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| IELTS Reading Practice Test-24 With Answers |
READING PASSAGE 1
You
should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which
are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Traditional
Farming System in
Africa
A
By
tradition land in Luapula is not owned by individuals, but as in many other
parts of Africa is allocated by the headman or head woman of a village to
people of either sex, according to need. Since land is generally prepared by
hand, one ulupwa cannot take on a very large area; in this sense, the land has
not been a limiting resource over large parts of the province. The situation
has already changed near the main townships, and there has long been a scarcity
of land for cultivation in the Valley. In these areas registered ownership
patterns are becoming prevalent.
B
Most
of the traditional cropping in Luapula, as in the Bemba area to the east, is
based on citemene, a system whereby crops are grown on the ashes of tree
branches. As a rule, entire trees are not felled but are pollarded so that they
can regenerate. Branches are cut over an area of varying size early in the dry
season and stacked to dry over a rough circle about a fifth to a tenth of the
pollarded area. The wood is fired before the rains and in the first year
planted with the African cereal finger millet (Eleusine coracane).
C
During
the second season, and possibly for a few seasons more the area is planted to
variously mixed combinations of annuals such as maize, pumpkins (Telfiria
occidentalis) and other cucurbits, sweet potatoes, groundnuts, Phaseolus beans
and various leafy vegetables, grown with a certain amount of rotation. The
diverse sequence ends with vegetable cassava, which is often planted into the
developing last-but-one crop as a relay.
D
Richards
(1969) observed that the practice of citemene entails a definite
division of labour between men and women. A man stakes out a plot in an
unobtrusive manner since it is considered provocative towards one’s neighbours
to mark boundaries in an explicit way. The dangerous work of felling branches
is the men’s province and involves much pride. Branches are stacked by the
women and fired by the men. Formerly women and men cooperated in the planting
work, but the harvesting was always done by the women. At the beginning of the
cycle little weeding is necessary, since the firing of the branches effectively
destroys weeds. As the cycle progresses weeds increase and nutrients eventually
become depleted to a point where further effort with annual crops is judged to
be not worthwhile: at this point the cassava is planted, since it can produce a
crop on nearly exhausted soil. Thereafter the plot is abandoned, and a new area
pollarded for the next citemene cycle.
E
When
the forest is not available – this is increasingly the case nowadays – various
ridging systems (ibala) are built on small areas, to be planted with
combinations of maize, beans, groundnuts and sweet potatoes, usually relayed
with cassava. These plots are usually tended by women, and provide subsistence.
Where their roots have year-round access to water tables mango, guava and
oil-palm trees often grow around houses, forming a traditional agroforestry
system. In season some of the fruit is sold by the roadside or in local
markets.
F
The
margins of dambos are sometimes planted to local varieties of rice during the
rainy season, and areas adjacent to vegetables irrigated with water from the
dambo during the dry season. The extent of cultivation is very limited, no
doubt because the growing of crops under dambo conditions calls for a great
deal of skill. Near towns, some of the vegetable produce is sold in local
markets.
G
Fishing
has long provided a much-needed protein supplement to the diet of Luapulans, as
well as being the one substantial source of cash. Much fish has dried for sale
to areas away from the main waterways. The Mweru and Bangweulu Lake Basins are
the main areas of year-round fishing, but the Luapula River is also exploited
during the latter part of the dry season. Several previously abundant and
desirable species, such as the Luapula salmon or mpumbu (Labeo altivelis) and
pale (Sarotherodon machochir) have all but disappeared from Lake Mweru,
apparently due to mismanagement.
H
Fishing
has always been a far more remunerative activity in Luapula that crop husbandry.
A fisherman may earn more in a week than a bean or maize grower in a whole
season. I sometimes heard claims that the relatively high earnings to be
obtained from fishing induced an ‘easy come, easy go’ outlook among Luapulan
men. On the other hand, someone who secures good but erratic earnings may feel
that their investment in economically productive activity is not worthwhile
because Luapulans fail to cooperate well in such activities. Besides, a
fisherman with spare cash will find little in the way of working equipment to
spend his money on. Better spend one’s money in the bars and have a good time!
I
Only
small numbers of cattle or oxen are kept in the province owing to the
prevalence of the tsetse fly. For the few herds, the dambos provide subsistence
grazing during the dry season. The absence of animal draft power greatly limits
peoples’ ability to plough and cultivate land: a married couple can rarely
manage to prepare by hand-hoeing. Most people keep freely roaming chickens and
goats. These act as a reserve for bartering, but may also be occasionally
slaughtered for ceremonies or for entertaining important visitors. These
animals are not a regular part of most peoples’ diet.
J
Citemene
has been an ingenious system for providing people with seasonal production of
high-quality cereals and vegetables in regions of acid, heavily leached soils.
Nutritionally, the most serious deficiency was that of protein. This could at
times be alleviated when fish was available, provided that cultivators lived
near the Valley and could find the means of bartering for dried fish. The
citemene/fishing system was well adapted to the ecology of the miombo regions
and sustainable for long periods, but only as long as the human population
densities stayed at low levels. Although population densities are still much
lower than in several countries of South-East Asia, neither the fisheries nor
the forests and woodlands of Luapula are capable, with unmodified traditional
practices, of supporting the people in a sustainable manner.
Overall,
people must learn to intensify and diversify their productive systems while yet
ensuring that these systems will remain productive in the future when even more
people will need food. Increasing overall production of food, though a vast
challenge in itself, will not be enough, however. At the same time, storage and
distribution systems must allow everyone accesses to at least a moderate share
of the total.
Questions 1-4
Complete
the sentences below with words taken from Reading Passage 1.
Choose NO
MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write
your answers in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.
1
In Luapula land allocation is in accordance with……………
2
The citemene system provides the land with ……………….. where crops are planted.
3
During the second season, the last planted crop is………………
4
Under suitable conditions, fruit trees are planted near………………
Questions 5-8
Classify
the following items with the correct description.
Write
your answers in boxes 5-8 on your answer sheet.
A
fish
B oxen
C goats
5
be used in some unusual occasions, such as celebrations.
6
cannot thrive for being affected by the pests.
7
be the largest part of creating profit.
8
be sold beyond the local area.
Questions 9-12
Do
the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In
boxes 9-12 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
People rarely use animals to cultivate the land.
10
When it is a busy time, children usually took part in the labor force.
11
The local residents eat goats on a regular time.
12 Though
citemene has been a sophisticated system, it could not provide enough protein.
Question 13
Choose
the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write
the correct letter in the box 13 on your answer sheet.
What
is the writer’s opinion about the traditional ways of practices?
A
They can supply the nutrition that people need.
B
They are not capable of providing adequate support to the population.
C
They are productive systems that need no more improving.
D
They will be easily modified in the future.
READING PASSAGE 2
You
should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based on
Reading Passage 2 below.
Can
we call it “ART”
Life-Casting
and Art
A
When
these life-castings were made in the 19th century, no one thought of them as
art. But, if critics today can hail Tracey Emin’s unmade bed and the lights
going off and on in a gallery as masterpieces of some kind, then shouldn’t
these more skillful and profoundly strange works have a greater claim on our
attention?
B
Art
changes over time; what is art changes, too. Objects intended for devotional,
ritualistic or recreational use are re-categorised, by latecomers from another
civilisation who no longer respond to these original purposes. Where would New
Yorker cartoon be without Lascaux gags in which one bison-painter makes
anachronistically “artistic” remarks to another” What also happens is that
techniques and crafts judged non-artistic at the time are reassessed?
C
In
the 19th century, life-casting was to sculpture what photography was to
painting; and both were viewed as cheating short-cuts by the senior arts. Their
virtues – of speed and unwavering realism – also implied their limitations;
they left little or no room for the imagination. For many, life-casting was an
insult to the sculptor’s creative gesture; in a famous lawsuit of 1834, a
moulder whose mask of the dying Napoleon had been reproduced and sold without
his permission, was judged to have no rights in the image – in other words, he
was specifically held not to be an artist. Rodin said of life-casting: “It
happens fast, but it doesn’t make art.” Others feared that the whole canon of
aesthetics might be blown off course if too much nature was allowed in, it
would lead art away from its proper pursuit of the ideal.
D
Gauguin,
at the end of the century, worried about future developments in photography: if
ever the process went into colour, what painter would labour away at a likeness
with a brush made from squirrel-tail? But painting has proved robust.
Photography changed it, of course, just as the novel had to reassess narrative
after the arrival of the cinema. But the gap between the senior and junior arts
was always narrower than the die-hards implied: painters have always used
technical back-up – studio assistants to do the boring bits, cameras Lucida and
Obscura; while apparently lesser crafts involve great skill, thought,
preparation, choice, and – depending on how we define it – imagination.
