2019 IELTS Reading Actual test 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

Bondi Beach

Bondi Beach is one of Australia’s most well-known beaches and among the world’s most famous. Bondi Beach is located in a suburb of Sydney, 7 kilometres east of the Sydney central business district. Bondi is said to be a corruption of an Aboriginal word boondi meaning water breaking over rocks. It has been spelt a number of different ways over time, e.g. Boondi, Bundi, Elundye. The Australian Museum records that Bondi means a place where a flight of nullas took place. The current spelling was accepted in 1827.

Aboriginal people occupied many sites in the area now known as Waverley in the period before European settlement. There were numerous recorded sightings during the early colonial period and there are significant aboriginal rock carvings, including rough carvings of fish or fishes on the cliffs. The indigenous people of the area, at the time of European settlement, have generally been referred to as the Sydney people or the Eora, which means “the people”. There is no clear evidence for the name or names of the particular band or bands of the Eora that roamed what is now the Waverley area. A number of place names within Waverley, most famously Bondi, have been based on words derived from Aboriginal languages of the Sydney region.

Formal European settlement goes back to 1809, when the early road builder, William Roberts received a grant of 81 hectares from Governor Bligh, of what is now most of the business and residential area of Bondi Beach. In 1851, Edward Smith Hall and Francis O’Brien purchased 200 acres of the Bondi area that embraced almost the whole frontage of Bondi Beach. Between 1855 and 1877 O’Brien purchased Hall’s share of the land, renamed the land the “O’Brien Estate”, and made the beach and the surrounding land available to the public as a picnic ground and amusement resort. As the beach became increasingly popular, O’Brien threatened to stop public beach access. However, the Municipal Council believed that the Government needed to intervene to make the beach a public reserve. However, it was not until June 9, 1882, that the NSW Government acted and Bondi Beach became a public beach.

In the early 1800s swimming at Sydney’s beaches was a controversial pastime. In 1803, Governor Philip King forbade convicts from bathing in Sydney Harbour because of “the dangers of sharks and stingrays, and for reasons of decorum”. But by the 1830s sea bathing was becoming a popular activity, despite being officially banned between 9:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. During the 1900s these restrictive attitudes began to relax and the beach became associated with health, leisure and democracy. Bondi Beach was a working-class suburb throughout most of the twentieth century with migrant people comprising the majority of the local population. The first tramway reached the beach in 1884 and the tram became the first public transportation in Bondi. As an alternative, this action changed the rule that only wealthy people could enjoy the beach. By the 1930s Bondi was drawing not only local visitors but also people from elsewhere in Australia and overseas.

The increasing popularity of sea bathing during the late 1800s and early 1900s raised concerns about public safety. In response, the world’s first formally documented surf lifesaving club, the Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club was formed in February 1906, the first club house being a simple tent in the dunes. This was powerfully reinforced by the dramatic events of “Black Sunday” at Bondi in 1938. Some 35,000 people were on the beach and a large group of lifesavers were about to start a surf race when three freak waves hit the beach, sweeping hundreds of people out to sea. Lifesavers rescued 300 people, the largest mass rescue in the history of surf bathing.

Bondi Beach is the end point of the City to Surf Fun Run, the largest running event in the world, which is held each year in August. Australian surf carnivals further instilled this image. Particularly popular during the inter-War years and immediately after World War ll, these displays of pageantry, discipline, strength and skill drew large crowds and even royal attention. A Royal Surf Carnival was held at Bondi Beach for Queen Elizabeth 11 during her first tour to Australia in 1954. In addition to many activities, Bondi Beach Market is open every Sunday. Many wealthy people spend Christmas Day at the beach. However, a shortage of houses occurs when lots of people rushed to the seaside. Manly is the seashore town which solved this problem. However, people still choose Bondi as their destination rather than Manly.

A commercial retail centre is separated from Bondi Beach by Campbell Parade, and Bondi Park, featuring many popular cafes, restaurants, and hotels, with views of the beach. The valley running down to the beach is famous over the world for its view of distinctive red tiled roofs. These architectural styles are deeply influenced by the coastal towns in England. In the last decade, Bondi Beaches’ unique position has seen a dramatic rise in svelte contemporary houses and apartments to take advantage of the views and scent of the sea. Bondi Beach hosted the beach volleyball competition at the 2000 Summer Olympics. A temporary 10,000-seat stadium, a much smaller stadium, 2 warm-up courts, and 3 training courts were set up to host the tournament and only stood for six weeks. The stadium had uncovered seating around three sides, and a partly covered stand on one side. Campaigners opposed both the social and environmental consequences of the development. “They’re prepared to risk lives and risk the Bondi beach environment for the sake of eight days of volleyball”, said Stephen Uniacke, a construction lawyer involved in the campaign. Other environmental concerns include the possibility that soil dredged up from below the sand will acidify when brought to the surface.

