Recent IELTS Reading Actual test 76

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

Making Copier

At first, nobody bought Chester Carlson’s strange idea. But trillions of documents later, his invention is the biggest thing in printing since Gutenberg

A

Copying is the engine of civilization: culture is behavior duplicated. The oldest copier invented by people is language, by which an idea of yours becomes an idea of mine. The second great copying machine was writing. When the Sumerians transposed spoken words into stylus marks on clay tablets more than 5,000 years ago, the hugely extended the human network that language had created. Writing freed copying from the chain of living contact. It made ideas permanent, portable and endlessly reproducible.

B

Until Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press in the mid-1400s, producing a book in an edition of more than one generally meant writing it out again. Printing with moveable type was not copying, however. Gutenberg couldn’t take a document that already existed, feed it into his printing press and run off facsimiles. The first true mechanical copier was manufactured in 1780, when James Watt, who is better known as the inventor of the modern steam engine, created the copying press. Few people today know what a copying press was, but you may have seen one in an antique store, where it was perhaps called a book press. A user took a document freshly written in special ink, placed a moistened sheet of translucent paper against the inked surface and squeezed the two sheets together in the press, causing some of the ink from the original to penetrate the second sheet, which could then be read by turning it over and looking through its back. The high cost prohibits the widespread use of this copier.

C

Among the first modem copying machines, introduced in 1950 by 3M, was the Thermo-Fax, and it made a copy by shining infrared light through an original document and a sheet of paper that had been coated with heat-sensitive chemicals. Competing manufacturers soon introduced other copying technologies and marketed machines called Dupliton, Dial-A-Matic Autostat, Verifax, Copease and Copymation. These machines and their successors were welcomed by secretaries, who had no other means of reproducing documents in hand, but each had serious drawbacks. All required expensive chemically treated papers. And all made copies that smelled bad, were hard to read, didn’t last long and tended to curl up into tubes. The machines were displaced, beginning in the late 1800s, by a combination of two 19th century inventions: the typewriter and carbon paper. For those reasons, copying presses were standard equipment in offices for nearly a century and a half.

D

None of those machines is still manufactured today. They were all made obsolete by a radically different machine, which had been developed by an obscure photographic-supply company. That company had been founded in 1906 as the Haloid Company and is known today as the Xerox Corporation. In 1959, it introduced an office copier called the Haloid Xerox 914, a machine that, unlike its numerous competitors, made sharp, permanent copies on ordinary paper-a huge breakthrough. The process, which Haloid called xerography (based on Greek words meaning “dry” and “writing”), was so unusual and nonnutritive that physicists who visited the drafty warehouses where the first machines were built sometimes expressed doubt that it was even theoretically feasible.

E

Remarkably, xerography was conceived by one person- Chester Carlson, a shy, soft-spoken patent attorney, who grew up in almost unspeakable poverty and worked his way through junior college and the California Institute of Technology. Chester Carlson was born in Seattle in 1906. His parents-Olof Adolph Carlson and Ellen Josephine Hawkins—had grown up on neighboring farms in Grove City, Minnesota, a tiny Swedish farming community about 75 miles west of Minneapolis. Compare with competitors, Carlson was not a normal inventor in 20-century. He made his discovery in solitude in 1937 and offered it to more than 20 major corporations, among them IBM, General Electric, Eastman Kodak and RCA. All of them turned him down, expressing what he later called “an enthusiastic lack of interest” and thereby passing up the opportunity to manufacture what Fortune magazine would describe as “the most successful product ever marketed in America.”

F

Carlson’s invention was indeed a commercial triumph. Essentially overnight, people began making copies at a rate that was orders of magnitude higher than anyone had believed possible. And the rate is still growing. In fact, most documents handled by a typical American office worker today are produced xerographically, either on copiers manufactured by Xerox and its competitors or on laser printers, which employ the same process (and were invented, in the 1970s, by a Xerox researcher). This year, the world will produce more than three trillion xerographic copies and laser-printed pages—about 500 for every human on earth.

G

Xerography eventually made Carlson a very wealthy man. (His royalties amounted to something like a 16th of a cent for every Xerox copy made, worldwide, through 1965.) Nevertheless, he lived simply. He never owned a second home or a second car, and his wife had to urge him not to buy third-class train tickets when he traveled in Europe. People who knew him casually seldom suspected that he was rich or even well-to-do; when Carlson told an acquaintance he worked at Xerox, the man assumed he was a factory worker and asked if he belonged to a union. “His possessions seemed to be composed of the number of things he could easily do without,” his second wife said. He spent the last years of his life quietly giving most of his fortune to charities. When he died in 1968, among the eulogizers was the secretary-general of the United Nations.

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

In boxes 1-6 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 14-27 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

Researcher on the Tree Crown

A

The forest canopy – the term given to the aggregated crowns of trees in a forest – is thought to host up to 40 per cent of all species, of which ten per cent could be unique to the forest roof. “We’re dealing with the richest, least known, most threatened habitat on Earth,” says Andrew Mitchell, the executive director of the Global Canopy Programme (GCP), a collection of groups undertaking research into this lofty world. “The problem with our understanding of forests is that nearly all the information we have has been gleaned from just two meters above the soil, and yet we’re dealing with trees that grow to heights of 60 meters, or in the case of the tallest redwood 112 meters. It’s like doctors trying to treat humans by only looking at their feet.”

B

Tropical rainforest comprises the richest of ecosystems, rivalled only by coral reel for its diversity and complex interrelationships. And a great deal of that diversity lives up in the canopy – an estimated 70-90 per cent of life in the rainforest exists in the trees; one in ten of all vascular plants are canopy dwellers, and about 20-25 per cent of all invertebrates are thought to be unique to the canopy.

C

The first Briton to actually get into the canopy may have been Sir Francis Drake who, in 1573, gained his first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean from a tall tree in Darien, Panama. However, the first serious effort to reach and study the canopy didn’t begin until 1929. The Oxford University Expedition to British Guiana, led by Major RWG Hingston, still ended up help of locals when it came to building an observation platform. It was a successful expedition all the same, despite the colony’s acting governor getting stuck high up on a winched seat during a visit. In terms of canopy access, the French have proved themselves to be excellent innovators, taking things further with the development of ‘lighter-than-air platforms -balloons and related equipment, to you and me. Francis Halle; from the Laboratoire de Botanique Tropicale at Montpellier University took to a balloon in the mid-1980s in order to approach the canopy from above. His work in French Guiana was inspired by the use in Gabon of a tethered helium balloon by Marcel and Annette Hladick. Halle went one further by using a small purpose-built airship-a cigar-shaped balloon with propellers to aid manoeuvrability. “We suddenly had a mobile system that could move around the treetops; there were no other means of doing this,” says Mitchell.

D

From this, two balloon-dependent features have developed: the radeau or raft, and the luge or sledge. The raft is a ‘floating’ platform, employed by French academics Dany Cleyet-Marrel and Laurent Pyot and is essentially an island in the treetops. Made of kevlar mesh netting and edged with inflated neoprene tubes, it rests on top of the canopy, allowing sampling (mostly of plants and insects) to take place at the edges of the platform, and can stay in position for several days. The luge, on the other hand, is an inflated hexagon similar to a traditional balloon basket but with a hole in the bottom covered with Kevlar mesh. Such techniques aren’t without their problems, however, “balloons can cover larger areas, especially for collection purposes, but they are extremely expensive- Jibe raft alone cost 122,000 [euro] (86,000 [pounds sterling]) in 2001], nut very effective because you can only reach the tops of the trees, and are highly dependent on the weather, ” says Dr Wilfried Morawetz, director of systematic botany at the University of Leipzig. “Balloons can usually only be used in the early morning for two to four hours. Last time, we could only fly three times during the whole week.” Given these factors, it comes as no surprise that operations involving these balloons numbered just six between 1986 and 2001.

E

Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Smith had the idea of using a static crane to get into the treetops. Un-tethered balloons may allow widely distributed sites to be sampled, but cranes allow scientists to study an area of at least a hectare from soil to canopy throughout the year, year after year. “Cranes beat any other access mode. They are cheap, reliable and fast. In two minutes I can reach any point in our forest, which is essential for comparative measurements across species,” says Professor Christian Korner of the University of Basel. Korner is using a static crane in a unique carbon dioxide-enrichment experiment in Switzerland, in an attempt to discover how forests might respond to the global increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (see Swiss canopy-crane carbon experiment, right). For reasons of convenience, cranes are generally situated close to cities or a research center. Leipzig University has a crane not far from the town, the Location allowing scientists to study the effect of city pollutants on forests. In order to increase the amount of canopy a crane can access, some have been mounted on short rail tracks. In “1995, Dr Wilfried Morawetz was the first to use this technique, installing a crane on 150 meters of track in the Venezuelan rainforest. “In my opinion, cranes should be the core of canopy research in the future,” he says.

F

It appears that the rest of the scientific community has now come around to Mitchell’s way of thinking. “I think most scientists thought him mad to consider such a complex field station at first,” says internationally respected ‘canopist’ Meg Lowman, the executive director of the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens. “However, we’ve all come to realize that a combination of methods, a long-term approach to ecological studies and a collaborative approach are the absolute best ways to advance canopy science. A permanent canopy field station would allow that to happen.” With A dedicated group of canopy scientists working together and a wide range of tools available for them to get into the treetops, we’re now finally on our way towards a true understanding of the least-known terrestrial habitat.

The reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-F

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-F, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

Asian Space 2

Satellite Technology

The space-age began with the launch of the Russian artificial satellite Sputnik in 1957 and developed further with the race to the moon between the United States and Russia. This rivalry was characterized by advanced technology and huge budgets. In this process, there were spectacular successes, some failures, but also many spin-offs.

Europe, Japan, China, and India quickly joined this space club of the superpowers. With the advent of relatively low-cost high-performance mini-satellites and launchers, the acquisition of indigenous space capabilities by smaller nations in Asia has become possible. How, in what manner, and for what purpose will these capabilities be realized?

A

Rocket technology has progressed considerably since the days of ‘fire arrows’ (bamboo poles filled with gunpowder) first used in China around 500 BC, and, during the Sung Dynasty, to repel Mongol invaders at the battle of Kaifeng (Kai-fung fu) in AD 1232. These ancient rockets stand in stark contrast to the present-day Chinese rocket launch vehicles, called the ‘Long March’, intended to place a Chinese astronaut in space by 2005 and, perhaps, to achieve a Chinese moon-landing by the end of the decade.

B

In the last decade, there has been a dramatic growth in space activities in Asia both in the utilization of space-based services and the production of satellites and launchers. This rapid expansion has led many commentators and analysts to predict that Asia will become a world space power. The space-age has had dramatic effects worldwide with direct developments in space technology influencing telecommunications, meteorological forecasting, earth resource and environmental monitoring, and disaster mitigation (flood, forest fires, and oil spills). Asian nations have been particularly eager to embrace these developments.

C

New and innovative uses for satellites are constantly being explored with potential revolutionary effects, such as in the field of health and telemedicine, distance education, crime prevention (piracy on the high seas), food and agricultural planning and production (rice crop monitoring). Space in Asia is very much influenced by the competitive commercial space sector, the emergence of low-cost mini-satellites, and the globalization of industrial and financial markets. It is not evident how Asian space will develop in the coming decades in the face of these trends. It is, however, important to understand and assess the factors and forces that shape Asian space activities and development in determining its possible consequences for the region.

D

At present, three Asian nations, Japan, China, and India, have comprehensive end-to-end space capabilities and possess a complete space infrastructure: space technology, satellite manufacturing, rockets, and spaceports. Already self-sufficient in terms of satellite design and manufacturing, South Korea is currently attempting to join their ranks with its plans to develop a launch site and spaceport. Additionally, nations in Southeast Asia as well as those bordering the Indian subcontinent (Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), have, or are starting to develop indigenous space programmes. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has, in varying degrees, embraced space applications using foreign technology and over the past five years or so its space activities have been expanding. Southeast Asia is predicted to become the largest and fastest-growing market for commercial space products and applications, driven by telecommunications (mobile and fixed services), the Internet, and remote sensing applications. In the development of this technology, many non-technical factors, such as economics, politics, culture, and history, interact and play important roles, which in turn affect Asian technology.

E

Asia and Southeast Asia, in particular, suffers from a long list of recurrent large-scale environmental problems including storms and flooding, forest fires and deforestation, and crop failures. Thus the space application that has attracted the most attention in this region is remote sensing. Remote sensing satellites equipped with instruments to take photographs of the ground at different wavelengths provide essential information for natural resource accounting, environmental management, disaster prevention and monitoring, land-use mapping, and sustainable development planning. Progress in these applications has been rapid and impressive. ASEAN members, unlike Japan, China, and India, do not have their own remote sensing satellites, however, most of its member nations have facilities to receive, process, and interpret such data from American and European satellites. In particular, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore have world-class remote sensing processing facilities and research programmes. ASEAN has plans to develop (and launch) its own satellites and in particular remote sensing satellites. Japan is regarded as the dominant space power in Asia and its record of successes and quality of technologies are equal to those of the West. In view of the technological challenges and high risks involved in space activities, a very long, and expensive, the learning curve has been followed to obtain those successes achieved. Japan, s satellite manufacturing was based on the old and traditional defense and military procurement methodologies as practiced in the US and Europe.

F

In recent years there have been fundamental changes in the way satellites are designed and built to drastically reduce costs. The emergence of ‘small satellites’ and their quick adoption by Asian countries as a way to develop low-cost satellite technology and rapidly establish a space capability has given these countries the possibility to shorten their learning curve by a decade or more. The global increase of technology transfer mechanisms and use of readily available commercial technology to replace costly space and military-standard components may very well result in a highly competitive Asian satellite manufacturing industry.

G

The laws of physics are the same in Tokyo as in Toulouse, and the principles of electronics and mechanics know no political or cultural boundaries. However, no such immutability applies to engineer practices and management; they are very much influenced by education, culture, and history. These factors, in turn, have an effect on costs, lead times, product designs and, eventually, international sales. Many Asian nations are sending their engineers to be trained in the West. Highly experienced, they return to work in the growing Asian space industry. Will this acquisition of technical expertise, coupled perhaps with the world-renowned Japanese manufacturing and management techniques, be applied to build world-class satellites and reduce costs?

The reading passage has seven paragraphs, A-G

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-G from the list below.

Write the correct number, i-ix, in boxes 28-32 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i Western countries provide essential assistance

ii Unbalanced development for an essential space technology

iii Innovative application compelled by competition

iv An ancient invention which is related to the future

v Military purpose of the satellite

vi Rockets for application in ancient China

vii Space development in Asia in the past

viii Non-technology factors counts

ix competitive edge gained by more economically feasible satellite

Paragraph D Example: Current space technology development in Asia