IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Tổng hợp đề thi
IELTS Reading Test Practice with Answer PDF
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Chia sẻ nguồn tài liệu hữu ích giúp các bạn luyện đề IELTS Reading hiệu quả. Tổng hợp 20 bộ
đề thi IELTS Reading Test PDF với đáp án để các bạn luyện tập và kiểm tra trình độ nhé.
Các bạn tham khảo bài chia sẻ về cách làm từng dạng bài Reading và tài liệu thêm cùng các
kiến thức ngay tại link này :
Cách làm 10 dạng câu hỏi trong Reading với ví dụ chi tiết: TẠI ĐÂY
Tổng hợp tài liệu IELTS Reading từ cơ bản đến nâng cao: TẠI ĐÂY
Lộ trình tự học IELTS từ 0-7.0 với tài liệu chi tiết: TẠI ĐÂY
Tìm hiểu và giải đáp 20 câu hỏi về IELTS: TẠI ĐÂY
150 bài học IELTS online chinh phục 5.0: TẠI ĐÂY
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Reading 1
Reading Passage has four sections A-D
Choose the correct heading for the each section from the list of headings below. Write the
correct number i-vi in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i Causes of volcanic eruption
ii Efforts to predict volcanic eruption
iii Volcanoes and the features of our planet
iv Different types of volcanic eruption
International relief efforts
vi The unpredictability of volcanic eruption
v
1. Section A
2. Section B
3. Section C
4. Section D
Volcanoes - earth-shattering news
When Mount Pinatubo suddenly erupted on 9 June 1991, the power of volcanoes past and
present again hit the headlines
A Volcanoes are the ultimate earth-moving machinery. A violent eruption can blow the top
fewkilometres off a mountain, scatter fine ash practically all over the globe and hurt rock
fragments into the stratosphere to darken the skies a continent away.
But the classic eruption - cone-shaped mountain, big bang, mushroom cloud and surges of
molten lava - is only a tiny part of a global story. Volcanism, the name given to volcanic
processes, really has shaped the world. Eruptions have rifted continents, raised mountain
chains, constructed islands and shaped the topography of the earth. The entire ocean floor has
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
a basement of volcanic basalt.
Volcanoes have not only made the continents, they are also thought to have made the world’s
first stable atmosphere and provided all the water for the oceans, rivers and ice-caps. There are
now about 600 active volcanoes. Every year they add two or three cubic kilometres of rock to
the continents. Imagine a similar number of volcanoes smoking away for the last 3,500 million
years. That is enough rock to explain the continental crust.
What comes out of volcanic craters is mostly gas. More than 90% of this gas is water vapour
from the deep earth: enough to explain, over 3,500 million years, the water in the oceans. The
rest of the gas is nitrogen, carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, methane, ammonia and hydrogen.
The quantity of these gases, again multiplied over 3,500 million years, is enough to explain the
mass of the world’s atmosphere. We are alive because volcanoes provided the soil, air and water
we need.
B Geologists consider the earth as having a molten core, surrounded by a semi-molten mantle
and a brittle, outer skin. It helps to think of a soft-boiled egg with a runny yolk, a firm but squishy
white and a hard shell. If the shell is even slightly cracked during boiling, the white material
bubbles out and sets like a tiny mountain chain over the crack - like an archipelago of volcanic
islands such as the Hawaiian Islands. But the earth is so much bigger and the mantle below is so
much halter.
Even though the mantle rocks are kept solid by overlying pressure, they can still slowly ‘flow’
like thick treacle. The flow, thought to be in the form of convection currents, is powerful enough
to fracture the ‘eggshell’ of the crust into plates, and keep them bumping and grinding against
each other, or even overlapping, at the rate of a few centimetres a year. These fracture zones,
where the collisions occur, are where earthquakes happen. And, very often, volcanoes.
C These zones are lines of weakness, or hot spots. Every eruption is different, but put at its
simplest, where there are weaknesses, rocks deep in the mantle, heated to 1,350oC, will start
to expand and rise. As they do so, the pressure drops, and they expand and become liquid and
rise
more swiftly.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Sometimes it is slow: vast bubbles of magma - molten rock from the mantle - inch towards the
surface, cooling slowly, to show through as granite extrusions (as on Skye, or the Great Whin
Sill, the lava dyke squeezed out like toothpaste that carries part of Hadrian’s Wall in northern
England). Sometimes - as in Northern Ireland, Wales and the Karoo in South Africa - the magma
rose faster, and then flowed out horizontally on to the surface in vast thick sheets. In the Deccan
plateau in western India, there are more than two million cubic kilometres of lava, some of it
2,400 metres thick, formed over 500,000 years of slurping eruption.
Sometimes the magma moves very swiftly indeed. It does not have time to cool as it surges
upwards. The gases trapped inside the boiling rock expand suddenly, the lava glows with heat,
it begins to froth, and it explodes with tremendous force. Then the slightly cooler lava following
it begins to flow over the lip of the crater. It happens on Mars, it happened on the moon, it even
happens on some of the moons of Jupiter and Uranus. By studying the evidence, vulcanologists
can read the force of the great blasts of the past. Is the pumice light and full of holes? The
explosion was tremendous. Are the rocks heavy, with huge crystalline basalt shapes, like the
Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland? It was a slow, gentle eruption.
The biggest eruption are deep on the mid-ocean floor, where new lava is forcing the continents
apart and widening the Atlantic by perhaps five centimetres a year. Look at maps of volcanoes,
earthquakes and island chains like the Philippines and Japan, and you can see the rough outlines
of what are called tectonic plates - the plates which make up the earth’s crust and mantle. The
most dramatic of these is the Pacific ‘ring of fire’ where there have the most violent explosions
- Mount Pinatubo near Manila, Mount St Helen’s in the Rockies and El Chichón in Mexico about
a decade ago, not to mention world-shaking blasts like Krakatoa in the Sunda Straits in 1883.
D But volcanoes are not very predictable. That is because geological time is not like human time.
During quiet periods, volcanoes cap themselves with their own lava by forming a powerful cone
from the molten rocks slopping over the rim of the crater; later the lava cools slowly into a huge,
hard, stable plug which blocks any further eruption until the pressure below becomes
irresistible. In the case of Mount Pinatubo, this took 600 years.
Then, sometimes, with only a small warning, the mountain blows its top. It did this at Mont
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Pelée in Martinique at 7.49 a.m. on 8 May, 1902. Of a town of 28,000, only two people survived.
In 1815, a sudden blast removed the top 1,280 metres of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. The
eruption was so fierce that dust thrown into the stratosphere darkened the skies, canceling the
following summer in Europe and North America. Thousands starved as the harvest failed, after
snow in June and frosts in August. Volcanoes are potentially world news, especially the quiet
ones.
Questions 5-9
Answer the questions below using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/ OR A NUMBER from
the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 5-9 on your answer sheet.
5. What are the sections of the earth’s crust, often associated with volcanic activity, called?
6. What is the name given to molten rock from the mantle?
7. What is the earthquake zone on the Pacific Ocean called?
8. For how many years did Mount Pinatubo remain inactive?
Questions 9-13
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each
answer.
Write your answers in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheets.
Volcanic eruptions have shaped the earth’s land surface. They may also have produced the
world’s atmosphere and 9 ........................ Eruptions occur when molten rocks from the earth’s
mantle
rise and expand. When they become liquid, they move more quickly through cracks in the
surface. There are different types of eruption. Sometimes the 10............. moves slowly and
forms outcrops of granite on the earth’s surface. When it moves more quickly it may flow out in
thick horizontal sheets. Examples of this type of eruption can be found in Northern Ireland,
Wales, South Africa and 11 ........................ A third type of eruption occurs when the lava
emerges
very quickly and 12 ......................... violently. This happens because the magma moves so
suddenly
that 13 ........................... are emitted.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
READING 2
Experience versus speed
Certain mental functions slow down with age, but the brain compensates in ways that can keep
seniors as sharp as youngsters.
Jake, aged 16, has a terrific relationship with his grandmother Rita, who is 70. They live close by,
and they even take a Spanish class together twice a week at a local college. After class they
sometimes stop at a cafe for a snack. On one occasion, Rita tells Jake, 'I think it's great how fast
you pick up new grammar. It takes me a lot longer.' Jake replies, 'Yeah, but you don't seem to
make as many silly mistakes on the quizzes as I do. How do you do that?'
In that moment, Rita and Jake stumbled across an interesting set of differences between older
and younger minds. Popular psychology says that as people age their brains 'slow down'. The
implication, of course, is that elderly men and women are not as mentally agile as middle-aged
adults or even teenagers. However, although certain brain functions such as perception and
reaction time do indeed take longer, that slowing down does not necessarily undermine mental
sharpness. Indeed, evidence shows that older people are just as mentally fit as younger people
because their brains compensate for some kinds of declines in creative ways that young minds
do not exploit.
Just as people's bodies age at different rates, so do their minds. As adults advance in age, the
perception of sights, sounds and smells takes a bit longer, and laying down new information into
memory becomes more difficult. The ability to retrieve memories also quickly slides and it is
sometimes harder to concentrate and maintain attention.
On the other hand, the ageing brain can create significant benefits by tapping into its extensive
hoard of accumulated knowledge and experience. The biggest trick that older brains employ is
to use both hemispheres simultaneously to handle tasks for which younger brains rely
predominantly on one side. Electronic images taken by cognitive scientists at the University of
Michigan, for example, have demonstrated that even when doing basic recognition or
memorization exercises, seniors exploit the left and right side of the brain more extensively than
men and women who are decades younger. Drawing on both sides of the brain gives them a
tactical edge, even if the speed of each hemisphere's process is slower.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
In another experiment, Michael Falkenstein of the University of Dortmund in Germany found
that when elders were presented with new computer exercises they paused longer before
reacting and took longer to complete the tasks, yet they made 50% fewer errors, probably
because of their more deliberate pace.
One analogy for these results might be the question of who can type a paragraph 'better': a I6year-old who glides along at 60 words per minute but has to double back to correct a number
of mistakes or a 70-year-old who strikes keys at only 40 words per minute but spends less time
fixing errors? In the end, if 'better' is defined as completing a clean paragraph. both people may
end up taking the same amount of time.
Computerized tests support the notion that accuracy can offset speed. In one so-called
distraction exercise, subjects were told to look at a screen, wait for an arrow that pointed in a
certain direction to appear, and then use a mouse to click on the arrow as soon as it appeared
on the screen. Just before the correct symbol appeared, however, the computer displayed
numerous other arrows aimed in various other directions. Although younger subjects cut
through the confusion faster when the correct arrow suddenly popped up, they more frequently
clicked on incorrect arrows in their haste.
Older test takers are equally capable of other tasks that do not depend on speed, such as
language comprehension and processing. In these cases, however. the elders utilize the brain's
available resources in a different way. Neurologists at Northwest University came to this
conclusion after analyzing 50 people ranging from age 23 to 78. The subjects had to lie down in
a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine and concentrate on two different lists of printed
words posted side by side in front of them. By looking at the lists, they were to find pairs of
words that were similar in either meaning or spelling.
The eldest participants did just as well on the tests as the youngest did, and yet the MRI scans
indicated that in the elders' brains, the areas which are responsible for language recognition
and interpretation were much less active. The researchers did find that the older people had
more activity in brain regions responsible for attentiveness. Darren Gleitman, who headed the
study, concluded that older brains solved the problems just as effectively but by different
means.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Questions 1-3
Choose the correct answer A, B, C or D ans write them on your answer sheet from 1-3
1. The conversation between Jake and Rita is used to give an example of
A. the way we learn languages.
B. the changes that occur in our brains over time.
C. the fact that it is easier to learn a language at a young age.
D. the importance of young and old people doing things together.
2. In paragraph six, what point is the analogy used to illustrate?
A. Working faster is better than working slower.
B. Accuracy is less important than speed.
C. Accuracy can improve over time.
D. Working faster does not always save time.
3. In the computerized distraction exercises, the subjects had to
A. react to a particular symbol on the screen.
B. type a text as quickly as possible.
C. move an arrow in different directions around the screen.
D. click on every arrow that appeared on the screen.
Questions 4-7
Complete each sentence with the correct ending A-F.
Write the correct letter A-F in boxes 4-7 on your answer sheet
4. According to popular psychology
5. Researchers at the University of Michigan showed that
6. Michael Falkenstein discovered that
7. Scientists at Northwest University concluded that
A. the older we get the harder it is to concentrate for any length of time.
B. seniors take longer to complete tasks but with greater accuracy.
C. old people use both parts of their brain more than young people.
D. older people use their brains differently but achieve the same result.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
E. the speed of our brain decreases with age.
F. older people do not cope well with new technology.
Questions 8-12
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in spaces 8-12 of your answer sheet.
People's bodies and 8 ______________ grow older at varying stages. As we age our senses take
longer to process information and our aptitude for recalling 9 _________ also decreases.
However, older people's brains do have several advantages. Firstly, they can call upon both
the 10 ________________ and 11 _________ which is already stored in their brain. Secondly,
although the 12 ______________ of each side of their brain is reduced, they are able to use
both sides at once.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
READING TEST 3
Questions 1-4
Reading Passage has five sections A-E
Choose the correct heading for section A and C-E from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number i-viii in boxes 28-31 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i
The connection between health-care and other human rights
ii
The development of market-based health systems.
iii
The role of the state in health-care
iv
A problem shared by every economically developed country
v
The impact of recent change
vi
The views of the medical establishment
vii
The end of an illusion
viii
Sustainable economic development
1
Section A
2
Section C
3
Section D
4
Section E
Example
Answer
Section B
viii
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
The Problem of Scarce Resources
Section A
The problem of how health-care resources should be allocated or apportioned, so
that they are distributed in both the most just and most efficient way, is not a new
one. Every health system in an economically developed society is faced with the
need to decide (either formally or informally) what proportion of the community’s
total resources should be spent on health-care; how resources are to be
apportioned; what diseases and disabilities and which forms of treatment are to be
given priority; which members of the community are to be given special
consideration in respect of their health needs; and which forms of treatment are
the most cost-effective.
Section B
What is new is that, from the 1950s onwards, there have been certain general
changes in outlook about the finitude of resources as a whole and of health-care
resources in particular, as well as more specific changes regarding the clientele of
health-care resources and the cost to the community of those resources. Thus, in
the 1950s and 1960s, there emerged an awareness in Western societies that
resources for the provision of fossil fuel energy were finite and exhaustible and that
the capacity of nature or the environment to sustain economic development and
population was also finite. In other words, we became aware of the obvious fact
that there were ‘limits to growth’. The new consciousness that there were also
severe limits to health-care resources was part of this general revelation of the
obvious. Looking back, it now seems quite incredible that in the national health
systems that emerged in many countries in the years immediately after the 193945 World War, it was assumed without question that all the basic health needs of
any community could be satisfied, at least in principle; the ‘in visible hand’ of
economic progress would provide.
Section C
However, at exactly the same time as this new realization of the finite character of
health-care resources was sinking in, an awareness of a contrary kind was
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
developing in Western societies: that people have a basic right to health-care as a
necessary condition of a proper human life. Like education, political and legal
processes and institutions, public order, communication, transport and money
supply, health-care came to be seen as one of the fundamental social facilities
necessary for people to exercise their other rights as autonomous human beings.
People are not in
a position to exercise personal liberty and to be self-determining if they are
poverty-stricken, or deprived of basic education, or do not live within a context of
law and order. In the same way, basic health-care is a condition of the exercise of
autonomy.
Section D
Although the language of ‘rights’ sometimes leads to confusion, by the late 1970s
it was recognized in most societies that people have a right to health-care (though
there has been considerable resistance in the United Sates to the idea that there is
a formal right to health-care). It is also accepted that this right generates an
obligation or duty for the state to ensure that adequate health-care resources are
provided out of the public purse. The state has no obligation to provide a healthcare system itself, but to ensure that such a system is provided. Put another way,
basic health-care is now recognized as a ‘public good’, rather than a ‘private good’
that one is expected to buy for oneself. As the 1976 declaration of the World Health
Organisation put it: ‘The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is
one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race,
religion, political belief, economic or social condition’. As has just been remarked,
in a liberal society basic health is seen as one of the indispensable conditions for
the exercise of personal autonomy.
Section E
Just at the time when it became obvious that health-care resources could not
possibly meet the demands being made upon them, people were demanding that
their fundamental right to health-care be satisfied by the state. The second set of
more specific changes that have led to the present concern about the distribution
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
of health-care resources stems from the dramatic rise in health costs in most OECD
countries, accompanied by large-scale demographic and social changes which have
meant, to take one example, that elderly people are now major (and relatively very
expensive) consumers of health-care resources. Thus in OECD countries as a whole,
health costs increased from 3.8% of GDP in 1960 to 7% of GDP in 1980, and it has
been predicted that the proportion of health costs to GDP will continue to increase.
(In the US the current figure is about 12% of GDP, and in Australia about 7.8% of
GDP.)
As a consequence, during the 1980s a kind of doomsday scenario (analogous to
similar doomsday extrapolations about energy needs and fossil fuels or about
population increases) was projected by health administrators, economists and
politicians. In this scenario, ever-rising health costs were matched against static or
declining resources.
Note
OECD: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development GDP: Gross
Domestic Products
Questions 5-8
Classify the following as first occurring
A between 1945 and 1950 B between 1950 and 1980 C after 1980
Write the correct letter A, B or C in boxes 32-35 on your answer sheet.
5
the realisation that the resources of the national health system were limited
6
a sharp rise in the cost of health-care.
7
a belief that all the health-care resources the community needed would be
produced by economic growth
7
an acceptance of the role of the state in guaranteeing the provision of healthcare.
Questions 8 - 12
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Do the following statements agree with the view of the writer in Reading Passage?
In boxes 8-12 on your answer sheet write:
YES - if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
NO - if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN - if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
8. Personal liberty and independence have never been regarded as directly linked
to health-care.
9. Health-care came to be seen as a right at about the same time that the limits of
health-care resources became evident.
10. IN OECD countries population changes have had an impact on health-care costs
in recent years.
11. OECD governments have consistently underestimated the level of health-care
provision needed.
12. In most economically developed countries the elderly will to make special
provision for their health-care in the future.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
READING 4
Urban planning in Singapore
British merchants established a trading post in Singapore in the early nineteenth
century, and for more than a century trading interests dominated. However, in
1965 the newly independent island state was cut off from its hinterland, and so it
set about pursuing a survival strategy. The good international communications it
already enjoyed provided a useful base, but it was decided that if Singapore was to
secure its economic future, it must develop its industry. To this end, new
institutional structures were needed to facilitate, develop, and control foreign
investment. One of the most important of these was the Economic Development
Board (EDB), an arm of government that developed strategies for attracting
investment. Thus from the outset, the Singaporean government was involved in
city promotion.
Towards the end of the twentieth century, the government realised that, due to
limits on both the size of the country’s workforce and its land area, its labourintensive industries were becoming increasingly uncompetitive. So an economic
committee was established which concluded that Singapore should focus on
developing as a service centre, and seek to attract company headquarters to serve
South East Asia, and develop tourism, banking, and offshore activities. The land
required for this service-sector orientation had been acquired in the early 1970s,
when the government realised that it lacked the banking infrastructure for a
modern economy. So a new banking and corporate district, known as the ‘Golden
Shoe’, was planned, incorporating the historic commercial area. This district now
houses all the major companies and various government financial agencies.
Singapore’s current economic strategy is closely linked to land use and
development planning. Although it is already a major city, the current development
plan seeks to ensure Singapore’s continued economic growth through
restructuring, to ensure that the facilities needed by future business are planned
now. These include transport and telecommunication infrastructure, land, and
environmental quality. A major concern is to avoid congestion in the central area,
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
and so the latest plan deviates from previous plans by having a strong
decentralisation policy. The plan makes provision for four major regional centres,
each serving 800,000 people, but this does not mean that the existing central
business district will not also grow. A major extension planned around Marina Bay
draws on examples of other ‘world cities’, especially those with waterside central
areas such as Sydney and San Francisco. The project involves major land
reclamation of 667 hectares in total. Part of this has already been developed as a
conference and exhibition zone, and the rest will be used for other facilities.
However the need for vitality has been recognised and a mixed zoning approach
has been adopted, to include housing and entertainment.
One of the new features of the current plan is a broader conception of what
contributes to economic success. It encompasses high quality residential provision,
a good environment, leisure facilities and exciting city life. Thus there is more
provision for low-density housing, often in waterfront communities linked to
beaches and recreational facilities. However, the lower housing densities will put
considerable pressure on the very limited land available for development, and this
creates problems for another of the plan’s aims, which is to stress environmental
quality. More and more of the remaining open area will be developed, and the only
natural landscape surviving will be a small zone in the centre of the island which
serves as a water catchment area. Environmental policy is therefore very much
concerned with making the built environment more green by introducing more
plants - what is referred to as the ‘beautification’ of Singapore. The plan focuses on
green zones defining the boundaries of settlements, and running along transport
corridors. The incidental green provision within housing areas is also given
considerable attention.
Much of the environmental provision, for example golf courses, recreation areas,
and beaches, is linked to the prime objective of attracting business. The plan places
much emphasis on good leisure provision and the need to exploit Singapore’s island
setting. One way of doing this is through further land reclamation, to create a whole
new island devoted to leisure and luxury housing which will stretch from the central
area to the airport. A current concern also appears to be how to use the planning
system to create opportunities for greater spontaneity: planners have recently
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
given much attention to the concept of the 24-hour city and the cafe society. For
example, a promotion has taken place along the Singapore river to create a cafe
zone. This has included the realisation, rather late in the day, of the value of
retaining older buildings, and the creation of a continuous riverside promenade.
Since the relaxation in 1996 of strict guidelines on outdoor eating areas, this has
become an extremely popular area in the evenings. Also, in 1998 the Urban
Redevelopment Authority created a new entertainment area in the centre of the
city which they are promoting as ‘the city’s one-stop, dynamic entertainment
scene’.
In conclusion, the economic development of Singapore has been very consciously
centrally planned, and the latest strategy is very clearly oriented to establishing
Singapore as a leading ‘world city’. It is well placed to succeed, for a variety of
reasons. It can draw upon its historic roots as a world trading centre; it has invested
heavily in telecommunications and air transport infrastructure; it is well located in
relation to other Asian economies; it has developed a safe and clean environment;
and it has utilised the international language of English.
Question 1-6
Complete the summary below using words from the box.
Singapore
When Singapore became an independent, self-sufficient state it decided to build
up its 1….., and government organisations were created to support this policy.
However, this initial plan met with limited success due to a shortage of 2……and
land. It was therefore decided to develop the 3….. sector of the economy instead.
Singapore is now a leading city, but planners are working to ensure that its
economy continues to grow. In contrast to previous policies, there is emphasis on
4……. In addition, land will be recovered to extend the financial district, and
provide 5…. as well as housing. The government also plans to improve the quality
of Singapore’s environment, but due to the shortage of natural landscapes it will
concentrate instead on what it calls 6……..
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Question 7-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
Write:
True- if the statement agrees with the information
False - if the statement contradicts the information
Not Given - if there is no information on this.
7. After 1965, the Singaporean government switched the focus of the island’s
economy.
8. The creation of Singapore’s financial centre was delayed while a suitable site was
found.
9. Singapore’s four regional centres will eventually be the same size as its central
business district.
10. Planners have modelled new urban developments on other coastal cities.
11. Plants and trees are amongst the current priorities for Singapore’s city planners.
12. The government has enacted new laws to protect Singapore’s old buildings.
13. Singapore will find it difficult to compete with leading cities in other parts of the
world.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
READING 5
Questions 1-5
Reading Passage contains six Key Points.
Choose the correct heading for Key Points TWO to SIX .from the list of headings
below. Write the correct number, i-viii, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i
Ensure the reward system is fair
ii
Match rewards lo individuals
iii
Ensure targets are realistic
iv
Link rewards to achievement
v
Encourage managers to take more responsibility
vi
Recognise changes in employees' performance over time
vii
Establish targets and give feedback
viii
Ensure employees are suited to their jobs
Example
Answer
Key Point One
viii
1
Key Point Two
2
Key Point Three
3
Key Point Four
4
Key Point Five
5
Key Point Six
Motivating Employees under Adverse Condition
THE CHALLENGE
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
It is a great deal easier to motivate employees in a growing organisation than a
declining one. When organisations are expanding and adding personnel,
promotional opportunities, pay rises, and the excitement of being associated with
a dynamic organisation create Slings of optimism. Management is able ta use the
growth to entice and encourage employees. When an organisation is shrinking, the
best and most mobile workers are prone to leave voluntarily. Unfortunately, they
are the ones the organisation can least afford to lose- those with me highest skills
and experience. The minor employees remain because their job options are limited.
Morale also surfers during decline. People fear they may be the next to be made
redundant. Productivity often suffers, as employees spend their time sharing
rumours and providing one another with moral support rather than focusing on
their jobs. For those whose jobs are secure, pay increases are rarely possible. Pay
cuts, unheard of during times of growth, may even be imposed. The challenge to
management is how to motivate employees under such retrenchment conditions.
The ways of meeting this challenge can be broadly divided into six Key Points, which
are outlined below.
KEY POINT ONE
There is an abundance of evidence to support the motivational benefits that result
from carefully matching people to jobs. For example, if the job is running a small
business or an autonomous unit within a larger business, high achievers should be
sought. However, if the job to be filled is a managerial post in a large bureaucratic
organisation, a candidate who has a high need for power and a low need for
affiliation should be selected. Accordingly, high achievers should not be put into
jobs that are inconsistent with their needs. High achievers will do best when the
job provides moderately challenging goals and where there is independence and
feedback. However, it should be remembered that not everybody is motivated by
jobs that are high in independence, variety and responsibility.
KEY POINT TWO
The literature on goal-setting theory suggests that managers should ensure that all
employees have specific goals and receive comments on how well they are doing
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
in those goals. For those with high achievement needs, typically a minority in any
organisation, the existence of external goals is less important because high
achievers are already internally motivated. The next factor to be determined is
whether the goals should be assigned by a manager or collectively set in
conjunction with the employees. The answer to that depends on perceptions the
culture, however, goals should be assigned. If participation and the culture are
incongruous, employees are likely to perceive the participation process as
manipulative and be negatively affected by it.
KEY POINT THREE
Regardless of whether goals are achievable or well within management's
perceptions of the employee's ability, if employees see them as unachievable they
will reduce their effort. Managers must be sure, therefore, that employees feel
confident that their efforts can lead to performance goals. For managers, this
means that employees must have the capability of doing the job and must regard
the appraisal process as valid.
KEY POINT FOUR
Since employees have different needs, what acts as a reinforcement far one may
not for another. Managers could use their knowledge of each employee to
personalise the rewards over which they have control. Some of the more obvious
rewards that managers allocate include pay, promotions, autonomy, job scope and
depth, and the opportunity lo participate in goal-setting and decision-making.
KEY POINT FIVE
Managers need to make rewards contingent on performance. To reward factors
other than performance will only reinforce those other factors. Key rewards such
as pay increases and promotions or advancements should be allocated for the
attainment of the employee's specific goals. Consistent with maximising the impact
of rewards, managers should look for ways to increase their visibility. Eliminating
the secrecy surrounding pay by openly communicating everyone's remuneration,
publicising performance bonuses and allocating annual salary increases in a lump
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
sum rather than spreading them out over an entire year are examples of actions
that will make rewards more visible and potentially more motivating.
KEY POINT SIX
The way rewards ore distributed should be transparent so that employees perceive
that rewards or outcomes are equitable and equal to the inputs given. On a
simplistic level, experience, abilities, effort and other obvious inputs should explain
differences in pay, responsibility and other obvious outcomes. The problem,
however, is complicated by the existence of dozens of inputs and outcomes ana by
the Fact that employee groups place different degrees of importance on them. For
instance, a study comparing clerical and production workers identified nearly
twenty inputs and outcomes. The clerical workers considered factors such as
quality of work performed and job knowledge near the top of their list, but these
were at the bottom of the production workers' list. Similarly, production workers
thought that the most important inputs were intelligence and personal
involvement with task accomplishment, two factors that were quite low in the
importance ratings of the clerks. There were also important, though less dramatic,
differences on the outcome side. For example, production workers rated
advancement very highly, whereas clerical workers rated advancement in the lower
third of their list. Such findings suggest that one person's equity is another's
inequity, so an ideal should probably weigh different inputs and outcomes
according to employee group.
Questions 6-11
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage?
In boxes 6-11 on your answer sheet, write:
YES - if the statement t 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
6. A shrinking organisation lends to lose its less skilled employees rather than its
more skilled employees.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
7. It is easier to manage a small business ban a large business.
8. High achievers are well suited lo team work.
9. Some employees can fee! manipulated when asked to participate in goal-setting.
10. The staff appraisal process should be designed by employees.
11. Employees' earnings should be disclosed to everyone within the organisation.
Questions 11-13
Look at the follow groups of worker (Question 11-13 )and the list of descriptions
below Match each group with the correct description, A -E.
Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 25-27 on your answer sheet.
11. high achievers
12. clerical workers
13. production workers List of Descriptions
A. They judge promotion to be important.
B. They have less need of external goats.
C. They think that the quality of their work is important.
D. They resist goals which are imposed.
E. They have limited job options.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
READING 6
PAPER RECYCLING
A Paper is different from other waste produce because it comes from a sustainable
resource: trees. Unlike the minerals and oil used to make plastics and metals, trees
are replaceable. Paper is also biodegradable, so it does not pose as much threat to
the environment when it is discarded. While 45 out of every 100 tonnes of wood
fibre used to make paper in Australia comes from waste paper, the rest comes
directly from virgin fibre from forests and plantations. By world standards this is a
good performance since the world-wide average is 33 per cent waste paper.
Governments have encouraged waste paper collection and sorting schemes and at
the same time, the paper industry has responded by developing new recycling
technologies that have paved the way for even greater utilization of used fibre. As
a result, industry’s use of recycled fibres is expected to increase at twice the rate
of virgin fibre over the coming years.
B Already, waste paper constitutes 70% of paper used for packaging and advances
in the technology required to remove ink from the paper have allowed a higher
recycled content in newsprint and writing paper. To achieve the benefits of
recycling, the community must also contribute. We need to accept a change in the
quality of paper products; for example stationery may be less white and of a
rougher texture. There also needs to be support from the community for waste
paper collection programs. Not only do we need to make the paper available to
collectors but it also needs to be separated into different types and sorted from
contaminants such as staples, paperclips, string and other miscellaneous items.
C There are technical limitations to the amount of paper which can be recycled and
some paper products cannot be collected for re-use. These include paper in the
form of books and permanent records, photographic paper and paper which is
badly contaminated. The four most common sources of paper for recycling are
factories and retail stores which gather large amounts of packaging material in
which goods are delivered, also offices which have unwanted business documents
and computer output, paper converters and printers and lastly households which
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
discard newspapers and packaging material. The paper manufacturer pays a price
for the paper and may also incur the collection cost.
D Once collected, the paper has to be sorted by hand by people trained to recognise
various types of paper. This is necessary because some types of paper can only be
made from particular kinds of recycled fibre. The sorted paper then has to be
repulped or mixed with water and broken down into its individual fibres. This
mixture is called stock and may contain a wide variety of contaminating materials,
particularly if it is made from mixed waste paper which has had little sorting.
Various machineries are used to remove other materials from the stock. After
passing through the repulping process, the fibres from printed waste paper are grey
in colour because the printing ink has soaked into the individual fibres. This recycled
material can only be used in products where the grey colour does not matter, such
as cardboard boxes but if the grey colour is not acceptable, the fibres must be deinked. This involves adding chemicals such as caustic soda or other alkalis, soaps
and detergents, water-hardening agents such as cal-cium chloride, frothing agents
and bleaching agents. Before the recycled fibres can be made into paper they must
be refined or treated in such a way that they bond together.
E Most paper products must contain some virgin fibre as well as recycled fibres and
unlike glass, paper cannot be recycled indefinitely. Most paper is down-cycled
which means that a prod-uct made from recycled paper is of an inferior quality to
the original paper. Recycling paper is beneficial in that it saves some of the energy,
labour and capital that go into producing virgin pulp. However, recycling requires
the use of fossil fuel, a non-renewable energy source, to collect the waste paper
from the community and to process it to produce new paper. And the recycling
process still creates emissions which require treatment before they can be
disposed of safely. Nevertheless, paper recycling is an important economical and
environmental practice but one which must be carried out in a rational and viable
manner for it to be useful to both industry and the community.
Questions 1-7
Complete the summary below of the first two paragraphs of the Reading Passage.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Choose ONE OR TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.
SUMMARY Example....
From the point of view of recycling, paper has two advantages over minerals and
oil in that firstly it comes from a resource which is (1)…… and secondly it is less
threatening to our environment when we throw it away because it is (2)
……
Although Australia’s record in the re-use of waste paper is good, it is still necessary
to use a combination of recycled fibre and (3)….. to make new paper. The paper
industry has contributed positively and people have also been encouraged by
(4)……..to collect their waste on a regular basis. One major difficulty is the removal
of ink from used paper but (5)….. are being made in this area. However, we need
to learn to accept paper which is generally of a lower ... (6)
... than before and
to sort our waste paper by removing (7) ….. before discarding it for collection.
Look at paragraphs C, D, and E and, using the information in the passage, complete
the flow chart below. Write your answers in boxes 8-12 on your answer sheet. Use
ONE OR TWO WORDS for each answer.
Waste Paper collected from:
Factories
The Paper is then
(38) .................
Retail stores
(37) .............................
and
paper converted and
(39) ...................
by adding water
The fibres are then
(41) ....................
printers Households
Chemicals are added in order to
(40) ....................................
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
READING 7
Creating Artificial Reefs
In the coastal waters of the US, a nation's leftovers have been discarded. Derelict
ships, concrete blocks, scrapped cars, army tanks, tyres filled with concrete and
redundant planes litter the sea floor. However, this is not waste disposal, but part
of a coordinated, state-run programme. To recently arrived fish, plants and other
sea organisms, these artificial reefs are an ideal home, offering food and shelter.
Sea-dumping incites widespread condemnation. Little surprise when oceans are
seen as 'convenient' dumping grounds for the rubbish we have created but would
rather forget. However, scientific evidence suggests that if we dump the right
things, sea life can actually be enhanced. And more recently, purpose-built
structures of steel or concrete have been employed - some the size of small
apartment blocks -principally to increase fish harvests.
Strong currents, for example, the choice of design and materials for an artificial reef
depends on where it is going to be placed. In areas of a solid concrete structure will
be more appropriate than ballasted tyres. It also depends on what species are to
be attracted. It is pointless creating high- rise structures for fish that prefer flat or
low-relief habitat. But the most important consideration is the purpose of the reef.
In the US, where there is a national reef plan using cleaned up rigs and tanks,
artificial reefs have mainly been used to attract fish for recreational fishing or sportdiving. But there are many other ways in which they can be used to manage the
marine habitat. For as well as protecting existing habitat, providing purpose-built
accommodation for commercial species (such as lobsters and octupi) and acting as
sea defences, they can be an effective way of improving fish harvests. Japan, for
example, has created vast areas of artificial habitat - rather than isolated reefs - to
increase its fish stocks. In fact, the cultural and historical importance of seafood in
Japan is reflected by the fact that it is a world leader in reef technology; what's
more, those who construct and deploy reefs have sole rights to the harvest.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
In Europe, artificial reefs have been mainly employed to protect habitat.
Particularly so in the Mediterranean where reefs have been sunk as physical
obstacles to stop illegal trawling, which is destroying sea grass beds and the marine
life that depends on them. If you want to protect areas of the seabed, you need
something that will stop trawlers dead in their tracks,' says Dr Antony Jensen of the
Southampton Oceanography Centre.
Italy boasts considerable artificial reef activity. It deployed its first scientifically
planned reef using concrete cubes assembled in pyramid forms in 1974 to enhance
fisheries and stop trawling. And Spain has built nearly 50 reefs in its waters, mainly
to discourage trawling and enhance the productivity of fisheries. Meanwhile,
Britain established its first quarried rock artificial reef in 1984 off the Scottish coast,
to assess its potential for attracting commercial species.
But while the scientific study of these structures is a little over a quarter of a century
old, artificial reefs made out of readily available materials such as bamboo and
coconuts have been used by fishermen for centuries. And the benefits have been
enormous. By placing reefs close to home, fishermen can save time and fuel. But
unless they are carefully managed, these areas can become over- fished. In the
Philippines, for example, where artificial reef programmes have been instigated in
response to declining fish populations, catches are often allowed to exceed the
maximum potential new production of the artificial reef because there is no proper
management control.
There is no doubt that artificial reefs have lots to offer. And while purpose-built
structures are effective, the real challenge now is to develop environmentally safe
ways of using recycled waste to increase marine diversity. This will require more
scientific research. For example, the leachates from one of the most commonly
used reef materials, tyres, could potentially be harmful to the creatures and plants
that they are supposed to attract. Yet few extensive studies have been undertaken
into the long- term effects of disposing of tyres at sea. And at the moment, there is
little consensus about what is environmentally acceptable to dump at sea,
especially when it comes to oil and gas rigs. Clearly, the challenge is to develop
environmentally acceptable ways of disposing of our rubbish while enhancing
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
marine life too. What we must never be allowed to do is have an excuse for
dumping anything we like at sea.
Questions 1-3
The list below gives some of the factors that must be taken into account when
deciding how to construct an artificial reef. Which THREE of these factors are
mentioned by the writer of the article? Write the appropriate letters A-F in boxes
1-3 on your answer sheet.
Questions 4-8
Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the
passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 4-8 on your answer sheet.
Area/Country
US
Type of Reef
Made using old ....(4)....
Japan
Forms large area
artificial habitat
lies deep down to form to act as a sea defence
.(6)……
Consists of pyramid to prevent trawling
shapes of ....(7)
Europe
Italy
Purpose
To attract fish for leisure
activities
of to improve ..(5)..
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Britain
made of rock
to
encourage
....(8).... Fish species
Questions 9-12
Using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS, complete the following sentences. Write
your answers in boxes 9-12 on your answer sheet.
In (9)….., people who build reefs are legally entitled to all the fish they attract.
Trawling inhibits the development of marine life because it damages the (10)…..
In the past, both (11).......were used to make reefs. To ensure that reefs are not
over-fished, good (12)……is required.
Question 13
Choose the appropriate letter A-D and write it in box 13 on your answer sheet.
13. According to the writer, the next step in the creation of artificial reefs is
A. to produce an international agreement.
B. to expand their use in the marine environment.
C. to examine their dangers to marine life.
D. to improve on purpose-built structures.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
READING 8
Questions 1-6
Reading Passage has eight paragraphs (A-H). Choose the most suitable heading for
each paragraph from the list of headings below.
Write the appropriate numbers (i-xi) in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.
NB There are more headings than paragraphs so you will not use all of them. You
may use any heading more than once.
List of Headings
i
Gathering the information
ii
Cigarettes produced to match an image
iii
Financial outlay on marketing
iv
The first advertising methods
v
Pressure causes a drop in sales
vi
Changing attitudes allow new marketing tactics
vii
Background to the research
viii
A public uproar is avoided
ix
The innovative move to written adverts
x
A century of uninhibited smoking
xi
Conclusions of the research
1. Paragraph A
2. Paragraph B
3. Paragraph C
4. Paragraph E
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
5. Paragraph F
6. Paragraph G
Example
Answer
Paragraph H - xi
Paragraph D - iv
Looking for a Market among Adolescents
A In 1992, the most recent year for which data are available, the US tobacco
industry spent $5 billion on domestic marketing. That figure represents a huge
increase from the approximate £250-million budget in 1971, when tobacco
advertising was banned from television and radio. The current expenditure
translates to about $75 for every adult smoker, or to $4,500 for every adolescent
who became a smoker that year. This apparently high cost to attract a new smoker
is very likely recouped over the average 25 years that this teen will smoke.
B In the first half of this century, leaders of the tobacco companies boasted that
innovative mass-marketing strategies built the industry. Recently, however, the
tobacco business has maintained that its advertising is geared to draw established
smokers to particular brands. But public health advocates insist that such
advertising plays a role in generating new demand, with adolescents being the
primary target. To explore the issue, we examined several marketing campaigns
undertaken over the years and correlated them with the ages smokers say they
began their habit. We find that, historically, there is considerable evidence that
such campaigns led to an increase in cigarette smoking among adolescents of the
targeted group.
C National surveys collected the ages at which people started smoking. The 1955
Current Population Survey (CPS) was the first to query respondents for this
information, although only summary data survive. Beginning in 1970, however, the
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS) included this question in some polls.
Answers from all the surveys were combined to produce a sample of more than
165,000 individuals. Using a respondent's age at the time of the survey and the
reported age of initiation, [age they started smoking], the year the person began
smoking could be determined. Dividing the number of adolescents (defined as
those 12 to 17 years old) who started smoking during a particular interval by the
number who were "eligible" to begin at the start of the interval set the initiation
rate for that group.
D Mass-marketing campaigns began as early as the 1880s, which boosted tobacco
consumption six fold by 1900. Much of the rise was attributed to a greater number
of people smoking cigarettes, as opposed to using cigars, pipes, snuff or chewing
tobacco. Marketing strategies included painted billboards and an extensive
distribution of coupons, which a recipient could redeem for free cigarettes .... Some
brands included soft-porn pictures of women in the packages. Such tactics inspired
outcry from educational leaders concerned about their corrupting influence on
teenage boys. Thirteen percent of the males surveyed in 1955 who reached
adolescence between 1890 and 1910 commenced smoking by 18 years of age,
compared with almost no females.
E The power of targeted advertising is more apparent if one considers the men born
between 1890 and 1899. In 1912, when many of these men were teenagers, the
R.J. Reynolds company launched the Camel brand of cigarettes with a revolutionary
approach. ... Every city in the country was bombarded with print advertising.
According to the 1955 CPS, initiation by age 18 for males in this group jumped to
21.6 percent, a two thirds increase over those boom before 1890. The NHIS
initiation rate also reflected this change. For adolescent males it went up from 2.9
percent between 1910 and 1912 to 4.9 percent between 1918 and 1921.
F It was not until the mid-1920s that social mores permitted cigarette advertising
to focus on women. ... In 1926 a poster depicted women imploring smokers of
Chesterfield cigarettes to "Blow Some My Way". The most successful crusade,
however, was for Lucky Strikes, which urged women to "Reach for a Lucky instead
of a Sweet." The 1955 CPS data showed that 7 percent of the women who were
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
adolescents during the mid-1920s had started smoking by age 18, compared with
only 2 percent in the preceding generation of female adolescents. Initiation rates
from the NHIS data for adolescent girls were observed to increase threefold, from
0.6 percent between 1922 and 1925 to 1.8 percent between 1930 and 1933. In
contrast, rates for males rose only slightly.
G The next major boost in smoking initiation in adolescent females occurred in the
late 1960s. In 1967 the tobacco industry launched "niche" brands aimed exclusively
at women. The most popular was Virginia Slims. The visuals of this campaign
emphasized a woman who was strong, independent and very thin. ... Initiation in
female adolescents nearly doubled, from 3.7 percent between 1964 and 1967 to
6.2 percent between 1972 and 1975 (NHIS data). During the same period, rates for
adolescent males remained stable.
H Thus, in four distinct instances over the past 100 years, innovative and directed
tobacco marketing campaigns were associated with marked surges in primary
demand from adolescents only in the target group. The first two were directed at
males and the second two at females. Of course, other factors helped to entrench
smoking in society. ... Yet it is clear from the data that advertising has been an
overwhelming force in attracting new users.
Questions 6-10
Do the following statements agree with the information in Reading Passage 21? In
boxes 6-10 write:
YES - if the statement is true according to the passage
NO - if the statement contradicts the passage
NOT GIVE - if there is no information about this in the passage
6. Cigarette marketing has declined in the US since tobacco advertising banned on
TV.
7. Tobacco companies claim that their advertising targets existing smokers.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
8. The difference in initiation rates between male and female smokers at of the 19
Lh century was due to selective marketing.
9. Women who took up smoking in the past lost weight.
10. The two surveys show different trends in cigarette initiation.
Questions 11-13
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 1113 on your answer sheet.
Tobacco companies are currently being accused of aiming their advertisements
mainly at (11)….. statistics on smoking habits for men born between 1890 and 1899
were gathered in the year (12).... . The (13) …..brand of cigarettes was designed for
a particular sex.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
READING 9
A spark, a flint: How fire leapt to life
[ The control of fire was the first and perhaps greatest of humanity’s steps towards
a life-enhancing technology. ]
To early man, fire was a divine gift randomly
delivered in the form of lightning, forest fire or
burning lava. Unable to make flame for
themselves, the earliest peoples probably stored
fire by keeping slow burning logs alight or by
carrying charcoal in pots.
How and where man learnt how to produce flame at will is unknown. It was
probably a secondary invention, accidentally made during tool-making operations
with wood or stone. Studies of primitive societies suggest that the earliest method
of making fire was through friction. European peasants would insert a wooden drill
in a round hole and rotate it briskly between their palms This process could be
speeded up by wrapping a cord around the drill and pulling on each end.
The Ancient Greeks used lenses or concave mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays
and burning glasses were also used by Mexican Aztecs and the Chinese.
Percussion methods of fire-lighting date back to Paleolithic times, when some
Stone Age tool-makers discovered that chipping flints produced sparks. The
technique became more efficient after the discovery of iron, about 5000 vears ago
In Arctic North America, the Eskimos produced a slow-burning spark by striking
quartz against iron pyrites, a compound that contains sulphur. The Chinese lit their
fires by striking porcelain with bamboo. In Europe, the combination of steel, flint
and tinder remained the main method of firelighting until the mid 19th century.
Fire-lighting was revolutionized by the discovery of phosphorus, isolated in 1669 by
a German alchemist trying to transmute silver into gold. Impressed by the
element’s combustibility, several 17th century chemists used it to manufacture
fire-lighting devices, but the results were dangerously inflammable. With
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
phosphorus costing the equivalent of several hundred pounds per ounce, the hrst
matches were expensive.
The quest for a practical match really began after 1781 when a group of French
chemists came up with the Phosphoric Candle or Ethereal Match, a sealed glass
tube containing a twist of paper tipped with phosphorus. When the tube was
broken, air rushed in, causing the phosphorus to selfcombust. An even more
hazardous device, popular in America, was the Instantaneous Light Box — a bottle
filled with sulphuric acid into which splints treated with chemicals were dipped.
The first matches resembling those used today were made in 1827 by John Walker,
an English pharmacist who borrowed the formula from a military rocket-maker
called Congreve. Costing a shilling a box, Congreves were splints coated with
sulphur and tipped with potassium chlorate. To light them, the user drew them
quickly through folded glass paper.