Life-casting was complex, technical work, as Benjamin Robert Haydon discovered
when he poured 250 litres of plaster over his black model Wilson and nearly
killed him.
E
Time
changes our view in another way, too. Each new art movement implies a
reassessment of what has gone before; what is done now alters what was done
before. In some cases, this is merely self-serving, with the new is using the
old to justify itself: Look how all of that points to this; aren’t we clever to
be the culmination of all that has gone before? But usually it is a matter of
re-alerting the sensibility, reminding us not to take things for granted; every
so often we need the aesthetic equivalent of a cataract operation. So there are
many items in this show – innocent bit-players back in the last half of the
19th century – which would sit happily nowadays in a commercial or public
gallery. Many curators would probably put in for the stunning cast of the hand
of a giant from Barnum’s circus.
F
The
initial impact is on the eye, in the contradiction (which Mueck constantly
exploits) between unexpected size and extreme verisimilitude. Next, the human
element kicks in: you note that the nails are dirt-encrusted – unless this is
the caster’s decorative addition – and the paddy fingertips extend far beyond
them. (Was the giant an anxious gnawer, or does giantism mean that the flesh
simply outgrows the nails?) Then you take in the element of choice,
arrangement, art if you like – the neat, pleated, buttoned sleeve end that
gives the item balance and variation of texture. This is just a moulded hand,
yet the part stands utterly for the whole: and, as an item on public display,
it reminds us, slyly, poignantly, of the full-size original who in his time was
just as much a victim of gawping. We are not a long way from Degas’s La Petite
Danseuse (which, after all, one critic said should be in the Dupuytren
pathology museum); though we are nearer to contemporary art that lazily gets
called cutting-edge.
G
Barthes
proclaimed the death of the author, the liberation of the text from authorial
intention, and the consequent empowerment of the reader; he announced this,
needless to say, in a text written with a particular intention in order to
communicate something very specific to a reader. An own goal of Keith Weller
proportions. But what doesn’t work for literature works much better for art.
Pictures do float free of their creators’ intentions; over time, the “reader”
does become more powerful. Few of us can look at a medieval altarpiece as its
painter “intended”, we believe too little and aesthetically know too much, so
we recreate, we find new fields of pleasure in the work. Equally, the lack of
artistic intention of Paul Richer and other forgotten craftsmen who brushed oil
on to flesh, who moulded, cast, decorated and primped a century and more ago is
now irrelevant.
H
What
counts is the surviving object and our living response to it. The tests are
simple: does it interest the eye, excite the brain, move the mind to
reflection, and involve the heart; further, is an apparent level of skill
involved? Much currently fashionable art bothers only the eye and briefly the
brain, but it fails to engage the mind or the heart. It may, to use the old
dichotomy, be beautiful, but it is rarely true to any significant depth. One of
the constant pleasures of art is its ability to come at us from an unexpected
angle and stop us short in wonder. That is what many of the objects in this
show do. The Ataxic Venus doesn’t make Ron Mueck’s Dead Dad any less intense
and moving an image; but she does offer herself as a companion, precursor, and,
yes, rival.
Questions 14-18
The
Reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-H
Which
paragraph contains the following information?
Write
the correct letter A-H, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.
14
Technicians do boring work
15
A trial on a famous figure’s mask in the 19th century
16
The intention from the author is claimed matters in Art
17
How to assess an art
18
Detailed depiction of an earlier work
Questions 19-24
Do the
following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?
In
boxes 19-24 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
19 The
intention of using artistic objects will change as time pass.
20
In the 19th century, people appreciate the fast speed and realism of living
casting.
21
Rodin indicated that slow pace would improve the artistic quality of the
casting.
22
The importance of painting dropped as the development of photographs.
23 Lifecasting
requires less skill and cost than painting.
24
Emerge of new art makes people recognise the meaning of art again.
Questions 25-26
Choose
the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write
your answers in boxes 25-26 on your answer sheet.
25
Why the hand of a giant from Barnum’s circus attract people’s
attention in the first place?
A
details and the human element
B
size and realism
C
texture and color
D
imagination and intuition
26 What
requirement does it depend on when judging if an object is “art”?
