment has been limited, in comparison with what they have achieved in the fields of abilities and training, with the result that most people continue to rely on unscientific methods of assessment. In recent times there has been a tremendous amount of work on personality tests, and on carefully controlled experimental studies of personality. Investigations of personality by Freudian and other ‘depth’ psychologists have an even longer history. And yet psychology seems to be no nearer to providing society with practicable techniques which are sufficiently reliable and accurate to win general acceptance. The soundness of the methods of psychologists in the field of personality assessment and the value of their work are under constant fire from other psychologists, and it is far from easy to prove their worth. G The growth of psychology has probably helped responsible members of society to become more aware of the difficulties of assessment. But it is not much use telling employers, educationists and judges how inaccurately they diagnose the personalities with which they have to deal unless psychologists are sure that they can provide something better. Even when university psychologists themselves appoint a new member of staff, they almost always resort to the traditional techniques of assessing the candidates through interviews, past records, and testimonials, and probably make at least as many bad appointments as other employers do. However, a large amount of experimental development of better methods has been carried out since 1940 by groups of psychologists in the Armed Services and in the Civil Service, and by such organizations as the (British) National Institute of Industrial Psychology and the American Institute of Research.



Question 1 Choose THREE letters A-F. Which THREE of the following are stated about psychologists involved in personality assessment?



IELTS Essentials



A



‘Depth’ psychologists are better at it than some other kinds of psychologist.



B



Many of them accept that their conclusions are unreliable.



C



They receive criticism from psychologists not involved in the field.



D



They have made people realise how hard the subject is.



E



They have told people what not to do, rather than what they should do.



F



They keep changing their minds about what the best approaches are.



53



Reading - In Class Activity



TITAN of technology Gordon Moore is one of the people who gave the world personal computers. Peter Richards spoke to him in 2003 Gordon Moore is the scientific brain behind Intel, the world’s biggest maker of computer chips. Both funny and self-deprecating, he’s a shrewd businessman too, but admits to being an ‘accidental entrepreneur’, happier in the back room trading ideas with techies than out selling the product or chatting up the stockholders. When he applied for a job at Dow Chemical after gaining his PhD, the company psychologist ruled that ‘I was okay technically, but that I’d never manage anything’. This year Intel is set to turn over $28 billion. When Moore co-founded Intel (short for Integrated Electronics) to develop integrated circuits thirty-five years ago, he provided the motive force in R&D (Research & Development) while his more extrovert partner Robert Noyce became the public face of the company. Intel’s ethos was distinctively Californian: laid-back, democratic, polo shirt and chinos. Moore worked in a cubicle like everyone else, never had a designated parking space and flew Economy. None of this implied lack of ambition. Moore and Noyce shared a vision, recognising that success depended just as much on intellectual pizazz as on Intel’s ability to deliver a product. Noyce himself received the first patent for an integrated circuit in 1961, while both partners were learning the business of electronics at Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild’s success put money in Moore and Noyce’s pockets, but they were starved of R&D money. They resigned, frustrated, to found Intel in 1968. ‘It was one of those rare periods when money was available,’ says Moore. They put in $250,000 each and drummed up another $2.5m of venture capital ‘on the strength of a one-page business plan that said essentially nothing’. Ownership was divided 50:50 between founders and backers. Three years later, Intel’s first microprocessor was released: the 4004, carrying 2,250 transistors. Progress after that was rapid. By the time the competition realised what was happening, Intel had amassed a seven-year R&D lead that it was never to relinquish. By the year 2000, Intel’s Pentium®4 chip was carrying 42 million transistors. ‘Now,’ says Moore, ‘we put a quarter of a billion transistors on a chip and are looking forward to a billion in the near future.’ The performance gains have been phenomenal. The 4004 ran at 108 kilohertz (108,000 hertz), the Pentium®4 at three gigahertz (3 billion hertz). It’s calculated that if automobile speed had increased similarly over the same period, you could now drive from New York to San Francisco in six seconds. Moore’s prescience in forecasting this revolution is legendary. In 1965, while still head of the R&D laboratory at Fairchild, he wrote a piece for Electronics magazine observing ‘that over the first few years we had essentially doubled the complexity of integrated circuits every year. I blindly extrapolated for the next ten years and said we’d go from about 60 to about 60,000 transistors on a chip. It proved a much more spot-on prediction than I could ever have imagined. Up until then, integrated circuits had been expensive and had principally military applications. But I could see that the economics were going to switch dramatically. This was going to become the cheapest way to make electronics.’



54



IELTS Essentials



The prediction that a chip’s transistor-count - and thus its performance - would keep doubling every year soon proved so accurate that Carver Mead, a friend from Caltech, dubbed it ‘Moore’s Law’. The name has stuck. ‘Moore’s Law’ has become the yardstick by which the exponential growth of the computer industry has been measured ever since. When, in 1975, Moore looked around him again and saw transistor-counts slowing, he predicted that in future chip-performance would double only every two years. But that proved pessimistic. Actual growth since then has split the difference between his two predictions, with performance doubling every 1 8 months. And there’s a corollary, says Moore. ‘If the cost of a given amount of computer power drops 50 per cent every 1 8 months, each time that happens the market explodes with new applications that hadn’t been economical before.’ He sees the microprocessor as ‘almost infinitely elastic’. As prices fall, new applications keep emerging: smart light bulbs, flashing trainers or greetings cards that sing ‘Happy Birthday’. Where will it all stop? Well, it’s true, he says, ‘that in a few more generations [of chips], the fact that materials are made of atoms starts to be a real problem. Essentially, you can’t make things any smaller.’ But in practice, the day of reckoning is endlessly postponed as engineers find endlessly more ingenious ways of loading more transistors on a chip. ‘I suspect I shared the feelings of everybody else that when we got to the dimensions of a micron [about 1986], we wouldn’t be able to continue because we were touching the wavelength of light. But as we got closer, the barriers just melted away.’ When conventional chips finally reach their limits, nanotechnology beckons. Researchers are already working on sci-fi sounding alternatives such as molecular computers, built atom by atom, that theoretically could process hundreds of thousands times more information than today’s processors. Quantum computers using the state of electrons as the basis for calculation could operate still faster. On any measure, there looks to be plenty of life left in Moore’s Law yet.



Questions 1-3 Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.



IELTS Essentials



1



What do we learn about Gordon Moore’s personality in the first two paragraphs?







A It has changed noticeably as his career has developed.







B It was once considered unsuitable for the particular type of business he was in.







C It made him more suited to producing things than to selling them.







D It is less complicated than it may at first appear.



2



What do we learn about Intel when it was first established?







A It was unlike any other company in its field at the time.







B It combined a relaxed atmosphere with serious intent.







C It attracted attention because of the unconventional way in which it was run.







D It placed more emphasis on ingenuity than on any other aspect.



3



What is stated about the setting up of Intel in the third paragraph?







A



It was primarily motivated by the existence of funds that made it possible.







B



It involved keeping certain sensitive information secret.







C



It resulted from the founders’ desire to launch a particular product.







D



It was caused by the founders’ dissatisfaction with their employer’s priorities.



55



Home Activity



How to Build a Tree House A tree house is a place where you can give free rein to your individual creativity. However, while there are almost as many types of tree house as there are types of tree, some general principles do apply when it comes to tree house construction. Before you begin your tree house plans, check with your local planning authorities about any restrictions on building tree houses that may exist. In some places, if a structure is below a certain size and not used as a permanent dwelling it will not need planning approval, but there may be restrictions on height or on windows overlooking adjacent properties. Safety is vital during construction. Always use a safety harness, and firmly tie it to a strong branch. Think before you act, and keep a first aid kit handy. First Steps First, you need to choose a tree and decide on a position within it for your tree house. Think about what you want from your tree house: Will it be an adult hideaway or children’s play area? If you are considering a tree house for children, keep it close to the ground: Consider whether you want your tree house to be hidden or visible, and make sure it will not disturb other people. Choose a mature, healthy tree with no special protection orders that may affect pruning. When selecting a tree it is best to consult a qualified arborist, and if any pruning is necessary arrange for this to be done professionally. Decide how you want to access your tree house and what materials you want to use. Whatever you decide, it is best to start small and simple. Every tree is different, so let the tree be your guide. Follow the form of the tree, allow for growth and movement, and keep the structure lightweight. Keep the various positions of the sun in mind when planning small decks. If there is not one ideal tree, then several closely spaced, smaller trees will suffice. Ideally, plan the structure on paper before starting work, allowing for a deck if you want one. Never make the tree house too big for the tree. Building a Platform The platform, providing a secure foundation for the rest of the structure, is the key element of almost any tree house. It should be built close to the trunk, with diagonal bracing for extra strength, if it is not supported by branches or posts. Make sure the platform is level, and keep it balanced centrally around the tree to support uneven loads and reduce swaying. When securing the structure, do everything you can to limit damage to the tree. Ideally use rope lashing, but make sure you know the right knots. If necessary, use strong galvanised steel screws, as ungalvanised screws or nails will rust and encourage disease and rot. Avoid cutting the bark all the way round, or constricting it too tightly with rope or wire. Once the platform is secure, you need to add the floor. For this you might use plywood sheets or conventional floorboards. The walls can either be built in situ in the tree or prefabricated on the ground and then hoisted up into position (for larger tree houses the latter is much easier and safer).To minimise the amount of work done while perched up in the tree, you can even add external wall finishes on the ground and prefix doors and windows.



56



IELTS Essentials



The roof may also be pre-assembled, but if branches are to penetrate it, or if it is an irregular shape, it is generally best to build it in situ. Once in position, the roof should be covered and protected with roofing felt. If desired the roof can be finished with local materials such as palm leaves or recycled shingles. Windows and Doors In a tree house, adhering to convention is unnecessary. This is a place to experiment and indulge your design fantasies. Whether your taste leans toward Gothic towers or rustic cottages, the possibilities for windows and doors are endless. The important thing is to keep them in proportion to the size and design of the tree house. For safety and lightness, use Perspex or Plexiglas instead of glass for windows. Try to use old or recycled items whenever possible. Deck and Railings Nothing can beat the experience of sitting outside a tree house, among the leaves and branches, on an outside deck, balcony or veranda. A deck can be part of the tree house platform, or it might be in a separate place nearby, perhaps at a different level and reached by a rope bridge or wooden walkway. Whichever you choose, the deck must be surrounded by safe railings. Functional these may be, but as with doors and windows, you can still give your imagination free rein. For something different, why not make a giant hammock by attaching a strong rope net to the deck? Spread with pillows and cushions it makes a great place to relax. Tree House Access Now that you have built your tree house, how will you get up there? A simple wooden or rope ladder is fine if the house is not far from the ground, but steps, ideally with handrails, are better for higher constructions. Spiral steps winding around the trunk are always fun and look more natural than a straight flight. If higher still, it is a good idea to break the journey with a series of landings. Sometimes it is possible to build a bridge or rope walkway from an adjacent tree, building or area of high ground. For really high tree houses, a rope pulley system with a harness or chair may be the most convenient method. A rope pulley with a basket is indispensable for hoisting up provisions, whatever the height your tree house. After all the effort involved in designing and building a tree house, the last thing you want is for it to fall down. Remember to check the floors, decks and railings frequently for rot or weakness. Inspect any steps, ladders and walkways, and repair damage immediately. Check the tree annually for growth and movement, and adjust or refix attachments to the tree as necessary.



Questions 1-6 Complete the sentences below with words taken from Reading Passage. Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.



IELTS Essentials



1



.............will provide information about restrictions that might apply to your construction.



2



Planning approval is not usually necessary for a small tree house that is not a............. .



3



A.............held securely in place is essential when working high up in a tree.



4



A tree house planned as.............can be built higher than one planned for children to play in.



5



You might not be allowed to prune a tree that has.............



6



Small decks will benefit from.............at different times of the day.



57



Questions 7-11 Label the diagram below. Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the reading passage for each answer.



8



7



9



58



10



11



IELTS Essentials



Questions 12-15 Complete each .sentence with the correct ending A—H from the box below.



IELTS Essentials







12 An outside deck







13 A basic wooden ladder







14 A rope walkway







15 A rope pulley







A



should be higher than the main part of the construction.







B



saves carrying items up ladders and staircases.







C



can connect one tree with another.







D



should not be too unconventional in design.







E



is best suited to low constructions.







F



is a potentially dangerous option.







G



can be constructed to wind around the trunk of the tree.







H



may increase the likelihood of a construction collapsing.



59



Do animals think? When an animal knows it is being chased and starts to run, is it obeying some ancient instinct, or does it ‘know’ to be afraid?



A



Mammals have brains so they can feel pain and fear and can react in disgust. If a wildebeest did not feel pain, it would continue grazing as lions slowly devoured it. If an antelope did not sense fear, it would not break into a sprint at the first hint of cheetah. If a canine were not disgusted, it would not vomit; it would not be, as the saying goes, sick as a dog. Pain, fear and disgust are part of a mammal’s survival machinery developed over tens of millions of years of evolution. Homo sapiens have, however, only been around for about 200,000 years so all three emotional states owe something to mammal origins. If football hooligans can feel those emotions, then so too do deer, foxes and dogs. The argument is about how ‘aware’ or ‘conscious’ non-human mammals might be during these emotional events. When an animal knows it is being chased and starts to run, is it obeying some instinct inherited from ancestors that knew when to flee a danger zone or does it actually ‘know’ to be afraid?



B



That might be the wrong question. A human startled by a strange shape in a darkened corridor experiences a pounding heart, lungs gasping for air and a body in recoil. This is the well-known flight or fight reaction. A human appreciates the full force of fear and has already started to counter the danger a fraction of a second before the brain has time to absorb and order the information presented by the menacing figure. This is because mental calculations are too slow to cope with surprise attack. Pain precedes logic. Touch something hot and you withdraw your hand even before you have time to think about doing so. Once again, the wisdom is after the event.



C



If humans can experience the universal emotions of fear, anger, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise, then so can mammals. But does an animal think about its state of fear? Does it have not just a mind but a theory of mind? Does it have a sense of its own identity and that of another being? Can it put itself in another animal’s shoes, so to speak? All animals communicate, but only humans have language. The puzzle remains: do animals think? Can they think about abstractions, about the past or about other animals? Researchers have wrestled with a series of experiments to see whether animals are capable of behaving as if they had the capacity to learn, the will to improvise and the ability to guess what other animals are thinking. Dogs show a remarkable capacity to guess human intentions correctly. Dogs, however, have lived intimately with humans for 15,000 years, so are unlikely to make ideal test subjects.



D



60



Primates, humanity’s closest relatives, show unexpected abilities. Researchers from St Andrews in 1999 counted 39 different ways in which chimpanzees deal with food. Since these differ according to group and geography, they have used the word ‘culture’ to describe these differing methods. One female chimpanzee in Kyoto, convinced researchers that she could place Arabic numerals in ascending order one to nine. Monkeys astonished a team at Columbia University in New York in 1998 by distinguishing groups of objects numbering one to four. Chimpanzees in large captive colonies forge alliances, switch sides and double-cross each other. They have also been seen in the wild systematically searching for leaves that have a medicinal effect. From such observations, a new branch of research has been born. It is called zoopharmacognosy.



IELTS Essentials



IELTS Essentials



E



Chimpanzees and humans share a common ancestor, and 98% of their DNA. Do more distant mammal relatives share the capacity for cogitation? Several years ago, Keith Kendrick at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge astonished the world by revealing that sheep could recognise up to 50 other sheep and up to ten human faces for at least two years after first seeing them. If a sheep can tell the difference between its flock members from flash cards and screen pictures, it must surely have a sense of these other creatures even when they are not there. Perhaps this means it also has an idea of ‘self.



F



More disconcertingly, pigs have demonstrated their own theory of mind. Mike Mendl of Bristol University revealed astonishing evidence at the British Association science festival in 2002. A larger and stronger pig that did not know where food was hidden had learned to follow a weaker, but better informed pig, to the trough. At this point the weaker pig would start to use distracting behaviour to keep the bully pig guessing, and only lunge for the rations when not being watched. It seems the smaller pig could guess what the other was thinking and outsmart it. In a human, this is what we call ‘intelligence’.



G



One of the animal world’s highest achievers, however, is not a mammal at all. Betty the crow lives in an Oxford laboratory. She repeatedly picks up a straight piece of wire, bends it into a hook and uses the hook to lift an appetising treat from a tube too deep for her beak. Before achieving this feat for the first time, she had never previously seen a piece of wire. So an animal far removed from humankind could identify a challenge, contemplate a simple matter of physics, identify a tool shape, select a raw material, make a tool and retrieve the reward. Birds are cousins not of mammals but of the dinosaurs. Humans and birds last shared a common ancestor 200 million years ago. Experiments like these confirm, over and over again, that other mammals are more like us than we thought. It becomes increasingly difficult to know just what it is that makes humans different.



