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| IELTS Reading Practice Test-7 With Answers |
READING
PASSAGE 1
You
should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which
are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
New Agriculture in
Oregon, US
A
Onion
growers in eastern Oregon are adopting a system that saves water and keeps
topsoil in place while producing the highest quality “super-colossal” onions.
Pear growers in southern Oregon have reduced their use of some of the most
toxic pesticides by up to two-thirds, and are still producing top-quality pear.
Range managers throughout the state have controlled the poisonous weed tansy
ragwort with insect predators and saved the Oregon livestock industry up to
$4.8 million a year.
B
These
are some of the results Oregon growers have achieved in collaboration with
Oregon State University (OSU) researchers as they test new farming methods
including integrated pest management (IPM). Nationwide, however, IPM has not
delivered results comparable to those in Oregon. A recent U.S General
Accounting Office (GAO) report indicates that while integrated pest management
can result in dramatically reduced pesticide use, the federal government has
been lacking in effectively promoting that goal and implementing IPM. Farmers
also blame the government for not making the new options of pest management
attractive. “Wholesale changes in the way that farmers control the pests on
their farms is an expensive business.” Tony Brown, of the National Farmers Association,
says. “If the farmers are given tax breaks to offset the expenditure, then they
would willingly accept the new practices.” The report goes on to note that even
though the use of the riskiest pesticides has declined nationwide, they still
make up more than 40 percent of all pesticides used today; and national
pesticide use has risen by 40 million kilograms since 1992. “Our food supply
remains the safest and highest quality on Earth but we continue to overdose our
farmland with powerful and toxic pesticides and to under-use the safe and
effective alternatives,” charged Patrick Leahy, who commissioned the report.
Green action groups disagree about the safety issue. “There is no way that
habitual consumption of foodstuffs grown using toxic chemical of the nature
found on today’s farms can be healthy for consumers,” noted Bill Bowler,
spokesman for Green Action, one of many lobbyists interested in this issue.
C
The
GAO report singles out Oregon’s apple and pear producers who have used the new
IPM techniques with growing success. Although Oregon is clearly ahead of the
nation, scientists at OSU are taking the Government Accounting Office
criticisms seriously. “We must continue to develop effective alternative
practices that will reduce environmental hazards and produce high-quality
products,” said Paul Jepson, a professor of entomology at OSU and new director
of
D
OSU’s
Integrated Plant Protection Centre (IPPC). The IPPC brings together scientists
from OSU’s Agricultural Experiment Station, OSU Extension service, the U.S.
Department of Agriculture and Oregon farmers to help develop agricultural
systems that will save water and soil, and reduce pesticides. In response to
the GAO report, the Centre is putting even more emphasis on integrating
research and farming practices to improve Oregon agriculture environmentally
and economically.
E
“The
GAO report criticizes agencies for not clearly communicating the goals of IPM,”
said Jepson. “Our challenge is to greatly improve the communication to and from
growers, to learn what works and what doesn’t. the work coming from OSU
researchers must be adopted in the field and not simply languish in scientific
journals.”
F
In
Oregon, growers and scientists are working together to instigate new practices.
For example, a few years ago scientists at OSU’s Malheur Experiment Station
began testing a new drip irrigation system to replace old ditches that wasted
water and washed soil and fertilizer into streams. The new system cut water and
fertilizer use by half kept topsoil in place and protected water quality.
G
In
addition, the new system produced crops of very large onions, rated
“super-colossal” and highly valued by the restaurant industry and food
processors. Art Pimms, one of the researchers at Malheur comments: “Growers are
finding that when they adopt more environmentally benign practices, they can
have excellent results. The new practices benefit the environment and give the
growers their success.”
H
OSU
researcher in Malheur next tested straw mulch and found that it successfully
held soil in place and kept the ground moist with less irrigation. In addition,
and unexpectedly, the scientists found that the mulched soil created a home for
beneficial beetles and spiders that prey on onion thrips – a notorious pest in
commercial onion fields – a discovery that could reduce the need for
pesticides. “I would never have believed that we could replace the artificial
pest controls that we had before and still keep our good results,” commented
Steve Black, a commercial onion farmer in Oregon, “but instead we have actually
surpassed expectations.”
I
OSU
researchers throughout the state have been working to reduce dependence on
broad-spectrum chemical spays that are toxic to many kinds of organisms,
including humans. “Consumers are rightly putting more and more pressure on the
industry to change its reliance on chemical pesticides, but they still want a
picture-perfect product,” said Rick Hilton, an entomologist at OSU’s Southern
Oregon Research and Extension Centre, where researches help pear growers reduce
the need for highly toxic pesticides. Picture perfect pears are an important
product in Oregon and traditionally they have required lots of chemicals. In
recent years, the industry has faced stiff competition from overseas producers,
so any new methods that growers adopt must make sense economically as well as
environmentally. Hilton is testing a growth regulator that interferes with the
molting of codling moth larvae. Another study used pheromone dispensers to
disrupt codling moth mating. These and other methods of integrated pest
management have allowed pear growers to reduce their use of organophosphates by
two-thirds and reduce all other synthetic pesticides by even more and still
produce top-quality pears. These and other studies around the state are part of
the effort of the IPPC to find alternative farming practices that benefit both
the economy and the environment.
