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| IELTS Reading Practice Test-5 With Answers |
READING
PASSAGE 1
You
should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which
are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Voyage of Going: beyond
the blue line 2
A
One
feels a certain sympathy for Captain James Cook on the day in 1778 that he
“discovered” Hawaii. Then on his third expedition to the Pacific, the British
navigator had explored scores of islands across the breadth of the sea, from
lush New Zealand to the lonely wastes of Easter Island. This latest voyage had
taken him thousands of miles north from the Society Islands to an archipelago
so remote that even the old Polynesians back on Tahiti knew nothing about it.
Imagine Cook’s surprise, then, when the natives of Hawaii came paddling out in
their canoes and greeted him in a familiar tongue, one he had heard on
virtually every mote of inhabited land he had visited. Marvelling at the
ubiquity of this Pacific language and culture, he later wondered in his journal:
“How shall we account for this Nation spreading itself so far over this Vast
ocean?”
B
Answers
have been slow in coming. But now a startling archaeological find on the island
of Éfaté, in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, has revealed an ancient seafaring
people, the distant ancestors of today’s Polynesians, taking their first steps
into the unknown. The discoveries there have also opened a window into the
shadowy world of those early voyagers. At the same time, other pieces of this
human puzzle are turning up in unlikely places. Climate data gleaned from
slow-growing corals around the Pacific and from sediments in alpine lakes in
South America may help explain how, more than a thousand years later, the
second wave of seafarers beat their way across the entire Pacific.
C
“What
we have is a first- or second-generation site containing the graves of some of
the Pacific’s first explorers,” says Spriggs, professor of archaeology at the
Australian National University and co-leader of an international team
excavating the site. It came to light only by luck. A backhoe operator, digging
up topsoil on the grounds of a derelict coconut plantation, scraped open a
grave – the first of dozens in a burial ground some 3,000 years old. It is the
oldest cemetery ever found in the Pacific islands, and it harbors the bones of
an ancient people archaeologists call the Lapita, a label that derives from a
beach in New Caledonia where a landmark cache of their pottery was found in the
1950s. They were daring blue-water adventurers who roved the sea not just as
explorers but also as pioneers, bringing along everything they would need to
build new lives – their families and livestock, taro seedlings and stone tools.
D
Within
the span of few centuries, the Lapita stretched the boundaries of their world
from the jungle-clad volcanoes of Papua New Guinea to the loneliest coral outliers
of Tonga, at least 2,000 miles eastward in the Pacific. Along the way they
explored millions of square miles of an unknown sea, discovering and colonizing
scores of tropical islands never before seen by human eyes: Vanuatu, New
Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa.
E
What
little is known or surmised about them has been pieced together from fragments
of pottery, animal bones, obsidian flakes, and such oblique sources as
comparative linguistics and geochemistry. Although their voyages can be traced
back to the northern islands of Papua New Guinea, their language – variants of
which are still spoken across the Pacific – came from Taiwan. And their
peculiar style of pottery decoration, created by pressing a carved stamp into
the clay, probably had its roots in the northern Philippines. With the
discovery of the Lapita cemetery on Éfaté, the volume of data available to
researchers has expanded dramatically. The bones of at least 62 individuals
have been uncovered so far – including old men, young women, even babies – and
more skeletons are known to be in the ground. Archaeologists were also thrilled
to discover six complete Lapita pots. It’s an important find, Spriggs says, for
it conclusively identifies the remains as Lapita. “It would be hard for anyone
to argue that these aren’t Lapita when you have human bones enshrined inside
what is unmistakably a Lapita urn.”
F
Several
lines of evidence also undergird Spriggs’s conclusion that this was a community
of pioneers making their first voyages into the remote reaches of Oceania. For
one thing, the radiocarbon dating of bones and charcoal places them early in
the Lapita expansion. For another, the chemical makeup of the obsidian flakes
littering the site indicates that the rock wasn’t local; instead, it was
imported from a large island in Papua New Guinea’s the Bismarck Archipelago,
the springboard for the Lapita’s thrust into the Pacific. A particularly
intriguing clue comes from chemical tests on the teeth of several skeletons.