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Questions 1-8 Reading passage has seven sections, A—Q. Which section contains the following information? NB You may use any letter more than once. 1



an investigation into the extent of animal intelligence and awareness



2



the suggestion that an animal less recognised for its intelligence has an impressive memory



3



evidence that at least one species of animal has multiple intelligences



4



a comparison of what different living creatures experience emotionally



5



an account of a supposedly simple creature that has learnt a clever trick



6



acknowledgment that inherited abilities should not be seen as a measure of intelligence.



7



an explanation of what happens when a person is frightened



8



an account of how one animal got the better of another



Questions 9-13 Answer the questions below. Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS ONLY from the text for each answer.



62



9



According to the text, which animal is hunted and eaten by lions?



10



What sort of people are given as an example of low intelligence humans?



11



Which phrase in section B means run away or stay and confront the danger?



12



According to the text, which two animals successfully completed numerical tasks?



13



What type of tool did Betty the crow make from a piece of wire?



IELTS Essentials



Leonardo’s lost mural A According to historical records, in 1502 Florentine statesman Piero Soderini commissioned the artist Leonardo da Vinci to paint a fresco on the inside wall of the Hall of the Five Hundred - a room named after the 500 members of the Republic of Florence’s Grand Council - which now serves as the city hall. The painting, six metres long and three metres tall, was to depict the scene of the knights of the Italian League defeating an army from Milan near the Tuscan town of Anghiari. Da Vinci, it is said, used the opportunity to try out a new oil-painting technique, but it was not very successful, possibly because of the high humidity in the hall. He never completed the mural. B In the 1550s, biographer and artist Giorgio Vasari was commissioned to remodel the Hall of the Five Hundred and paint several enormous murals, each four or five metres high. One mural - picturing the same battle - was to be painted over Leonardo’s unfinished work, but at least one source describes Vasari as a Leonardo fan who couldn’t bring himself to destroy the work. C Maunzio Seracini, an art diagnostician at the University of California, San Diego, has spent around 40 years on a quest to find out what happened to da Vinci’s painting. He has said, ‘I’m convinced it’s there.’ A break came in the 1970s, when he climbed a scaffold in front of Vasari’s painting and spied two words inscribed on a banner one of the knights is carrying: ‘cerca trova,’ it said, which roughly translates as ‘seek and find’. Seracini took it as a clue that rather than doing what had been asked, Vasari had built a false wall in front of da Vinci’s work and painted his mural on that surface instead. D A team led by Seracini eventually got permission to scan the entire building with high-frequency surface-penetrating radar. The scanning revealed some sort of hollow space directly behind the section of mural where the inscription had been found. To peek behind Vasari’s fresco, the team planned to drill 14 strategically located centimetre-wide holes in the work. But an outcry ensued after journalists publicised the project. Some 300 Italian scholars petitioned the mayor of Florence to halt the work. ‘But the team was making little boreholes some nine to twelve metres above the ground,’ said art historian Martin Kempof of Oxford University, who wasn’t involved in the work. ‘That kind of damage can be repaired invisibly.’ E Despite the public protests, in late 2011 Seracini and his team were given permission to continue their work - but not in the 14 spots they’d originally hoped to investigate. To avoid damaging original portions of Vasari’s painting, museum curators permitted them to drill only into existing cracks and recently restored spots. This time the researchers struck gold: a hollow space behind 17 centimetres of fresco and brick. They inserted an endoscopic camera into the space and took video footage of rough masonry work as well as spots that appear to have been stroked by a brush. A substance removed from the void was analysed with x-rays, and the results suggested it contained traces of black pigment.



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F Based on the x-ray data, Seracini thinks the black pigment, which is made up of an unusual combination of manganese and iron, is similar to those found in brown glazes of what is probably da Vinci’s most famous painting, La Gioconda (Mona Lisa).That Seracini found components unique to Renaissance painting leads him to call the results ‘encouraging evidence’, yet he complained that further samples couldn’t be collected because he was only permitted to work on the project within a very narrow time period. ‘Unless I get hold of a piece of it, and prove that it is real paint, I cannot say anything definite, and that’s very frustrating,’ he said.



Questions 1-8 The Reading Passage has six paragraphs, A-F. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-F, next to each statement. NB You may use any letter more than once.



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1



a compromise that allowed work to continue



2



a connection that lends weight to a theory



3



a report that suggests great professional respect



4



a restriction that prevented a conclusion from being reached



5



evidence of instructions not being followed



6



a long-term commitment to an investigation



7



an experiment that failed to produce satisfactory results



8



an independent opinion on a contentious issue



IELTS Essentials



Paraphrasing the main ideas Magazine circulations are in the millions and advertising revenue is rising, despite the growth of TV and electronic media, reports David Short



IELTS Essentials



A



Print is not dead yet - at least not when it comes to magazines. Despite ever growing competition from television and electronic media, a new report shows that worldwide advertising expenditure in consumer magazines has doubled over the past decade.



B



The report also shows that many magazines in Europe continue to enjoy circulations in the millions. Although there are more and more television channels, whether cable, satellite, terrestrial, analogue, or digital, and despite the incursion of the Internet, magazines are still a regular shopping or subscription item.



C



Advertising expenditure worldwide was $225 billion last year, according to the report World Magazine Trends. $32 billion of this, or 14%, was taken by magazines. In Europe, the share of consumer magazine expenditure was $12 billion or 21% of an estimated overall spend of $57 billion. But the share had dropped in the past 15 years from 30%, with decline having been particularly severe in Belgium and Germany, where commercial television was introduced relatively late.



D



However, the type of magazines which Europeans choose to flip through still varies dramatically according to country, with few signs that the European magazine with a common title is making inroads across nations. Interests which can create top-selling titles in one country are nowhere to be seen in the circulation lists of others.



E



But whatever their relative importance across the world, magazines have one real advantage over broadcast media. For advertisers such as tobacco and alcohol producers, which are barred or severely restricted on television in some countries, magazines remain a safe haven for their messages. And new French research has revealed that magazines are still powerful tools for owners of brands.



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1



Read the ablove text and then answer the questions.







a



Which paragraph contains the most detail?







b



Which three paragraphs cover one main theme?



2



Choose the sentence that best paraphrases the main idea in each paragraph of the text.







1



Paragraph A







A



The amount of money spent on magazine advertising is increasing.







B



The rivalry between magazines and other media is surprising.







C



Some magazines sell better than others.







2



Paragraph B







A



Magazines are more popular than they used to be.







B



A lot of people are still reading magazines.







C



TV is more available than ever.







3



Paragraph C







4



Europe allocates a greater proportion of its advertising budget to magazines than the world average.



B



Belgium and Germany spend more on magazine advertising than other European countries.



C



The figures for magazine advertising in Europe are decreasing.



Paragraph D







A



Across Europe, people read very different kinds of magazines.







B



The idea of a ‘European’ magazine is becoming popular.







C



Magazines that cover popular activities can become best sellers.







Paragraph E



5







A



Cigarette advertising is banned in some countries.







B



Magazines advertise a smaller range of products than television.



C



There are fewer limitations on magazine advertising than TV advertising.







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A



IELTS Essentials



Home Activity



Why does music move us? How is it that the combination of sound waves that we know as music can have such a moving effect, asks Roger Highoeld. In the most basic terms, sound is merely a pressure wave that ripples through air. So how does the combination of sound waves that we know as music become, as Tolstoy put it, ‘the shorthand of emotion’? Or, to put it another way, how can mechanical vibrations have such a moving effect? The answer, according to Philip Ball, author of The Music Instinct, lies not in the notes themselves, but in our brains. Recently, I hosted an event with him at the Royal Institution, at which he explained to a packed audience why listening to much current pop music was as demanding as listening to Bach or Beethoven. Whatever your favourite genre of music your brain has to work hard to make sense of it. Its remarkable skill at pattern detection will take the extraordinary harmonicscrammed richness of a note played on a piano or flute, and magically collapse it in your head, so that it is perceived as a single note rather than a forest of overtones. My companion explained that we are pattern seekers, and that music helps us to find patterns in sound. We come equipped with all sorts of rules of thumb to make sense of what we hear. Those rules are the brain mechanisms that we use to organise sound and make sense of music. Medical scanners have shown that this process is not limited to one part of the brain. Different aspects of music activate different areas. We use our temporal lobe to process melody and pitch, our hippocampus to recover musical memories and what we might call ‘rhythm-processing circuits’ to fire up motor functions. Interestingly, the brain gives out the same signal of confusion when it encounters sentences that do not make sense as it does when the syntax of music sounds wrong and when chords do not complement one another. If you study the way we react to patterns of notes, you find there is something special about a pitch that is double the frequency of another; the interval better known as an octave. The biggest question, however, is whether this kind of mental circuitry is designed specifically to handle music, or if songs and tunes are just ‘auditory cheesecake’, as Harvard University’s Steven Pinker puts it. He claims that sounds accidentally generate pleasure via neural systems. The ability to hear them in the first place evolved to respond to other kinds of stimuli. The disappointing truth might be that we simply do not know. We do know, however, that the way we learn to appreciate music is profoundly affected by how we were raised. A few years ago, Philip Ball wrote about the fact that music seems to have a national character, probably as a result of the rhythms and cadences of the different language spoken in each case. The English tend to vary the pitch of their speech, and the length of their vowels more than the French and their composers follow suit in the rhythms and intervals they use. On the latter measure, Elgar is considered by some to be the most ‘English’ of all composers, perhaps explaining why his music is so frequently the background to important national pageants.



IELTS Essentials



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Similarly, concepts of what is harmonious boil down to a matter of convention, not acoustics. The older generation struggle with modern music and complain that it is dissonant - full of horrible jarring notes that are difficult to listen to. However, dissonance has always been in music. Beethoven and Chopin are full of it. It is all a matter of convention. What we regard as consonant now was thought dissonant in the Middle Ages. The augmented fourth was thought sinister back then, when it was dubbed ‘diabolus in musica’.We still find it slightly unsettling today, which might explain why it is so popularly used in heavy metal. Towards the end of my evening with Philip Ball, I asked whether music’s effects on the brain can be harnessed for good. It was a perfect set-up for him to examine the so-called ‘Mozart effect’ - the belief that playing your children classical music will make them brainier. He cited an experiment conducted in 1996, which concluded that playing babies rock music had a more beneficial effect than did playing them Mozart. The essential factor was not the music per se, but the fact that it put the children in bright spirits. For Ball, the definition of the ‘music instinct’ is that we are predisposed to make the world a musical place. Apart from the tiny proportion of the population who really are tone-deaf, it is impossible to say: ‘I am not musical,’ even if it may seem that way whenever you get dragged along to participate in karaoke.



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IELTS Essentials



Questions 1-6 Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-I from the box below.



1



Hearing mechanical vibrations



2 Listening to popular music 3



Recognising patterns



4 Hearing music that we have previously heard 5 Listening to discordant music 6 Hearing an octave



A is innate and allows the brain to simplify complex musical combinations.







B is an ability that most people do not possess.







C can affect us at a surprisingly deep level.







D activates our temporal lobe.







E has a very particular effect on most listeners.







F activates our hippocampus.







G is more challenging than most people think.







H depends on the genre of music you prefer listening to.







I has the same effect as reading sentences that do not make sense.



Questions 7-13 Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?



IELTS Essentials







TRUE



if the statement agrees with the information,







FALSE



if the statement contradicts the information,







NOT GIVEN



if there is no information on this.



7



Steven Pinker believes that humans’ ability to enjoy sounds was an important development.



8



English and French musicians compose music that is similar in style.



9



Elgar composed music that typified his country of origin.



10



Older people tend to listen to classical rather than popular music.



11



In heavy metal music, the effect of a particular note is recognised.



12



Philip Ball stresses the benefits of children listening to classical music.



13



Karaoke tends to attract people who are not very musical.



69



Rag-pickers: The Bottom Rung in the Waste Trade Ladder A Recycling has existed in one form or another for many years in India and is complicated. Long before the term itself seeped into everyday vocabulary, women separated newspapers and sold them to weekend buyers, who cycled by with a weighing scale and loose change to pay with. Bottles were reused until they broke, and tins were simply never thrown away. As a 13-year-old, I was surrounded by baby food tins from my infancy, storing rice, dals and chutneys. These habits are sadly dying out, superseded by the advent of the non-recyclable, non-reusable sachet and plastic packaging. Now, instead of being stored away for a rainy day, unwanted products are tossed carelessly into the dustbin. And this is where modern-day recycling begins. In Delhi, for every hundred residents, one person is engaged in recycling. B All recycling in India is undertaken by and via the informal sector. This sector includes rag-pickers, middlemen, transporters, and finally, reprocessors. In terms of human resources this sector is arranged in a table-top pyramid with ragpickers at the base, forming the backbone of waste collection. At the thinner end of the wedge are the small middlemen, who buy the waste and sell it onto larger middlemen, who usually specialise in particular items and materials. Above them are factory owners, who procure supplies from those beneath through a ubiquitous network of agents. C Delhi is particularly interesting, because it has one of the largest and most vibrant recycling bases in the country. The 100,000 waste-pickers are the base of a huge recycling pyramid, handling something like 15% of the solid waste generated in the city. Since over 7,000 metric tonnes of waste is generated daily, this is a substantial business. A range of material is processed within the sector, including plastics, metals, paper and glass. Studies estimate that this informal labour force saves the three Delhi Municipalities a minimum of Rs. 6 lakhs (approx. 12,000 USD) every day. It has been calculated that a single scrap of material can increase 700% in value before it is even reprocessed, as it moves along the recycling chain. D So, recycling in Delhi is big business but is it a green business, and who does it benefit? Consider, first, the rag-picker, usually a young person, though not a child, with a large woven sack hanging from his or her shoulder. He or she will begin work as early as 4am, or miss the most profitable finds. As locations and routes are territorial, residents may begin to recognise their own rag-picker. By late afternoon, or when the bag is full, the rag-picker hunts down a middleman to sell to. The waste should be separated according to almost 30 different categories, and it must be clean and dry. In secret segregation patches around the city, thousands of the poorest inhabitants sort through waste and wash it from makeshift water sources. Hunched over for hours, the poor undertake what the privileged preach: segregation of waste. If the privileged had done this themselves, the poor would suffer less from backache, allergies and respiratory disorders, and have fewer cuts, burns and dog-bites.



70



IELTS Essentials



The transaction at the selling point is complex and frequently unjust. A rag-picker may be paid less if waste is sub-standard or wet, or if the buyer is temporarily cash strapped. Rag-pickers often take loans from buyers, and soon find themselves working simply to pay back debt. E Rag-pickers generally live either in slums, often the shop or warehouse of a middleman, or outside in alleyways and on footpaths. Some sleep in dustbins. Their access to basic amenities and essential services is virtually non-existent. The police regularly beat them or burn their bags of waste, leaving them with nothing to show for a day’s work. Municipal workers charge rag-pickers to be allowed to forage in a bin, and if it is a lucrative bin, the rates gradually increase. Once ensconced, the municipal worker makes them do additional work, sweeping or loading trucks. It is not unknown for the police to pick up rag-pickers and force them to clean the police station. F Sadly and shockingly, this whole process subsidises the consumption of various materials by the city’s wealthier citizens. The example of plastics is a good example. According to a report by the Ministry of Environment, the plastics industry is growing at 10% per annum, and almost 52% of this is expected to be used in the packaging sector. Packaging is a short life use and it will be collected and processed as waste by the informal sector. It will be undertaken in a manner which ensures that ecologically, economically and socially, the costs will be internalised by this recycling chain. G In India, the informal sector has an essential role because it is able to undertake recycling, which the municipality cannot. However, although it is critical, especially to the handling of solid waste, the sector is unable to optimise its work. There is a stark lack of awareness and specific skills, as well as very poor working conditions. The services provided by this sector are poorly understood and ultimately free to consumers, so are currently unappealing to the private sector. Recycling, at least for now, must be seen as the flip side of urban middle class consumption. The state’s attitude towards informal recycling is schizophrenic. On the one hand, in conferences and seminars, the sector is praised and rag-pickers complemented for their contribution. On the other hand, the sector is ignored by planners and policy makers, who look to reform municipal systems. The current Third Master Plan for Delhi, though still being drafted in secrecy, has been largely criticised for having ‘left out the informal sectors’. This lack of planning perpetuates the image of the sector as an illegal and illegitimate one, which is projected as encroaching upon the city, rather than serving it.



IELTS Essentials



71



Questions 1-8 Reading passage has seven sections, A-G. Which section contains the following information? NB You may use any letter more than once. 1



an account of a typical clay’s labour



2



examples of cruelty and specific exploitation



3



an accusation that double standards are operating



4



a description of a hierarchical system



5



an allegation that wealthier people are not doing what they could



6



an assertion that the rich benefit from the hard work of the poor



7



a summary of how a business has changed over time



8



a claim that recycling is economically beneficial to the authorities



Questions 9-13 Complete the summary below. Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer. The notion of recycling in India has changed hugely. At one time, people 9 ................ everything from newspapers to household containers. Now, with the 10 ................ disposable products and plastic packaging, people simply throw things away instead of putting them aside for 11 ................ .The 12 ................ takes care of the whole recycling process nowadays. Rag-pickers are at the bottom of a 13 ................ with everyone from the various middlemen to the factory owners and their agents looking down.