Questions
1-8
Use
the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-G)
with opinions or deeds below.
Write
the appropriate letters A-G in boxes 1-8 on
your answer sheet.
NB You
may use any letter more than once
A Tony
Brown E
Art Pimms
B Patrick
Leahy F
Steve Black
C Bill Bowler
G Rick Hilton
D Paul Jepson
1
There
is a double-advantage to the new techniques.
2 The work on
developing these alternative techniques is not finished.
3 Eating food
that has had chemicals used in its production is dangerous to our health.
4 Changing
current farming methods into a new one is not a cheap process.
5 Results have
exceeded the anticipated goal.
6 The research
done should be translated into practical projects.
7 The U.S.
produces the best food in the world nowadays.
8 Expectations
of end-users of agricultural products affect the products.
Questions
9-13
Do
the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet, write
YES
if the statement is true
NO
if the
statement is false
NOT
GIVEN
if the information is not given in the passage
9
Integrated Pest Management has generally been regarded as a success in
across the US.
10 Oregon farmers
of apples and pears have been promoted as successful examples of Integrated
Pest Management.
11 The IPPC uses
scientists from different organisations globally
12 Straw mulch
experiments produced unplanned benefits.
13 The apple
industry is now facing a lot of competition from abroad.
READING
PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which
are based on Reading Passage 2 below.
WHAT COOKBOOKS REALLY TEACH US
A
Shelves
bend under their weight of cookery books. Even a medium-sized bookshop contains
many more recipes than one person could hope to cook in a lifetime. Although
the recipes in one book are often similar to those in another, their
presentation varies wildly, from an array of vegetarian cookbooks to
instructions on cooking the food that historical figures might have eaten. The
reason for this abundance is that cookbooks promise to bring about a kind of
domestic transformation for the user. The daily routine can be put to one side
and they liberate the user, if only temporarily. To follow their instructions
is to turn a task which has to be performed every day into an engaging,
romantic process. Cookbooks also provide an opportunity to delve into distant cultures
without having to turn up at an airport to get there.
B
The
first Western cookbook appeared just over 1,600 years ago. De re coquinara (it
means concerning cookery’) is attributed to a Roman gourmet named Apicius. It
is probably a compilation of Roman and Greek recipes, some or all of them drawn
from manuscripts that were later lost. The editor was sloppy, allowing several
duplicated recipes to sneak in. Yet Apicius’s book set the tone of cookery
advice in Europe for more than a thousand years. As a cookbook, it is
unsatisfactory with very basic instructions. Joseph Vehling, a chef who
translated Apicius in the 1930s, suggested the author had been obscure on
purpose, in case his secrets leaked out.
C
But
a more likely reason is that Apicius’s recipes were written by and for
professional cooks, who could follow their shorthand. This situation continued
for hundreds of years. There was no order to cookbooks: a cake recipe might be
followed by a mutton one. But then, they were not written for careful study.
Before the 19th century, few educated people cooked for themselves.
D
The
wealthiest employed literate chefs; others presumably read recipes to their
servants. Such cooks would have been capable of creating dishes from the
vaguest of instructions. The invention of printing might have been expected to
lead to greater clarity but at first, the reverse was true. As words acquired
commercial value, plagiarism exploded. Recipes were distorted through reproduction.
A recipe for boiled capon in The Good Huswives Jewell, printed in 1596, advised
the cook to add three or four dates. By 1653, when the recipe was given by a
different author in A Book of Fruits & Flowers, the cook was told to set
the dish aside for three or four days.
E
The
dominant theme in 16th and 17th-century cookbooks was ordered. Books combined
recipes and household advice, on the assumption that a well-made dish, a
well-ordered larder and well-disciplined children were equally important.
Cookbooks thus became a symbol of dependability in chaotic times. They hardly
seem to have been affected by the English civil war or the revolutions in
America and France.
F
In
the 1850s Isabella Beeton published The Book of Household Management. Like
earlier cookery writers she plagiarized freely, lifting not just recipes but
philosophical observations from other books. If Beeton’s recipes were not
wholly new, though, the way in which she presented them certainly was. She
explains when she chief ingredients are most likely to be in season, how long
the dish will take to prepare and even how much it is likely to cost. Beetons
recipes were well suited to her times. Two centuries earlier, an understanding
of rural ways had been so widespread that one writer could advise cooks to heat
water until it was a little hotter than milk comes from a cow. By the 1850s
Britain was industrialising. The growing urban middle class needed details, and
Beeton provided them in full.