DNA teased from these ancient bones may also help answer one of the most
puzzling questions in Pacific anthropology: Did all Pacific islanders spring
from one source or many? Was there only one outward migration from a single
point in Asia, or several from different points? “This represents the best opportunity
we’ve had yet,” says Spriggs, “to find out who the Lapita actually were, where
they came from, and who their closest descendants are today.”
G
“There
is one stubborn question for which archaeology has yet to provide any answers:
How did the Lapita accomplish the ancient equivalent of a moon landing, many
times over? No one has found one of their canoes or any rigging, which could
reveal how the canoes were sailed. Nor do the oral histories and traditions of
later Polynesians offer any insights, for they segue into myth long before they
reach as far back in time as the Lapita.” All we can say for certain is that
the Lapita had canoes that were capable of ocean voyages, and they had the
ability to sail them,” says Geoff Irwin, a professor of archaeology at the
University of Auckland and an avid yachtsman. Those sailing skills, he says,
were developed and passed down over thousands of years by earlier mariners who
worked their way through the archipelagoes of the western Pacific making short
crossings to islands within sight of each other. Reaching Fiji, as they did a
century or so later, meant crossing more than 500 miles of ocean, pressing on
day after day into the great blue void of the Pacific. What gave them the
courage to lunch out on such a risky voyage?
H
The
Lapita’s thrust into the Pacific was eastward, against the prevailing trade
winds, Irwin notes. Those nagging headwinds, he argues, may have been the key
to their success. “They could sail out for days into the unknown and
reconnoiter, secure in the knowledge that if they didn’t find anything, they
could turn about and catch a swift ride home on the trade winds. It’s what made
the whole thing work.” Once out there, skilled seafarers would detect abundant
leads to follow to land: seabirds and turtles, coconuts and twigs carried out
to sea by the tides and the afternoon pileup of clouds on the horizon that
often betokens an island in the distance. Some islands may have broadcast their
presence with far less subtlety than a cloud bank. Some of the most violent
eruptions anywhere on the planet during the past 10,000 years occurred in
Melanesia, which sits nervously in one of the most explosive volcanic regions
on Earth. Even less spectacular eruptions would have sent plumes of smoke
billowing into the stratosphere and rained ash for hundreds of miles. It’s
possible that the Lapita saw these signs of distant islands and later sailed
off in their direction, knowing they would find land. For returning explorers,
successful or not, the geography of their own archipelagoes provided a safety
net to keep them from overshooting their home ports and sailing off into
eternity.
I
However
they did it, the Lapita spread themselves a third of the way across the
Pacific, the called it quits for reasons known only to them. Ahead lay the vast
emptiness of the central Pacific, and perhaps they were too thinly stretched to
venture farther. They probably never numbered more than a few thousand in
total, and in their rapid migration eastward they encountered hundreds of
islands – more than 300 in Fiji alone. Still, more than a millennium would pass
before the Lapita’s descendants, a people we now call the Polynesians, struck
out in search of new territory.
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 is
true
FALSE
if the statement is
false
NOT
GIVEN
if the information is not given in the passage
1 Captain cook once expected Hawaii
might speak another language of people from other pacific islands.
2 Captain cook
depicted a number of cultural aspects of Polynesians in his journal.
3 Professor Spriggs and his
research team went to the Efate to try to find the site of the ancient
cemetery.
4 The Lapita
completed a journey of around 2,000 miles in a period less than a centenary.
5 The Lapita
were the first inhabitants in many pacific islands.
6 The unknown
pots discovered in Efate had once been used for cooking.
7 The um buried
in Efate site was plain as it was without any decoration.
Questions
8-10
Summary
Complete
the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage
Using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each
answer.