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IELTS Essentials



Home Activity



In Praise of Fast Food The media and a multitude of cookbook writers would have us believe that modern, fast, processed food is a disaster, and that it is a mark of sophistication to bemoan the steel roller mill and sliced white bread while yearning for stone-ground flour and a brick oven. Perhaps, we should call those who scorn industrialised food, culinary Luddites, after the 19th-century English workers who rebelled against the machines that destroyed their way of life. Instead of technology, what these Luddites abhor is commercial sauces and any synthetic aid to flavouring our food. Culinary Luddism has come to signify more than just taste, however. It presents itself as a moral and political crusade, and it is here that I begin to back off. As a historian, I cannot accept the notion that the sunny, rural days of yesterday is in such contrast to the grey industrial present. I refute the philosophy that so crudely pits fresh and natural against processed and preserved, local against global, slow against fast and additive-free against contaminated. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front. It will come as a shock to many to discover that the notion of food being fresh and natural is actually a rather modern one. For our ancestors, what was natural frequently tasted bad. Fresh meat was rank and tough, fresh fruit inedibly sour, and fresh vegetables horribly bitter. Natural was unreliable. Fresh milk soured, eggs went rotten and everywhere seasons of plenty were followed by seasons of hunger. What’s more, natural was usually indigestible. Grains, which supplied 50 to 90 per cent of the calories in most societies, had to be threshed, ground and cooked to be fit for consumption. So to make food tasty, safe, digestible, and healthy, our forebears bred, ground, soaked, leached, curdled, fermented, and cooked naturally occurring plants and animals until they were nothing at all like their original form. They created sweet oranges and juicy apples and non-bitter legumes, happily abandoning their more natural but less tasty ancestors. They dried their meat and fruit, salted and smoked their fish, curdled and fermented their dairy products, and cheerfully used additives and preservatives like sugar, salt, oil and vinegar to make food edible. Eating fresh, natural food was regarded with suspicion verging on horror; only the uncivilised, the poor, and the starving resorted to it. The ancient Greeks regarded the consumption of greens and root vegetables as a sign of bad times, and many succeeding civilizations believed the same. Happiness was not a verdant garden abounding in fresh fruits, but a securely locked storehouse jammed with preserved, processed foods. What about the idea that the best food is handmade in the country? That food comes from the country goes without saying. However, the idea that country people eat better than city dwellers is preposterous. Very few of our ancestors working the land were independent peasants baking their own bread and salting down their own pig. Most were burdened with heavy taxes and rent, often paid directly by the food they produced. Many were ultimately serfs or slaves, who subsisted on what was left over; on watery soup and gritty flatbread.



IELTS Essentials



73



The dishes we call ethnic and assume to be of peasant origin were invented for the urban, or at least urbane, aristocrats who collected the surplus. This is as true of the lasagna of northern Italy as it is of the chicken korma of Mughal Delhi, the moo shu pork of imperial China, and the pilafs and baklava of the great Ottoman palace in Istanbul. Cities have always enjoyed the best food and have invariably been the focal points of culinary innovation. Preparing home-cooked breakfast, dinner, and tea for eight to ten people 365 days a year was servitude. Churning butter or skinning and cleaning rabbits, without the option of picking up the phone for a pizza if something went wrong, was unremitting, unforgiving toil. Not long ago, in Mexico, most women could expect to spend five hours a day kneeling at the grindstone preparing the dough for the family’s tortillas. In the first half of the 20th century, Italians embraced factory-made pasta and canned tomatoes. In the second half, Japanese women welcomed factory-made bread because they could sleep a little longer instead of getting up to make rice. As supermarkets appeared in Eastern Europe, people rejoiced at the convenience of ready-made goods. Culinary modernism had proved what was wanted: food that was processed, preservable, industrial, novel, and fast, the food of the elite at a price everyone could afford. Where modern food became available, people grew taller and stronger and lived longer. So the sunlit past of the culinary Luddites never existed and their ethos is based not on history but on a fairy tale. So what? Certainly no one would deny that an industrialised food supply has its own problems. Perhaps we should eat more fresh, natural, locallysourced, slow food. Does it matter if the history is not quite right? It matters quite a bit, I believe. If we do not understand that most people had no choice but to devote their lives to growing and cooking food, we are incapable of comprehending that modern food allows us unparalleled choices. If we urge the farmer to stay at his olive press and the housewife to remain at her stove, all so that we may eat traditionally pressed olive oil and home-cooked meals, we are assuming the mantle of the aristocrats of old. If we fail to understand how scant and monotonous most traditional diets were, we fail to appreciate the ‘ethnic foods’ we encounter. If we assume that good food means only old or slow or homemade food, we miss the fact that many industrial foods are better. Certainly no one with a grindstone will ever produce chocolate as sophisticated as that produced by 72 hours in a conching machine. And let us not forget that the current popularity of Italian food owes much to two convenience foods that even purists love, factory pasta and canned tomatoes. Far from fleeing them, we should be clamouring for more high-quality industrial foods. If we romanticise the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savour traditional, fresh, and natural foods. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the processed staples salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea -produced by food corporations. Culinary Luddites are right, though, about two important things: We need to know how to prepare good food, and we need a culinary ethos. As far as good food goes, they’ve done us all a service by teaching us how to use the bounty delivered to us by the global economy. Their ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen, and many of us would be starving.



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IELTS Essentials



Questions 1-3 Label the diagrams below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from Reading Passage for each answer.



2



1



3



Questions 4-8 Complete the sentences. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.



IELTS Essentials



4



The writer does not believe that a ................. philosophy of food production is superior to an industrialised philosophy of food production.



5



In the past, the majority of fresh, natural food ................. and could not be relied on.



6



Most people’s intake consisted largely of ................. , which required a great deal of preparation.



7



The ................. of food was unrecognisable once it had gone through the various processes of making it edible.



8



For the ancient Greeks, a ................. full of food was preferable to a garden full of fruit.



75



Questions 9-14 Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.



76



9



What does the writer say about peasants?







A



They had a better diet than most people living in cities.







B



They were largely self-sufficient.







C



Much of what they produced went to a landowner.







D



They created imaginative soup and flatbread dishes.



10



Lasagna is an example of a dish







A invented by peasants.







B created for wealthy city-dwellers.







C that was only truly popular in northern Italy.







D that tastes like dishes from several other countries.



11



Which of the following is NOT an important factor mentioned in the eighth and ninth paragraphs?







A the development of take-away food as an option







B the arduous nature of food preparation before mass-production







C the global benefits of industrialised food production







D the range of advantages that industrialised food production had



12



What is the important point the writer wishes to make in the tenth paragraph?







A There are disadvantages to modern food production as well as advantages.







B People need to have a balanced diet.







C People everywhere now have a huge range of food to choose from.







D Demand for food that is traditionally produced exploits the people that produce it.



13



The writer mentions chocolate, pasta and canned tomatoes in the same paragraph because







A the industrialised version has advantages over the natural version.







B they are all products associated with a sophisticated lifestyle.







C they are all products that have suffered from over-commercialisation.







D they are the most popular examples of industrial foods.



14



What is the overall point that the writer makes in the reading passage?







A People should learn the history of the food they consume.







B Modern industrial food is generally superior to raw and natural food.







C Criticism of industrial food production is largely misplaced.







D People should be more grateful for the range of foods they can now choose from.



IELTS Essentials



Opinions and attitudes - In Class Activity



Loblolly Pines and Carbon Dioxide Scientists at North Carolina’s Duke University in the US have been studying how plants react to higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The researchers collected, counted and analysed seeds produced at the Duke Free Air CO2, Enrichment (FACE) site in Duke Forest, near the university’s campus. Loblolly pine trees there have been receiving elevated amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) around the clock for over a decade, in a US Department of Energy funded project designed to simulate natural growing conditions. This is important research because many people predict that there will be significantly higher levels of the gas everywhere by the middle of this century. The Carolina researchers have shown that loblolly pine trees grown for twelve years in air one-and-a-half times richer in CO2 than today’s levels produced twice as many seeds as those grown under normal conditions. Their analysis found the high CO2 loblolly seeds were similar in nutrient content, germination and growth potential to seeds from trees growing under present-day CO2 concentrations. As one researcher said: ‘If anything, they actually seem to be slightly better seeds rather than more seeds of poorer quality.’This is particularly interesting since a previous study established that grasses and other herbaceous plants tend to produce a greater number of seeds under high CO2 but of inferior quality. This means that some woody tree species could, in the future, out-compete grasses and other herbaceous plants. ‘Even if both groups were producing twice as many seeds, if the trees are producing high-quality seeds and the herbaceous species aren’t, then competitively you can get a shift,’ said Danielle Way, a Duke post-doctoral researcher. The ultimate competitive outcome will depend on how other comparable trees respond to high CO2 levels, admits James Clark, another Duke biology professor who also participated in the study. ‘We don’t know that yet, because we only have estimates for loblolly pines,’ he adds.



IELTS Essentials



77



Questions 1-5 Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-G, below. Write the correct letter, A-G.



78



1



It is widely predicted that plant species all over the world could



2



Research in North Carolina has established that loblolly pine trees would



3



Previous research had established that herbaceous plant species would



4



Danielle Way makes the point that trees like the loblolly pine could



5



James Clark concedes that the loblolly pine trees could







A



produce greater quantities of good seeds if CO2 levels were higher.







B



benefit from rising CO2 levels at the expense of other similar species.







C



be untypical in the way they respond to higher CO2 levels.







D



eventually have a competitive advantage over other plant species.







E



face uniformly high levels of CO2 by 2050.







F



be adversely affected by rising CO2 levels in unforeseen ways.







G



produce poorer quality seeds if CO2 levels were higher.



1



......................................



2



......................................



3



......................................



4



......................................



5



......................................



IELTS Essentials



The meaning of dreams We are fascinated by our dreams. And it is usually our own dreams we’re fascinated by. When another person launches into a lengthy exposition of the dreams that graced their night, our eyes are liable to glaze over quickly. But for many of us, our own dreams provide an endless source of intrigue. Nowadays we are less likely than our ancestors to believe that dreams have a predictive function. But it is probably part of the 20th-century neurologist Sigmund Freud’s lasting legacy that we can’t quite shake off the idea that they somehow hold the key to our hidden hopes and desires. Incredibly enough, the idea that the symbolic meaning of our dream is there, waiting to be interpreted, remains very appealing. There are, of course, alternative views, including the one that dreams have no meaning whatsoever and result instead from the brain’s attempts to make sense of neural processes that occur during sleep. But adopting such a scientific attitude to dreams doesn’t imply that they are no longer a source of fascination to us. We could simply relate to them differently. Instead of seeking to decipher the symbols that our unconscious is supposedly messaging to us, we could use them as a starting point for reflection. Whether or not the content of our dreams actually reflects our waking concerns, thinking about them could be a helpful way of exploring our own thoughts. While we may be disappointed that we can’t consult a dream dictionary to explain what the things we’ve dreamt about mean, by thinking about them we might gain insights into our own lives. In other words, the important thing is not what the dream means in an absolute sense, but what it means to us personally.



Questions 1-4 Complete the summary using the list of words A-G, below. Write the correct letter, A-G, for each question.



IELTS Essentials



1



The idea that dreams can foretell the future



2



Freud’s idea that it’s possible to interpret the meaning of dreams



3



The idea that dreams have no meaning at all



4



The idea that it is worth thinking about our own dreams







A



has been the subject of extensive scientific research.







B



shouldn’t make them any less interesting.







C



is no longer taken as seriously as it used to be.







D



seems more relevant when we hear about other people’s dreams.







E



may be a useful one for the individual to pursue.







F



has never gained wide acceptance.







G



is still surprisingly influential today.



1



......................................



2



......................................



3



......................................



4



......................................



79



Think happy It’s no joke: even scientists at the Royal Society are now taking the search for the source of happiness very seriously A What would Sir Isaac Newton have made of it? There he was, painted in oils, gazing down at one of the strangest meetings that the Royal Society, Britain’s most august scientific body, has ever held. If Newton had flashed a huge grin, it would have been completely appropriate, for beneath him last week a two-day conference was unfolding on a booming new field of science: investigating what makes people happy. Distinguished professors strode up to the podium, including one eminent neurologist armed with videos of women giggling at comedy films; another was a social scientist brandishing statistics on national cheerfulness. Hundreds of other researchers sat scribbling notes on how to produce more smiles. B The decision by the Royal Society to pick ‘the science of wellbeing’ from hundreds of applications for conferences on other topics is no laughing matter. It means that the investigation of what makes people happy is being taken very seriously indeed. ‘Many philosophies and religions have studied this subject, but scientifically it has been ignored,’ said Dr Nick Baylis, a Cambridge University psychologist and one of the conference organisers. ‘For the Royal Society to give us its countenance is vital, because that states that what we are doing deserves to be acknowledged and investigated by the best scientific minds.’ C At first sight, the mission of Baylis - and the growing number of other scientists working on happiness research - appears fanciful. They want to deploy scientifically rigorous methods to determine why some people are lastingly happy while others tend to misery. Then they envisage spreading the secret of happiness across the globe and, in short, increasing the sum of human happiness. ‘If someone is happy, they are more popular and also healthier, they live longer and are more productive at work. So it is very much worth having,’ he says. D Baylis, the only ‘positive psychology’ lecturer in Britain, knows that the aims of happiness research might sound woolly, so he is at pains to distance himself from the brigades of non-academic self-help gurus. He refers to ‘life satisfaction’ and ‘wellbeing’ and emphasises that his work, and that of others at the conference, is grounded in solid research. So what have the scientists discovered - has a theory of happiness been defined yet? E According to Professor Martin Seligman, probably the world’s leading figure in this field, happiness could be but a train ride - and a couple of questionnaires - away. It was Seligman, a psychologist from Pennsylvania University, who kick-started the happiness science movement with a speech he made as President of the American Psychological Association (APA). Why, asked Seligman, shocking delegates at an APA conference, does science only investigate suffering?



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IELTS Essentials



Why not look into what steps increase happiness, even for those who are not depressed, rather than simply seek to assuage pain? For a less well-known scientist, the speech could have spelt the end of a career, but instead Seligman landed funding of almost £18m to follow his hunch. He has been in regular contact with hundreds of other researchers and practising psychologists around the world, all the while conducting polls and devising strategies for increasing happiness. F His findings have led him to believe that there are three main types of happiness. First, there is ‘the pleasant life’ - the kind of happiness we usually gain from sensual pleasures such as eating and drinking or watching a good film. Seligman blames Hollywood and the advertising industry for encouraging the rest of us, wrongly as he sees it, to believe that lasting happiness is to be found that way. Second, there is ‘the good life’, which comes from enjoying something we are good or talented at. The key to this, Seligman believes, lies in identifying our strengths and then taking part in an activity that uses them. Third, there is ‘the meaningful life’. The most lasting happiness, Seligman says, comes from finding something you believe in and then putting your strengths at its service. People who are good at communicating with others might thus find long-lasting happiness through becoming involved in politics or voluntary work, while a rock star wanting to save the world might find it in organising a charity concert. G Achieving ‘the good life’ and ‘the meaningful life’ is the secret of lasting happiness, Seligman says. For anybody unsure of how to proceed, he has an intriguing idea. To embark on the road to happiness, he suggests that you need a pen, some paper and, depending on your location, a railway ticket. First, identify a person to whom you feel a deep debt of gratitude but have never thanked properly. Next, write a 300-word essay outlining how important the help was and how much you appreciate it. Then tell them you need to visit, without saying what for, turn up at their house and read them the essay. The result: tears, hugs and deeper, longer-lasting happiness, apparently, than would come from any amount of champagne. H Sceptics may insist that science will always remain a clumsy way of investigating and propagating happiness and say that such things are better handled by artists, writers and musicians - if they can be handled at all. And not everybody at the conference was positive about the emerging science. Lewis Wolpert, professor of biology as applied to medicine at University College London, who has written a bestseller about his battle with depression, said: ‘If you were really totally happy, I’d be very suspicious. I think you wouldn’t do anything, you’d just sort of sit there in a treacle of happiness. There’s a whole world out there, and unless you have a bit of discomfort, you’ll never actually do anything.’



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81



Questions 1-4 Complete the sentences below with words taken from Reading Passage. Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer. 1



At the conference, research into happiness was referred to as the .................



2



Baylis and others intend to use ................. to find out what makes people happy or unhappy.



3



Baylis gives classes on the subject of ................. .



4



Baylis says he should not be categorised among the ................. who do not have academic credentials.



Questions 5-10 Complete the summary below using words from the box. Write your answers in boxes 5-10 on your answer sheet.



Seligman’s categories of happiness Seligman’s first type of happiness involves the enjoyment of pleasures such as 5 ................. He believes that people should not be under the 6 ................. that such things lead to happiness that is not just temporary. His second type is related to 7 ................. Identification of this should lead to 8 ................. and the result is ‘the good life’. His third type involves having a strong 9 ................. and doing something about it for the benefit of others. This, according to Seligman, leads to happiness that has some 10 ................. .



82



confidence



entertainment



incentive



leadership



thrill



perseverance



illusion



effort



ability



theory



celebration



participation



ego



permanence



leadership



encouragement



exaggeration



concept



conviction



support



IELTS Essentials



The Effect of the Full Moon on Sleep There has long been a popular belief that human sleep patterns are affected by the moon. People complain, for example, that they sleep badly, or that their sleep is disturbed, when there is a full moon. Some people put this down to the bright glow that is created in the sky when the moon is full, whilst others look for an explanation in the gravitational pull of the Earth’s closest neighbour. A recent study at the University of Basel in Switzerland put these theories to the test. Christian Cajochen and his colleagues were discussing these beliefs when they suddenly realised they already had data that might give them the answer. In an earlier, unrelated study, conducted between 2000 and 2003, researchers in Basel had collected detailed observations of some thirty men and women of various ages who had slept for three days at various times of the month in the university’s sleep lab. The amount of light in this lab is artificially controlled to ensure that anyone sleeping there cannot perceive the changes in light that occur at different times of the night and day. Cajochen decided to revisit the data collected during the study to see what it might reveal about the effects of the phases of the moon on sleeping patterns. What he found was that when the moon was full, there was a reduction in brain activity related to deep sleep of around thirty per cent. He also found that people were taking five minutes longer to drop off to sleep, and that the overall time spent asleep fell by twenty minutes. It is also recorded that participants reported feeling that they’d slept less well at the time. What’s more, they seemed to have reduced levels of melatonin, a hormone known to regulate sleep. It was the first time that a link had been established between lunar cycles and human sleep patterns. The lunar cycle seems to influence human sleep, even when the moon itself cannot be observed. While conceding that the findings may not be replicated by larger-scale studies, Cajochen says it would be interesting to investigate the idea that there might be what he calls a circalunar clock in the brain, and whether the moon also has power over other aspects of human behaviour, such as cognitive performance and mood.



Questions 1-8 Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer For a long time it has been commonly believed that people sleep less well when there is a full moon, either because of the light it creates or because of the 1 ................. influence that the moon has over the Earth. Christian Cajochen of Basel University has shown that human sleep is affected by the lunar cycle, even when the moon itself cannot be seen. To do this, he studied existing data collected in the university’s 2 ................. where subjects were kept in 3 ................. conditions so that they had no idea if it was light or dark outside. Cajochen knew that certain types of 4 ................. are associated with deep sleep, and discovered that this fell by around 5 ................. when the moon was full. He also found that the onset of sleep was delayed by as much as 6 ................. and that there was a fall in the amount of a hormone called melatonin which is understood to 7 ................. sleep patterns in the body. Cajochen is now keen to see if there is such a thing as a 8 ................. in the brain and whether the moon affects other aspects of human behaviour.



IELTS Essentials



83



General Training - Reading Practice 1



Finding student accommodation On campus or off, the right des-res in your first year needs to be chosen with extra care. Fred Redwood reports. It can be a difficult task trying to find suitable accommodation if you’re going to university far from home, but don’t be tempted to make a quick decision. Dr Susan Goddard, the accommodation officer at the University of Reading says: “If you take accommodation in an expensive area or if you move into a fiat where you have nothing in common with the other people, you might find you want to move again after a few months. So choose carefully.” How should you go about finding good accommodation? If places in halls of residence are available then it’s probably wise to take up one of them. The number of rooms available varies. Reading, which has average provision, gives 48 per cent of students and nearly all first-years the chance of living in hall. A single room with three meals a day should cost about £5,400 for the academic year. It may seem costly, but you will also have an early opportunity to meet other students. However, if you go through Clearing all places in hall may be taken, in which case your first stop should be the accommodation officer. Dr Goddard says: “Don’t give up hope of a room in hall if there isn’t one immediately available. Consider living with a host family for a time so you can move quickly if a place becomes free. It will be more difficult to leave a shared flat, where you have to sign a contract and pay a few months’ rent in advance.” Another main concern should be convenience. Student accommodation is rarely located in the most central parts of university towns and cities. But you don’t want to travel for an hour every day on the bus to get to class. Ask the accommodation officer which areas are popular with students, and which are the best value for money. It is also a good idea to visit an area at different times of day and in the evening. Is it noisy or quiet? Are there regular buses? Are there good facilities nearby such as shops, a park, or a sports centre? Think also about your own ability to make noise. You are likely to have parties and, probably, your music collection doesn’t contain much in the way of piano sonatas. Find out if the people on the next floor seem likely to appreciate your taste in music and don’t live next to an old people’s home where people like their peace and quiet.



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IELTS Essentials



Questions 1-7 Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text



IELTS Essentials







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



It is best to take your time to find the right place to live.



2



Universities tend to give first year students priority to rent halls of residence.



3



Halls of residence are fairly cheap.



4



Rental contracts for shared accommodation are usually flexible.



5



Student accommodation is often found close to the university.



6



It is a good idea to visit an area you are considering living in to find out more about it.



7



Students should avoid living near noisy neighbours.



85



The best summer festivals Knowing which summer festival to go to and what to do can be a minefield. Read our festival guide and choose one that suits your taste. Natalie Paris reports. A. Wilderness Festival The main reason to go to this festival is to have fun with friends in a beautiful country setting, with music coming a definite second. In the evening there’s entertainment ranging from theatre to huge feasts served at long tables. In the daytime, market stalls sell everything from jewellery to record players and even camel rides. B. Larmer Tree This summer, organisers are selling seven-day passes that allow holders to arrive early at a dedicated, comfortable campsite and spend a couple of days before the festival exploring the local countryside. Child-friendly, with coastal walks and numerous beaches nearby, for families wanting to take an extended break it could be just the ticket. C. Kendal Calling Looking at one of the season’s most interesting line-ups of bands, any parents of a certain age will recognise the music they loved from the eighties. Set in a deer park in one of Britain’s most picturesque regions, Kendal’s independent, mid-sized festival wins lots of praise and bigger crowds each summer. Away from the main stage, coffee is served, poetry read and live gigs played to small groups. D. Latitude With a lakeside surrounded by eye-catching art, a reading area, outdoor theatre and a loud disco in the woods, Latitude really does have something for everyone. The average festival-goers are late teens celebrating exam results or artsy older folk with young families, but who needs trendy people when the atmosphere is this good? E. Great Escape Each year some of Europe’s shiniest new bands set sail for the beaches of Brighton with the intention of gaining new fans. These international acts make the Great Escape unique in the UK and a great place to discover fresh sounds at many of the 30 urban venues around the town. F. BoomTown Fair BoomTown is less of a festival and more of a weird and wonderful, temporary world, made up of lantern-lit streets leading to different cultural zones. There’s a Latin quarter, an American city downtown area, a Chinatown and even an English town hall. One district is accessed via a ski lift and each area boasts great restaurants, bars and discos for late night partygoers.



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IELTS Essentials



Questions 8-14 Look at the festival reviews, A-F. For which festival are the following statements true? NB You may use any letter more than once.



8



It gets more popular every year.



9



It is famous for its internationally themed areas.



10 It is a good place to have a longer holiday. 11 It is popular with many different types of people. 12 Its music is of less importance than other festivals. 13 It is a good place to discover new artists from abroad. 14 It is held in a beautiful area of the UK.



IELTS Essentials



87



COLLEGE CENTRES The College has five main Centres: A. Grahame Park Centre Our Grahame Park Centre offers some of the best training opportunities in North London. It has industry-standard facilities, including hairdressing salons, a construction area, kitchens and a fully functioning training restaurant. The latest addition is a professional media make-up studio with its own photographic area. Our Grahame Park Centre also has superb sports facilities including a 20-metre pool and cardiovascular suite. Naturally, like all our Centres, Grahame Park offers state-of-the-art IT suites all running the latest software. It is also home to the Business Training & Advisory Service (BTAS). B. Montagu Road Centre With its welcoming, community atmosphere, Montagu Road is a perfect setting for many of the College’s international students. Situated in a leafy, residential area, the Centre is close to tube and mainline stations as well as local shops and eateries. C. North London Business Park Centre The North London Business Park Centre offers a wide-ranging selection of courses, including much of the College’s Business & Management and Health & Social Care provision. The Centre has domestic facilities and a horticultural centre for students with special needs. It also houses a working travel agency staffed by Travel & Tourism students. The Centre is served by regular bus routes and has plenty of car parking space. D. Stanhope Road Centre This small and friendly Centre offers ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages), Art & Craft and Adult Basic Skills courses. It is just a short step from busy shopping streets and close to many public transport links. E. Wood Street Centre Close to all local amenities and with excellent public transport links, this Centre offers courses in varying subjects, and is home to our renowned Art & Design programmes. Facilities at Wood Street include a professional multimedia suite and excellent dance and drama studios. Students have the opportunity to take advantage of the College’s extensive IT facilities in the Centre’s Belling Suite, a purpose-built unit housing some 50 top-of-the-range PCs. One of the earliest examples of learning in the area can be found at this Centre with the historic Tudor Hall, which was originally opened as a school by Queen Elizabeth 1 in the 16th century.



88



IELTS Essentials



Questions 15-21 Read the information about a college’s different centres A-E. NB You may use any letter more than once.



Which centre 15 is recommended as a good place for students from abroad? 16 is where courses related to subjects such as nursing are held? 17 is very near to an area where lots of people go shopping? 18 has a new facility for people aiming to work in TV or films? 19 is said to be in a pleasant and attractive area? 20 contains a part that formerly had a different use? 21 has a named area that was specially created to contain certain equipment?



IELTS Essentials



89



FACILITIES, ACTIVITIES & SPORT It’s not all work, work, work! We want you to enjoy your time here as well as succeed in your studies. All College Centres have pleasant atmospheres and, when you’re not in class, there are plenty of ways to fill your time. Learning centres The state-of-the-art learning centres at all our College Centres are carefully designed to optimise self-directed study in a supportive learning environment. There are plenty of networked PCs to work at, with internet access, and a range of other computerised and paper-based resources. Our staff are always on hand to help. Student Union The College has an active Student Union, which organises and helps to fund a wide range of activities, represents student opinion to the College management and offers support and advice to its members. Contact the Youth Work team leaders or see the Student Guide for more information. The Youth & Community Team This team works with students to organise activities to make your time at the College even more enjoyable and interesting. Some activities complement course work and provide extra accreditation. A programme of actvities runs throughout the year, and usually includes: trips and visits; singing, music and comedy workshops; debates; karaoke and cabaret; yoga and self-defence. Look out for details on College notice boards, or drop into the student common rooms. The Youth Work teams at each College Centre also play a vital part in ensuring the safety and wellbeing of students when they are on College sites. Food and refreshments All College Centres offer a selection of refreshments. Grahame Park and Russell Lane provide freshly cooked meals and the other Centres offer a variety of lighter snacks. Grahame Park and Russell Lane also have Poppins shops, which sell a range of items from stationery to confectionery. Sports You can enjoy the use of the superb sports facilities at our Grahame Park Centre. There are plenty of arranged activities, and there are drop-in times for you to make use of the facilities at your convenience: The multi-use sports hall is ideal for a range of activities and exercise classes. The fitness room is well-equipped with a variety of different resistance and cardiovascular machines to suit most needs. Students wishing to use the equipment must complete an induction course, which can be arranged by a member of staff. The swimming pool is 20m in length, and regular drop-in times and activities are scheduled. The pool is supervised by a qualified lifeguard. Facilities include showers and changing areas.



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IELTS Essentials



Questions 22-27 Read the information from the college prospectus. Complete the sentences below with words taken from the passage. Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.



22 At the ..................... , college employees are available to give advice at all times. 23 Students should get in touch with the people who run the ..................... to find out about the Student Union. 24 For people who are interested in discussions, ..................... are organised. 25 You can visit the ..................... to find out about Youth & Community Team activities. 26 Paper and pens can be bought in ..................... at two of the Centres. 27 Students wishing to use the fitness room must do ..................... .



IELTS Essentials



91



RSI A Pia Enoizi panicked when a specialist told her that she had repetitive strain injury (RSI) and would never be able to work with a computer. Then 19, she was studying history at Cambridge University. ‘I saw my career being shot to pieces,’ she says. ‘What on earth was I going to do? At the time, I was thinking about an academic life.’ The first warning sign was cramp, which struck during a summer job that involved data entry and analysis. ‘I sat at the computer on a plastic chair with no thought about posture or taking breaks. One evening, I was cooking pasta and was surprised when I could not lift a pan of boiling water.’ The cramps recurred, but she was enjoying the work and put the discomfort out of her mind. Back at Cambridge for her final year, however, she quickly developed essay-writer’s cramp. ‘We handwrote essays,’ says Enoizi, who is now 25. ‘First, I found it a struggle to get through a full essay. Next, to my horror, the pain and cramp became so intense I could not write at all. I began to have horrific pins and needles and pains shooting up my arm.’ B More than half a million Britons suffer from RSI - or work-related upper-limb disorder, the description specialists prefer to use. However, this figure includes only reported cases, says Andrew Chadwick, the chief executive of the RSI Association. ‘Students and children are not included. Nor are the thousands of stoics who struggle in silence. Many who call our helpline are desperate. They say they cannot afford to lose their jobs.’ RSI is not a diagnosis, but an umbrella term for a range of about 30 painful inflammatory disorders linked to daily overuse of a muscle. Tennis and golfer’s elbow are common examples, but many more are occupational. Factory assembly workers and computer users are believed to be the most susceptible, followed by musicians, dressmakers, flight attendants - who repeatedly tear tickets in half - sign language interpreters and litter pickers, who repeatedly squeeze the handles on litter collectors. Text messaging has not yet been known to cause the condition, but Virgin Mobile was concerned enough two years ago to advise users to flex their fingers and shake their wrists occasionally. C Some specialists draw a parallel between the overuse of muscles and joints by RSI sufferers and the stress suffered by marathon runners. An athlete runs to exhaustion, but would never consider doing so every day; the body needs time to recover before the next event. Yet, with computer-related RSI, the fingers are honed to work faster and faster, says Chadwick: ‘It is often the hardest and fastest workers, who put in long hours without proper breaks, who develop a disorder.’ D Enoizi’s recovery has taken several years’ determination and discipline. She missed a lot of work, but her college paid for an amanuensis - a postgraduate student to whom she dictated essays and her exams papers -and for physiotherapy. But even the repeated dictation led to a painful contraction of the neck muscles. ‘During finals, I had to lie on the floor to rest my neck,’ she says. Enoizi was delighted to graduate with a first, but she then had to take a year off to rest and retrain her body. Her first stop was a residential chronic pain management course. ‘I realised that the damage caused by RSI was never going to go away. I had to learn how to control it.’ During her year off, Enoizi visited a chiropractor, an osteopath and a kinesiologist. She also tried magnet therapy and herbal supplements. But none of these made a difference.



92



IELTS Essentials



Pilates, with its emphasis on posture and balancing muscles, helped. Physiotherapy also proved crucial. ‘It made a big difference when my physiotherapist bandaged my arms and somehow lifted the forearm muscles away from the nerves. There was an instant feeling of liberation - everything felt less tight.’ E Enoizi now uses a curved keyboard. This helps me keep my wrists straight, but with my arms slightly curved, so my elbows do not dig into my ribs. Everything is more relaxed. My chair is fully adjustable and I take frequent breaks.’ She is now working at Boots as an assistant project manager. ‘I do a mixture of computer analysis, meetings and discussions,’ she says. ‘But, at the end of a long day, I might get a little pain. I walk briskly -jogging can aggravate joints - stretch gently at my desk and keep up the Pilates. I feel optimistic’ F Enoizi supports the RSI Association’s call for prevention. ‘I am concerned about school children,’ she says. ‘Many use computers for several hours a day, yet are given little advice on posture and injury. Whether they are short, tall, aged 12 or 18, most sit at the same non-adjustable chairs, and at the same height desks. And many send text messages and play games on their computers until late at night.’



IELTS Essentials



93



Questions 28-33 The article has six sections A-F. Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below. List of Headings



94







i



Not enough sympathy







ii



The need for action







iii



An inaccurate comparison







iv



Is it really a new phenomenon?







V



The problem gets worse







vi



Not a complete solution







vii



Progress resulting from research







viii



How common is the problem?







ix



Changing attitudes







X



A variety of attempts







28



Paragraph A







29



Paragraph B







30



Paragraph C







31



Paragraph D







32



Paragraph E







33



Paragraph F



IELTS Essentials



Questions 34-39 The article has six sections A-F. Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.



Question 40 Choose FOUR letters A-H. 40 Which FOUR of the following helped Pia Enoizi?