G
In
France, cookbooks were fast becoming even more systematic. Compared with
Britain, France had produced few books written for the ordinary householder by
the end of the 19th century. The most celebrated French cookbooks were written
by superstar chefs who had a clear sense of codifying a unified approach to
sophisticated French cooking. The 5,000 recipes in Auguste Escoffier’s Le Guide
Culinaire (The Culinary Guide), published in 1902, might as well have been
written in stone, given the book’s reputation among French chefs, many of whom
still consider it the definitive reference book.
H
What
Escoffier did for French cooking, Fannie Farmer did for American home cooking.
She not only synthesised American cuisine; she elevated it to the status of
science. ‘Progress in civilisation has been accompanied by progress in
cookery,’ she breezily announced in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, before
launching into a collection of recipes that sometimes resembles a book of
chemistry experiments. She was occasionally over-fussy. She explained that
currants should be picked between June 28th and July 3rd, but not when it is
raining. But in the main, her book is reassuringly authoritative. Its recipes
are short, with no unnecessary chat and no unnecessary spices.
I
In
1950 Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David launched a revolution in cooking
advice in Britain. In some ways, Mediterranean Food recalled even older
cookbooks but the smells and noises that filled David’s books were not a mere
decoration for her recipes. They were the point of her books. When she began to
write, many ingredients were not widely available or affordable. She understood
this, acknowledging in a letter edition of one of her books that even if people
could not very often make the dishes here described, it was stimulating to
think about them. David’s books were not so much cooking manuals as guides to
the kind of food people might well wish to eat.
Questions
14-16
Complete
the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the
passage for each answer.
Write
your answers in boxes 14-16 on your answer sheet.
Why are there so many cookery books?
There
are a great number more cookery books published than is really necessary and it
is their 14…………………….. which makes them differ from each other.
There are such large numbers because they offer people an escape from
their 15……………………… and some give the user the chance to inform
themselves about other 16…………………….
Questions
17-21
Reading
Passage has nine paragraphs, A-I. Which paragraph contains the
following information?
Write
the correct letter, A-I, in boxes 17-21 on your
answer sheet.
NB You
may use any letter more than once.
17 cookery books
providing a sense of stability during periods of unrest
18 details in
recipes being altered as they were passed on
19 knowledge
which was in danger of disappearing
20 the negative
effect on cookery books of a new development
21 a period when
there was no need for cookery books to be precise
Questions
22-26
Look
at the following statements (Questions 22-26) and list of books (A-E)
below. Match each statement with the correct book.
Write
the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 22-26 on your
answer sheet
22 Its recipes
were easy to follow despite the writer’s attention to detail.
23 Its writer
may have deliberately avoided passing on details.
24 It appealed
to ambitious ideas people have about cooking.
25 Its writer
used ideas from other books but added additional related information.
26
It
put into print ideas which are still respected today.
List
of cookery books
A De re
coquinara
B The Book of Household Management
C Le Guide Culinaire
D The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
E Mediterranean Food
READING
PASSAGE 3
You
should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are
based on Reading Passage 3 below.
Learning lessons
from the past
A
Many
past societies collapsed or vanished, leaving behind monumental ruins such as
those that the poet Shelley imagined in his sonnet, Ozymandias. By
collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or
political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable, for an extended
time. By those standards, most people would consider the following past
societies to have been famous victims of full-fledged collapses rather than of
just minor declines: the Anasazi and Cahokia within the boundaries of the modem
US, the Maya cities in Central American, Moche and Tiwanaku societies in South
America, Norse Greenland, Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete in Europe, Great
Zimbabwe in Africa, Angkor Wat and the Harappan Indus Valley cities in Asia,
and Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean.
B
The
monumental ruins left behind by those past societies hold a fascination for all
of us. We marvel at them when as children we first learn of them through
pictures. When we grow up, many of us plan vacations in order to experience
them at first hand. We feel drawn to their often spectacular and haunting
beauty, and also to the mysteries that they pose. The scales of the ruins
testify to the former wealth and power of their builders. Yet these builders
vanished, abandoning the great structures that they had created at such effort.
How could a society that was once so mighty end up collapsing?
C
It
has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandonments were at
least partly triggered by ecological problems: people inadvertently destroying
the environmental resources on which their societies depended. This suspicion
of unintended ecological suicide (ecocide) has been confirmed by discoveries
made in recent decades by archaeologists, climatologists, historians,
palaeontologists, and palynologists (pollen scientists). The processes through
which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments
fall into eight categories, whose relative importance differs from case to
case: deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems, water management
problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native
species, human population growth, and increased impact of people.