Write your answers in boxes 8-10 on your answer
sheet.
Scientific Evident found in Efate site
Tests
show the human remains and the charcoal found in the buried um are from the
start of the Lapita period. Yet The 8…………………… covering many of the
Efate sites did not come from that area. Then examinations carried out on
the 9…………………… discovered at Efate site reveal that not everyone
buried there was a native living in the area. In fact, DNA could identify the
Lapita’s nearest 10…………………… present-days.
Questions
11-13
Answer
the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the
passage for each answer.
11 What did the
Lapita travel in when they crossed the oceans?
12 In Irwins’s
view, what would the Lapita have relied on to bring them fast back to the base?
13 Which sea
creatures would have been an indication to the Lapita of where to find land?
READING
PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-27 which
are based on Reading Passage 2 below.
Memory and Age
A
Aging,
it is now clear, is part of an ongoing maturation process that all our organs
go through. “In a sense, aging is keyed to the level of the vigor of the body
and the continuous interaction between levels of body activity and levels of
mental activity,” reports Arnold B. Scheibel, M.D., whose very academic title
reflects how once far-flung domains now converge on the mind and the brain.
Scheibel is a professor of anatomy, cell biology, psychiatry, and behavioral
sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, and director of
university’s Brain Research Institute. Experimental evidence has backed up
popular assumptions that the aging mind undergoes decay analogous to that of
the aging body. Younger monkeys, chimps, and lower animals consistently outperform
their older colleagues on memory tests. In humans, psychologists concluded,
memory and other mental functions deteriorate over time because of inevitable
organic changes in the brain as neurons die off. The mental decline after young
adulthood appeared inevitable.
B
Equipped
with imaging techniques that capture the brain in action, Stanley Rapoport,
Ph.D., at the National Institutes of Health, measured the flow of blood in the
brains of old and young people as they went through the task of matching photos
of faces. Since blood flow reflects neuronal activity, Rapoport could compare
with networks of neurons were being used by different subjects. “Even when the
reaction times of older and younger subjects were the same, the neural networks
they used were significantly different. The older subjects were using different
internal strategies to accomplish the same result in the same time,” Rapoport
says. Either the task required greater effort on the part of the older subjects
or the work of neurons originally involved in tasks of that type had been taken
over by other neurons, creating different networks.
C
At
the Georgia Institute of Technology, psychologist Timothy Salthouse, Ph.D.,
compared a group of very fast and accurate typists of college-age with another
group in their 60s. since reaction time is faster in younger people and most
people’s fingers grow less nimble with age, younger typists might be expected
to tap right along while the older one’s fumble. But both typed 60 words a
minute. The older typists, it turned out, achieved their speed with cunning
little strategies that made them far more efficient than their younger
counterparts: They made fewer finger movements, saving a fraction of a second
here and there. They also read ahead in the text. The neural networks involved
in typing appear to have been reshaped to compensate for losses in motor skills
or other age changes.
D
“When
a rat is kept in isolation without playmates or objects to interact with, the
animal’s brain shrinks, but if we put that rat with 11 other rats in a large
cage and give them an assortment of wheels, ladders, and other toys, we can
show—after four days—significant differences in its brain,” says Diamond,
professor of integrative biology. Proliferating dendrites first appear in the
visual association areas. After a month in the enriched environment, the whole
cerebral cortex has expanded, a has its blood supply. Even in the enriched
environment, rats get bored unless the toys are varied. “Animals are just like
we are. They need stimulation,” says Diamond.