IELTS Essentials







A



an amanuensis







B



an osteopath







C



magnet therapy







D



Pilates







E



physiotherapy







F



a curved keyboard







G



brisk walking







H



jogging



95



General Training - Reading Practice 2



WALK FOR LIFE Walk for life is run by the Health and Sports Development Unit of the council. It is part of a national scheme to encourage one million people to walk regularly for their health. The aim is to achieve this by supporting local co-ordinators to develop Volunteer Led Walks. Walk for Life relies on the hard work and dedication of the Volunteer Leaders. It’s not an easy job to please everyone! Week in, week out, whatever the weather, Leaders can be found welcoming new walkers, greeting regulars, completing essential paperwork and ensuring that everyone has a safe walking experience. For many new walkers, the decision to walk regularly and more importantly to continue walking, requires motivation, commitment and often involves a major change in lifestyle. It is often too easy to start a slippery slope by thinking ‘I’ll just give it a miss this once’ when the weather doesn’t look very nice or if you are feeling a bit tired. But Walk for life would like to recognise the fact that you are dedicated and give you a reward to say ‘Well done’ and act as an incentive to say ‘Keep going’! Once you hit 20 walks you will receive a certificate. After 50 walks you will be able to pull on a Walk for Life cap and feel proud of yourself - that’s about one walk every week for a year. After 75 walks you can be smug in the knowledge that walking with Walk for Life is definitely one of your good habits and be safe in the knowledge that after another 25 walks you can look forward to a Mystery Gift. There may be a delay between reaching a landmark and receiving your reward as some registers are only examined quarterly. Don’t worry - just make sure your name is taken down at the start of every walk you attend. Certificates were recently sent to the first Walkers who reached 20 walks and there are many more of you not too far behind! Who will be the first to reach 50 walks?



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IELTS Essentials



Questions 1-7 Read the extract from a leaflet about walking and answer Questions 1-7. Do the following statements reflect the claims of the writer of the leaflet?



IELTS Essentials







YES



if the statement agrees with the views of the writer.







NO



if the statement contradicts the views of the writer.







NOT GIVEN



if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this.



1



The Walk for Life scheme has attracted a lot of publicity.



2



Volunteer Leaders have to put in a lot of effort.



3



Some Volunteer Leaders give up the scheme.



4



Taking up regular walking is a simple decision to make.



5



The Walk for Life rewards are meant to be amusing.



6



It is unlikely that many people will complete 100 walks.



7



Everyone who qualifies for a reward according to the records kept will eventually receive one.



97



Where to eat for less in New York Our New York expert recommends the best dining options for under £20. Lucien A You may not be able to order whatever you like on the menu at this popular restaurant in the East Village and come out spending under £20, but it’s worth a visit for the food and atmosphere. We recommend the steak and chicken dishes, which are particularly good value. Harlow & Sons B This is a small wood-panelled space that’s a coffee shop by day, and a restaurant and bar by night. Dishes served from the small menu are made from fresh ingredients and the desserts created by the in-house pastry chefs are really worth tasting. You can even buy one to take home with you from their shop next door which specialises in a wide range of handmade products. Fragole C This traditional Italian in a trendy part of Brooklyn, is not as famous as some others nearby, but its home-made pastas and fresh sauces draw in a young, fashionable crowd of knowledgeable foodies. There are plenty of classic dishes, but you won’t be disappointed if you opt for the specials which are different everyday. Dos Toros Taqueria D This is Mexican food made from super-fresh ingredients, with friendly service and in funky surroundings. The menu is a simple list of burritos, tacos and quesadillas. I defy anyone who has tasted the guacamole-filled grilled chicken quesadilla not to come back for more. Abboccato E The aroma of freshly baked breads draws you into this elegant Italian in the unlikely setting of Midtown. The pastas are handmade and regional dishes include seafood which is best on a Monday. It’s also far less busy early in the week than on the weekends. Mission Chinese Food F This is the second restaurant created by the Korean-born chef, who combines Chinese, Korean and Western traditions with his unique culinary skills. It’s often packed so you might not be seated straight away. The menu changes regularly and the service is speedy. It’s best to order a mix of spicy and mild dishes and share with your dinner date.



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Questions 8-14 Look at the six restaurant reviews, A-F. For which restaurant are the following statements true? You may use any letter more than once.



8



It may be necessary to wait to get a table.



9



It is best to choose from the menu that changes daily.



10 It could be difficult to stick to a budget when eating here. 11 It serves dishes devised from mixing different cooking styles. 12 It is likely to make customers want to return for a special dish. 13 It is open from morning until late in the evening. 14 It serves some of its best food at the beginning of the week.



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APPLICATION & INTERVIEW INFORMATION Application After you have read through the prospectus and decided which course you want to apply for, please follow the simple procedures detailed below: 1 Detach and complete the centre-fold application form and return it as soon as possible to: Course Applications Department, The Admissions Centre, Southgate College, High Street, Southgate, London N14 6BS 2 Complete and forward the reference form to someone who knows of you and your progress. This person would usually be your present or last tutor. Interview After we have received your application and reference form, you will be invited in for an interview, during which you will be taken on a tour of the College, and we will assess your application to ensure we offer the right course for you. After Interview Unconditional offer If you have already achieved the entry requirements to join the College, an ‘unconditional offer’ will be given to you and arrangements will be made for you to enrol as soon as possible. Conditional offer You will be given a ‘conditional offer’ if there are additional criteria to be met; these may include exam results of further practical tests or reports. On receipt of your exam results, you will need to show the College evidence of your grades. Waiting list offer If the course of your choice is oversubscribed and there are no longer any places available, you may be included on the ‘waiting list’, either with a conditional or an unconditional offer. We will then contact you with an offer if a place becomes available. No offer If, after the interview, the College considers that you will not benefit from the course of your choice, we will contact you in writing and will offer further advice on your next step.



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Questions 15-20 Read the information from a college prospectus and complete the flow charts below. Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.



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STUDENT SERVICES A wide range of facilities and services is available at the College to assist you with your studies and to help you overcome difficulties. The following is a flavour of what we can offer. Information The Admissions Centre provides information about all the College’s courses and learning programmes. The staff are here to give you opportunities to discuss your education and training needs and to match them with the right course. Careers As well as offering drop-in sessions for quick queries and advice, Prospects Careers Service also provides individual advice and guidance about education, training, career and employment opportunities. You can book an appointment with a Careers Officer in the Progression Centre. Progression Centre The Progression Centre aims to help our students and the local community find out more about the opportunities available to them and to help them achieve their next move in education or employment. Students can drop in or book an appointment for advice or opportunities available. Library & Learning Resources Our Library & Learning Resources Centre provides a state-ot-the-art learning environment offering information and resources to help you succeed. Our specialist team are here to support an appropriate learning environment and to guide you through information-gathering tasks for assignments. A large suite of computers allows access to a wide range of information-based software. Learning Support The Inclusive Learning Support Service is available for any student who is having difficulties with their coursework. The Inclusive Learning Manager will see any student for a guidance interview to develop a support programme based on individual need. The support may be on a one-to-one basis with a member of the Inclusive Learning Support team or from outside agencies. The service also applies to examination boards on behalf of students who require concessions due to a disability and/or learning difficulty. Counselling and Student Services The Co-ordinator of Student Services, the College Youth Worker and the Nursing Welfare Officers provide information, advice, support and personal counselling on any issues that may cause difficulties or worry.



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Questions 21-27 Read the information about student services at a college. Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-J from the box below.



21 People who are not currently students at the college can find out about courses from 22 Students with problems in their private lives can speak to 23 Students collecting material for a piece of course work can get help from 24 Students having problems with their course may be advised to speak to 25 People trying to decide which course would be best for them should speak to 26 Someone who only wants a brief chat about jobs can go without an appointment to 27 A student may be offered a specially created way of solving their problem by



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A



a personal tutor.







B



the Prospects Careers Service.







C



the Inclusive Learning Support Manager.







D



the Progression Centre.







E



an examinations officer.







F



the Library and Learning Resources Centre.







G



the College Youth Worker.







H



someone in the Admissions Centre.







I



someone who is not a member of the college staff.







J



a Careers Officer.



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Natural assets worth saving in the Outback John Craven meets the conservationist who believes every endangered creature must have its price. A What’s the going rate for a hairy-nosed wombat? How much for a yellow-footed rock wallaby? It’s hard to believe, but some of Australia’s most endangered species are now listed as assets in the annual balance sheet of one of the country’s top companies. Earth Sanctuaries Ltd says it is revolutionising conservation by applying the rules of private enterprise to its eight wildlife reserves ... and every animal it protects has a price tag. By the year 2025, the company aims to have turned one per cent of the continent into places where vanishing native species are safeguarded behind high fences. B For visitors like me, staying in the basic but comfortable sanctuaries and enjoying escorted walks through the bush is a wonderful way of discovering what Australia was like before the Europeans arrived two centuries ago and changed everything. Under the southern stars, beams of powerful torches capture an array of weird and wonderful creatures as they bounce along - most of the inhabitants are nocturnal marsupials. Many I’d never heard of, such as bilbies, potoroos, bandicoots, rufous bettongs and woylies, which - at just a few inches high - are the world’s smallest and rarest kangaroos. C They are also worth a small fortune, according to Earth Sanctuaries, which has, for example, 38 bilbies, 20 more than last year, with a value of £80,000. Those hairy-nosed wombats are worth £525 each and the market price of its 120 rock wallabies is £125,000. They are among 1,189 creatures, worth more than £1.6 million, which have gone on the books of Earth Sanctuaries now that Australian companies can value ‘non-human living organisms held for commercial purposes’ as assets. D As I walked through the showpiece sanctuary at Warrawong, in the hills above Adelaide in South Australia, several hundred thousand pounds worth of rare marsupials scattered before me. My guide was managing director John Wamsley, a giant of a man who created Warrawong after making his fortune in the building industry. He spent much of his money and 12 years of his time turning a dairy farm into a landscape which the first European settlers would have recognised - while also teaching maths at the local university. E ‘Then I hit on the idea of making it into a business,’ John told me. ‘Earth Sanctuaries has to raise nearly half a billion pounds in the next 25 years. As a charity, there’s no way we could do that, but it’s a trivial amount in the marketplace. We sold shares in the company, using our land and animals as assets. Share values have increased one hundredfold in 14 years, which I think is better than any other company in Australia. And there are 12 species of rare or endangered animals that have grown in numbers because of us. When we listed on the Stock Exchange, we were the first publicly-listed company in the world with conservation as its core business, but I’m sure that in years to come, conservation companies will be everywhere. It’s an ideal, incredibly simple way to raise funds.’



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F From its beginnings at Warrawong, Earth Sanctuaries is now an £8 million company with a quarter of a million acres of land and eight sanctuaries, each unique. Warrawong, for instance, has at least 20 duckbilled platypuses living in the swamps and ponds that John Wamsley dug out personally. At Yookamurra, 90 minutes’ drive from Adelaide, nine miles of ‘feral’ fencing - keeping out foxes, cats and so on - protects 3,000 acres of mallee trees that are home to near-extinct species such as the numbat. More than a hundred of these delicate, termite-eating marsupials live in the hollows of 1,000-yearold mallees. And John Wamsley says: ‘So how can I spend shareholders’ money saving the oldest forest in Australia? On the face of it I can’t, because the wood is worthless. But now that it has £260,000 worth of numbats living in it, I have to save it because, if I lose those numbats, I’m not looking after my shareholders’ assets.’ G And these appealing little animals with extremely long noses are valuable assets - John recently sold half a dozen to the West Australian government for more than £2,000 each. To catch sight of one - something few people have done - I had to keep watch for an hour or so at dawn in absolute silence. Suddenly one appeared, followed quickly by three others - long noses twitching, spikey tails high in the air. For a few minutes they played around the tree before scampering off in search of a termite breakfast. Once, numbats ranged across the whole of southern Australia. Now they are down to a few hundred - and I had just seen four of them. That’s what eco-tourism should be all about. H Before the sanctuary was established, Yookamurra was dying - now it teems with wildlife, some of it quite tame. Wilma the wombat, all muscle and action, trundles between the bush and the tourist huts like a hairy tank. She looks cute but it’s best not to get too close because, like her relative the koala, she has quite a bite. Emus and their chicks wander unconcerned past the restaurant terrace, while a small mob - that is their collective noun - of kangaroos hangs around quite shamelessly hoping for titbits. I The newest and largest sanctuary is Scotia, a £4 million project covering 150,000 acres of the Outback of New South Wales. The world’s longest feral fence has just been built to guard creatures such as bridled nail-tailed wallabies, stick nest rats (really appealing animals -honest!) and brush-tailed bettongs. .



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Questions 28-33 The passage has nine paragraphs labelled A-I. Which paragraph contains the following information? 28 a change in rules concerning companies in Australia 29 a term used for a group of a particular creature 30 a business deal made with another organisation 31 a belief that other organisations like Earth Sanctuaries will be set up 32 a creature that can be dangerous if approached by humans 33 sources of light for seeing creatures



Questions 34-39 Classify the following statements as referring to W Warrawong Y Yookamurra S Scotia 34 It contains something of no financial value. 35 It contains places for visitors to stay in. 36 It is the most recently created sanctuary. 37 It contains creatures that are said to be more attractive than their name suggests. 38 It was formerly used for a different kind of business. 39 It contains areas of water created by the founder.



Question 40 Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Which of the following best summarises the writer’s attitude in the passage?



106



A



He is doubtful about the approach being taken by Earth Sanctuaries.



B



He is surprised by how little he knew about endangered species.



C



He is impressed by what is being achieved by Earth Sanctuaries.



D



He is amazed that John Wamsley’s ideas have not been tried before.



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General Training - In Class Activity (90 mins)



Black Bears and Grizzlies in Canada Black bears and grizzly bears are both found in North America, and, because they look quite similar to each other, are often confused. Although closely related, however, the two species are in fact quite distinct. Part of the confusion arises out of the fact that both species are characterised by considerable colour variations, and there are also variations in size and weight. So using those criteria alone, it is not easy to make a confident identification. A large black bear, for example, could be either a black bear or a grizzly bear, and so could a smaller, paler individual. Black bears have a wider geographic range than grizzlies, and can be found in every Canadian province except Prince Edward Island. Today, grizzlies are found only in western and far northern Canada and in small pockets of the western United States. Black bears are primarily adapted to forested areas and their edges and clearings. Although grizzly bears make substantial use of forested areas, they also make much more use of large, non-forested meadows and valleys than black bears do. Black bears have short, curved claws better suited to climbing trees than digging. In contrast, grizzly bears have longer, less curved claws and a larger shoulder muscle mass more suited to digging than climbing. This enables grizzlies to forage efficiently for foods which must be dug from the soil, such as roots, bulbs, corms and tubers, as well as to catch burrowing rodents. The primary difference between the dietary habits of black bears and grizzly bears is the amount of meat, fish and root foods eaten. Grizzly bears tend to be more carnivorous, whereas black bears eat more plant material. A behavioural difference between black bears and grizzly bears is the length of time cubs are under their mother’s care. Black bear cubs are born in the winter hibernation den, spend the summer following birth with their mother, stay with her in her den again in the fall, then separate from her early the next summer as yearlings, whereas grizzly bear cubs can spend up to three and a half years under their mother’s care before separation. Black bears are generally much less aggressive than grizzly bears and rely on their ability to climb trees to allow themselves and their cubs to escape predators such as wolves, grizzly bears or other black bears. Grizzly bears are more likely to rely on their size and aggressiveness to protect themselves and their cubs from predators or other perceived threats. One behavioural difference between the two varieties of bears is significant if you hike in the backcountry. There are two types of bear attacks, the defensive attack and the predatory attack. The former can occur when hikers are walking into the wind so that bears do not smell them coming. If you come within three to six metres of a grizzly bear, and it suddenly notices you, he/she may react defensively and even attack out of response to a possible threat. This is especially likely if you disturb a mother grizzly bear and her cubs. According to some experts, in this type of attack, you should play dead. This enforces the impression to the grizzly that you are not a threat and the bear most often walks away once the perceived threat is gone. The predatory attack, on the other hand, is most often launched by black bears; this is its natural method of hunting animals. While it is highly unlikely that people will be stalked by a predatory black bear, if they are, the recommended response is just the opposite to that for a defensive attack. Shout! Wave your arms and try to appear as large as possible. Don’t run. If actually attacked, throw rocks at them. All bears prefer not to have to fight for their food, and if you put up a strong enough defence, they will likely leave you alone.



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Questions 1-8 Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?



TRUE



if the statement agrees with the information







FALSE if the statement contradicts the information







NOT GIVEN



1



It can be difficult to distinguish a black bear from a grizzly bear.



2



Grizzly bears have fewer colour variations than black bears.



3



Black bears are generally heavier than grizzly bears.



4



Both types of bear can be found in forested areas.



5



Generally, black bears are better at digging than grizzly bears.



6



Both types of bear eat fish in preference to other foods.



7



The diet of grizzly bears includes a larger proportion of meat.