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

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

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

Follow your nose

A

Aromatherapy is the most widely used complementary therapy in the National Health Service, and doctors use it most often for treating dementia. For elderly patients who have difficulty interacting verbally, and to whom conventional medicine has little to offer, aromatherapy can bring benefits in terms of better sleep, improved motivation, and less disturbed behaviour. So the thinking goes. But last year, a systematic review of health care databases found almost no evidence that aromatherapy is effective in the treatment of dementia. Other findings suggest that aromatherapy works only if you believe it will. In fact, the only research that has unequivocally shown it to have an effect has been carried out on animals.

B

Behavioural studies have consistently shown that odours elicit emotional memories far more readily than other sensory cues. And earlier this year, Rachel Herz, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and colleagues peered into people’s heads using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to corroborate that. They scanned the brains of five women while they either looked at a photo of a bottle of perfume that evoked a pleasant memory for them, or smelled that perfume. One woman, for instance, remembered how as a child living in Paris—she would watch with excitement as her mother dressed to go out and sprayed herself with that perfume. The women themselves described the perfume as far more evocative than the photo, and Herz and co-workers found that the scent did indeed activate the amygdala and other brain regions associated with emotion processing far more strongly than the photograph. But the interesting thing was that the memory itself was no better recalled by the odour than by the picture. “People don’t remember any more detail or with any more clarity when the memory is recalled with an odour,” she says. “However, with the odour, you have this intense emotional feeling that’s really visceral.”

C

That’s hardly surprising, Herz thinks, given how the brain has evolved. “The way I like to think about it is that emotion and olfaction are essentially the same things,” she says. “The part of the brain that controls emotion literally grew out of the part of the brain that controls smell.” That, she says, probably explains why memories for odours that are associated with intense emotions are so strongly entrenched in us, because the smell was initially a survival skill: a signal to approach or to avoid.

D

Eric Vermetten, a psychiatrist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, says that doctors have long known about the potential of smells to act as traumatic reminders, but the evidence has been largely anecdotal. Last year, he and others set out to document it by describing three cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in which patients reported either that a certain smell triggered their flashbacks, or that smell was a feature of the flashback itself. The researchers concluded that odours could be made use of in exposure therapy, or for reconditioning patients’ fear responses.

E

After Vermetten presented his findings at a conference, doctors in the audience told him how they had turned this association around and put it to good use. PTSD patients often undergo group therapy, but the therapy itself can expose them to traumatic reminders. “Some clinicians put a strip of vanilla or a strong, pleasant, everyday odorant such as coffee under their patients’ noses, so that they have this continuous olfactory stimulation,” says Vermetten. So armed, the patients seem to be better protected against flashbacks. It’s purely anecdotal, and nobody knows what’s happening in the brain, says Vermetten, but it’s possible that the neural pathways by which the odour elicits the pleasant, everyday memory override the fear-conditioned neural pathways that respond to verbal cues.

F

According to Herz, the therapeutic potential of odours could lie in their very unreliability. She has shown with her perfume-bottle experiment that they don’t guarantee any better recall, even if the memories they elicit feel more real. And there’s plenty of research to show that our noses can be tricked, because being predominantly visual and verbal creatures, we put more faith in those other modalities. In 2001, for instance, Gil Morrot, of the National Institute for Agronomic Research in Montpellier, tricked 54 oenology students by secretly colouring a white wine with an odourless red dye just before they were asked to describe the odours of a range of red and white wines. The students described the coloured wine using terms typically reserved for red wines. What’s more, just like experts, they used terms alluding to the wine’s redness and darkness—visual rather than olfactory qualities. Smell, the researchers concluded, cannot be separated from the other senses.

G

Last July, Jay Gottfried and Ray Dolan of the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience in London took that research a step further when they tested people’s response times in naming an odour, either when presented with an image that was associated with the odour or one that was not. So, they asked them to sniff vanilla and simultaneously showed them either a picture of ice cream or of cheese, while scanning their brains in a fMRI machine. People named the smells faster when the picture showed something semantically related to them, and when that happened, a structure called the hippocampus was strongly activated. The researchers’ interpretation was that the hippocampus plays a role in integrating information from the senses— information that the brain then uses to decide what it is perceiving.

Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G

Choose the correct heading for paragraph A, C-E and G from the list of headings below.

Write the correct number i-ix in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

Example Answer

Paragraph B iv

Example Answer

Paragraph F v

List of Headings

i Remembering the past more clearly

ii Bringing back painful memories

iii Originally an alarm signal

iv The physical effects of scent versus image

v Checking unreliable evidence

vi Reinforcing one sense with another

vii Protection against reliving the past

viii The overriding power of sight and sound

ix Conflicting views

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

Architecture in Britain

From the Middle Ages to the 20th century, what are the influences and movements that have shaped the changing face of British architecture?