One
of the most profoundly important mental functions is memory-notorious for its
failure with age. So important is a memory that the Charles A. Dana foundation
recently spent $8.4 million to set up a consortium of leading medical centers
to measure memory loss and aging through brain-imaging technology,
neurochemical experiment, and cognitive and psychological tests. One thing,
however, is already fairly clear—many aspects of memory are not a function of
age at all but of education. Memory exists in more than one form. What we call
knowledge—facts—is what psychologists such as Harry P. Bahrick, Ph.D., of Ohio
Wesleyan University call semantic memory. Events, conversations, and
occurrences in time and space, on the other hand, make up episodic or event
memory, which is triggered by cues from the context. If you were around in 1963
you don’t need to be reminded of the circumstances surrounding the moment you
heard that JFK had been assassinated. That event is etched into your episodic
memory.
E
When
you forget a less vivid item, like buying a roll of paper towels at the
supermarket, you may blame it on your aging memory. It’s true that episodic
memory begins to decline when most people are in their 50s, but it’s never
perfect at any age. “Every memory begins as an event,” says Bahrick. “Through
repetition, certain events leave behind a residue of knowledge or semantic
memory. On a specific day in the past, somebody taught you that two and two are
four, but you’ve been over that information so often you don’t remember where
you learned it. What started as an episodic memory has become a permanent part
of your knowledge base.” You remember the content, not the context. Our
language knowledge, our knowledge of the world and of people, is largely that
permanent or semi-permanent residue.
F
Probing
the longevity of knowledge, Bahrick tested 1,000 high school graduates to see
how well they recalled their algebra. Some had completed the course as recently
as a month before, others as long as 50 years earlier. He also determined how
long each person had studied algebra, the grade received, and how much the
skill was used over the course of adulthood. Surprisingly, a person’s grasp of
algebra at the time of testing did not depend on how long ago he’d taken the
course—the determining factor was the duration of instruction. Those who had
spent only a few months learning algebra forgot most of it within two or three
years.
G
In
another study, Bahrick discovered that people who had taken several courses in
Spanish, spread out over a couple of years, could recall, decades later, 60 per
cent or more of the vocabulary they learned. Those who took just one course
retained only a trace after three years. “This long-term residue of knowledge
remains stable over the decades, independent of the age of the person and the
age of the memory. No serious deficit appears until people get to their 50s and
60s, probably due to the degenerative processes of aging rather than a
cognitive loss.”
H
“You
could say metamemory is a byproduct of going to school,” says psychologist
Robert Kail, Ph.D., of Purdue University, who studies children from birth to 20
years, the time of life when mental development is most rapid. “The
question-and-answer process, especially exam-taking, helps children learn—and
also teaches them how their memory works. This may be one reason why, according
to a broad range of studies in people over 60, the better educated a person is,
the more likely they are to perform better in life and on psychological tests.
A group of adult novice chess players were compared with a group of child
experts at the game. In tests of their ability to remember a random series of
numbers, the adults, as expected, outscored the children. But when asked to
remember the patterns of chess pieces arranged on a board, the children won.
“Because they’d played a lot of chess, their knowledge of chess was better
organized than that of the adults, and their existing knowledge of chess served
as a framework for new memory,” explains Kail.
I
Specialized
knowledge is a mental resource that only improve with time. Crystallized
intelligence about one’s occupation apparently does not decline at all until at
least age 75, and if there is no disease or dementia, may remain even longer.
Special knowledge is often organized by a process called “chunking.” If
procedure A and procedure B are always done together, for example, the mind may
merge them into a single command. When you apply yourself to a specific
interest—say, cooking—you build increasingly elaborate knowledge structures
that let you do more and do it better. This ability, which is tied to
experience, is the essence of expertise. Vocabulary is one such specialized
form of accrued knowledge. Research clearly shows that vocabulary improves with
time. Retired professionals, especially teachers and journalists, consistently
score higher on tests of vocabulary and general information than college
students, who are supposed to be in their mental prime.
Questions
14-17
Choose
the correct letter A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.
14 What does the
experiment of typist show in the passage?
A Old
people reading ability is superior
B Losses
of age is irreversible
C
Seasoned tactics made elders more efficient
D Old
people performed poorly in the driving test
15 Which is
correct about rat experiment?
A
Different toys have a different effect on rats
B Rat’s
brain weight increased in both cages.
C
Isolated rat’s brain grows new connections
D Boring
and complicated surroundings affect brain development
16 What can be
concluded in a chess game of children group?
A They
won a game with adults.
B Their
organization of chess knowledge is better
C Their
image memory is better than adults
D They
used a different part of the brain when playing chess
17 What is the
author’s purpose of using “vocabulary study” at the end of the passage?
A
Certain people are sensitive to vocabularies while others aren’t
B
Teachers and professionals won by their experience
C
Vocabulary memory as a crystallized intelligence is hard to decline
D Old
people use their special zone of the brain when the study
Question
18-23
Summary
Complete
the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage
Using NO
MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.
Write
your answers in boxes 18-23 on your answer sheet.
It’s
long been known that as one significant mental function, 18…………………….deteriorates
with age. Charles A. Dana foundation invested millions of dollars to test
memory decline. They used advanced technology, neurochemical experiments and
ran several cognitive and 19…………………… experiments. Bahrick called
one form “20………………………..”, which describes factual knowledge. Another one
called “21………………………” contains events in time and space format. He
conducted two experiments toward to knowledge memory’s longevity, he asked 1000
candidates some knowledge of 22……………………., some could even remember
it decades ago. Second research of Spanish course found that multiple courses
participants could remember more than half of 23………………………. They
learned after decades, whereas single course taker only remembered as short as
3 years.
Questions
24-27
Use
the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-F)
with opinions or deeds below.
Write
the appropriate letters A-F in boxes 24-27 on
your answer sheet.
A Harry P.
Bahrick
B Arnold B. Scheibel
C Marion Diamond
D Timothy Salthouse
E Stanley Rapport
F Robert Kail
24 Examined both
young and old’s blood circulation of the brain while testing.
25 Aging is a
significant link between physical and mental activity.
26 Some semantic
memory of an event would not fade away after repetition.
27 Rat’s brain
developed when putting in a diverse environment.
READING PASSAGE 3
You
should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40 which are
based on Reading Passage 3 below.
Facial expression 1
A
A
facial expression is one or more motions or positions of the muscles in the
skin. These movements convey the emotional state of the individual to
observers. Facial expressions are a form of nonverbal communication. They are a
primary means of conveying social information among aliens, but also occur in
most other mammals and some other animal species. Facial
expressions and their significance in the perceiver can, to some extent, vary
between cultures with evidence from descriptions in the works of Charles
Darwin.
B
Humans
can adopt a facial expression to read as a voluntary action. However, because
expressions are closely tied to emotion, they are more often involuntary. It
can be nearly impossible to avoid expressions for certain emotions, even when
it would be strongly desirable to do so; a person who is trying to avoid
insulting an individual he or she finds highly unattractive might,
nevertheless, show a brief expression of disgust before being able to reassume
a neutral expression. Microexpressions are one example of this
phenomenon. The close link between emotion and expression can also work in the
order direction; it has been observed that voluntarily assuming an expression
can actually cause the associated emotion.
C
Some
expressions can be accurately interpreted even between members of different
species – anger and extreme contentment being the primary examples. Others,
however, are difficult to interpret even in familiar individuals. For instance,
disgust and fear can be tough to tell apart. Because faces have only a limited
range of movement, expressions rely upon fairly minuscule differences in the
proportion and relative position of facial features, and reading them requires
considerable sensitivity to the same. Some faces are often falsely read as
expressing some emotion, even when they are neutral because their proportions
naturally resemble those another face would temporarily assume when emoting.
D
Also,
a person’s eyes reveal much about hos they are feeling, or what they are
thinking. Blink rate can reveal how nervous or at ease a
person maybe. Research by Boston College professor Joe Tecce suggests that
stress levels are revealed by blink rates. He supports his data with statistics
on the relation between the blink rates of presidential candidates and their
success in their races. Tecce claims that the faster blinker in the
presidential debates has lost every election since 1980. Though Tecce’s data is
interesting, it is important to recognize that non-verbal communication
is multi-channelled, and focusing on only one aspect is
reckless. Nervousness can also be measured by examining each candidates’
perspiration, eye contact and stiffness.