8



Both types of bear build a hibernation den.



if there is no information on this



Questions 9-13 Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. 9



What do black bears do if threatened by predators?



10 What type of attack on humans is more typical of grizzly bears? 11 What are people advised to do if a mother grizzly bear defending cubs attacks them? 12 What shouldn’t people do if a predatory black bear threatens them? 13 What weapons should you use to counter a black bear attack?



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African Coins A In 1770, the explorer James Cook landed on the east coast of Australia and claimed the territory for Great Britain. It seems that, contrary to popular myth, he may not actually have been the first European to set foot on the continent. A new expedition, led by an Australian anthropologist, is investigating the possibility that ancient exploration may have taken place long before Cook and other Europeans ever journeyed to the continent. The expedition will follow a seventy-year-old treasure map to a sandy beach where a cache of mysterious ancient coins was discovered in the 1940s. The researchers are setting out to discover how the coins ended up in the sand; whether they washed ashore following shipwrecks and whether they can provide more details about ancient trade routes. B The coins were originally found by an Australian soldier named Maurie Isenberg, who was stationed in a remote area known as the Wessel Islands. The Wessel Islands are part of Arnhem Land, a region in Australia’s vast Northern Territory. Isenberg was assigned to a radar station located on the Wessel Islands, and during his off-duty hours, he often went fishing along the idyllic beaches. One day in 1944, he came across a few old coins and put them in a tin. He marked the spot where he’d found the coins with an X on a hand-drawn map, but didn’t think that he’d unearthed anything of great note. C Indeed, it wasn’t until 1979 that Isenberg sent the coins to be authenticated and learned that some of them were estimated to be of great age. As it turned out, five of them had been produced in the sultanate of Kilwa in East Africa and are thought to date back to the twelfth century. Kilwa was a prosperous trading centre in those days, located on an island that is part of present-day Tanzania. Australian anthropologist Mike Owen, a heritage consultant in Darwin, is leading the upcoming expedition, and he says that tr coins, ‘have the capacity to redraft Australian history’. The copper coins, which were seldom used outsiae of East Africa, probably held very little monetary value in Kilwa: ‘Yet, there they were - on a beach ten thousand kilometres to the east.’ D Along with the African coins, there were a number of seventeenth and eighteenthcentury Dutch coins in the cache of the type known as duits. The first record of European activity in the islands actually dates back to 1623, when sailors aboard a Dutch ship called the Wesel gave the islands their current name. However, oral history from the indigenous Yolngu people who inhabit the islands suggests that they played host to many visitors over the centuries. The expedition’s main researcher is Australian anthropologist Dr Ian Mcintosh, who has spoken in depth with the Yolngu people. ‘There was much talk of the Wessel Islands as a place of intense contact history,’ he says. E Mcintosh points out that Northern Australia may have drawn early visitors because it lies close to the terminus of the ancient Indian Ocean trade route that linked Africa’s east coast with Arabia, Persia, India and the Spice Islands (now part of Indonesia). ‘This trade route was already very active, a very long time ago, and this find may be evidence of early exploration by peoples from East Africa or the Middle East.’ According to Mcintosh, the shape of the Wessel Islands serves as a ‘big catching arm’ for any ships blown off course, which may point to the coins coming from a shipwreck, or even multiple shipwrecks.



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F It is difficult to tell whether there was routine contact with the outside world or whether there is any connection between the Dutch coins and the far older African coins, which may simply have ended up in the same place, but it is hoped that more evidence may come to light. Adding to the sense of anticipation is a persistent rumour that, in one of the many caves in the islands, there are more coins and antique weaponry. G The expedition is sponsored by the Australian Geographic Society and intends to follow the hand-drawn map given to them by Isenberg. Included in the team is a geomorphologist, whose task is to examine how the coastal landscape has changed over time. If shipwrecks are involved, how the coins washed up may provide clues to the location of a wreck, say the experts. Meanwhile, a heritage specialist has the job of looking after the documentation and ensuring that the site is protected, and anthropologists working with local indigenous people hope to identify likely sites of contact with foreign visitors. ‘There is great interest on the part of the Yolngu in this project, and in uncovering aspects of their own past,’ says Mcintosh.



Questions 14-20 Reading Passage has seven paragraphs, A-G. Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-G from the list of headings below. i



A possible explanation for why a discovery was made in a particular location



ii



A recent study casts doubt on an accepted interpretation of events



iii



Analysis reveals the origins of objects discovered by chance



iv Documentary evidence that supports the study’s initial findings v



How the current study is going to be organised



vi Evidence suggesting that traders once lived on the Wessel Islands vii A long-standing suggestion that further discoveries are possible viii The significance of a chance discovery goes undetected ix The aims of the current study



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x



Written and anecdotal evidence of early trade in the region







14



Paragraph A







15



Paragraph B







16



Paragraph C







17



Paragraph D







18



Paragraph E







19



Paragraph F







20



Paragraph G



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Questions 21-26 Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.



IELTS Essentials



21



Maurie Isenberg first discovered the coins in the year .......................... .



22



The African coins which Isenberg found were made of .......................... .



23



The African coins are thought to have been made in the .......................... century.



24



The later coins Isenberg found are called .......................... .



25



The islands where Isenberg found the coins are named after a .......................... .



26



Local people think there may be .......................... as well as more coins on the islands.



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When Tablet Turns Teacher I remember the day, years ago, when I took an iPad home for the first time. It was a humbling experience Within minutes, my two young daughters had seized on the device, and were handling it with far more dexterity than me. So much so, in fact, that after that, whenever I felt flummoxed by a phone or computer, I’d give it straight to my kids to sort out. And if we were ever trapped in a car, tram or anything else, I was apt to hand over whatever device I was using at the time, and let them explore its functions - something people of my generation never seem to have the skill or patience to do. But does their dexterity arise because my children are ‘digital natives’ - kids who have grown up in a world surrounded by mobile phones and keypads? Or is the ability to decode an electronic gadget innate to all young human brains, irrespective of where they live? These are the fascinating questions which a group of researchers from Boston in the USA have been exploring in the unlikely setting of Ethiopia. A few years ago, Nicholas Negroponte, formerly of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-founded a group known as One Laptop per Child, which has been successfully distributing ultra-cheap computers to the world’s poor as part of an educational campaign. But now Negroponte and Matt Keller, a fellow researcher who previously worked with the World Food Programme, have launched an experiment so bold it might be science fiction. Six months ago, they dropped dozens of boxed iPads into two extremely remote villages in Ethiopia, where the population was completely unable to read and write and had no prior exposure to electronics. No instructions were left with the packages, aside from telling the village elders that the iPads were designed for kids aged four to eleven. They also showed one adult how to charge the iPads with a solar-powered device. Then the researchers vanished and monitored what happened next by making occasional visits and tracking the behaviour of the children via SIM cards, USB sticks and cameras installed in the iPads. The results were thought-provoking, particularly for anyone involved in the education business. Within minutes of the iPads landing, they’d unpacked the boxes and worked out how to turn them on. Then, in both villages, activity coalesced around a couple of child leaders, who made the mental leap to explore those tablets - and taught the others what to do. In one village, this leader turned out to be a partly disabled child: although he had never been a dominant personality before, he was a natural explorer, so became the teacher. The discovery process then became intense. When the children used the iPads, however, they didn’t sit with a machine each on their laps in isolation as western kids might be expected to do. Instead they huddled together, touching and watching each other’s machines, constantly swapping knowledge. Within days, they were using the pre-installed apps, with games, movies and educational lessons. After a couple of months, some were singing the ‘alphabet song’ in English and recognising letters - at the request of the Ethiopian government, the machines were all in English. More startling still, one group of kids even worked out how to disable a block that the Boston-based researchers had installed into the machines, which was supposed to stop them taking pictures of themselves. And all of this apparently happened without any adult supervision -and without anyone in that community having handled text on screen before.



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This experiment still has much further to run, and has not been independently audited. But the researchers have already drawn three tentative conclusions. The first is that, ‘no matter how remote children are, or how illiterate their community, they have the ability to figure out sophisticated technology,’ as Keller says. Secondly, and leading from that first point, technology can potentially be a potent self-learning tool. And thirdly - and more controversially - Keller concludes that ‘getting kids access to technology may be much more important than giving them schools’ In other words, instead of pouring money into shiny buildings and teacher training, aid groups might do better just to distribute mobile phones and laptops with those self-teaching games. Many people would dispute that. After all, the technology world is full of hype; and some economists and development experts such as C.K. Prahalad have questioned whether poor communities can truly derive the benefits of modern technology without help. Singing an ‘alphabet song’ is one thing; reading calculus is quite another. But at the very least, Negroponte and Keller’s experiments raise two further questions in my mind. Firstly, what is all this technology doing to our kids’ neural networks and the way future societies will conceive of the world? Secondly, and more practically, could these lessons about self-learning be applied to the West? Should someone who worries about the failures of the US education system to reach the American poor, for example, be looking to iPads for a possible solution?The answers aren’t clear. But the next time my kids grab my own devices, I may not feel quite so much parental guilt. Those devices may now be unleashing an evolutionary leap - with consequences that my tech-challenged generation cannot imagine.



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Questions 27-33 Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?







YES



if the statement agrees with the views/claims of the writer







NO



if the statement contradicts the views/ciaims of the writer







NOT GIVEN







if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this



27 The writer accepts that young people are more adept at using electronic devices. 28 The writer is surprised that the Boston researchers chose Ethiopia for their research project. 29 The writer regards the project in Ethiopia as very ambitious. 30 The villagers in Ethiopia were unaware that the gadgets were intended for children. 31 The behaviour of the Ethiopian children was similar to that observed in western children. 32 The researchers would have preferred the textual content on the laptops to have been in the local language. 33 The researchers predicted that the children would learn how to enable the laptops’ camera function.



Questions 34-37 Complete the summary using the list of words, A-N, below. Although the research project is 34 ................ , it is possible to identify some preliminary findings. Firstly, the ability to 35 ................ the workings of digital hardware and software seems not to depend on levels of 36 ................ nor on experience of using technology. What’s more, faced with the challenge presented by the computers, the village children behaved in a highly 37 ................ way, with leaders emerging who took on the role of teacher to the benefit of the whole community.



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A



inconsequential



B



instruction



C



literacy D



disrupt



E



numeracy



F



independent



G



invalid H



competitive



I



co-operative



J



ongoing



K



design L



intuition



M decode



N



input



IELTS Essentials



Questions 38-40 Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.



38 What do the preliminary findings suggest to Matt Keller?



A



Current educational policies may be misguided.







B



Certain teaching methods are counter-productive.







C



Technology is not as hard to understand as was thought.







D



Formal instruction may make technical subjects harder to grasp.



39 In the final paragraph the writer suggests that the project



A



has revealed dangers that young people using technology might face.







B



has overstated the case for how much can be self-taught about technology.







C



has the potential to provide a model for dealing with education elsewhere.







D



has made her re-evaluate her own attitude towards the misuse of technology.



40 In the passage as a whole, the writer’s main aim is to



IELTS Essentials







A



criticise the way some teachers make use of technology.







B



question the findings of one study into children’s use of technology.







C



compare the effects of technology on children in various parts of the world.







D



explore the idea that young people have a natural ability to engage with technology.



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Home Activity



Addicted to Tech? Smartphones, social networking and the Internet are destroying our identities and ruining our lives. At least, that is what two new books, iDisorder by Larry Rosen and Digital Vertigo by Andrew Keen, would have you believe. I’m not so sure. Rosen, a psychologist at California State University, argues that over-reliance on technology can cause psychological problems, the ‘iDisorders’ of the book’s title, but I struggled to find any causal link in chapter after chapter of correlations. He describes how overuse of hand-held devices and general exposure to technology can cause various psychological disorders. But of course, the disorders existed before these technologies, and Rosen fails to convince that their incidence is on the rise. Digital Vertigo is equally unconvincing. Keen, whose previous book The Cult of the Amateur spoke out against user-generated content, states that privacy ‘is being dumped into the dustbin of history’, warning that we cannot trust the large corporations that run the Internet with our precious personal data. It’s a viewpoint I’m entirely sympathetic with, but Keen’s argument, woven between name-dropping anecdotes from Silicon Valley conferences and well-known quotes from the film The Social Network, left me unconvinced. As Keen points out, we must all take personal responsibility for the information we put online. However, social media needn’t inevitably lead to the problems he suggests. I have found Twitter, Facebook and other online services essential for initiating and maintaining major social connections. In fact, without social networking, I would be short one wife, one job and at least half a dozen close friends. These technologies are tools, and like all tools they must be used correctly. Cars are far more dangerous to society than Facebook. According to the World Health Organization, 1.2 million people die in road traffic accidents each year. As a society we accept this because of the benefits that cars offer, and we work to mitigate the downsides. It should be the same with smartphones and social networking. If you can’t go five minutes without a status update then, yes, you should probably step away from the touchscreen, but let’s not ignore the great opportunities these technologies offer for fear of some unproven and unrealised disaster. People used to worry about the effects of the telephone on society, but 150 years on, we seem to be managing just fine.



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Questions 1-6 Do the following statements agree with the information in the Reading Passage? Next to each statement, write. YES



if the statement agrees with the views/claims of the writer



NO



if the statement contradicts the views/claims of the writer



NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this



IELTS Essentials



1



Rosen has demonstrated a connection between overuse of technology and certain psychological conditions.



2



Rosen provides evidence that the conditions he describes are becoming more common.



3



Keen’s previous book has been very influential.



4



Keen is right to warn about the threat to privacy posed by the Internet.



5



An international body is concerned that social networking might be addictive.



6



There may be people who are over-dependent on electronic devices.



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Fieldwork on the final frontier What is it like to work in the remote forests of Papua New Guinea? Biologist Vojtech Novotny knows better than most. Let me tell you about our work in Papua New Guinea. We’ve built a research station on the northern coast. About five per cent of all species live in Papua New Guinea. With the Amazon and the Congo, it is one of the three largest areas of rainforest still left. Papua New Guinea has about 800 different languages, a really amazing diversity, and there are 20 different ones within a 20 mile radius of our station. Because different tribes speak such different languages, they also speak one universal language, pidgin English. Once you learn that - and Europeans usually manage this in less than six months - you can speak directly to the local people. This is socially very rewarding because there is a coming together of tribal culture and high-level academic culture. We have a team of what we call para-ecologists. These are people we train in scientific methods and pay to work with us. The local people are perfect for this. They not only have an intimate knowledge of the local geography, they also have an extensive knowledge of taxonomy, especially of the trees. We connect the Latin names with their local language names and then explain that we need caterpillars from this list of trees, and ask them to collect them for us. On one occasion, we were studying tiny larvae that bore tunnels in leaves. I put a fairly high reward for every live insect. We were expecting that our collectors might earn £5 a day, which is reasonable by Papua New Guinea standards and by our budget. But embarrassingly, they found so many that we had to lower the rate because otherwise we would have gone bankrupt. This collaboration with local people helps our research because it opens up possibilities that others don’t have. For instance, we have contacts with people who own the forest that they cut down for their subsistence, using traditional ‘slashand-burn’ agricultural methods. We always like to shock our fellow biologists at conferences by describing how we are cutting down tropical forests so that we can survey insects from the canopy. But that’s exactly what we are doing. When local people were clearing their part of the forest, we worked with them, slowly taking the forest apart, collecting caterpillars, ants, everything. We have devised a 3D structure of insects and plants in the forest. Our inventory came up with about 9,500 insect species feeding on 200 species of tree, and they do it in 50,000 different ways. Even for us ecologists, this is a mind-boggling complexity. However, ecologists also tend to get overexcited by the huge diversity we see in rainforests and extrapolate it to unrealistic numbers of species for the entire planet. Previous estimates put the number of insect species worldwide at 30 million. We put it at six million. We found that a tree species has about the same number of insect species feeding on it whether it grows in Papua New Guinea or Europe: tropical forests are so rich in insects only because they have so many species of tree.



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Questions 1-6 Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in the Reading Passage? Next to questions 1-6, write



IELTS Essentials







YES



if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer







NO



if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer







NOT GIVEN



if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this



1



The range of languages in the region makes communication difficult for Europeans



2



The training of para-ecologists costs less in Papua New Guinea than in Europe.



3



Reducing the rate of pay offered to specimen collectors can reduce their effectiveness.



4



The fact that some local collaborators are also landowners is an advantage.



5



The researchers try to discourage the use of destructive agricultural practices.



6



There is a tendency for scientists to underestimate the diversity of species in existence in the world.