A
audience status
B
fresh or old condition
C
lasting period
D
public response
READING
PASSAGE 3
You
should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are based on
Reading Passage 3 below.
Honey
bees in trouble
Can
native pollinators fill the gap?
A
Recently,
ominous headlines have described a mysterious ailment, colony collapse disorder
(CCD), that is wiping out the honeybees that pollinate many crops. Without
honeybees, the story goes, fields will be sterile, economies will collapse, and
food will be scarce.
B
But
what few accounts acknowledge is that what’s at risk is not itself a natural
state of affairs. For one thing, in the United States, where CCD was first
reported and has had its greatest impacts, honeybees are not a native species.
Pollination in modern agriculture isn’t alchemy, it’s industry. The total
number of hives involved in the U.S. pollination industry has been somewhere
between 2.5 million and 3 million in recent years. Meanwhile, American farmers
began using large quantities of organophosphate insecticides, planted
large-scale crop monocultures, and adopted “clean farming” practices that scrubbed
native vegetation from field margins and roadsides. These practices killed many
native bees outright – they’re as vulnerable to insecticides as an agricultural
pest – and made the agricultural landscape inhospitable to those that remained.
Concern about these practices and their effects on pollinators isn’t new – in
her 1962 ecological alarm cry Silent Spring, Rachel Carson warned of a
‘Fruitless Fall’ that could result from the disappearance of insect
pollinators.
C
If
that ‘Fruitless Fall’ has not-yet-occurred, it may be largely thanks to the
honeybee, which farmers turned to as the ability of wild pollinators to service
crops declined. The honeybee has been semi-domesticated since the time of the
ancient Egyptians, but it wasn’t just familiarity that determined this choice:
the bees’ biology is in many ways suited to the kind of agricultural system
that was emerging. For example, honeybee hives can be closed up and moved out
of the way when pesticides are applied to a field. The bees are generalist pollinators,
so they can be used to pollinate many different crops. And although they are
not the most efficient pollinator of every crop, honeybees have strength in
numbers, with 20,000 to 100,000 bees living in a single hive. “Without a doubt,
if there was one bee you wanted for agriculture, it would be the honeybee,”
says Jim Cane, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The honeybee, in other
words, has become a crucial cog in the modern system of industrial agriculture.
That system delivers more food, and more kinds of it, to more places, more
cheaply than ever before. But that system is also vulnerable, because making a
farm field into the photosynthetic equivalent of a factory floor, and
pollination into a series of continent-long assembly lines, also leaches out
some of the resilience characteristics of natural ecosystems.
D
Breno
Freitas, an agronomist, pointed out that in nature such a high degree of
specialization usually is a very dangerous game: it works well while all the
rest is in equilibrium, but runs quickly to extinction at the least disbalance.
In effect, by developing an agricultural system that is heavily reliant on a
single pollinator species, we humans have become riskily overspecialized. And
when the human-honeybee relationship is disrupted, as it has been by colony
collapse disorder, the vulnerability of that agricultural system begins to
become clear.
E
In
fact, a few wild bees are already being successfully managed for crop
pollination. “The problem is trying to provide native bees inadequate numbers
on a reliable basis in a fairly short number of years in order to service the
crop,” Jim Cane says. “You’re talking millions of flowers per acre in a two-to
three-week time frame, or less, for a lot of crops.” On the other hand, native
bees can be much more efficient pollinators of certain crops than honeybees, so
you don’t need as many to do the job. For example, about 750 blue orchard bees
(Osmia lignaria) can pollinate a hectare of apples or almonds, a task that
would require roughly 50,000 to 150,000 honeybees. There are bee tinkerers
engaged in similar work in many corners of the world. In Brazil, Breno Freitas
has found that Centris tarsata, the native pollinator of wild cashew, can
survive in commercial cashew orchards if growers provide a source of floral
oils, such as by interplanting their cashew trees with a Caribbean cherry.
F
In
certain places, native bees may already be doing more than they’re getting
credit for. Ecologist Rachael Winfree recently led a team that looked at
pollination of four summer crops (tomato, watermelon, peppers, and muskmelon)
at 29 farms in the region of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Winfree’s team
identified 54 species of wild bees that visited these crops, and found that
wild bees were the most important pollinators in the system: even though
managed honeybees were present on many of the farms, wild bees were responsible
for 62 percent of flower visits in the study. In another study focusing
specifically on watermelon, Winfree and her colleagues calculated that native
bees alone could provide sufficient pollination at 90 percent of the 23 farms
studied. By contrast, honeybees alone could provide sufficient pollination at
only 78 percent of farms.
G
“The
region I work in is not typical of the way most food is produced,” Winfree
admits. In the Delaware Valley, most farms and farm fields are relatively
small, each farmer typically grows a variety of crops, and farms are
interspersed with suburbs and other types of land use which means there are
opportunities for homeowners to get involved in bee conservation, too. The
landscape is a bee-friendly patchwork that provides a variety of nesting
habitat and floral resources distributed among different kinds of crops, weedy
field margins, fallow fields, suburban neighborhoods, and semi-natural habitat
like old woodlots, all at a relatively small scale. In other words,
“pollinator-friendly” farming practices would not only aid pollination of
agricultural crops, but also serve as a key element in the overall conservation
strategy for wild pollinators, and often aid other wild species as well.
H
Of
course, not all farmers will be able to implement all of these practices. And
researchers are suggesting a shift to a kind of polyglot agricultural system.
For some small-scale farms, native bees may indeed be all that’s needed. For
larger operations, a suite of managed bees – with honeybees filling the
generalist role and other, native bees pollinating specific crops – could be
augmented by free pollination services from resurgent wild pollinators. In
other words, they’re saying, we still have an opportunity to replace a risky
monoculture with something diverse, resilient, and robust.
Questions 27-30
Do
the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage
3?
In
boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet, write
YES
if the statement agrees
with the claims of the writer
NO
if the statement
contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT
GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
27
In the United States, farmers use honeybees on a large scale over the past few
years.
28
Cleaning farming practices would be harmful to farmers’ health.
29
The blue orchard bee is the most efficient pollinator among native bees for
every crop.
30
It is beneficial to other local creatures to protect native bees.
Questions 31-35
Choose
the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write
your answers in boxes 31-35 on your answer sheet.
31
The example of the “Fruitless Fall” underlines the writer’s point about
A
needs for using pesticides.
B
impacts of losing insect pollinators.
C
vulnerabilities of native bees.
D
benefits in building more pollination industries.
32
Why can honeybees adapt to the modern agricultural system?
A
the honeybees can pollinate more crops efficiently
B
The bees are semi-domesticated since ancient times.
C
Honeybee hives can be protected away from pesticides.
D
The ability of wild pollinators using to serve crops declines.
33
The writer mentions factories and assembly lines to illustrate
A
one drawback of the industrialised agricultural system.
B
a low cost in modern agriculture.
C
the role of honeybees in pollination.
D
what a high yield of industrial agriculture.
34
In the 6th paragraph, Winfree’s experiment proves that
A
honeybee can pollinate various crops.
B
there are many types of wild bees as the pollinators.
C
the wild bees can increase the yield to a higher percentage
D
wild bees work more efficiently as a pollinator than honey bees in certain
cases
35
What does the writer want to suggest in the last paragraph?
A
the importance of honey bees in pollination
B
adoption of different bees in various sizes of the agricultural system
C
the comparison between the intensive and the rarefied agricultural system
D
the reason why farmers can rely on native pollinators
Questions 36-40
Complete
each sentence with the correct ending, A-F, below.
Write
the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet
36
The headline of colony collapse disorder states that
37
Viewpoints of Freitas manifest that
38
Examples of blue orchard bees have shown that
39
Centris tarsata is mentioned to exemplify that
40
One finding of the research in Delaware Valley is that
A
native pollinators can survive when a specific plant is supplied.
B
it would cause severe consequences both to commerce and agriculture.
C
honey bees can not be bred.
D
some agricultural landscapes are favorable in supporting wild bees.
E
a large scale of honey bees are needed to pollinate.
F
an agricultural system is fragile when relying on a single pollinator
ANSWERS
1. need
2. (the) ashes
3. (vegetable) cassava
4. houses
5. C
6. B
7. A
8. A
9. TRUE
10. NOT GIVEN
11. FALSE
12. TRUE
13. B
14. D
15. C
16. G
17. H
18. F
19. YES
20. NO
21. NOT GIVEN
22. NO
23. NOT GIVEN
24. YES
25. B
26. D
27. YES
28. NOT GIVEN
29. NO
30. YES
31. B
32. C
33. A
34. D
35. B
36. B
37. F
38. E
39. A
40. D
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