E
As
Charles Darwin noted in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals: the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and
animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements. Still, up to the
mid-20th century, most anthropologists believed that facial
expressions were entirely learned and could, therefore, differ among cultures.
Studies conducted in the 1960s by Paul Ekman eventually supported Darwin’s
belief to a large degree.
F
Ekman’s
work on facial expressions had its starting point in the work of psychologist
Silvan Tomkins. Ekman showed that contrary to the belief of some
anthropologists including Margaret Mead, facial expressions of emotion are not
culturally determined, but universal across human cultures. The South Fore
people of New Guinea were chosen as subjects for one such survey. The study consisted
of 189 adults and 130 children from among a very isolated population, as well
as twenty-three members of the culture who lived a less isolated lifestyle as a
control group. Participants were told a story that described one particular
emotion; they were then shown three pictures (two for children) of facial
expressions and asked to match the picture which expressed the story’s emotion.
G
While
the isolated South Fore people could identify emotions with the same accuracy
as the non-isolated control group, problems associated with the study include
the fact that both fear and surprise were constantly misidentified. The study
concluded that certain facial expressions correspond to particular emotions and
can not be covered, regardless of cultural background, and regardless of
whether or not the culture has been isolated or exposed to the mainstream.
H
Expressions
Ekman found to be universally included those indicating anger, disgust, fear,
joy, sadness, and surprise (not that none of these emotions has a definitive
social component, such as shame, pride, or schadenfreude). Findings on contempt
(which is social) are less clear, though there is at least some preliminary
evidence that this emotion and its expression are universally recognized. This
may suggest that the facial expressions are largely related to the mind and
each part on the face can express specific emotion.
Questions
28-32
Summary
Complete
the Summary paragraph below. In boxes 28-32 on your answer
sheet, write the correct answer with NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS
The
result of Ekman’s study demonstrates that fear and surprise are
persistently 28…………………… and made a conclusion that some facial
expressions have something to do with certain 29…………………. Which is
impossible covered, despite of 30………………….. and whether the culture has
been 31…………………… or 32………………………. to the mainstream.
Questions
33-38
The
reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-H
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-H, in boxes 33-38 on
your answer sheet.
NB You
may use any letter more than once.
33 the
difficulty identifying the actual meaning of facial expressions
34 the
importance of culture on facial expressions is initially described
35 collected
data for the research on the relation between blink and the success in
elections
36 the features
on the sociality of several facial expressions
37 an indicator
to reflect one’s extent of nervousness
38 the relation between emotion and
facial expressions
Questions
39-40
Choose
two letters from the A-E
Write your answers in boxes 39-40 on your answer sheet
Which Two of the following statements are true according to Ekman’s
theory?
A No evidence
shows animals have their own facial expressions.
B The
potential relationship between facial expression and state of mind exists
C Facial
expressions are concerning different cultures.
D Different
areas on face convey a certain state of mind.
E Mind controls
men’s facial expressions more obvious than women’s
ANSWERS
1.
TRUE
2. FALSE
3. FALSE
4. NOT GIVEN
5. TRUE
6. NOT GIVEN
7. FALSE
8. rock
9. teeth
10. descendants
11. canoes
12. trade winds
13. seabirds and turtles
14. C
15. D
16. B
17. C
18. Memory
19. psychological
20. semantic memory
21. episodic memory/event
memory
22. algebra
23. vocabulary
24. E
25. B
26. A
27. C
28.
misidentified
29. emotions
30. cultural background
31. isolated
32. exposed
33. C
34. A
35. D
36. H
37. D
38. B
39. B
40. D
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