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Predicting Volcanic Eruptions Predicting a volcanic eruption is hard even in developed countries such as Italy, Iceland and the USA, where there is intensive monitoring to detect movements beneath the surface. But in the developing world the majority of active volcanoes, including some that pose a high risk to large populations, have no local monitoring or warning system. Help is on the way, however, from the sky. Earth-observing satellites, such as the European Space Agency’s Envisat, can detect unrest in unmonitored volcanoes using a technique called Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR). InSAR is the most revealing way to show slight deformations in the ground due to movements of molten rock below. It works by combining satellite radar images of the same place taken at different times. This is displayed in the form of rainbow-coloured interference patterns, or interferograms as they are known, in which the arrangement of coloured bands shows the direction and extent of ground deformation. InSAR is particularly useful for tropical volcanoes, where cloud cover can obscure visual observations, because the radar beam can see through it. As a result, many volcanoes previously thought to be dormant are now known to be showing signs of unrest. The resources for acquiring more detailed, ground-based monitoring can now be targeted at such volcanoes. A recent review of InSAR technology in the journal Science gave Mount Longonot, Kenya, as an example. Radar data from Envisat showed a nine-centimetre uplift over two years in the volcano, which was previously thought dormant. While InSAR has enormous potential, it is still a new technique that relies on frequent observations and long-duration space missions. A series of Earth-observing satellites called Sentinel is expected to provide the data continuity required for serious InSAR volcano modelling. Sentinel is expected to observe all land masses regularly, with a six-day cycle in operation for the next two decades. ‘InSAR is a growing field,’ says Juliet Biggs of Bristol University, co-author of the Science paper. ‘In the past ten years of my involvement ... the community has gone from a small handful of specialists to a wide range of practitioners’ Of course, early warning of eruptions still faces challenges, as scientists try to work out how to tell whether a period of volcanic unrest will lead to eruption. Unrest usually subsides without an eruption, and false alarms can undermine public trust. But consistent InSAR monitoring will give vulcanologists a clearer picture of potentially threatening behaviour.



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Questions 1-8 Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.



IELTS Essentials



1



There is relatively little monitoring of most active volcanoes located in ....................



2



InSAR techniques can indicate pieces of land where .................... may be moving beneath the surface.



3



The term .................... is used to describe the coloured patterns produced by InSAR techniques.



4



InSAR can be used in places where .................... makes other methods problematic.



5



The type of movement measured at Mount Longonot is described as ....................



6



InSAR techniques depend on space flights of .................... in order to function.



7



Regular data for InSAR modelling will be provided on a .................... by Sentinel.



8



The writer is concerned about the effects of .................... on people’s attitude towards predicting volcanic activity.



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Biophilia in the city Biophilia, as defined by evolutionary biologist E.O.Wilson, is ‘the human bond with other species’, and the idea was elaborated in his work Biophilia, published in 1984, in which he argues that our very existence depends on this close relationship with the natural world. The concept of biophilia with reference to whole cities is, however, a 21 st-century phenomenon, as evidenced by the communique released at the end of the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009 which stated: ‘the future of our globe will be won or lost in the cities of the world.’ Climate change has probably been the single greatest influence on this debate. This idea has been further fuelled by the United Nations identifying cities as the source of 75% of greenhouse gas emissions, which have an environmental impact around the world. Cities are also the consumers of 75% of the world’s natural resources, the extraction of which affects many habitats across the globe. Since 2009, work has been going on around Europe and beyond to encourage city leaders to adapt their policies to the reality of climate change in a concerted manner. One group of cities has gone a step further and formed the Biophilic Cities Network, which recognises people’s need to access and respond to nature as part of their daily lives. Any city joining the network is asked to commit to the following aims:



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•



Work diligently to protect and restore nature within their boundaries and to forge new links with the natural world wherever possible.



•



Share information and insights about tools, techniques, programmes and projects which have been successfully applied in the city.



•



Assist other cities outside the group, which are also striving to become more biophilic, offering help in data collection and analysis, sharing technical expertise and knowledge, and other forms of professional support for the expansion of urban nature.



•



Meet periodically as a group to share experiences and insights and provide mutual support and guidance in advancing the practice of biophilic urbanism.



IELTS Essentials



Questions 1-6 Complete the summary using the list of words, A-K, below. Write the correct letter, A-K Biophilia Cities Network Biophilia is the idea that human existence relies on maintaining a close relationship with the natural world, and it has recently been acknowledged that cities play a key part in this. The United Nations identified that cities are responsible for creating 75% of greenhouse gas emissions whilst at the same time consuming around the same 1 .................... of the world’s natural resources. This led to the 2 .................... of the Biophilic Cities Network, a group of city governments that has made a 3 .................... to work together in addressing not only the issue of climate change, but also the need for their citizens to have access to nature as part of their everyday lives. Each city in the group will work towards the 4 .................... of its own natural environment, as well as restoring nature wherever possible. Through co-operation with the other members, cities will share information about 5 .................... which have worked. They will also help non-members to achieve the same goals through the sharing of both skills and 6 .................... Regular meetings of the group will help to further these aims.



IELTS Essentials



A



initiatives



B



formation



C



commitment



D



impact



E



protection



F



management



G



non-members



H



expertise



I



proportion



J



insights



K



collection



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Summary completion Take eight minutes to complete the summary of the music passage. There are signs that the brave new world of subscription music is not that far off. A recent survey found interest in subscription services highest among consumers in the all-important 18-24 age group and those aficionados who spend large sums of money on music each year. Musicians themselves are also adapting to a service model. The key is to build online communities of fans who feel engaged in the creative process, giving ‘users’ an unprecedented degree of participation in the music they listen to. Some famous artists, such as Metallica, Prince and David Bowie, maintain online collections of live concert downloads, exclusive digital-only tracks, videos, online journals and interactive forums where like-minded fans can meet. Young listeners, it seems, are increasingly unimpressed with the album format however cleverly the songs are anaged and attractively designed the cover art is. The album is ‘traditional not inevitable’ according to William Higham of Next Big Thing, a London-based youth trend consultancy. The next generation of music fans is growing up in a ‘compilation culture’, he says, pointing out that the single-track purchases make up a much larger percentage of digital music sales than singles do for ‘offline’ music purchases.



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Home Activity - General Reading - Practice - 1



Virgin London Marathon Date of event: 21 April



Run for the NSPCC Each year, thousands of people from across the UK come together to be part of the NSPCC’s London Marathon running team, raising vital funds for vulnerable children in the UK. Looking for an NSPCC charity place? Complete our online enquiry form to express your interest in an NSPCC place in the next Virgin London Marathon. A £100 registration fee will be payable on application (refundable if we’re unable to offer you a place). Places are based on strength of application, so we will ask you to include as much detail as possible. Successful applicants must commit to raise at least £2,000. Run for us with your own place If you were successful in securing a place in the ballot or other Virgin London Marathon entry scheme, and would like to run for the NSPCC, we’d love to welcome you to the team! Register as an own place runner and receive the same support as our charity place runners, we just ask that you raise as much as you can for vulnerable children. Join the NSPCC team today We’ll support you every step of the way As part of the NSPCC team, you will receive full support throughout your marathon journey, including: •



An exclusive training day with marathon training experts in January.



•



Comprehensive training plans for all levels of experience.



•



NSPCC runners Facebook page to chat to your team mates.



•



A dedicated London Marathon team at the NSPCC, on hand with first class fundraising support.



•



A huge team of NSPCC supporters cheering you on along the route.



•



A well deserved massage and refreshments soon after you’ve crossed the finish line.



Enquire now If you have any questions, please take a look at our Frequently Asked Questions. You can also contact us by completing our online enquiry form, calling 020 7825 2621 or sending an email to [email protected].



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How your money helps Every penny you raise by taking part in this fantastic event will go towards offering support and advice to vulnerable children across the UK who need our help. We want to protect the most vulnerable children in society, as well as being there for every child who needs us through services like ChildLine and the NSPCC helpline. NSPCC = National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children



Questions 1-7 Read the extract from a webpage about the London Marathon. Do the following statements agree with the information given in the webpage?



IELTS Essentials







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



A payment of £100 will secure a place in the NSPCC team.



2



There is a minimum amount that NSPCC team runners are expected to raise.



3



It is not too late for runners who have already been offered a London Marathon place to join the NSPCC team.



4



Runners who run with their own place will need more training than NSPCC team runners.



5



NSPCC runners can communicate with one another before the event.



6



NSPCC runners can count on encouragement from spectators.



7



NSPCC team runners will be given food and drink during the race.



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Advice sheet on food poisoning What is it! Food poisoning is an illness which occurs after eating or drinking anything that is contaminated by germs or sometimes chemicals. What are the symptoms! Symptoms depend on the type of germ or chemical, but diarrhoea, sickness, stomach pains and sometimes fever and headache are the most common. Illness may last for only a day or continue for one or two weeks. How can I tell if food is contaminated? You can’t! Even food which looks and tastes fresh can cause food poisoning. What can I do to avoid food poisoning! Raw food, especially meat and poultry, contains germs which can cause food poisoning. To stop these germs getting onto food: •



Store raw and cooked food apart. Raw meat must always be kept on the bottom shelf of the fridge.



•



Use separate utensils and chopping boards for raw and cooked foods.



•



Wash your hands with soap in warm running water after handling raw food.



•



Do not eat food while handling it.



To kill the germs before you eat food: •



Thaw frozen poultry and joints of meat completely before cooking. Meat should be thawed in the bottom of the refrigerator.



•



Cook food thoroughly. Poultry should always be cooked until the juices run clear.



•



If you want to keep food for later, cool it quickly and put it in the fridge as soon as possible or keep it hot in the oven. If food is stored at the right temperature, germs cannot grow.



To keep other germs off food: •



Do not eat foods made with raw eggs, e.g. homemade mayonnaise, some mousses and



•



Do not drink unpasteurised milk and do not drink milk from bottles which birds have pecked.



•



Keep pets and pet food away from food, work surfaces and utensils.



•



Wash your hands after using the toilet, before and after preparing food, after handling pets and after emptying the waste bin.



•



Keep food covered.



•



Do not store food in open tins in the refrigerator.



Having a party!



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•



Follow the advice in this leaflet.



•



Do not prepare food too far in advance.



IELTS Essentials



•



If you invite a lot of guests, use commercial caterers who have the equipment to prepare and store large amounts of food safely.



If I am suffering from food poisoning, is there anything I should do while I am ill! •



Wash hands with soap in warm running water and dry thoroughly, especially when preparing food and after using the toilet.



•



Avoid close contact with other people until sickness and diarrhoea has stopped.



•



Avoid preparing food for other people.



•



Clean toilet seats, flush handles, door handles and taps frequently with hot soapy water and disinfectant.



•



Soiled clothes and bedding should be washed separately in the washing machine on the hottest cycle.



Will I need to take time off work/school! You must stay away from work or school until at least 48 hours after you begin to feel better. If your work involves handling food, nursing or working with the young, sick or elderly, you must tell your employer.



Questions 8-14 Read the leaflet about food poisoning. Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer.



8



Different germs and chemicals produce different ................. .



9



Food might be ................. even when it appears to be fine.



10 All ................. contains germs, but particular care must be taken with meat and poultry. 11 It is preferable to ................. frozen meat and poultry rather than cook it directly. 12 The food of ................. should not come into contact with the food you eat. 13 Hiring ................. is the best option if you want to provide food for a large number of people. 14 If you are suffering from food poisoning, clean your living space more rigorously. The ................. of the washing machine is advisable for any clothes or bedding affected.



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PART-TIME JOBS: HOW TO BALANCE WORK AND PLAY A. Whether you’re currently a student looking to take on a part-time job to cover your living costs or a graduate needing cash to tide you over while you get on the career ladder, getting part-time work can be essential to keeping your finances in order. However, you mustn’t burn yourself out and become ineffective. It’s easy to take on too much and suddenly find there’s no time for fun. B. And stretch... We all need to stretch ourselves to reach our potential, and that includes funding our way through university and after university. This is also something that future employers wish to see. By getting a part-time job you’re learning important transferable skills that you can make the most of later. You’ll also earn yourself a bit of extra cash. C. ...But be realistic While stretching to reach your full potential, make sure you’re realistic about what you can physically manage and what other commitments you have. Remember that the National Association of Student Employment Services suggests a sensible work limit of no more than 15 hours per week. If you’re still at university, write a priorities list with how many hours you need to spend in lectures, how many you need to spend on coursework and how many you realistically need for yourself. Whatever’s left over can be put to good use in a parttime job - it’s certainly more productive than watching day-time TV. If you’re job hunting for your graduate career then you need to put time aside to actively look for work and this can be very time-consuming. Don’t lose sight of your end goal and become so engrossed in your day-to-day part-time job that you forget what you’re doing it all for! D. Money, money, money Once you have a part-time job and your hours are set, it can be very easy to think only about the money if you’re offered extra shifts. While a little more cash might be welcome - and good for your bank account - make sure you don’t take on more than you can handle.The last thing you want is to spoil your work-life balance or miss out on a proper full-time graduate job because you couldn’t say no to another £30. E. Paying tax Taxes can get very complicated as a student or part-time worker and you need to stay on top of things to get the most out of your part-time job. If you’re a student and working in your holidays, you won’t need to pay tax - you just have to ask for a P38S Student Employees form from your employer to prove you’re exempt. However, if you’re working during term time or are a graduate trying to earn some extra cash while job-hunting, you will have to pay tax, but only if you earn more than your Personal Allowance. Read our guide to taxes if you’re unsure - being aware of the laws surrounding your own taxes could save you a lot of money. F. Time to relax The most important thing about working part-time is to ensure there’s still at least some relaxation. If you’re studying or looking for work all day and then having to go straight into a long evening shift, you’ll quickly resent the fact that you’ve got no free time. If you’re desperate for the cash, see if budgeting better can help to reduce overheads and free up some time. Remember those priorities!



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Questions 15-19 Read the online information about student part-time jobs. The reading passage has six sections, A-F. Which section contains the following information? NB You may use any letter more than once.



15 a warning about the temptation of getting distracted for short-term financial gain 16 advice about remembering a fundamental objective 17 an explanation of rules that apply to some students and not others 18 a warning about the possibility of exhaustion 19 a suggestion that working while you are a student will improve your chances of employment in the future



Questions 20-22 Answer the questions below. Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/ OR A NUMBER ONLY from the text for each answer.



20 Which phrase in section B means abilities that can be used in more than one situation? 21 What is recommended as a reasonable amount of time to dedicate to a part-time job? 22 What name is given to the amount you must exceed before you start paying tax?



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Top five best-paying jobs without a degree While most people now aspire to go to university after high school, not everyone can. There are all sorts of reasons why young people choose to get into the job market sooner rather than later, and some of them are earning very healthy salaries. We’ve put together a list of the top five most popular careers that offer high income opportunities without you having to have letters after your name. 1. Estate agent Annual salary - anything between £20,000 and £100,000 Being an estate agent requires a licence but anyone interested needs only a few formal qualifications. During the property boom of the late nineties, many people became licensed estate agents and the market became very competitive. If you’re dedicated, however, you can make a very good living. The downside is that you’ll be permanently on call, you’ll work weekends, and you’ll probably have to survive periods with little or no income. 2. Firefighter Annual starting salary - £20,000 / annual salary for trained firefighter - £30,000 The attraction is the sense of reward and the fact that you’ll be seen as a hero. You’ll be out there saving lives and property and, what’s more, you’ll stay in great shape. Most firefighters have a reasonable set of exam results but a degree is not required. If you stay with a battalion, you can soon work through the ranks and take on a leadership role. However, bear in mind work can be physically draining and the risk factor is extremely high. 3. Air Traffic Controller Annual salary - upwards of £80,000 You don’t need a degree to apply, but, if initially accepted, you’ll have to take classes and pass stringent tests. Both your medical history and social background will be rigorously checked. Pay can be very generous but being responsible for the safety of thousands of people every day is immensely stressful. 4. Salesperson Annual salary - anyone’s guess! You don’t need a post-school education to be a salesperson - just an iron will and a very thick skin. The appeal is that you earn what you’re worth and there are no limits. The drawback is the lack of stability, together with constant rejection and occasional disapproval of what you do for a living. 5. Electrician Annual salary: £20,000 - £36,000 The great thing about learning a trade is that even those who failed dismally at school get a second bite at the cherry. Of course, you need basic intelligence to learn complex, potentially dangerous skills but the process of becoming an electrician is fairly painless. Not surprisingly, the queue to work with high voltage isn’t long so there’s usually plenty of work around for those willing.



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Questions 23-29 Read the article about top paying jobs. Choose the correct job for each statement from the list of jobs below. 23 People will ask questions about your past. 24 The work keeps you fit. 25 Not many people want such a dangerous job. 26 Some people feel the job is not respectable. 27 The profession was especially popular at a certain time. 28 People with low educational attainment get a second chance. 29 Quick promotion is a possibility.



IELTS Essentials



List of jobs







A estate agent







B firefighter







C air traffic controller







D salesman







E electrician



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Science shows why you’re smarter than a Neanderthal Neanderthals never invented written language, developed agriculture or progressed past the Stone Age. At the same time, they had brains just as big in volume as modern humans’. The question of why we Homo sapiens are significantly more intelligent than the similarly big-brained Neanderthals—and why we survived and proliferated while they went extinct— has puzzled scientists for some time. A study by Oxford researchers provides evidence for a novel explanation. As they detail in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a greater percentage of the Neanderthal brain seems to have been devoted to vision and control of their larger bodies, leaving less mental real estate for higher thinking and social interactions. The research team, led by Eiluned Pearce, came to the finding by comparing the skulls of 13 Neanderthals who lived 27,000 to 75,000 years ago to 32 human skulls from the same era. In contrast to previous studies, which merely measured the interior of Neanderthal skulls to arrive at a brain volume, the researchers attempted to come to a “corrected” volume, which would account for the fact that the Neanderthals’ brains were in control of rather differently-proportioned bodies than our ancestors’ brains were. One of the easiest differences to quantify, they found, was the size of the visual cortex—the part of the brain responsible for interpreting visual information. In primates, the volume of this area is roughly proportional to the size of the animal’s eyes, so by measuring the Neanderthals’ eye sockets, they could get a decent approximation of the visual cortex as well. The Neanderthals, it turns out, had much larger eyes than ancient humans. The researchers speculate that this could be because they evolved exclusively in Europe, which is of higher latitude (and thus has poorer light conditions) than Africa, where H. sapiens evolved. Along with eyes, Neanderthals had significantly larger bodies than humans, with wider shoulders, thicker bones and a more robust build overall.To account for this difference, the researchers drew upon previous research into the estimated body masses of the skeletons found with these skulls and of other Neanderthals. In primates, the amount of brain capacity devoted to body control is also proportionate to body size, so the scientists were able to calculate roughly how much of the Neanderthals’ brains were assigned to this task. After correcting for these differences, the research team found that the amount of brain volume left over for other tasks—in other words, the mental capacity not devoted to seeing the world or moving the body—was significantly smaller for Neanderthals than for ancient H. sapiens. Although the average raw brain volumes of the two groups studied were practically identical (1473.84 cubic centimetres for humans versus 1473.46 for Neanderthals), the average “corrected” Neanderthal brain volume was just 1133.98 cubic centimetres, compared to 1332.41 for the humans. This divergence in mental capacity for higher cognition and social networking, the researchers argue, could have led to the wildly different fates of H. sapiens and Neanderthals. “Having less brain available to manage the social world has profound implications for the Neanderthals’ ability to maintain extended trading networks,” Robin Dunbar, one of the co-authors, said in a press statement.”[They] are likely also to have resulted in less well developed material culture—which, between them, may have left them more exposed than modern humans when facing the ecological challenges of the Ice Ages.”



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Previous studies have also suggested that the internal organisation of Neanderthal brains differed significantly from ours. For example, a 2010 project used computerised 3D modelling and Neanderthal skulls of varying ages to find that their brains developed at different rates over the course of an individual’s adolescence as compared to human brains despite comparable brain volumes. The overall explanation for why Neanderthals went extinct while we survived, of course, is more complicated. Emerging evidence points to the idea that Neanderthals were smarter than previously thought, though perhaps not smart enough to outmanoeuvre humans for resources. But not all of them had to—in another major 2010 discovery, a team of researchers compared human and Neanderthal genomes and found evidence that our ancestors in Eurasia may have interbred with Neanderthals, preserving a few of their genes amidst our present-day DNA. Apart from the offspring of a small number of rare interbreeding events, though, the Neanderthals did die out. Their brains might have been just as big as ours, but ours might have been better at a few key tasks—those involved in developing social bonds in particular—allowing us to survive the most recent glacial period while the Neanderthals expired.



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Questions 30—31 Read the article about Neanderthals. Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.



30 What is it that scientists have until this research been unable to understand?



A



how Neanderthals communicated and grew food during the Stone Age







B



why Homo sapiens had bigger brains than Neanderthals







C



how Homo sapiens managed to outlast Neanderthals







D



why Neanderthals had poor eyesight



31 What did the research team base their investigations on?



A



some Neanderthal skulls and some slightly older human skulls







B



a larger number of human skulls than Neanderthal skulls







C



measurements of the inside of a Neanderthal skull







D



previous research which they knew was correct



Questions 32-34 Which of the following information about Neanderthals and Homo sapiens is provided in the passage? Choose THREE letters A-G



136



A



Neanderthals’ visual cortex was about the same size as their eye sockets.



B



Neanderthals probably spent more time in relative darkness than did Homo sapiens.



C



Neanderthals had heavier skeletons than Homo sapiens.



D



Neanderthals were less physically adept than Homo sapiens.



E



Neanderthals had significantly smaller brains than Homo sapiens.



F



Neanderthals were more socially adept than Homo sapiens.



G



Neanderthals may have suffered due to conducting an insufficient amount of trade.



IELTS Essentials



Question 35 Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D. The research team’s overall conclusion was that ...



A



Neanderthals’ brains were too small to control their large bodies.







B



Homo sapiens survived longer than Neanderthals due to their superior intelligence.







C



Neanderthals were less intelligent than had previously been thought.







D



The brains of Neanderthals were geared in a way that did not ultimately benefit them.



Questions 36-40 Complete the summary. Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer. Previous studies and emerging evidence



Study of Neanderthal skulls and 36 .................. images helped researchers conclude that although Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had 37 .................. , their mental development differed. Other evidence suggests that some Neanderthals and Homo sapiens may have shared 38 .................. rather than tight over them. Modern humans may have Neanderthal 39 .................. as a result of possible interbreeding. However, Neanderthals did not survive, and this may be largely due to their inability to build 40 .................. .



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Home Activity - General Reading - Practice - 2



Aussie Walkabout Experience Go behind the scenes at Auckland Zoo and come eye to eye with some of our Australian neighbours. Come to the zoo before opening hours and experience the morning sights and sounds. Help the keepers feed the emus, wallabies and kangaroos in the Aussie Walkabout and take breakfast to the cheeky rainbow and musk lorikeets.



Tour features •



A small group fully escorted by an experienced guide.



•



Your guide will photograph you immersed in your tour. The photos will be recorded onto a complimentary CD, which you will receive at the tour conclusion. A fantastic visual record of your unforgettable experience.



Price Adult/Child - $75 per person.



Tour dates and times The Aussie Walkabout tour runs on Thursday, Friday and Saturdays - departing from the Information Centre at 8:00am.This tour is approximately an hour and a half in duration - finishing at 9.30.



Important things to know •



Group sizes vary from two to four people.



•



The minimum age for this tour is six years and if you are under fifteen years of age you must be accompanied by a paying adult.



•



Wear flat, enclosed shoes and appropriate clothing for the weather conditions.



•



Please do not wear any loose jewellery or red clothing.



Arrival details Participants must arrive at the zoo by 8:00am. If you arrive after this time there will be no opportunity to join the group, so please ensure you allow ample time for travelling and parking in the car park near the entrance. Your guide will give the group an initial personal safety briefing before the tour starts. Participants should note this is compulsory.



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Questions 1-9 Read the information about Auckland Zoo on the following page. Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text!



IELTS Essentials







TRUE



if the statement agrees with the information.







FALSE



if the statement contradicts the information.







NOT QIVEN



1



The tour takes place when the zoo is closed to the public.



2



Participants can assist in the feeding of different species during the tour.



3



Tour participants get a CD free of charge at the beginning of each tour.



4



Participants are welcome to bring their own camera on the tour.



5



Tours operate on a weekend basis only.



6



There is a free car park for visitors to the zoo.



7



A minimum of four people are permitted on each tour.



S



Latecomers are always refused entry to the tour.



9



Participants are required to attend a talk on keeping safe prior to the tour.



if there is no information on this.



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Volunteering at Museum Victoria A. A volunteer is someone who freely gives their time and skills to an organisation in order to help it further its goals. Volunteers are unpaid for their contribution to the organisation but are highly regarded for the assistance they give. B. People choose to volunteer with Museum Victoria for a number of reasons including a desire to help preserve and promote Victoria’s cultural and natural heritage. They may also wish to share their talents with museum staff and visitors or develop new skills. C. Our volunteers come from diverse backgrounds and are aged between 17 and 90. They include students, retirees, full-time and part-time workers, parents and job seekers. For over a century the volunteer program has encouraged a wide range of participants in Museum Victoria activities. Everyone has something to offer. D. Most ‘Front of House’ roles such as assisting visitors when they arrive are available every day that the museum is open. Behind the scenes or ‘Back of House’ roles such as providing assistance with administration tasks including cataloguing and photocopying are usually available on weekdays. There are no regular evening voluntary positions though some special events may occur in the evening. E. Volunteers cannot undertake core business. There are no voluntary positions that involve the handling of money, such as ticketing, working in the museum shop or finance department, or which involve a duty of care for visitor or collection safety. F. Most volunteers commit to a weekly or fortnightly rostered position but this is flexible. A shift can be between two and six hours long. Our guidelines are at least 24 hours per year or an average of two hours per month and no more than 832 hours per year or an average of 64 hours per month. G. We have an extensive professional development program that volunteers can take advantage of. It is part of the volunteer agreement with Museum Victoria that development opportunities will be provided on an ongoing basis to support volunteer roles.



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Questions 10-17 Read the information about volunteering. The passage has seven paragraphs labelled A-Q. Which paragraph mentions the following! NB You may use any letter more than once.



10 How frequently you can volunteer. 11 Why people decide to volunteer. 12 What kind of people choose to volunteer. 13 What specific duties volunteers can choose to undertake. 14 What training opportunities are open to volunteers. 1 5 What kind of duties are unavailable to volunteers. 16 What a volunteer is. 17 How long the volunteering program has been running.



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141



Anti-fatigue mats Anti-fatigue mats are designed to lessen tiredness caused by standing for long periods on hard surfaces. When considering their use, there are several factors that should be considered at the same time. Work should be organised so that the worker has some choice about his/her working position and an opportunity to change position frequently. A workplace that includes a footstool increases the variety of body positions and encourages frequent changes between them. Footwear is a factor which may further reduce the harmful effects of prolonged standing. Shoes should provide cushioning for both the arch and heel while providing comfort to the wearer. The type of flooring used in the workplace has an equally important influence on comfort, especially on tender feet. Hard, unyielding floors, like concrete, are the least comfortable surfaces to work on. Wood or cork - anything that provides some elasticity - is gentler on the feet. More than that, softer floor coverings reduce fatigue and improve safety by reducing slips and falls on slippery floors. Anti-fatigue mats absorb the shock due to walking and this cushioning effect reduces foot fatigue. However, it is important to understand that for oily or greasy areas some mats are more suitable than others. Mats with smooth surfaces are suitable for dry areas. Mats with drainage holes are designed primarily for wet areas and mats made with rubber are the best option for areas where grease is present. The use of matting also requires caution because mats can lead to tripping and falling accidents when installed improperly. Another type of floor covering, namely anti-slip matting, is useful in increasing foot comfort and safety. However, workers may experience a feeling of burning in the feet, because the non-slip properties of anti-slip matting causes their shoes to grab suddenly on the flooring, making their feet slide forward inside the shoes. Friction inside the shoes produces heat which creates soreness. Shock-absorbing insoles can minimise this discomfort.



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Questions 18-24 Read the information from a leaflet. Complete the notes below Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the text for each answer.



Changes in working/standing position • Use a 18 ................... to rest your legs and move from one position to the another at regular intervals.



Footwear Select shoes with adequate support for the 19 ...................



Soft Flooring •



Select materials such as timber and 20 ...................



•



Can decrease the risk of tiredness and accidents such as 21 ...................



Anti-fatigue mats • Use 22 ................... material on oily surfaces.



Anti-slip mats • May cause a 23 ................... sensation in the feet. • The wearing of 24 ................... may improve comfort.



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Hearing Protectors Hearing protectors are designed to reduce exposure to loud noise and there are three main types available. Ear plugs are inserted to block the ear canal and are sold as disposable products or reusable plugs. Custom moulded ear plugs are also available. Ear muffs consist of soft ear cushions that fit around the ear and hard outer cups. They are held together by a head band. Canal caps have flexible tips that act as caps which plug the ear canal. They do not extend into the ear canal, only close the ear opening. Therefore they do not offer as much protection as ear plugs or ear muffs. The choice of hearing protectors depends on a number of factors including the level of noise, comfort and the suitability of the hearing protector for both the worker and his environment. Most importantly, the hearing protector should provide the desired noise reduction. Ear muffs are more desirable for intermittent noise, since the removal and reinsertion of earplugs may be inconvenient. Canal caps are also ideal for situations where hearing protection must be taken on and off frequently. They are not designed for continuous wear. Ear plugs are lightweight and portable, less expensive than muffs and more comfortable in hot, humid work areas. However, they provide less protection than some muffs, and should not be used in areas where noise levels exceed 105 decibels. They are not as visible as muffs and a supervisor cannot readily check to see if workers are wearing them. They must be properly inserted to provide adequate protection. Ear muffs can vary with respect to the material and depth of the dome, and the force of the headband. The deeper and heavier the dome, the greater the low-frequency attenuation provided by the protector. Ear muffs can usually provide greater protection than plugs, although this is not always true. They are easier to fit, generally more durable than plugs and they have replaceable parts. However, they are more expensive, and often less comfortable than plugs, especially in hot work areas. The human aspects of hearing protection are particularly important. It is therefore a good idea for the employer to provide a number of different types of hearing protection from which workers can choose, keeping in mind any safety or hygienic reasons for not providing a particular kind of protector. For example, ear plugs which are used in a plant setting where people reuse them throughout the day, often reinserting them with dirty fingers, can introduce dirt and bacteria into the ears, causing ear infections.



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IELTS Essentials



Questions 25-28 Read the extract from a leaflet about hearing protectors. Look at the following statements (questions 25-28) and the list of items below.



A canal caps







B ear muffs







C ear plugs







D both canal caps and ear muffs



25 They cost more than the other options. 26 They provide the user with the least amount of protection. 27 They are suitable for use if exposed to varying noise levels. 28 They can be specifically made for an individual user.



Questions 29-33 Complete the table below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.



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145



Guided Busway A A guided bus way is a dedicated buses-only route with buses running on a purposebuilt track. The bus is guided along the route so that steering is automatically controlled and, like a tram, the vehicle follows a set path. The bus driver controls the speed of the vehicle. B Kerb-guided buses are normal, everyday buses with a driver at the wheel. What makes them different is small guide wheels attached to the front wheels of the bus that run along the vertical face of kerbs on a purpose-built track called a guide way. The guide wheels steer the bus whilst it is in the guide way. Guide ways can be used for part or all of a bus route. Guided buses can either be low-speed operations, introduced to relieve congestion in busy towns, or high-speed operations which provide ‘light rapid transit’ (LRT) over longer distances. C Like a railway line, the guide way excludes all other traffic, giving the bus a clear road ahead, even in congested areas during rush hours. Therefore the service is fast and reliable: at peak periods, guided buses can arrive at frequent intervals. All these factors mean guided buses can deliver a high standard of public transport akin to a metro, light rail or tram system. Unlike a train or tram, though, the bus can leave the bus way at certain junctions and drive on normal roads, giving it the flexibility to provide on-road services too and allowing passengers to get on or off close to their homes or at any key location in the area. D Bus lanes and bus-only roads are open to illegal use by other road users for queue jumping and parking. This abuse slows bus journeys and drains resources as breaches of bus lanes need to be monitored and fines have to be issued for misuse. With its kerbs and narrow width, a guided bus way is not accessible by most vehicles, virtually eliminating the abuse of the bus route. Guided bus ways can also be built in areas too narrow tor standard bus lanes, including disused railway lines with embankments land that could never be made into a road. E Guided bus systems are less expensive than light rail or metro systems. Like light rail, a guided bus service can be high speed, reliable and comfortable. It also has the advantage of the transport not being fixed to the rail with the bus being able to leave the guide way and drive down any road as does a standard bus, enabling bus stops to be located within the community. Guided bus ways do not require the overhead electrification or signalling systems usually needed to operate light rail or metro systems. F A guided bus way has a number of advantages over a traditional tarmac road. A guided bus way can offer better drainage than a solid tarmac road, as water can drain away between the guide way tracks. The guide way also takes up less space than a standard road lane. The route can be landscaped and planted alongside and between the tracks, making the bus way very green to the eye, absorbing engine noise and allowing the bio-diversity of an area to exist alongside the transport system. Such landscaping also makes the bus way look very different to a toad, discouraging other toad users from accidentally entering it.



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IELTS Essentials



Questions 34-39 Read the article about guided bus ways. The passage has six paragraphs, A-F. Which paragraph mentions the following? NB You may use any letter more than once. 34 examples of the environmental benefits to a guided bus way 35 references to how guided bus systems differ from light rail or metro systems 36 a description of how guided buses work 37 the limitations of bus lanes and bus-only roads 38 reasons why guide buses are needed 39 what a guided bus way is



Question 40 The writer mentions a number of features of guided bus ways. Which FOUR features are mentioned by the writer of the text?



IELTS Essentials







A



Complexity of the technology







B



Faster routes into city centres







C



Encouragement for greater use of public transport







D



More infrastructure required







E



Reduced costs of vehicles







F



Increased maintenance of guide way







G



Integration with other public transport







H



More emissions



147



148



IELTS Essentials