Walker never patented his invention, and three years later it was copied by a
Samuel Jones, who marketed his product as Lucifers. About the same time, a French
chemistry student called Charles Sauria produced the first “strike-anywhere”
match by substituting white phosphorus for the potassium chlorate in the Walker
formula. However, since white phosphorus is a deadly poison, from 1845 matchmakers exposed to its fumes succumbed to necrosis, a disease that eats away jawbones. It wasn’t until 1906 that the substance was eventually banned.
That was 62 years after a Swedish chemist called Pasch had discovered non-toxic
red or amorphous phosphorus, a development exploited commercially by Pasch’s
compatriot J E Lundstrom in 1885. Lundstrom’s safety matches were safe because
the red phosphorus was non-toxic; it was painted on to the striking surface instead
of the match tip, which contained potassium chlorate with a relatively high ignition
temperature of 182 degrees centigrade.
America lagged behind Europe in match technology and safety standards. It wasn’t
until 1900 that the Diamond Match Company bought a French patent for safety
matches — but the formula did not work properly in the different climatic
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
conditions prevailing in America and it was another 11 years before scientists finally
adapted the French patent for the US.
The Americans, however, can claim several “firsts” in match technology and
marketing. In 1892 the Diamond Match Company pioneered book matches. The
innovation didn’t catch on until after 1896, when a brewery had the novel idea of
advertising its product in match books. Today book matches are the most widely
used type in the US, with 90 percent handed out free by hotels, restaurants and
others.
Other American innovations include an anti-after-glow solution to prevent the
match from smoldering after it has been blown out; and the waterproof match,
which lights after eight hours in water.
Questions 1-8
Complete the summary below. Choose your answers from the box at the bottom
of the page and write them in boxes 1 8 on your answer sheet.
NB There are more words than spaces so you will not use them all You may use any
of the words more than once.
EARLY FIRE-LIGHTING METHODS
Example: Primitive Societies saw fire as a
(Example)
gift. Answer: heavenly
They tried to (1)……..burning logs or charcoal (2)……that they could create fire
themselves. It is suspected that the first man-made flames were produced by
(3)……..The very first fire-lighting methods involved the creation of (4)…… by, for
example, rapidly (5)……. a wooden stick in a round hole. The use of (6)….. or
persistent chipping was also widespread in Europe and among other peoples such
as the Chinese and (7)……..European practice of this method continued until the
1850s (8)……the discovery of phosphorus some years earlier.
List of Words
Mexicans
random
rotating
despite
preserve
realising
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
sunlight
lacking
heavenly
percussion Chance
friction
unaware
without
make
heating
Eskimos
surprised
Questions 9-15
Look at the following notes that have been made about the matches described in
Reading Passage 32. Decide which type of match (A-H) corresponds with each
description and write your answers in boxes 9-15 on your answer sheet.
NB There are more matches than descriptions so you will not use them all. You may
use any match more than once.
Example
could be lit after soaking in water
Answer
H
NOTES
9.
made using a less poisonous type of phosphorus
10.
identical to a previous type of match
11.
caused a deadly illness
12.
first to look like modern matches
13.
first matches used for advertising
14.
relied on an airtight glass container
15.
made with the help of an army design
Types of Matches
A. the Ethereal Match
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
B. the Instantaneous Light box
C. Congreves
D. Lucifers
E. the first strike-anywhere match
F. Lundstrom’s safety match
G. book matches
H. waterproof matches
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
READING 10
The Motor Car
A There are now over 700 million motor vehicles in the world - and the number is
rising by more than 40 million each year. The average distance driven by car users
is growing too - from 8 km a day per person in western Europe in 1965 to 25 km a
day in 1995. This dependence on motor vehicles has given rise to major problems,
including environmental pollution, depletion of oil resources, traffic congestion and
safety.
B While emissions from new cars are far less harmful than they used to be, city
streets and motorways are becoming more crowded than ever, often with older
trucks, buses and taxis, which emit excessive levels of smoke and fumes. This
concentration of vehicles makes air quality in urban areas unpleasant and
sometimes dangerous to breathe. Even Moscow has joined the list of capitals
afflicted by congestion and traffic fumes. In Mexico City, vehicle pollution is a major
health hazard.
C Until a hundred years ago, most journeys were in the 20 km range, the distance
conveniently accessible by horse. Heavy freight could only be carried by water or
rail. The invention of the motor vehicle brought personal mobility to the masses
and made rapid freight delivery possible over a much wider area. Today about 90
per cent of inland freight in the United Kingdom is carried by road. Clearly the world
cannot revert to the horse-drawn wagon. Can it avoid being locked into congested
and polluting ways of transporting people and goods?
D In Europe most cities are still designed for the old modes of transport. Adaptation
to the motor car has involved adding ring roads, one-way systems and parking lots.
In the United States, more land is assigned to car use than to housing. Urban sprawl
means that life without a car is next to impossible. Mass use of motor vehicles has
also killed or injured millions of people. Other social effects have been blamed on
the car such as alienation and aggressive human behaviour.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
E A 1993 study by the European Federation for Transport and Environment found
that car transport is seven times as costly as rail travel in terms of the external social
costs it entails such as congestion, accidents, pollution, loss of cropland and natural
habitats, depletion of oil resources, and so on. Yet cars easily surpass trains or buses
as a flexible and convenient mode of personal transport. It is unrealistic to expect
people to give up private cars in favour of mass transit.
F Technical solutions can reduce the pollution problem and increase the fuel
efficiency of engines. But fuel consumption and exhaust emissions depend on
which cars are preferred by customers and how they are driven. Many people buy
larger cars than they need for daily purposes or waste fuel by driving aggressively.
Besides, global car use is increasing at a faster rate than the improvement in
emissions and fuel efficiency which technology is now making possible.
G One solution that has been put forward is the long-term solution of designing
cities and neighbourhoods so that car journeys are not necessary - all essential
services being located within walking distance or easily accessible by public
transport. Not only would this save energy and cut carbon dioxide emissions, it
would also enhance the quality of community life, putting the emphasis on people
instead of cars. Good local government is already bringing this about in some
places. But few democratic communities are blessed with the vision - and the
capital - to make such profound changes in modern lifestyles.
H A more likely scenario seems to be a combination of mass transit systems for
travel into and around cities, with small 'low emission' cars for urban use and larger
hybrid or lean burn cars for use elsewhere. Electronically tolled highways might be
used to ensure that drivers pay charges geared to actual road use. Better
integration of transport systems is also highly desirable - and made more feasible
by modern computers. But these are solutions for countries which can afford them.
In most developing countries, old cars and old technologies continue to
predominate.
Questions 1-6
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Reading Passage has eight paragraphs (A-H). Which paragraphs concentrate on the
following information? Write the appropriate letters (A-H) in boxes 14-19 on your
answer sheet.
NB You need only write ONE letter for each answer.
1. a comparison of past and present transportation methods
2. how driving habits contribute to road problems
3. the relative merits of cars and public transport
4. the writer's own prediction of future solutions
5. the increasing use of motor vehicles
6. the impact of the car on city development
Questions 7-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage
2? In boxes 7-13 on your answer sheet write
YES - if the statement agrees with the information
NO - if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN - if there is no information on this in the passage
7. Vehicle pollution is worse in European cities than anywhere else.
8. Transport by horse would be a useful alternative to motor vehicles.
9. Nowadays freight is not carried by water in the United Kingdom.
10. Most European cities were not designed for motor vehicles.
11. Technology alone cannot solve the problem of vehicle pollution.
12. People's choice of car and attitude to driving is a factor in the pollution problem.
13. Redesigning cities would be a short-term solution
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
ANSWER
READING 1
1. iii
2. i
3. iv
4. vi
5. plates/ the plates/ the tectonic plates
6. magma
7. ring of fire
8. 600 / 600 years/ for 600 years
9. water/ the water/ oceans/ the oceans
10. lave/ magma/ molten rock
11. India/ western India
12. explodes
13. gases / the gases / trapped gases
READING 2
1B
2D
3A
4E
5C
6B
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
7D
8 minds
9 memories
10 & 11 knowledge, experience (in either order) 12 speed
READING 3
1. iv
2. i
3. iii
4. v
5. B
6. B
7. A
8. B
9. NO
10. YES
11. YES
12. NOT GIVEN
13. NOT GIVEN
READING 4
1. Industry
2. Labour
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
3. Service
4. Decentralisation
5. Entertainment
6. Beautification
7. TRUE
8. FALSE
9. NOT GIVEN
10. TRUE
11. TRUE
12. NOT GIVEN
13. FALSE
READING 5
1. vii
2. iii
3. ii
4. iv
5. i
6. NO
7. NOT GIVEN
8. NO
9. YES
10. NOT GIVEN
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
11. YES
12. B
13. C
14. A
READING 6
1. sustamable
2. biodegradable
3. virgin fibre/ pulp
4. governments/ the government
5. advances
6. quality
7. contaminants
8. offices
9. sorted
10. (re)pulped
11. de-ink/ remove ink/ make white
12. Refined
READING 7
1, 2 & 3: B, D, E (In any order)
4. rigs and/or tanks
5. fish stocks
6. physical obstacles
7. concrete
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
8. commercial
9. Japan
10. sea [grass) beds/floor/bottom
11. bamboo and coconuts
12. management (control)
13. C
READING 8
1 - iii
2 - vii
3-i
4 - ix
5 - vi
6 - ii
7 – NO
8 - YES
9 - YES
10 - NOT GIVEN
11 - NO
12 - adolescents
13 - 1955
14 - Virginia Slims
READING 9
1. preserve
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
2. unaware
3. chance
4. friction
5 . rotating
6. percussion
7. Eskimos
8. despite
9. F
10. D
11. E
12. C
13. G
14. A
15. C
READING 10
1. C
2. F
3. E
4. H
5. A
6. D
7. NOTGIVEN
8. NO
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
9. NOTGIVEN
10. YES
11. YES
12. YES
13. NO
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
ĐỀ TEST TỔNG
Test 1
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–13, which are based on
Reading Passage 1 below.
Aphantasia: A life without mental images
Close your eyes and imagine walking along a sandy beach and then gazing over
the horizon as the Sun rises. How clear is the image that springs to mind?
Most people can readily conjure images inside their head - known as their mind's
eye. But this year scientists have described a condition, aphantasia, in which some
people are unable to visualise mental images.
Niel Kenmuir, from Lancaster, has always had a blind mind's eye. He knew he was
different even in childhood. "My stepfather, when I couldn't sleep, told me to count
sheep, and he explained what he meant, I tried to do it and I couldn't," he says. "I
couldn't see any sheep jumping over fences, there was nothing to count."
Our memories are often tied up in images, think back to a wedding or first day at
school. As a result, Niel admits, some aspects of his memory are "terrible", but he
is very good at remembering facts. And, like others with aphantasia, he struggles
to recognise faces. Yet he does not see aphantasia as a disability, but simply a
different way of experiencing life.
Mind's eye blind
Ironically, Niel now works in a bookshop, although he largely sticks to the nonfiction aisles. His condition begs the question what is going on inside his pictureless mind. I asked him what happens when he tries to picture his fiancee. "This is
the hardest thing to describe, what happens in my head when I think about things,"
he says. "When I think about my fiancee there is no image, but I am definitely
thinking about her, I know today she has her hair up at the back, she's brunette.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
But I'm not describing an image I am looking at, I'm remembering features about
her, that's the strangest thing and maybe that is a source of some regret."
The response from his mates is a very sympathetic: "You're weird." But while Niel
is very relaxed about his inability to picture things, it is often a cause of distress for
others. One person who took part in a study into aphantasia said he had started to
feel "isolated" and "alone" after discovering that other people could see images in
their heads. Being unable to reminisce about his mother years after her death led
to him being "extremely distraught".
The super-visualiser
At the other end of the spectrum is children's book illustrator, Lauren Beard, whose
work on the Fairytale Hairdresser series will be familiar to many six-year-olds. Her
career relies on the vivid images that leap into her mind's eye when she reads text
from her author. When I met her in her box-room studio in Manchester, she was
working on a dramatic scene in the next book. The text describes a baby perilously
climbing onto a chandelier.
"Straightaway I can visualise this grand glass chandelier in some sort of French kind
of ballroom, and the little baby just swinging off it and really heavy thick curtains,"
she says. "I think I have a strong imagination, so I can create the world and then
keep adding to it so it gets sort of bigger and bigger in my mind and the characters
too they sort of evolve. I couldn't really imagine what it's like to not imagine, I think
it must be a bit of a shame really."
Not many people have mental imagery as vibrant as Lauren or as blank as Niel. They
are the two extremes of visualisation. Adam Zeman, a professor of cognitive and
behavioural neurology, wants to compare the lives and experiences of people with
aphantasia and its polar-opposite hyperphantasia. His team, based at the
University of Exeter, coined the term aphantasia this year in a study in the journal
Cortex.
Prof Zeman tells the BBC: "People who have contacted us say they are really
delighted that this has been recognised and has been given a name, because they
have been trying to explain to people for years that there is this oddity that they
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
find hard to convey to others." How we imagine is clearly very subjective - one
person's vivid scene could be another's grainy picture. But Prof Zeman is certain
that aphantasia is real. People often report being able to dream in pictures, and
there have been reported cases of people losing the ability to think in images after
a brain injury.
He is adamant that aphantasia is "not a disorder" and says it may affect up to one
in 50 people. But he adds: "I think it makes quite an important difference to their
experience of life because many of us spend our lives with imagery hovering
somewhere in the mind's eye which we inspect from time to time, it's a variability
of human experience."
Questions 1–5
Do the following statements agree with the information in the IELTS reading text?
In boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE
if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE
if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN
if there is no information on this
1. Aphantasia is a condition, which describes people, for whom it is hard to visualise
mental images.
2. Niel Kenmuir was unable to count sheep in his head.
3. People with aphantasia struggle to remember personal traits and clothes of
different people.
4. Niel regrets that he cannot portray an image of his fiancee in his mind.
5. Inability to picture things in someone's head is often a cause of distress for a
person.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
6. All people with aphantasia start to feel 'isolated' or 'alone' at some point of their
lives.
7. Lauren Beard's career depends on her imagination.
8. The author met Lauren Beard when she was working on a comedy scene in her
next book.
Questions 9–13
Complete the sentences below.
Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.
9. Only a small fraction of people have imagination as ….. as Lauren does.
10. Hyperphantasia is ….. to aphantasia.
11.There are a lot of subjectivity in comparing people's imagination - somebody's
vivid scene could be another person's…..
12. Prof Zeman is ….. that aphantasia is not an illness.
13. Many people spend their lives with …… somewhere in the mind's eye.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14–26, which are based on
Reading Passage 2 below.
Life lessons from villains, crooks and gangsters
(A) A notorious Mexican drug baron’s audacious escape from prison in July doesn’t,
at first, appear to have much to teach corporate boards. But some in the business
world suggest otherwise. Beyond the morally reprehensible side of criminals' work,
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
some business gurus say organised crime syndicates, computer hackers, pirates
and others operating outside the law could teach legitimate corporations a thing
or two about how to hustle and respond to rapid change.
(B) Far from encouraging illegality, these gurus argue that – in the same way big
corporations sometimes emulate start-ups – business leaders could learn from the
underworld about flexibility, innovation and the ability to pivot quickly. “There is a
nimbleness to criminal organisations that legacy corporations [with large, complex
layers of management] don’t have,” said Marc Goodman, head of the Future
Crimes Institute and global cyber-crime advisor. While traditional businesses focus
on rules they have to follow, criminals look to circumvent them. “For criminals, the
sky is the limit and that creates the opportunity to think much, much bigger.”
(C) Joaquin Guzman, the head of the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel, for instance,
slipped out of his prison cell through a tiny hole in his shower that led to a milelong tunnel fitted with lights and ventilation. Making a break for it required creative
thinking, long-term planning and perseverance – essential skills similar to those
needed to achieve success in big business.