D
Those
past collapses tended to follow somewhat similar courses constituting
variations on a theme. Writers find it tempting to draw analogies between the
course of human societies and the course of individual human lives – to talk of
a society’s birth, growth, peak, old age and eventual death. But that metaphor
proves erroneous for many past societies: they declined rapidly after reaching
peak numbers and power, and those rapid declines must have come as a surprise and
shock to their citizens. Obviously, too, this trajectory is not one that all
past societies followed unvaryingly to completion: different societies
collapsed to different degrees and in somewhat different ways, while many
societies did not collapse at all.
E
Today
many people feel that environmental problems overshadow all the other threats
to global civilisation. These environmental problems include the same eight
that undermined past societies, plus four new ones: human-caused climate
change, the build-up of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages,
and full human utilisation of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity. But the
seriousness of these current environmental problems is vigorously debated. Are
the risks greatly exaggerated, or conversely are they underestimated? Will
modem technology solve our problems, or is it creating new problems faster than
it solves old ones? When we deplete one resource (eg wood, oil, or ocean fish),
can we count on being able to substitute some new resource (eg plastics, wind
and solar energy, or farmed fish)? Isn’t the rate of human population growth
declining, such that we’re already on course for the world’s population to
level off at home manageable number of people?
F
Questions
like this illustrate why those famous collapses of past civilisations have
taken on more meaning than just that of a romantic mystery. Perhaps there are
some practical lessons that we could learn from all those past collapses. But
there are also differences between the modem world and its problems, and those
past societies and their problems. We shouldn’t be so naive as to think that
the study of the past will yield simple solutions, directly transferable to our
societies today. We differ from past societies in some respects that put us at
lower risk than them; some of those respects often mentioned include our
powerful technology (ie its beneficial effects), globalisation, modem medicine,
and greater knowledge of past societies and of distant modem societies. We also
differ from past societies in some respects that put us at greater risk than
them: again, our potent technology (ie its unintended destructive effects),
globalisation (such that now a problem in one part of the world affects all the
rest), the dependence of millions of us on modern medicine for our survival,
and our much larger human population. Perhaps we can still learn from the past,
but only if we think carefully about its lessons.
Questions
27-29
Choose
the correct letter A, B, C or D.
27 When the
writer describes the impact of monumental ruins today, he emphasizes
A the
income they generate from tourism.
B the
area of land they occupy.
C their
archaeological value.
D their
romantic appeal.
28 Recent
findings concerning vanished civilisations
A have
overturned long-held beliefs.
B caused
controversy amongst scientists.
C come
from a variety of disciplines.
D
identified one main cause of environmental damage.
29 What does the
writer say about ways in which former societies collapsed?
A The
pace of decline was usually similar.
B The
likelihood of collapse would have been foreseeable.
C
Deterioration invariably led to total collapse.
D
Individual citizens could sometimes influence the course of events.
Questions
30-34
Do
the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage?
Write
YES
if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO
if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT
GIVEN
if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
30 It is widely
believed that environmental problems represent the main danger faced by the
modern world.
31 The
accumulation of poisonous substances is a relatively modern problem.
32 There is
general agreement that the threats posed by environmental problems are very
serious.
33 Some past
societies resembled present-day societies more closely than others.
34 We should be
careful when drawing comparisons between past and present.
Questions
35-39
Complete
each sentence with the correct ending, A-F, below.
Write the correct letter, A-F
35 Evidence of
the greatness of some former civilisations
36 The parallel
between an individual’s life and the life of a society
37 The number of
environmental problems that societies face
38 The power of
technology
39 A
consideration of historical events and trends
A is not
necessarily valid.
B provides grounds for an optimistic outlook.
C exists in the form of physical structures.
D is potentially both positive and negative.
E will not provide direct solutions for present problems.
F is greater now than in the past.
Question
40
Choose
the correct letter A, B, D or D
40 What is the
main argument of Reading Passage 3?
A There
are differences as well as similarities between past and present societies.
B More
should be done to preserve the physical remains of earlies civilisations.
C Some
historical accounts of great civilisations are inaccurate.
D Modern
societies are dependent on each other for their continuing survival.
ANSWERS
1. E
2. D
3. C
4. A
5. F
6. D
7. B
8. G
9. NO
10. YES
11. NO
12. YES
13. NOT GIVEN
14.
presentation
15. (daily) routine
16. cultures
17. E
18. D
19. F
20. D
21. C
22. D
23. A
24. E
25. B
26. C
27. D
28. C
29. A
30. YES
31. YES
32. NO
33. NOT GIVEN
34. YES
35. C
36. A
37. F
38. D
39. E
40. A
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