Architecture is about evolution, not revolution. It used to be thought that once the Romans pulled out of Britain in the fifth century, their elegant villas, carefully-planned towns and engineering marvels like Hadrian’s Wall simply fell into decay as British culture was plunged into the Dark Ages. It took the Norman Conquest of 1 066 to bring back the light, and the Gothic cathedral-builders of the Middle Ages played an important part in the revival of British culture. However, the truth is not as simple as that. Romano-British culture—and that included architecture along with language, religion, political organisation and the arts—survived long after the Roman withdrawal. And although the Anglo-Saxons had a sophisticated building style of their own, little survives to bear witness to their achievements as the vast majority of Anglo-Saxon buildings were made of wood.

Even so, the period between the Norman landing at Pevensey in 1066 and the day in 1485 when Richard III lost his horse and his head at Bosworth, ushering in the Tudors and the Early Modern period, marks a rare flowering of British buildings. And it is all the more remarkable because the underlying ethos of medieval architecture was “fitness for purpose”. The great cathedrals and parish churches that lifted up their towers to heaven were not only acts of devotion in stone; they were also fiercely functional buildings. Castles served their particular purpose and their battlements and turrets were for use rather than ornament. The rambling manor houses of the later Middle Ages, however, were primarily homes, their owners achieving respect and maintaining status by their hospitality and good lordship rather than the grandeur of their buildings. In a sense, the buildings of the 16th century were also governed by fitness for purpose—only now, the purpose was very different. In domestic architecture, in particular, buildings were used to display status and wealth.

This stately and curious workmanship showed itself in various ways. A greater sense of security led to more outward-looking buildings, as opposed to the medieval arrangement where the need for defence created houses that faced inward onto a courtyard or series of courtyards. This allowed for much more in the way of exterior ornament. The rooms themselves tended to be bigger and lighter—as an expensive commodity, the use of great expanses of glass was in itself a statement of wealth. There was also a general move towards balanced and symmetrical exteriors with central entrances. With the exception of Inigo Jones (1573-1652), whose confident handling of classical detail and proportion set him apart from all other architects of the period, most early 17th century buildings tended to take the innocent exuberance of late Tudor to work one step further. But during the 1640s and 50s, the Civil War and its aftermath sent many gentlemen and nobles to the Continent either to escape the fighting or, when the war was lost, to follow Charles II into exile. There they came into contact with French, Dutch and Italian architecture and, with Charles’s restoration in 1 660, there was a flurry of building activity as royalists reclaimed their property and built themselves houses reflecting the latest European trends. The British Baroque was a reassertion of authority, an expression of absolutist ideology by men who remembered a world turned upside down during the Civil War. The style is heavy and rich, sometimes overblown and melodramatic. The politics which underpin it are questionable, but its products are breathtaking.

The huge glass-and-iron Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, shows another strand to 19th century architecture—one which embraced new industrial processes. But it wasn’t long before even this confidence in progress came to be regarded with suspicion. Mass production resulted in buildings and furnishings that were too perfect, as the individual craftsman no longer had a major role in their creation. Railing against the dehumanising effects of industrialisation, reformers like John Ruskin and William Morris made a concerted effort to return to hand-crafted, pre-industrial manufacturing techniques. Morris’s influence grew from the production of furniture and textiles until by the 1880s a generation of principled young architects was following his call for good, honest construction.

The most important trends in early 20th century architecture simply passed Britain by. Whilst Gropius was working on cold, hard expanses of glass, and Le Corbusier was experimenting with the use of reinforced concrete frames, we had staid establishment architects like Edwin Lutyens producing Neo-Georgian and Renaissance country houses for an outmoded landed class. In addition, there was slightly batty architect craftsmen, the heirs of William Morris, still trying to turn the clock back to before the Industrial Revolution by making chairs and spurning new technology. Only a handful of Modern Movement buildings of any real merit were produced here during the 1920s and 1930s, and most of these were the work of foreign architects such as Serge Chermayeff, Berthold Lubetkin and Erno Gold-finger who had settled in this country.

After the Second World War, the situation began to change. The Modern Movement’s belief in progress and the future struck a chord with the mood of post-war Britain and, as reconstruction began under Attlee’s Labour government in 1 945, there was a desperate need for cheap housing which could be produced quickly. The use of prefabricated elements, metal frames, concrete cladding and the absence of decoration—all of which had been embraced by Modernists abroad and viewed with suspicion by the British—were adopted to varying degrees for housing developments and schools. Local authorities, charged with the task of rebuilding city centres, became important patrons of architecture. This represented a shift away from the private individuals who had dominated the architectural scene for centuries.

Since the War, it has been corporate bodies like these local authorities, together with national and multinational companies, and large educational institutions, which have dominated British architecture. By the late 1 980s the Modern Movement, unfairly blamed for the social experiments implicit in high-rise housing, had lost out to irony and spectacle in the shape of post-modernism, with its cheerful borrowings from anywhere and any period. But now, in the new Millennium, even post-modernism is showing signs of age. What comes next?

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

Write your answers in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet.