Recent IELTS Reading Actual test 84

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

Blue-footed Boobies 2

A

Boobies are a small group of seabirds native to tropical and subtropical oceans throughout the world. Their diet consists mainly of fish. They are specialized fish eaters feeding on small school fish like sardines, anchovies, mackerel, and flying fish. When their prey is in sight, they fold their long wings back around their streamlined bodies and plunge into the water from as high as 80 feet, so streamlined they barely make a splash. They travel in parties of about 12 to areas of water with large schools of small fish. When the lead bird sees a fish shoal in the water, it will signal the rest of the group and they will all dive together. Surprisingly, individuals do not eat with the hunting group, preferring to eat on their own, usually in the early morning or late afternoon.

B

There are three varieties on the Galapagos: the blue-footed, red-footed, and masked boobies. They are all members of the same family, and are not only different in appearance but also in behaviours. The blue-footed and red-footed boobies mate throughout the year, while the masked boobies have an annual mating cycle that differs from island to island. All catch fish in a similar manner, but in different areas: the blue-footed booby does its fishing close to shore, while the masked booby goes slightly farther out, and the red-footed booby fishes at the farthest distances from shore.

C

Although it is unknown where the name “Booby” emanates from, some conjecture it may come from the Spanish word for clown, “bobo”, meaning “stupid”. Its name was probably inspired by the bird’s clumsiness on land and apparently unwarranted bravery. The blue footed booby is extremely vulnerable to human visitors because it does not appear to fear them. Therefore these birds received such name for their clumsiness on land in which they were easy, captured, killed, and eaten by humans.

D

The blue-footed booby’s characteristic feet play a significant part in their famous courtship ceremony, the ‘booby dance’. The male walks around the female, raising his bright blue feet straight up in the air while bringing his ‘shoulders’ towards the ground and crossing the bottom tips of his wings high above the ground. Plus he’ll raise his bill up towards the sky to try to win his mate over. The female may also partake in these activities – lifting her feet, sky pointing, and of course, squawking at her mate. After mating, another ritual occurs – the nest-building which ironically is never used because they nest on the bare ground. When the female is ready to lay her eggs, they scrape the existing nest away so she can nest on exposed ground. Sun-baked islands form the booby’s breeding grounds. When ready the female Blue Footed Booby lays one to three eggs.

E

After mating, two or three eggs are laid in a shallow depression on flat or gently sloping ground. Both male and female take turns incubating the eggs. Unlike most birds, booby doesn’t develop brood patches (areas of bare skin on the breast) to warm the eggs during incubation. Instead, it uses its broad webbed feet, which have large numbers of prominent blood vessels, to transmit heat essential for incubation. The eggs are thick-shelled so they can withstand the full weight of an incubating bird.

F

After hatching, the male plays a major role in bringing fish home. He can bring back a constant supply of small fish for the chicks, which must be fed continuously. The reason is that the male has a longer tail than the female in relation to his body size, which makes him able to execute shallower dives and to feed closer to shore. Then the female takes a greater part as time proceeds. Sooner or later, the need to feed the young becomes greater than the need to protect them and both adults must fish to provide enough.

G

When times are good, the parents may successfully fledge all three chicks, but, in harder times, they may still lay as many eggs yet only obtain enough food to raise one. The problem is usually solved by the somewhat callous-sounding system of “opportunistic sibling murder.” The first-born chick is larger and stronger than its nest mate(s) as a result of hatching a few days earlier and also because the parents feed the larger chick. If food is scarce, the first born will get more food than its nest mate(s) and will outcompete them, causing them to starve. The above system optimizes the reproductive capacity of the blue-foot in an unpredictable environment. The system ensures that, if possible, at least one chick will survive a period of shortage rather than all three dying of starvation under a more ‘humane’ system.

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 1-6 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i Unusual way of hatching the chicks

ii Feeding habit of the red-footed booby

iii Folding wings for purpose

iv Rearing the young

v Classification of boobies

vi Diving for seafood

vii Surviving mechanism during the food shortage period

viii Mating and breeding

ix Origin of the booby’s name

Example Answer

Paragraph C ix

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

Chinese Yellow Citrus Ant

for

BIOLOGICAL CONTROL

A

In 1476, the farmers of Berne in Switzerland decided, according to this story, there was only one way to rid their fields of the cutworms attacking their crops. They took the pests to court. The worms were tried, found guilty and excommunicated by the archbishop. In China, farmers had a more practical approach to pest control. Rather than rely on divine intervention, they put their faith in frogs, ducks and ants. Frogs and ducks were encouraged to snap up the pests in the paddies and the occasional plague of locusts. But the notion of biological control began with an ant. More specifically, the story says, it started with the predatory yellow citrus ant Oecophylla smaragdina, which has been polishing off pests in the orange groves of southern China for at least 1700 years. The yellow citrus ant is a type of weaver ant, which binds leaves and twigs with silk to form a neat, tent-like nest. In the beginning, farmers made do with the odd ants’nest here and there. But it wasn’t long before growing demand led to the development of a thriving trade in nests and a new type of agriculture—ant farming.

B

Foran insect that bites, the yellow citrus ant is remarkably popular. Even by ant standards, Oecophylla smaragdina is a fearsome predator. It’s big, runs fast and has a powerful nip—painful to humans but lethal to many of the insects that plague the orange groves of Guangdong and Guangxi in southern China. And for at least 17 centuries. Chinese orange growers have harnessed these six-legged killing machines to keep their fruit groves healthy and productive. The story explains that citrus fruits evolved in the Far East and the Chinese discovered the delights of their flesh early on. As the ancestral home of oranges, lemons and pomelos, China also has the greatest diversity of citrus pests. And the trees that produce the sweetest fruits, the mandarins—or kan–attract a host of plant-eating insects, from black ants and sap-sucking mealy bugs to leaf-devouring caterpillars. With so many enemies, fruit growers clearly had to have some way of protecting their orchards.

C

The West did not discover the Chinese orange growers’ secret weapon until the early 20th century. At the time, Florida was suffering an epidemic of citrus canker and in 1915 Walter Swingle, a plant physiologist working for the US Department of Agriculture, was, the story says, sent to China in search of varieties of orange that were resistant to the disease. Swingle spent some time studying the citrus orchards around Guangzhou, and there he came across the story of the cultivated ant. These ants, he was told, were “grown” by the people of a small village nearby who sold them to the orange growers by the nestful.

D

The earliest report of citrus ants at work among the orange trees appears in a book on tropical and subtropical botany written by His Han in AD 304. “The people of Chiao-Chih sell in their markets ants in bags of rush matting. The nests are like silk. The bags are all attached to twigs and leaves which, with the ants inside the nests, are for sale. The ants are reddish-yellow in colour, bigger than ordinary ants. In the south, if the kan trees do not have this kind of ant, the fruits will all be damaged by many harmful insects, and not a single fruit will be perfect.

E

Initially, farmers relied on nests which they collected from the wild or bought in the market where trade in nests was brisk. ‘It is said that in the south orange trees which are free of ants will have wormy fruits. Therefore the people race to buy nests for their orange trees, ‘wrote Liu Hsun in Strange Things Noted in the South, written about AD 890. The business quickly became more sophisticate. From the 10th century, country people began to trap ants in artificial nests baited with fat. “Fruit growing families buy these ants from vendors who make a business of collecting and selling such creatures, “wrote Chuang Chi-Yu in 1130. “They trap them by filling hogs ‘or sheep’s bladders with fat and placing them with the cavities open next to the ants ‘nests. They wait until the ants have migrated into the bladders and take them away. This is known as ‘rearing orange ants’. “Farmers attached the bladders to their trees, and in time the ants spread to other trees and built new nests. By the 17th century, growers were building bamboo walkways between their trees to speed the colonization of their orchards. The ants ran along these narrow bridges from one tree to another and established nests “by the hundreds of thousands”.

F

Did it work? The orange growers clearly thought so. One authority, Chi Ta-Chun, writing in 1700，stressed how important it was to keep the fruit trees free of insect pests, especially caterpillars. “It is essential to eliminate them so that the trees are not injured. But hand labour is not nearly as efficient as ant power…” Swingle was just as impressed. Yet despite this report, many Western biologists were skeptical. In the West, the idea of using one insect to destroy another was new and highly controversial. The first breakthrough had come in 1888，when the infant orange industry in California had been saved from extinction by the Australian vedalia beetle. This beetle was the only thing that had made an inroad into the explosion of cottony cushion scale that was threatening to destroy the state’s citrus crops. But, as Swingle now knew, California’s “first” was nothing of the sort. The Chinese had been an expert in biocontrol for many centuries.

G

The story goes on to say that the long tradition of ants in the Chinese orchards only began to waver in the 1950s and 1960s with the introduction of powerful organic (I guess the author means chemical insecticides). Although most fruit growers switched to chemicals, a few hung onto their ants. Those who abandoned ants in favour of chemicals quickly became disillusioned. As costs soared and pests began to develop resistance to the chemicals, growers began to revive the old ant patrols. They had good reason to have faith in their insect workforce. Research in the early 1960s showed that as long as there were enough ants in the trees, they did an excellent job of dispatching some pests—mainly the larger insects—and had modest success against others. Trees with yellow ants produced almost 20 per cent more healthy leaves than those without. More recent trials have shown that these trees yield just as big a crop as those protected by expensive chemical sprays.

H

One apparent drawback of using ants—and one of the main reasons for the early skepticism by Western scientists—was that citrus ants do nothing to control mealy bugs， waxy-coated scale insects which can do considerable damage to fruit trees. In fact, the ants protect mealy bugs in exchange for the sweet honeydew they secrete. The orange growers always denied this was a problem but Western scientists thought they knew better. Research in the 1980s suggests that the growers were right all along. Where mealy bugs proliferate under the ants ‘protection they are usually heavily parasitized and this limits the harm they can do. Orange growers who rely on carnivorous ants rather than poisonous chemicals maintain a better balance of species in their orchards. While the ants deal with the bigger insect pests, other predatory species keep down the numbers of smaller pests such as scale insects and aphids. In the long run, ants do a lot less damage than chemicals—and they’re certainly more effective than ex-communication.

Use the information in the passage to match the year (listed A-G) with the correct description below.

Write the appropriate letters A-G in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once

A 1888

B 1476

C 1915

D 1700

E 1130

F 304 AD

G 1950

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

John Franklin: “the discovery of the slowness”

A

John Franklin (1786-1847) was the most famous vanisher of the Victorian era. He joined the Navy as a midshipman at the age of 14 and fought in the battles of Copenhagen and Trafalgar. When peace with the French broke out. he turned his attention to, and in particular to solve the conundrum of the Northwest Passage, the mythical clear-water route which would, if it existed, link the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans above the northern coast of the American continent. The first expedition Franklin led to the Arctic was an arduous overland journey from Hudson Bay to the shores of the so-called Polar Ocean east of the Coppermine River. Between 1819 and 1822. Franklin and his twenty-strong team covered 5550 miles on foot. Their expedition was a triumph of surveying – they managed to chart hundreds of miles of previously unknown coastline.

B

There followed a career as a travel writer and salon-goer {‘the man who ate his boots’ was Franklin’s tag-line), a second long Arctic expedition, and a controversial spell as Governor of Van Diemen’s Land. Then, in May 1845, Franklin set off with two ships – the Erebus and the Terror – and 129 men on the voyage that would kill him. In July, the convoy was seen by two whalers, entering Lancaster Sound. Nothing more would be heard of it for 14 years. Had the ships sunk or been iced in? Were the men dead, or in need of rescue? Or had they broken through to the legendary open polar sea, beyond the ‘ice barrier’?

C

In his personal correspondence and in his published memoirs. Franklin comes across as a man dedicated to the external duties of war and exploration, who kept introspection and self-analysis to a minimum. His blandness makes him an amenably malleable subject for a novelist, and Sten Nadolny has taken full advantage of this licence. Most important, he has endowed his John Franklin with a defining character trait for which there is no historical evidence: (‘slowness’, or ‘calmness’).

D

Slowness influences not only Franklin’s behaviour but also his vision, his thought and his speech. The opening scene of The Discovery of Slowness (The Discovery of Slowness by Sten Nadolny) – depicts Franklin as a young boy. playing catch badly because his reaction time is too slow. Despite the bullying of his peers, Franklin resolves not to fall into step with ‘their way of doing things’. For Nadolny. Franklin’s fated fascination with the Arctic stems from his desire to find an environment suited to his peculiar slowness.

E

He describes Franklin as a boy dreaming of the ‘open water and the time without hours and days’ which exist in the far north, and of finding in the Arctic a place ‘where nobody would find him too slow’. Ice is a slow mover. Ice demands a corresponding patience from those who venture onto it. The explorers who have thrived at high latitude and at high altitudes haven’t usually been men of great speed. They have tended instead to demonstrate unusual self-possession, a considerable capacity for boredom, and a talent for what the Scots call ‘tholing’, the uncomplaining endurance of suffering.

F

These were all qualities which the historical Franklin possessed in abundance, and so Nadolny’s concentration and exaggeration of them isn’t unreasonable. Even as an adult, his slowness of thought means that he is unable to speak fluently, so he memorises ‘entire fleets of words and batteries of response’, and speaks a languid, bric-a-brac language. In the Navy, his method of thinking first and acting later initially provokes mockery from his fellow sailors. But Franklin persists in doing things his way. and gradually earns the respect of those around him. To a commodore who tells him to speed up his report of an engagement, he replies: ‘When I tell something, sir. I use my own rhythm.’ A lieutenant says approvingly of him: ’Because Franklin is so slow, he never loses time.’

G

Since it was first published in Germany in 1983. The Discovery of Slowness has sold more than a million copies and been translated into 13 languages. It has been named as one of German literature’s twenty ‘contemporary classics’, and it has been as a manual and by European pressure groups and institutions representing causes as diverse as sustainable development, the Protestant Church, management science, motoring policy and pacifism.

H

The various groups that have taken the novel up have one thing in common: a dislike of the high-speed culture of Postmodernity. Nadolny’s Franklin appeals to them because he is immune to ‘the compulsion to be constantly occupied’, and to the idea that ‘someone was better if he could do the same thing fast.’ Several German churches have used him in their symposia and focus groups as an example of peacefulness, piety and self-confidence. A centre scheme (a ‘march of slowness’ or ‘of the slow’), inspired by the novel. Nadolny has appeared as a guest speaker for RIO, a Lucerne-based organisation which aims to reconcile management principles with ideas of environmental sustainability. The novel has even become involved in the debate about speed limits on German roads. Drive down an autobahn today, and you will see large road-side signs proclaiming ‘unhurriedness’ a slogan which deliberately plays off the title of the novel.

I

A management journal in the US described The Discovery of Slowness is a ‘major event not only for connoisseurs of fine historical fiction but also for those of us who concern themselves with leadership, communication and systems-thinking, issues’. It’s easy to see where the attraction lies for the management crowd. The novel is crammed with quotations about time-efficiency, punctiliousness and profitability: ‘As a rule, there are always three points in time: the right one. the lost one and the premature one’. ‘What did too late mean? They hadn’t waited for it long enough, that’s what it meant.’

Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs A-H.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-H, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.