(D) While Devin Liddell, who heads brand strategy for Seattle-based design
consultancy, Teague, condemns the violence and other illegal activities he became
curious as to how criminal groups endure. Some cartels stay in business despite
multiple efforts by law enforcement on both sides of the US border and millions of
dollars from international agencies to shut them down. Liddell genuinely believes
there’s a lesson in longevity here. One strategy he underlined was how the bad
guys respond to change. In order to bypass the border between Mexico and the US,
for example, the Sinaloa cartel went to great lengths. It built a vast underground
tunnel, hired family members as border agents and even used a catapult to
circumvent a high-tech fence.
(E) By contrast, many legitimate businesses fail because they hesitate to adapt
quickly to changing market winds. One high-profile example is movie and game
rental company Blockbuster, which didn’t keep up with the market and lost
business to mail order video rentals and streaming technologies. The brand has all
but faded from view. Liddell argues the difference between the two groups is that
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
criminal organisations often have improvisation encoded into their daily behaviour,
while larger companies think of innovation as a set process. “This is a leadership
challenge,” said Liddell. “How well companies innovate and organise is a reflection
of leadership.”
Left-field thinking
(F) Cash-strapped start-ups also use unorthodox strategies to problem solve and
build their businesses up from scratch. This creativity and innovation is often borne
out of necessity, such as tight budgets. Both criminals and start-up founders
“question authority, act outside the system and see new and clever ways of doing
things,” said Goodman. “Either they become Elon Musk or El Chapo.” And, some
entrepreneurs aren’t even afraid to operate in legal grey areas in their effort to
disrupt the marketplace. The co-founders of music streaming service Napster, for
example, knowingly broke music copyright rules with their first online file sharing
service, but their technology paved the way for legal innovation as regulators
caught up.
(G) Goodman and others believe thinking hard about problem solving before
worrying about restrictions could prevent established companies falling victim to
rivals less constrained by tradition. In their book The Misfit Economy, Alexa Clay
and Kyra Maya Phillips examine how individuals can apply that mindset to become
more innovative and entrepreneurial within corporate structures. They studied not
just violent criminals like Somali pirates, but others who break the rules in order to
find creative solutions to their business problems, such as people living in the slums
of Mumbai or computer hackers. They picked out five common traits among this
group: the ability to hustle, pivot, provoke, hack and copycat.
(H) Clay gives a Saudi entrepreneur named Walid Abdul-Wahab as a prime example.
Abdul-Wahab worked with Amish farmers to bring camel milk to American
consumers even before US regulators approved it. Through perseverance, he
eventually found a network of Amish camel milk farmers and started selling the
product via social media. Now his company, Desert Farms, sells to giant mainstream
retailers like Whole Foods Market. Those on the fringe don’t always have the option
of traditional, corporate jobs and that forces them to think more creatively about
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
how to make a living, Clay said. They must develop grit and resilience in order to
last outside the cushy confines of cubicle life. “In many cases scarcity is the mother
of invention,” Clay said.
Questions 14-21
Reading Passage 2 has eight paragraphs A-H. Match the headings below with the
paragraphs. Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 14-21 on your answer sheet.
14. Jailbreak with creative thinking
15. Five common traits among rule-breakers
16. Comparison between criminals and traditional businessmen
17. Can drug baron's espace teach legitimate corporations?
18. Great entrepreneur
19. How criminal groups deceive the law
20. The difference between legal and illegal organisations
21. Similarity between criminals and start-up founders
Questions 22–25
Complete the sentences below.
Write ONLY ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 22–25 on your answer sheet.
22. To escape from a prison, Joaquin Guzman had to use such traits as creative
thinking, long-term planning and …..
23. The Sinaloa cartel built a grand underground tunnel and even used a …. to avoid
the fence.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
24. The main difference between two groups is that criminals, unlike large
corporations, often have
encoded into their daily life.
25. Due to being persuasive, Walid Abdul-Wahab found a ….. of Amish camel milk
farmers.
Question 26
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
26. The main goal of this article is to:
A Show different ways of illegal activity
B Give an overview of various criminals and their gangs
C Draw a comparison between legal and illegal business, providing examples
D Justify criminals with creative thinking
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27–40, which are based on
Reading Passage 3 below.
Britain needs strong TV industry
Comedy writer Armando Iannucci has called for an industry-wide defence of the
BBC and British programme-makers. "The Thick of It" creator made his remarks in
the annual MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival.
"It's more important than ever that we have more strong, popular channels... that
act as beacons, drawing audiences to the best content," he said. Speaking earlier,
Culture Secretary John Whittingdale rejected suggestions that he wanted to
dismantle the BBC.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
'Champion supporters'
Iannucci co-wrote "I'm Alan Partridge", wrote the movie "In the Loop" and created
and wrote the hit "HBO" and "Sky Atlantic show Veep". He delivered the 40th
annual MacTaggart Lecture, which has previously been given by Oscar winner Kevin
Spacey, former BBC director general Greg Dyke, Jeremy Paxman and Rupert
Murdoch. Iannucci said: "Faced with a global audience, British television needs its
champion supporters."
He continued his praise for British programming by saying the global success of
American TV shows had come about because they were emulating British
television. "The best US shows are modelling themselves on what used to make
British TV so world-beating," he said. "US prime-time schedules are now littered
with those quirky formats from the UK - the "Who Do You Think You Are"'s and the
variants on "Strictly Come Dancing" - as well as the single-camera non-audience
sitcom, which we brought into the mainstream first. We have changed
international viewing for the better."
With the renewal of the BBC's royal charter approaching, Iannucci also praised the
corporation. He said: "If public service broadcasting - one of the best things we've
ever done creatively as a country - if it was a car industry, our ministers would be
out championing it overseas, trying to win contracts, boasting of the British jobs
that would bring." In July, the government issued a green paper setting out issues
that will be explored during negotiations over the future of the BBC, including the
broadcaster's size, its funding and governance.
Primarily Mr Whittingdale wanted to appoint a panel of five people, but finally he
invited two more people to advise on the channer renewal, namely former Channel
4 boss Dawn Airey and journalism professor Stewart Purvis, a former editor-in-chief
of ITN. Iannucci bemoaned the lack of "creatives" involved in the discussions.
"When the media, communications and information industries make up nearly 8%
our GDP, larger than the car and oil and gas industries put together, we need to be
heard, as those industries are heard. But when I see the panel of experts who've
been asked by the culture secretary to take a root and branch look at the BBC, I
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
don't see anyone who is a part of that cast and crew list. I see executives, media
owners, industry gurus, all talented people - but not a single person who's made a
classic and enduring television show."
'Don't be modest'
Iannucci suggested one way of easing the strain on the licence fee was "by pushing
ourselves more commercially abroad".
"Use the BBC's name, one of the most recognised brands in the world," he said.
"And use the reputation of British television across all networks, to capitalise
financially oversees. Be more aggressive in selling our shows, through advertising,
through proper international subscription channels, freeing up BBC Worldwide to
be fully commercial, whatever it takes.
"Frankly, don't be icky and modest about making money, let's monetise the
bezeesus Mary and Joseph out of our programmes abroad so that money can come
back, take some pressure off the licence fee at home and be invested in even more
ambitious quality shows, that can only add to our value."
Mr Whittingdale, who was interviewed by ITV News' Alastair Stewart at the festival,
said he wanted an open debate about whether the corporation should do
everything it has done in the past. He said he had a slight sense that people who
rushed to defend the BBC were "trying to have an argument that's never been
started".
"Whatever my view is, I don't determine what programmes the BBC should show,"
he added. "That's the job of the BBC." Mr Whittingdale said any speculation that
the Conservative Party had always wanted to change the BBC due to issues such as
its editorial line was "absolute nonsense".
Questions 27-31
Do the following statements agree with the information in the IELTS reading text?
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
In boxes 27–31 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE
if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE
if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN
if there is no information on this
27. Armando Iannucci expressed a need of having more popular channels.
28. John Whittingdale wanted to dismantle the BBC.
29. Iannucci delivered the 30th annual MacTaggart Lecture.
30. Ianucci believes that British television has contributed to the success of
American TV-shows.
31. There have been negotiations over the future of the BBC in July.
Questions 32–35
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 32-35 on your answer sheet.
32. Ianucci praised everything EXCEPT
A US shows
B British shows
C Corporation
D British programming
33. To advise on the charter renewal Mr Whittingdale appointed a panel of
A five people
B two people
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
C seven people
D four people
34. Who of these people was NOT invited to the discussion concerning BBC
renewal?
A. Armando Iannucci
B. Dawn Airey
C. John Whittingdale
D. Stewart Purvis
35. There panel of experts lacks:
A. media owners
B . people who make enduring TV-shows
C. gurus of Television industry
D. top executives
Questions 36–40
Complete the summary below.
Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 37–40 on your answer sheet.
Easing the strain on the licence fees
Iannucci recommended increasing BBC's profit by pushing ourselves more 36. …..
He suggests being more aggressive in selling British shows, through advertising and
proper international 37……. Also, he invokes producers to stop being 38. …. and
modest about making money and invest into even 39…… quality shows. However,
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Mr Whittingdale denied any 40….. that the Conservative Party had always wanted
to change the BBC because of its editorial line.
ANSWERS
Each question correctly answered scores 1 mark. Correct spelling is needed in all
answers.
Section 1
1. False
2. True
3. Not Given
4. True
5. True
6. Not Given
7. True
8. False
9. Vibrant
10. Polar-opposite
11. Grainy picture
12. Adamant
13. Imagery hovering
Section 2
14. C
15. G
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
16. B
17. A
18. H
19. D
20. E
21. F
22. Perseverance
23. Catapult
24. Improvisation
25. Network
26. C
Section 3
27. True
28. False
29. Not Given
30. True
31. False
32. A
33. C
34. A
35. B
36. commercially abroad
37. subscription channels
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
38. icky
39. more ambitious
40. speculation
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
TEST 2
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–16, which are based on
Reading Passage 1 below.
Sea monsters are the stuff of legend - lurking not just in the depths of the oceans,
but also the darker corners of our minds. What is it that draws us to these
creatures?
"This inhuman place makes human monsters," wrote Stephen King in his novel
The Shining. Many academics agree that monsters lurk in the deepest recesses,
they prowl through our ancestral minds appearing in the half-light, under the bed
- or at the bottom of the sea.
"They don't really exist, but they play a huge role in our mindscapes, in our
dreams, stories, nightmares, myths and so on," says Matthias Classen, assistant
professor of literature and media at Aarhus University in Denmark, who studies
monsters in literature. "Monsters say something about human psychology, not the
world."
One Norse legend talks of the Kraken, a deep sea creature that was the curse of
fishermen. If sailors found a place with many fish, most likely it was the monster
that was driving them to the surface. If it saw the ship it would pluck the hapless
sailors from the boat and drag them to a watery grave.
This terrifying legend occupied the mind and pen of the poet Alfred Lord
Tennyson too. In his short 1830 poem The Kraken he wrote: "Below the thunders
of the upper deep, / Far far beneath in the abysmal sea, / His ancient, dreamless,
uninvaded sleep / The Kraken sleepeth."
The deeper we travel into the ocean, the deeper we delve into our own psyche.
And when we can go no further - there lurks the Kraken.
Most likely the Kraken is based on a real creature - the giant squid. The huge
mollusc takes pride of place as the personification of the terrors of the deep sea.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Sailors would have encountered it at the surface, dying, and probably thrashing
about. It would have made a weird sight, "about the most alien thing you can
imagine," says Edith Widder, CEO at the Ocean Research and Conservation
Association.
"It has eight lashing arms and two slashing tentacles growing straight out of its
head and it's got serrated suckers that can latch on to the slimiest of prey and it's
got a parrot beak that can rip flesh. It's got an eye the size of your head, it's got a
jet propulsion system and three hearts that pump blue blood."
The giant squid continued to dominate stories of sea monsters with the famous
1870 novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne. Verne's
submarine fantasy is a classic story of puny man against a gigantic squid.
The monster needed no embellishment - this creature was scary enough, and
Verne incorporated as much fact as possible into the story, says Emily Alder from
Edinburgh Napier University. "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and
another contemporaneous book, Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, both tried to
represent the giant squid as they might have been actual zoological animals, much
more taking the squid as a biological creature than a mythical creature." It was a
given that the squid was vicious and would readily attack humans given the chance.
That myth wasn't busted until 2012, when Edith Widder and her colleagues were
the first people to successfully film giant squid under water and see first-hand the
true character of the monster of the deep. They realised previous attempts to film
squid had failed because the bright lights and noisy thrusters on submersibles had
frightened them away.
By quietening down the engines and using bioluminescence to attract it, they
managed to see this most extraordinary animal in its natural habitat. It serenely
glided into view, its body rippled with metallic colours of bronze and silver. Its huge,
intelligent eye watched the submarine warily as it delicately picked at the bait with
its beak. It was balletic and mesmeric. It could not have been further from the
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
gnashing, human-destroying creature of myth and literature. In reality this is a
gentle giant that is easily scared and pecks at its food.
Another giant squid lies peacefully in the Natural History Museum in London, in
the Spirit Room, where it is preserved in a huge glass case. In 2004 it was caught in
a fishing net off the Falkland Islands and died at the surface. The crew immediately
froze its body and it was sent to be preserved in the museum by the Curator of
Molluscs, Jon Ablett. It is called Archie, an affectionate short version of its Latin
name Architeuthis dux. It is the longest preserved specimen of a giant squid in the
world.
"It really has brought science to life for many people," says Ablett. "Sometimes
I feel a bit overshadowed by Archie, most of my work is on slugs and snails but
unfortunately most people don't want to talk about that!"
And so today we can watch Archie's graceful relative on film and stare Archie
herself (she is a female) eye-to-eye in a museum. But have we finally slain the
monster of the deep? Now we know there is nothing to be afraid of, can the Kraken
finally be laid to rest? Probably not says Classen. "We humans are afraid of the
strangest things. They don't need to be realistic. There's no indication that
enlightenment and scientific progress has banished the monsters from the
shadows of our imaginations. We will continue to be afraid of very strange things,
including probably sea monsters."
Indeed we are. The Kraken made a fearsome appearance in the blockbuster
series Pirates of the Caribbean. It forced Captain Jack Sparrow to face his demons
in a terrifying face-to-face encounter. Pirates needed the monstrous Kraken,
nothing else would do. Or, as the German film director Werner Herzog put it, "What
would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep
without dreams."
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Questions 1–7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage
1?
In boxes 1–7 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE
if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE
if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN
if there is no information on this
1. Matthias Classen is unsure about the possibility of monster's existence.
2. Kraken is probably based on an imaginary animal.
3. Previous attempts on filming the squid had failed due to the fact that the
creature was scared.
4. Giant squid was caught alive in 2004 and brought to the museum.
5. Jon Ablett admits that he likes Archie.
6. According to Classen, people can be scared both by imaginary and real monsters.
7. Werner Herzog suggests that Kraken is essential to the ocean.
Questions 8–12
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 8–12 on your answer sheet.
8. Who wrote a novel about a giant squid?
A. Emily Alder
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
B. Stephen King
C. Alfred Lord Tennyson
D. Jules Verne
9. What, of the featuring body parts, mollusc DOESN'T have?
A. two tentacles
B. serrated suckers
C. beak
D. smooth suckers
10. Which of the following applies to the bookish Kraken?
A. notorious
B. scary
C. weird
D. harmless
11. Where can we see a giant squid?
A. at the museum
B. at a seaside
C. on TV
D. in supermarkets
12. The main purpose of the text is to:
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
A. help us to understand more about both mythical and biological creatures of the
deep
B. illustrate the difference between Kraken and squid
C. shed the light on the mythical creatures of the ocean
D. compare Kraken to its real relative
Questions 13–16
Complete the sentences below.
Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 13–16 on your answer sheet.
13. According to the Victor Hugo's novel, the squid would ….. if he had such
opportunity.
14. The real squid appeared to be …. and ….
15. Archie must be the …. of its kind on Earth.
16. We are able to encounter the Kraken's …. in a movie franchise.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 17–27, which are based on
Reading Passage 2 below.
The atom bomb was one of the defining inventions of the 20th Century. So how
did science fiction writer HG Wells predict its invention three decades before the
first detonations?
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
(A) Imagine you're the greatest fantasy writer of your age. One day you dream
up the idea of a bomb of infinite power. You call it the "atomic bomb". HG Wells
first imagined a uranium-based hand grenade that "would continue to explode
indefinitely" in his 1914 novel The World Set Free. He even thought it would be
dropped from planes. What he couldn't predict was how a strange conjunction of
his friends and acquaintances - notably Winston Churchill, who'd read all Wells's
novels twice, and the physicist Leo Szilard - would turn the idea from fantasy to
reality, leaving them deeply tormented by the scale of destructive power that it
unleashed.
(B) The story of the atom bomb starts in the Edwardian age, when scientists such
as Ernest Rutherford were grappling with a new way of conceiving the physical
world. The idea was that solid elements might be made up of tiny particles in atoms.
"When it became apparent that the Rutherford atom had a dense nucleus, there
was a sense that it was like a coiled spring," says Andrew Nahum, curator of the
Science Museum's Churchill's Scientists exhibition. Wells was fascinated with the
new discoveries. He had a track record of predicting technological innovations.
Winston Churchill credited Wells for coming up with the idea of using aeroplanes
and tanks in combat ahead of World War One.
(C) The two men met and discussed ideas over the decades, especially as
Churchill, a highly popular writer himself, spent the interwar years out of political
power, contemplating the rising instability of Europe. Churchill grasped the danger
of technology running ahead of human maturity, penning a 1924 article in the Pall
Mall Gazette called "Shall we all commit suicide?". In the article, Churchill wrote:
"Might a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to
destroy a whole block of buildings - nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons
of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?" This idea of the orange-sized bomb is
credited by Graham Farmelo, author of Churchill's Bomb, directly to the imagery of
The World Set Free.
(D) By 1932 British scientists had succeeded in splitting the atom for the first
time by artificial means, although some believed it couldn't produce huge amounts
of energy. But the same year the Hungarian emigre physicist Leo Szilard read The
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
World Set Free. Szilard believed that the splitting of the atom could produce vast
energy. He later wrote that Wells showed him "what the liberation of atomic
energy on a large scale would mean". Szilard suddenly came up with the answer in
September 1933 - the chain reaction - while watching the traffic lights turn green
in Russell Square in London. He wrote: "It suddenly occurred to me that if we could
find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons
when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large
mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction."
(E) In that eureka moment, Szilard also felt great fear - of how a bustling city like
London and all its inhabitants could be destroyed in an instant as he reflected in his
memoir published in 1968:
"Knowing what it would mean - and I knew because I had read HG Wells - I did not
want this patent to become public." The Nazis were on the rise and Szilard was
deeply anxious about who else might be working on the chain reaction theory and
an atomic Bomb. Wells's novel Things To Come, turned into a 1936 film, The Shape
of Things to Come, accurately predicted aerial bombardment and an imminent
devastating world war. In 1939 Szilard drafted the letter Albert Einstein sent to
President Roosevelt warning America that Germany was stockpiling uranium. The
Manhattan Project was born.
(F) Szilard and several British scientists worked on it with the US military's
massive financial backing. Britons and Americans worked alongside each other in
"silos" - each team unaware of how their work fitted together. They ended up
moving on from the original enriched uranium "gun" method, which had been
conceived in Britain, to create a plutonium implosion weapon instead. Szilard
campaigned for a demonstration bomb test in front of the Japanese ambassador
to give them a chance to surrender. He was horrified that it was instead dropped
on a city. In 1945 Churchill was beaten in the general election and in another shock,
the US government passed the 1946 McMahon Act, shutting Britain out of access
to the atomic technology it had helped create. William Penney, one of the returning
Los Alamos physicists, led the team charged by Prime Minister Clement Atlee with
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
somehow putting together their individual pieces of the puzzle to create a British
bomb on a fraction of the American budget.
(G) "It was a huge intellectual feat," Andrew Nahum observes. "Essentially they
reworked the calculations that they'd been doing in Los Alamos. They had the
services of Klaus Fuchs, who [later] turned out to be an atom spy passing
information to the Soviet Union, but he also had a phenomenal memory." Another
British physicist, Patrick Blackett, who discussed the Bomb after the war with a
German scientist in captivity, observed that there were no real secrets. According
to Nahum he said: "It's a bit like making an omelette. Not everyone can make a
good one."When Churchill was re-elected in 1951 he "found an almost complete
weapon ready to test and was puzzled and fascinated by how Atlee had buried the
costs in the budget", says Nahum. "He was very conflicted about whether to go
ahead with the test and wrote about whether we should have 'the art and not the
article'. Meaning should it be enough to have the capability… [rather] than to have
a dangerous weapon in the armoury."
(H) Churchill was convinced to go ahead with the test, but the much more
powerful hydrogen bomb developed three years later worried him greatly.HG
Wells died in 1946. He had been working on a film sequel to The Shape of Things
To Come that was to include his concerns about the now-realised atomic bomb
he'd first imagined. But it was never made. Towards the end of his life, says Nahum,
Wells's friendship with Churchill "cooled a little". "Wells considered Churchill as an
enlightened but tarnished member of the ruling classes." And Churchill had little
time for Wells's increasingly fanciful socialist utopian ideas.
(I) Wells believed technocrats and scientists would ultimately run a peaceful new
world order like in The Shape of Things To Come, even if global war destroyed the
world as we knew it first. Churchill, a former soldier, believed in the lessons of
history and saw diplomacy as the only way to keep mankind from self-destruction
in the atomic age. Wells's scientist acquaintance Leo Szilard stayed in America and
campaigned for civilian control of atomic energy, equally pessimistic about Wells's
idea of a bold new scientist-led world order. If anything Szilard was tormented by
the power he had helped unleash. In 1950, he predicted a cobalt bomb that would
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
destroy all life on the planet. In Britain, the legacy of the Bomb was a remarkable
period of elite scientific innovation as the many scientists who had worked on
weaponry or radar returned to their civilian labs. They gave us the first commercial
jet airliner, the Comet, near-supersonic aircraft and rockets, highly engineered
computers, and the Jodrell Bank giant moveable radio telescope.
(J) The latter had nearly ended the career of its champion, physicist Bernard
Lovell, with its huge costs, until the 1957 launch of Sputnik, when it emerged that
Jodrell Bank had the only device in the West that could track it. Nahum says Lovell
reflected that "during the war the question was never what will something cost.
The question was only can you do it and how soon can we have it? And that was
the spirit he took into his peacetime science." Austerity and the tiny size of the
British market, compared with America, were to scupper those dreams. But though
the Bomb created a new terror, for a few years at least, Britain saw a vision of a
benign atomic future, too and believed it could be the shape of things to come.
Questions 17–25
Reading Passage 2 has ten paragraphs, A–J.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A–J, in boxes 17–25 on your answer sheet. Note that one
paragraph is not used.
17. Scientific success
18. Worsening relations
19. The dawn of the new project
20. Churchill's confusion
21. Different perspectives
22. Horrifying prediction
23. Leaving Britain behind the project
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
24. Long-term discussion
25. New idea
Questions 26–27
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D
Write the correct letter in boxes 26–27 on your answer sheet.
26. How can you describe the relations between Churchill and Wells throughout
the years?
A.
B.
C.
D.
passionate → friendly → adverse
curious → friendly
respectful → friendly → inhospitable
friendly → respectful → hostile
27. What is the type of this text?
A.
B.
C.
D.
science-fiction story
article from the magazine
historical text
Wells autobiography
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28–40, which are based on
Reading Passage 3 below.
As More Tech Start-Ups Stay Private, So Does the Money
Not long ago, if you were a young, brash technologist with a world-conquering
start-up idea, there was a good chance you spent much of your waking life working
toward a single business milestone: taking your company public.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Though luminaries of the tech industry have always expressed skepticism and
even hostility toward the finance industry, tech’s dirty secret was that it looked to
Wall Street and the ritual of a public offering for affirmation — not to mention
wealth.
But something strange has happened in the last couple of years: The initial public
offering of stock has become déclassé. For start-up entrepreneurs and their
employees across Silicon Valley, an initial public offering is no longer a main goal.
Instead, many founders talk about going public as a necessary evil to be postponed
as long as possible because it comes with more problems than benefits.
“If you can get $200 million from private sources, then yeah, I don’t want my
company under the scrutiny of the unwashed masses who don’t understand my
business,” said Danielle Morrill, the chief executive of Mattermark, a start-up that
organizes and sells information about the start-up market. “That’s actually
terrifying to me.
Silicon Valley’s sudden distaste for the I.P.O. — rooted in part in Wall Street’s
skepticism of new tech stocks — may be the single most important psychological
shift underlying the current tech boom. Staying private affords start-up executives
the luxury of not worrying what outsiders think and helps them avoid the quarterly
earnings treadmill.
It also means Wall Street is doing what it failed to do in the last tech boom: using
traditional metrics like growth and profitability to price companies. Investors have
been tough on Twitter, for example, because its user growth has slowed. They have
been tough on Box, the cloud-storage company that went public last year, because
it remains unprofitable. And the e-commerce company Zulily, which went public
last year, was likewise punished when it cut its guidance for future sales.
Scott Kupor, the managing partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen
Horowitz, and his colleagues said in a recent report that despite all the attention
start-ups have received in recent years, tech stocks are not seeing unusually high
valuations. In fact, their share of the overall market has remained stable for 14
years, and far off the peak of the late 1990s.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
That unwillingness to cut much slack to young tech companies limits risk for
regular investors. If the bubble pops, the unwashed masses, if that’s what we are,
aren’t as likely to get washed out.
Private investors, on the other hand, are making big bets on so-called unicorns
— the Silicon Valley jargon for start-up companies valued at more than a billion
dollars. If many of those unicorns flop, most Americans will escape unharmed,
because losses will be confined to venture capitalists and hedge funds that have
begun to buy into tech start-ups, as well as tech founders and their employees.
The reluctance — and sometimes inability — to go public is spurring the
unicorns. By relying on private investors for a longer period of time, start-ups get
more runway to figure out sustainable business models. To delay their entrance
into the public markets, firms like Airbnb, Dropbox, Palantir, Pinterest, Uber and
several other large start-ups are raising hundreds of millions, and in some cases
billions, that they would otherwise have gained through an initial public offering.
“These companies are going public, just in the private market,” Dan Levitan, the
managing partner of the venture capital firm Maveron, told me recently. He means
that in many cases, hedge funds and other global investors that would have bought
shares in these firms after an I.P.O. are deciding to go into late-stage private
rounds. There is even an oxymoronic term for the act of obtaining private money
in place of a public offering: It’s called a “private I.P.O.”
The delay in I.P.O.s has altered how some venture capital firms do business.
Rather than waiting for an initial offering, Maveron, for instance, says it now sells
its stake in a start-up to other, larger private investors once it has made about 100
times its initial investment. It is the sort of return that once was only possible after
an I.P.O.
But there is also a downside to the new aversion to initial offerings. When the
unicorns do eventually go public and begin to soar — or whatever it is that
fantastical horned beasts tend to do when they’re healthy — the biggest winners
will be the private investors that are now bearing most of the risk.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
It used to be that public investors who got in on the ground floor of an initial
offering could earn historic gains. If you invested $1,000 in Amazon at its I.P.O. in
1997, you would now have nearly $250,000. If you had invested $1,000 in Microsoft
in 1986, you would have close to half a million. Public investors today are unlikely
to get anywhere near such gains from tech I.P.O.s. By the time tech companies
come to the market, the biggest gains have already been extracted by private
backers.
Just 53 technology companies went public in 2014, which is around the median
since 1980, but far fewer than during the boom of the late 1990s and 2000, when
hundreds of tech companies went public annually, according to statistics
maintained by Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida. Today’s
companies are also waiting longer. In 2014, the typical tech company hitting the
markets was 11 years old, compared with a median age of seven years for tech
I.P.O.s since 1980.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve asked several founders and investors why they’re
waiting; few were willing to speak on the record about their own companies, but
their answers all amounted to “What’s the point?”
Initial public offerings were also ways to compensate employees and founders
who owned lots of stock, but there are now novel mechanisms — such as selling
shares on a secondary market — for insiders to cash in on some of their shares in
private companies. Still, some observers cautioned that the new trend may be a
bad deal for employees who aren’t given much information about the company’s
performance.
“One thing employees may be confused about is when companies tell them,
‘We’re basically doing a private I.P.O.,’ it might make them feel like there’s less risk
than there really is,” said Ms. Morrill of Mattermark. But she said it was hard to
persuade people that their paper gains may never materialize. “The Kool-Aid is
really strong,” she said.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
If the delay in I.P.O.s becomes a normal condition for Silicon Valley, some
observers say tech companies may need to consider new forms of compensation
for workers. “We probably need to fundamentally rethink how do private
companies compensate employees, because that’s going to be an issue,” said Mr.
Kupor, of Andreessen Horowitz.
During a recent presentation for Andreessen Horowitz’s limited partners — the
institutions that give money to the venture firm — Marc Andreessen, the firm’s cofounder, told the journalist Dan Primack that he had never seen a sharper
divergence in how investors treat public- and private-company chief executives.
“They tell the public C.E.O., ‘Give us the money back this quarter,’ and they tell the
private C.E.O., ‘No problem, go for 10 years,’ ” Mr. Andreessen said.
At some point this tension will be resolved. “Private valuations will not forever
be higher than public valuations,” said Mr. Levitan, of Maveron. “So the question
is, Will private markets capitulate and go down or will public markets go up?”
If the private investors are wrong, employees, founders and a lot of hedge funds
could be in for a reckoning. But if they’re right, it will be you and me wearing the
frown — the public investors who missed out on the next big thing.
Questions 28–31
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 28–31 on your answer sheet.
28. How much funds would you gain by now, if you had invested 1000$ in the
Amazon in 1997?
A.
B.
C.
D.
250,000$
close to 500,000$
It is not stated in the text
No funds
29. Nowadays founders talk about going public as a:
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
A.
B.
C.
D.
necessity.
benefit.
possibility.
profit.
30. In which time period was the biggest number of companies going public?
A.
B.
C.
D.
early 1990s
late 1900s and 2000s
1980s
late 1990s
31. According to the text, which of the following is true?
A. Private valuations may be forever higher than public ones.
B. Public valuations eventually will become even less valuable.
C. The main question is whether the public market increase or the private market
decrease.
D. The pressure might last for a long time.
Questions 32–36
Complete the sentences below.
Write ONLY ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 32–36 on your answer sheet.
32. Skepticism was always expected by the ….. of tech industry.
33. The new aversion to initial offerings has its …..
34. Selling shares on a secondary market is considered a ….. mechanism.
35. Workers' compensation might be an …..
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
36. The public investors who failed to participate in the next big thing might be the
ones wearing the …..
Questions 37–40
Do the following statements agree with the information in the IELTS reading text?
In boxes 37–40 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE
if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE
if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN
if there is no information on this
37. Private investors are bearing most of the risk.
38. Not many investors were willing to speak on the record.
39. The typical tech company hitting the markets in 1990s was 5 years old.
40. Marc Andreessen, the firm's co-founder, expressed
divergency in how investors treat public.
amazement with
ANSWERS
Each question correctly answered scores 1 mark. Correct spelling is needed in all
answers.
Section 1
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
False
False
True
False
Not Given
True
Not Given
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
8. D
9. D
10.B
11.A
12.A
13.readily attack (humans)
14.balletic, mesmeric
15.longest preserved specimen
16.fearsome appearance
Section 2
17. D
18. H
19. E
20. G
21. I
22. A
23. F
24. C
25. B
26. C
27. B
Section 3
28. A
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
29. A
30. B
31. C
32. luminaries
33. downside
34. novel
35. issue
36. frown
37. True
38. True
39. Not Given
40. False
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
TEST 3
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–14, which are based on
Reading Passage 1 below.
The students’ problem
(A) The college and university accommodation crisis in Ireland has become ‘so
chronic’ that students are being forced to sleep rough, share a bed with strangers
– or give up on studying altogether.
(B) The deputy president of the Union of Students in Ireland, Kevin Donoghue, said
the problem has become particularly acute in Dublin. He told the Irish Mirror:
“Students are so desperate, they’re not just paying through the nose to share
rooms – they’re paying to share a bed with complete strangers. It reached crisis
point last year and it’s only getting worse. “We’ve heard of students sleeping rough;
on sofas, floors and in their cars and I have to stress there’s no student in the
country that hasn’t been touched by this crisis. “Commutes – which would once
have been considered ridiculous – are now normal, whether that’s by bus, train or
car and those who drive often end up sleeping in their car if they’ve an early start
the next morning.”
(C) Worry is increasing over the problems facing Ireland's 200,000 students as the
number increases over the next 15 years. With 165,000 full-time students in Ireland
– and that figure expected to increase to around 200,000 within the next 15 years
–fears remain that there aren’t enough properties to accommodate current
numbers.
(D) Mr. Donoghue added: “The lack of places to live is actually forcing schoolleavers out of college altogether. Either they don’t go in the first place or end up
having to drop out because they can’t get a room and commuting is just too
expensive, stressful and difficult.”
(E) Claims have emerged from the country that some students have been forced to
sleep in cars, or out on the streets, because of the enormous increases to rent in
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
the capital. Those who have been lucky enough to find a place to live have had to
do so ‘blind’ by paying for accommodation, months in advance, they haven’t even
seen just so they will have a roof over their head over the coming year.
(F) According to the Irish Independent, it’s the ‘Google effect’ which is to blame. As
Google and other blue-chip companies open offices in and around Dublin’s
docklands area, which are ‘on the doorstep of the city’, international professionals
have been flocking to the area which will boast 2,600 more apartments, on 50 acres
of undeveloped land, over the next three to 10 years.
(G) Rent in the area soared by 15 per cent last year and a two-bedroom apartment
overlooking the Grand Canal costs €2,100 (£1,500) per month to rent. Another twobedroom apartment at Hanover Dock costs €2,350 (almost £1,700) with a threebedroom penthouse – measuring some 136 square metres – sits at €4,500 (£3,200)
per month in rent.
(H) Ireland’s Higher Education Authority admitted this was the first time they had
seen circumstances ‘so extreme’ and the Fianna Fáil party leader, Michael Martin,
urged on the Government to intervene. He said: “It is very worrying that all of the
progress in opening up access to higher education in the last decade – particularly
for the working poor – is being derailed because of an entirely foreseeable
accommodation crisis.
Questions 1-8
Reading Passage 1 has eight paragraphs, A–H.
Choose the most suitable paragraph headings from the list of headings and write
the correct letter, A–H, in boxes 1–8 on your answer sheet.
1. Cons of the commuting
2. Thing that students have to go through
3. Commutes have become common in Ireland nowadays
4. Danger of the overflow
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
5. Cause of the problems
6. Pricing data
7. Regression
8. Eyeless choice
Questions 9–14
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage
1?
In boxes 9–14 on your answer sheet, writE
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
9. The accommodation problem in Ireland is especially bad in Dublin.
10. Commutes are considered ridiculous.
11. The number of students in Ireland is not likely to increase in the future.
12. Due to the opening of the new offices around Dublin, the number of local
restaurants will go up significantly over the next 3 to 10 years.
13. The rent price went up by 15% last year.
14. Michael Martin stated that crisis could have been omitted if the government
reacted properly.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 15–30, which are based on
Reading Passage 2 below.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
The science of sleep
We spend a third of our lives doing it. Napoleon, Florence Nightingale and
Margaret Thatcher got by on four hours a night. Thomas Edison claimed it was
waste of time.
So why do we sleep? This is a question that has baffled scientists for centuries
and the answer is, no one is really sure. Some believe that sleep gives the body a
chance to recuperate from the day's activities but in reality, the amount of energy
saved by sleeping for even eight hours is miniscule - about 50 kCal, the same
amount of energy in a piece of toast.
With continued lack of sufficient sleep, the part of the brain that controls
language, memory, planning and sense of time is severely affected, practically
shutting down. In fact, 17 hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in
performance equivalent to a blood alcohol level of 0.05% (two glasses of wine). This
is the legal drink driving limit in the UK.
Research also shows that sleep-deprived individuals often have difficulty in
responding to rapidly changing situations and making rational judgements. In real
life situations, the consequences are grave and lack of sleep is said to have been be
a contributory factor to a number of international disasters such as Exxon Valdez,
Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and the Challenger shuttle explosion.
Sleep deprivation not only has a major impact on cognitive functioning but also
on emotional and physical health. Disorders such as sleep apnoea which result in
excessive daytime sleepiness have been linked to stress and high blood pressure.
Research has also suggested that sleep loss may increase the risk of obesity because
chemicals and hormones that play a key role in controlling appetite and weight gain
are released during sleep.
What happens when we sleep?
What happens every time we get a bit of shut eye? Sleep occurs in a recurring
cycle of 90 to 110 minutes and is divided into two categories: non-REM (which is
further split into four stages) and REM sleep.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Non-REM sleep
Stage one: Light Sleep
During the first stage of sleep, we're half awake and half asleep. Our muscle
activity slows down and slight twitching may occur. This is a period of light sleep,
meaning we can be awakened easily at this stage.
Stage two: True Sleep
Within ten minutes of light sleep, we enter stage two, which lasts around 20
minutes. The breathing pattern and heart rate start to slow down. This period
accounts for the largest part of human sleep.
Stages three and four: Deep Sleep
During stage three, the brain begins to produce delta waves, a type of wave that
is large (high amplitude) and slow (low frequency). Breathing and heart rate are at
their lowest levels.
Stage four is characterised by rhythmic breathing and limited muscle activity. If
we are awakened during deep sleep we do not adjust immediately and often feel
groggy and disoriented for several minutes after waking up. Some children
experience bed-wetting, night terrors, or sleepwalking during this stage.
REM sleep
The first rapid eye movement (REM) period usually begins about 70 to 90
minutes after we fall asleep. We have around three to five REM episodes a night.
Although we are not conscious, the brain is very active - often more so than when
we are awake. This is the period when most dreams occur. Our eyes dart around
(hence the name), our breathing rate and blood pressure rise. However, our bodies
are effectively paralysed, said to be nature's way of preventing us from acting out
our dreams.
After REM sleep, the whole cycle begins again.
How much sleep is required?
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
There is no set amount of time that everyone needs to sleep, since it varies from
person to person. Results from the sleep profiler indicate that people like to sleep
anywhere between 5 and 11 hours, with the average being 7.75 hours.
Jim Horne from Loughborough University's Sleep Research Centre has a simple
answer though: "The amount of sleep we require is what we need not to be sleepy
in the daytime."
Even animals require varied amounts of sleep:
Species
Python
Tiger
Cat
Chimpanzee
Sheep
African elephant
Giraffe
Average total sleep time per day
18 hrs
15.8 hrs
12.1 hrs
9.7 hrs
3.8 hrs
3.3 hrs
1.9 hr
The current world record for the longest period without sleep is 11 days, set by
Randy Gardner in 1965. Four days into the research, he began hallucinating. This
was followed by a delusion where he thought he was a famous footballer.
Surprisingly, Randy was actually functioning quite well at the end of his research
and he could still beat the scientist at pinball.
Questions 15–22
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage
1?
In boxes 15–22 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE
if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE
if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN
if there is no information on this
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
15. Thomas Edison slept 4 hours a night.
16. Scientists don't have a certain answer for why we have to sleep.
17. Lack of sleep might cause various problems.
18. Sleep-deprivation may be the cause of anorexia.
19. There are four stages of the REM sleep.
20. According to Jim Horne, we need to sleep as much as it takes to not be sleepy
during the day.
21. Giraffes require less sleep than dogs.
22. After four sleepless days, Randy had a delusion about him being a football
celebrity.
Questions 23–27
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 23–27 on your answer sheet.
23. During the Light Sleep stage:
A.
B.
C.
D.
Muscle activity increases
Jiggling might occur
It is not easy to be woken up
After waking up, one may experience slight disorientation
24. Heart rate is at the lowest level during:
A.
B.
C.
D.
Light Sleep stage
Rem Sleep
True Sleep stage
Third Sleep stage
25. The brain activity is really high:
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
A.
B.
C.
D.
During REM sleep
During the stage of True Sleep
When we are awake
During the Deep sleep stage
26. Humans require at least:
A.
B.
C.
D.
7.75 hours of sleep
5 hours of sleep
8 hours
There is no set amount of time
27. Pythons need:
A.
B.
C.
D.
Less sleep than tigers
Twice as much sleep as cats
Almost ten times more sleep than giraffes
More sleep than any other animal in the world
Questions 28–30
Complete the sentences below.
Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 28–30 on your answer sheet.
28. If we continually lack sleep, the specific part of our brain that controls language,
is …. .
29. True Sleep lasts approximately …..
30. Although during REM sleep our breathing rate and blood pressure rise, our
bodies ….
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 31–40, which are based on
Reading Passage 3 below.
A new study finds that half of human cultures don't practice romantic lip-on-lip
kissing. Animals don't tend to bother either. So how did it evolve?
When you think about it, kissing is strange and a bit icky. You share saliva with
someone, sometimes for a prolonged period of time. One kiss could pass on 80
million bacteria, not all of them good.
Yet everyone surely remembers their first kiss, in all its embarrassing or
delightful detail, and kissing continues to play a big role in new romances.
At least, it does in some societies. People in western societies may assume that
romantic kissing is a universal human behaviour, but a new analysis suggests that
less than half of all cultures actually do it. Kissing is also extremely rare in the animal
kingdom.
So what's really behind this odd behaviour? If it is useful, why don't all animals
do it – and all humans too? It turns out that the very fact that most animals don't
kiss helps explain why some do.
According to a new study of kissing preferences, which looked at 168 cultures
from around the world, only 46% of cultures kiss in the romantic sense.
Previous estimates had put the figure at 90%. The new study excluded parents
kissing their children, and focused solely on romantic lip-on-lip action between
couples.
Many hunter-gatherer groups showed no evidence of kissing or desire to do so.
Some even considered it revolting. The Mehinaku tribe in Brazil reportedly said it
was "gross". Given that hunter-gatherer groups are the closest modern humans get
to living our ancestral lifestyle, our ancestors may not have been kissing either.
The study overturns the belief that romantic kissing is a near-universal human
behaviour, says lead author William Jankowiak of the University of Nevada in Las
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Vegas. Instead it seems to be a product of western societies, passed on from one
generation to the next, he says. There is some historical evidence to back that up.
Kissing as we do it today seems to be a fairly recent invention, says Rafael
Wlodarski of the University of Oxford in the UK. He has trawled through records to
find evidence of how kissing has changed. The oldest evidence of a kissing-type
behaviour comes from Hindu Vedic Sanskrit texts from over 3,500 years ago. Kissing
was described as inhaling each other's soul.
In contrast, Egyptian hieroglyphics picture people close to each other rather than
pressing their lips together.
So what is going on? Is kissing something we do naturally, but that some cultures
have suppressed? Or is it something modern humans have invented?
We can find some insight by looking at animals.
Our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, do kiss. Primatologist Frans de
Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, has seen many instances of chimps
kissing and hugging after conflict.
For chimpanzees, kissing is a form of reconciliation. It is more common among
males than females. In other words, it is not a romantic behaviour.
Their cousins the bonobos kiss more often, and they often use tongues while
doing so. That's perhaps not surprising, because bonobos are highly sexual beings.
When two humans meet, we might shake hands. Bonobos have sex: the socalled bonobo handshake. They also use sex for many other kinds of bonding. So
their kisses are not particularly romantic, either.
These two apes are exceptions. As far as we know, other animals do not kiss at
all. They may nuzzle or touch their faces together, but even those that have lips
don't share saliva or purse and smack their lips together. They don't need to.
Take wild boars. Males produce a pungent smell that females find extremely
attractive. The key chemical is a pheromone called androstenone that triggers the
females' desire to mate.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
From a female's point of view this is a good thing, because males with the most
androstonene are also the most fertile. Her sense of smell is so acute, she doesn't
need to get close enough to kiss the male.
The same is true of many other mammals. For example, female hamsters emit a
pheromone that gets males very excited. Mice follow similar chemical traces to
help them find partners that are genetically different, minimising the risk of
accidental incest.
Animals often release these pheromones in their urine. "Their urine is much
more pungent," says Wlodarski. "If there's urine present in the environment they
can assess compatibility through that."
It's not just mammals that have a great sense of smell. A male black widow spider
can smell pheromones produced by a female that tell him if she has recently eaten.
To minimise the risk of being eaten, he will only mate with her if she is not hungry.
The point is, animals do not need to get close to each other to smell out a good
potential mate.
On the other hand, humans have an atrocious sense of smell, so we benefit from
getting close. Smell isn't the only cue we use to assess each other's fitness, but
studies have shown that it plays an important role in mate choice.
A study published in 1995 showed that women, just like mice, prefer the smell of
men who are genetically different from them. This makes sense, as mating with
someone with different genes is likely to produce healthy offspring. Kissing is a
great way to get close enough to sniff out your partner's genes.
In 2013, Wlodarski examined kissing preferences in detail. He asked several
hundred people what was most important when kissing someone. How they
smelled featured highly, and the importance of smell increased when women were
most fertile.
It turns out that men also make a version of the pheromone that female boars find
attractive. It is present in male sweat, and when women are exposed to it their
arousal levels increase slightly.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Pheromones are a big part of how mammals chose a mate, says Wlodarski, and
we share some of them. "We've inherited all of our biology from mammals, we've
just added extra things through evolutionary time."
On that view, kissing is just a culturally acceptable way to get close enough to
another person to detect their pheromones.
In some cultures, this sniffing behaviour turned into physical lip contact. It's hard
to pinpoint when this happened, but both serve the same purpose, says Wlodarski.
So if you want to find a perfect match, you could forego kissing and start smelling
people instead. You'll find just as good a partner, and you won't get half as many
germs. Be prepared for some funny looks, though.
Questions 31–35
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage
3?
In boxes 31–35 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE
if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE
if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN
if there is no information on this
31. Both Easter and Wester societies presume that kissing is essential for any part
of the world.
32. Our ancestors were not likely to kiss.
33. Chimpanzees and bonbons kiss not for the romance.
34. There are other animal, rather than apes, that kiss.
35. Scent might be important in choosing your partner.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Questions 36–39
Complete the sentences below.Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the
passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 35–39 on your answer sheet.
36. According to the Mehinaku tribe, kissing is …..
37. Human tradition is to …. when they meet.
38. A male black widow will mate with the female if only she is …..
39. Humans benefit from getting close due to the fact that we have an ….. of smell.
Question 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
40. Passage 3 can be described as:
A.
B.
C.
D.
Strictly scientific text
Historical article
Article from a magazine
Dystopian sketch
ANSWERS
Each question correctly answered scores 1 mark. Correct spelling is needed in all
answers.
Section 1
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
D
A
B
C
F
G
H
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
8. E
9. True
10.False
11.False
12.Not Given
13.True
14.Not Given
15.Not Given
16.True
17.True
18.False
19.False
20.True
21.Not Given
22.True
23.B
24.D
25.A
26.D
27.C
28.practically shutting down
29.20 minutes
30.are (effectively) paralysed
31.False
32.True
33.True
34.False
35.True
36.gross
37.shake hands
38.not hungry
39.(an) atrocious sense
40.C
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
TEST 4
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-12, which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
The potential to sniff out disease
The fact diseases have a smell comes as no surprise - but finding someone or
something that can detect them at an early stage could hold huge potential for
medicine.
Breath, bodily odours and urine are all amazingly revealing about general health.
Even the humble cold can give off an odour, thanks to the thick bacteria-ridden
mucus that ends up in the back of the throat. The signs are not apparent to
everyone - but some super-smellers are very sensitive to the odours. Joy Milne, for
example, noticed her husband's smell had changed shortly before he was
diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
Humans can detect nearly 10,000 different smells. Formed by chemicals in the air,
they are absorbed by little hairs, made of extremely sensitive nerve fibres, hanging
from the nose's olfactory receptors. And the human sense of smell is 10,000 times
more sensitive than the sense of taste. But dogs, as the old joke might have had it,
smell even better.
Their ability to detect four times as many odours as humans makes them a potential
early warning system for a range of diseases. Research suggesting dogs' could sniff
out cancers, for example, was first published about 10 years ago. And there have
been many tales of dogs repeatedly sniffing an area of their owner's body, only for
it to turn out to be hiding a tumour.
What they are smelling are the "volatile molecules" given off by cells when they
become cancerous. Some studies suggest dogs can be 93% accurate. Others
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
suggest they can detect very small tumours before clinical tests can. And yet more
studies have produced mixed results.
Does cancer smell?
At Milton Keynes University Hospital, a small team has recently begun to collect
human urine samples to test dogs' ability to detect the smell of prostate cancer.
The patients had symptoms such as difficulty urinating or a change in flow, which
could turn out to be prostate, bladder or liver cancer.
Rowena Fletcher, head of research and development at the hospital, says the role
of the dogs - which have been trained by Medical Detection Dogs - is to pick out
samples that smell of cancer. Further down the line, a clinical test will show if the
dogs' diagnosis is correct. She says the potential for using dogs in this way is farreaching - even if it is not practical to have a dog in every surgery.
"We hope one day that there could be an electronic machine on every GP's desk
which could test a urine sample for diseases by smelling it," she says. "But first we
need to pick up the pattern of what the dogs are smelling."
And that's the key. Dogs can't tell us what their noses are detecting, but scientists
believe that different cancers could produce different smells, although some might
also be very similar.
Electronic noses
Lab tests to understand what these highly-trained dogs are smelling could then
inform the development of 'electronic noses' to detect the same molecules. These
might then give rise to better diagnostic tests in the future. The potential for using
smell to test for a wide range of diseases is huge, Ms Fletcher says.
Bacteria, cancers and chronic diseases could all have their own odour - which may
be imperceptible to only the most sensitive humans, but obvious to dogs. It may be
possible in the future to use disease odours as the basis for a national screening
programme or to test everybody at risk of a certain cancer in a particular age group.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
However, there are fewer than 20 dogs in the UK trained to detect cancer at
present. Training more will take more funding and time. On the positive side, all
dogs are eligible to be trained provided they are keen on searching and hunting.
Whatever their breed or size, it's our four-legged friend's astounding sense of smell
which could unlock a whole new way of detecting human diseases.
Questions 1-5
Do the following statements agree with the information in the IELTS reading text?
In boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE
if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE
if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN
if there is no information on this
1. You can have a specific smell even due to simple cold.
2. Human sense of taste is 10,000 less sensetive than human sense of smell.
3. Dogs and cats can sniff out different diseases.
4. Doctors believe that different cancers might have the same specific smell.
5. There are more than 20 dogs in the UK trained to detect cancer.
Questions 6-9
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 6-9 on your answer sheet.
6. All the studies suggest that dogs:
A. Can be 93% accurate
B. Can detect very small tumours
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
C. Can't detect tumours at all
D. Different studies have shown different results
7. What scientists give dogs to detect cancer?
A.
B.
C.
D.
Urine samples
Bacterias
Different odours
Nothing
8. What's an electronic nose?
A.
B.
C.
D.
A specific tool for dogs
A gadget to diagnose diseases
A recovery tool for ill patients
An artificial nose
9. The main objective of this passage is to:
A.
B.
C.
D.
Bring awareness to the cancer problem
Show us how good dogs are at detecting cancer
Show us how important it can be to be able to diagnose a disease by an odour
Tell us about new technologies
Questions 10-12
Complete the sentences below.
Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 10-12 on your answer sheet.
10. Scientists hope that one day an ------ will be on every desk.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
11. Electronic nose would help to detect the -----12. Dogs can ------ a new way of diagnosing diseases.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 13-26, which are based on
Reading Passage 2 below.
Trash Talk
Sorting through a mountain of pottery to track the Roman oil trade
(A) In the middle of Rome’s trendiest neighborhood, surrounded by sushi
restaurants and nightclubs with names like Rodeo Steakhouse and Love Story, sits
the ancient world’s biggest garbage dump—a 150-foot-tall mountain of discarded
Roman amphoras, the shipping drums of the ancient world. It takes about 20
minutes to walk around Monte Testaccio, from the Latin testa and Italian cocci,
both meaning “potsherd.” But despite its size—almost a mile in circumference—
it’s easy to walk by and not really notice unless you are headed for some excellent
pizza at Velavevodetto, a restaurant literally stuck into the mountain’s side. Most
local residents don’t know what’s underneath the grass, dust, and scattering of
trees. Monte Testaccio looks like a big hill, and in Rome people are accustomed to
hills.
(B) Although a garbage dump may lack the attraction of the Forum or Colosseum, I
have come to Rome to meet the team excavating Monte Testaccio and to learn
how scholars are using its evidence to understand the ancient Roman economy. As
the modern global economy depends on light sweet crude, so too the ancient
Romans depended on oil—olive oil. And for more than 250 years, from at least the
first century A.D., an enormous number of amphoras filled with olive oil came by
ship from the Roman provinces into the city itself, where they were unloaded,
emptied, and then taken to Monte Testaccio and thrown away. In the absence of
written records or literature on the subject, studying these amphoras is the best
way to answer some of the most vexing questions concerning the Roman
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
economy—How did it operate? How much control did the emperor exert over it?
Which sectors were supported by the state and which operated in a free market
environment or in the private sector?
(C) Monte Testaccio stands near the Tiber River in what was ancient Rome’s
commercial district. Many types of imported foodstuffs, including oil, were brought
into the city and then stored for later distribution in the large warehouses that lined
the river. So, professor, just how many amphoras are there?” I ask José Remesal of
the University of Barcelona, co-director of the Monte Testaccio excavations. It’s the
same question that must occur to everyone who visits the site when they realize
that the crunching sounds their footfalls make are not from walking on fallen
leaves, but on pieces of amphoras. (Don’t worry, even the small pieces are very
sturdy.) Remesal replies in his deep baritone, “Something like 25 million complete
ones. Of course, it’s difficult to be exact,” he adds with a typical Mediterranean
shrug. I, for one, find it hard to believe that the whole mountain is made of
amphoras without any soil or rubble. Seeing the incredulous look on my face as I
peer down into a 10-foot-deep trench, Remesal says, “Yes, it’s really only
amphoras.” I can’t imagine another site in the world where archaeologists find so
much—about a ton of pottery every day. On most Mediterranean excavations,
pottery washing is an activity reserved for blisteringly hot afternoons when digging
is impossible. Here, it is the only activity for most of Remesal’s team, an
international group of specialists and students from Spain and the United States.
During each year’s two-week field season, they wash and sort thousands of
amphoras handles, bodies, shoulders, necks, and tops, counting and cataloguing,
and always looking for stamped names, painted names, and numbers that tell each
amphora’s story.
(D) Although scholars worked at Monte Testaccio beginning in the late 19th
century, it’s only within the past 30 years that they have embraced the role
amphoras can play in understanding the nature of the Roman imperial economy.
According to Remesal, the main challenge archaeologists and economic historians
face is the lack of “serial documentation,” that is, documents for consecutive years
that reflect a true chronology. This is what makes Monte Testaccio a unique record
of Roman commerce and provides a vast amount of datable evidence in a clear and
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
unambiguous sequence. “There’s no other place where you can study economic
history, food production and distribution, and how the state controlled the
transport of a product,” Remesal says. “It’s really remarkable.”
Questions 13-16
Reading Passage 2 has four paragraphs A-D. Which paragraph contains what
information? Write the correct letter, A-D, in boxes 13-16 on your answer sheet.
13. Questions about the Roman economy
14. A unique feature
15. Description of the dump
16. Dialogue with a professor
Questions 17–21
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage
2? In boxes 17–21 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE
if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE
if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN
if there is no information on this
17. World’s biggest garbage dump is surrounded by restaurants and nightclubs.
18. The garbage dump is as popular as the Colosseum in Rome.
19. Ancient Roman economy depended on oil.
20. There is no information on how many amphoras are there.
21. Remesal says that Monte Testaccio is a great place to study economics.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Questions 22–26
Complete the sentences below.
Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 22–26 on your answer sheet.
22. It is unknown for ---- what’s underneath the grass, dust, and scattering of trees.
23. Monte Testaccio stands near the ancient Rome’s ----.
24. Remesal doesn't believe that the whole mountain is made of
without any soil or rubble.
25. Remesal’s team washes and sorts thousands of amphoras each year’s two-week
…...
26. ----- started working at Monte Testaccio in the late 19th century.
IELTS Academic Reading Test 4. Section 3
This is the final section of IELTS Reading practice test #4. After you complete it, you
can see your result for the full IELTS Reading test.
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on
Reading Passage 3 below.
Mysterious Dark Matter May Not Always Have Been Dark
Dark matter particles may have interacted extensively with normal matter long
ago, when the universe was very hot, a new study suggests. The nature of dark
matter is currently one of the greatest mysteries in science. The invisible substance
— which is detectable via its gravitational influence on "normal" matter - is thought
to make up five-sixths of all matter in the universe.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Astronomers began suspecting the existence of dark matter when they noticed the
cosmos seemed to possess more mass than stars could account for. For example,
stars circle the center of the Milky Way so fast that they should overcome the
gravitational pull of the galaxy's core and zoom into the intergalactic void. Most
scientists think dark matter provides the gravity that helps hold these stars back.
Astronomers know more about what dark matter is not than what it actually is.
Scientists have mostly ruled out all known ordinary materials as candidates for dark
matter. The consensus so far is that this missing mass is made up of new species of
particles that interact only very weakly with ordinary matter. One potential clue
about the nature of dark matter has to do with the fact that it's five times more
abundant than normal matter, researchers said.
"This may seem a lot, and it is, but if dark and ordinary matter were generated in a
completely independent way, then this number is puzzling," said study co-author
Pavlos Vranas, a particle physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
Livermore, California. "Instead of five, it could have been a million or a billion. Why
five?" The researchers suggest a possible solution to this puzzle: Dark matter
particles once interacted often with normal matter, even though they barely do so
now. "This may have happened in the early universe, when the temperature was
very high — so high that both ordinary and dark matter were 'melted' in a plasma
state made up of their ingredients".
The protons and neutrons making up atomic nuclei are themselves each made up
of a trio of particles known as quarks. The researchers suggest dark matter is also
made of a composite "stealth" particle, which is composed of a quartet of
component particles and is difficult to detect (like a stealth airplane). The scientists'
supercomputer simulations suggest these composite particles may have masses
ranging up to more than 200 billion electron-volts, which is about 213 times a
proton's mass. Quarks each possess fractional electrical charges of positive or
negative one-third or two-thirds. In protons, these add up to a positive charge,
while in neutrons, the result is a neutral charge. Quarks are confined within protons
and neutrons by the so-called "strong interaction."
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
The researchers suggest that the component particles making up stealth dark
matter particles each have a fractional charge of positive or negative one-half, held
together by a "dark form" of the strong interaction. Stealth dark matter particles
themselves would only have a neutral charge, leading them to interact very weakly
at best with ordinary matter, light, electric fields and magnetic fields. The
researchers suggest that at the extremely high temperatures seen in the newborn
universe, the electrically charged components of stealth dark matter particles could
have interacted with ordinary matter. However, once the universe cooled, a new,
powerful and as yet unknown force might have bound these component particles
together tightly to form electrically neutral composites. Stealth dark matter
particles should be stable — not decaying over eons, if at all, much like protons.
However, the researchers suggest the components making up stealth dark matter
particles can form different unstable composites that decay shortly after their
creation. "For example, one could have composite particles made out of just two
component particles," Vranas said.
These unstable particles might have masses of about 100 billion electron-volts or
more, and could be created by particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) beneath the France-Switzerland border. They could also have an
electric charge and be visible to particle detectors, Vranas said. Experiments at the
LHC, or sensors designed to spot rare instances of dark matter colliding with
ordinary matter, "may soon find evidence of, or rule out, this new stealth dark
matter theory," Vranas said in a statement. If stealth dark matter exists, future
research can investigate whether there are any effects it might have on the cosmos.
"Are there any signals in the sky that telescopes may find?" Vranas said. "In order
to answer these questions, our calculations will require larger supercomputing
resources. Fortunately, supercomputing development is progressing fast towards
higher computational speeds." The scientists, the Lattice Strong Dynamics
Collaboration, will detail their findings in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical
Review Letters.
Questions 27-34
Complete the sentences below.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 27-34 on your answer sheet.
27. One of the greatest mysteries in science is the nature of the ….
28. All known material have been mostly ….. as candidates for dark matter.
29. Dark matter is a lot more …. than normal matter.
30. Due to high temperature, both ordinary and dark matter were 'melted' in a ….
31. It is confirmed that quarks are within protons and neutrons by …..
32. It is suggested that stealth dark matter particle would only have a ….
33. Experiments at the LHC may soon find …. of the new stealth dark matter theory.
34. To answer questions we require …. resources .
Questions 35-39
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage
3?
In boxes 35–39 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE
if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE
if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN
if there is no information on this
35. The nature of dark matter is a mystery.
36. It is likely that dark matter consists of ordinary materials.
37. Quarks have neither positive nor negative charge.
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
38. Protons are not stable.
39. Dark matter has a serious impact on the cosmos.
Question 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
40. Passage 3 is:
A.
B.
C.
D.
a scientific article
a sci-fi article
a short sketch
an article from a magazine
ANSWERS
Each question correctly answered scores 1 mark. Correct spelling is needed in all
answers.
Section 1
1. True
2. True
3. Not Given
4. False
5. False
6. D
7. A
8. B
9. C
10.Electronic machine
11.Same molecules
12.Unlock
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
Section 2
13.B
14.D
15.A
16.C
17.True
18.False
19.True
20.False
21.True
22.Most local residents
23.Commercial district
24.Amphoras
25.Field season
26.Scholars
Section 3
27.Dark matter
28.Ruled out
29.Abundant
30.Plasma state
31.Strong interaction
32.Neutral charge
33.Evidence
34.Larger supercomputing
35.True
36.False
37.False
38.False
39.Not given
40.A
IELTS Fighter - Trung Tâm Luyện Thi IELTS Hàng Đầu Việt Nam
Website: ielts-fighter.com | Hotline: 0963 891 756
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter/
Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ieltsfighter.support/
IELTS Fighter xin chúc bạn luôn học tập hiệu quả. Nếu bạn muốn được nhận thêm
tài liệu hoặc bài tập, hãy liên lạc với chúng tôi nhé.
Website: https://ielts-fighter.com/
Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ielts.fighter
Group: https://www.facebook.com/ieltsfighter/support/