![](assets/img/IELTS READING.png)
Going Bananas, Computer Provides More Questions Than Answers, Save Endangered Language -IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test with Answers
Pratice Question Types
Reading Passage 1 :
• Sentence Completion• True/False/Not Given
• Multiple Information
Reading Passage 2 :
• Multiple Paragtraph
• Summary completion
• Matching Information
Reading Passage 3
• Multiple Paragtraph
• Matching Information
• Multiple Choice Questions
READING PASSAGE 1
Going Bananas
A
The world's favourite fruit could disappear forever in 10 years’ time. The banana is
among the world’s oldest crops. Agricultural scientists believe that the first edible banana
was discovered around ten thousand years ago. It has been at an evolutionary standstill
ever since it was first propagated in the jungles of South-East Asia at the end of the last
ice age. Normally the wild banana, a giant jungle herb called Musa acuminata, contains
a mass of hard seeds that make the fruit virtually inedible. But now and then, hunter gatherers must have discovered rare mutant plants that produced seed-less, edible fruits.
Geneticists now know that the vast majority of these soft-fruited plants resulted from
genetic accidents that gave their cells three copies of each chromosome instead of the
usual two. This imbalance prevents seeds and pollen from developing normally, rendering
the mutant plants sterile. And that is why some scientists believe the world's most popular
fruit could be doomed. It lacks the genetic diversity to fight off pests and diseases that are
invading the banana plantations of Central America and the small-holdings of Africa and
Asia alike.
B
In some ways, the banana today resembles the potato before blight brought famine to
Ireland a century and a half ago. But "it holds a lesson for other crops, too", says Emile
Frison, top banana at the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and
Plantain in Montpellier, France. "The state of the banana,, ,Frison warns, "can teach a
broader lesson the increasing standardisation of food crops round the world is threatening
their ability to adapt and survive."
C
The first Stone Age plant breeders cultivated these sterile freaks by replanting cuttings
from their stems. And the descendants of those original cuttings are the bananas we still
eat today. Each is a virtual clone, almost devoid of genetic diversity. And that uniformity
makes it ripe for disease like no other crop on Earth. Traditional varieties of sexually
reproducing crops have always had a much broader genetic base, and the genes will
recombine in new arrangements in each generation. This gives them much greater
flexibility in evolving responses to disease - and far more genetic resources to draw on in
the face of an attack. But that advantage is fading fast, as growers increasingly plant the
same few, high-yielding varieties. Plant breeders work feverishly to maintain resistance
in these standardized crops. Should these efforts falter, yields of even the most productive
crop could swiftly crash. "When some pest or disease comes along, severe epidemics
can occur," says Geoff Hawtin, director of the Rome-based International Plant Genetic
Resources Institute.
D
The banana is an excellent case in point. Until the 1950s,one variety, the Gros Michel,
dominated the world’s commercial banana business. Found by French botanists in Asian
the 1820s,the Gros Michel was by all accounts a fine banana, richer and sweeter than
today's standard banana and without the latter/s bitter aftertaste when green. But it was
vulnerable to a soil fungus that produced a wilt known as Panama disease. "Once the
fungus gets into the soil it remains there for many years. There is nothing farmers can do.
Even chemical spraying won’t get rid of it," says Rodomiro Ortiz, director of the Inter national Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Ibadan, Nigeria. So plantation owners played
a running game, abandoning infested fields and moving so "clean” land _ until they ran
out of clean land in the 1950s and had to abandon the Gros Michel. Its successor, and
still the reigning commercial king, is the Cavendish banana, a 19th-century British
discovery from southern China. The Cavendish is resistant to Panama disease and, as a
result, it literally saved the international banana industry. During the 1960s,it replaced
the Gros Michel on supermarket shelves. If you buy a banana today, it is almost certainly
a Cavendish. But even so, it is a minority in the world's banana crop.
E
Half a billion people in Asia and Africa depend on bananas. Bananas provide the largest
source of calories and are eaten daily. Its name is synonymous with food. But the day of
reckoning may be coming for the Cavendish and its indigenous kin. Another fungal
disease, black Sigatoka, has become a global epidemic since its first appearance in Fiji
in 1963. Left to itself, black Sigatoka which causes brown wounds on leaves and pre-
mature fruit ripening - cuts fruit yields by 50 to 70 per cent and reduces the productive
lifetime of banana plants from 30 years to as little as 2 or 3. Commercial growers keep
Sigatoka at bay by a massive chemical assault. Forty sprayings of fungicide a year is
typical. But despite the fungicides, diseases such as black Sigatoka are getting more and
more difficult to control. "As soon as you bring in a new fungicide, they develop
resistance”, says Frison.”One thing we can be sure of is that the Sigatoka won’t lose in
this battle." Poor farmers, who cannot afford chemicals, have it even worse. They can do
little more than watch their plants die. "Most of the banana fields in Amazonia have
already been destroyed by the disease," says Luadir Gasparotto, Brazil’s leading banana
pathologist with the government research agency EMBRAPA. Production is likely to fall
by 70 percent as the disease spreads, he predicts. The only option will be to find a new
variety.
F
But how? Almost all edible varieties are susceptible to the diseases, so growers cannot
simply change to a different banana. With most crops, such a threat would unleash an
army of breeders, scouring the world for resistant relatives whose traits they can breed
into commercial varieties. Not so with the banana. Because all edible varieties are sterile,
bringing in new genetic traits to help cope with pests and diseases is nearly impossible.
Nearly, but not totally. Very rarely, a sterile banana will experience a genetic accident that
allows an almost normal seed to develop, giving breeders a tiny window for improvement.
Breeders at the Honduran Foundation of Agricultural Research have tried to exploit this
to create disease-resistant varieties. Further backcrossing with wild bananas yielded a
new seedless banana resistant to both black Sigatoka and Panama disease.
G
Neither Western supermarket consumers nor peasant growers like the new hybrid.
Some accuse it of tasting more like an apple than a banana. Not surprisingly, the majority
of plant breeders have till now turned their backs on the banana and got to work on easier
plants. And commercial banana companies are now washing their hands of the whole
breeding effort, preferring to fund a search for new fungicides instead. "We supported a
breeding programme for 40 years, but it wasn’t able to develop an alternative to
Cavendish. It was very expensive and we got nothing back," says Ronald Romero, head
of research at Chiquita, one of the Big Three companies that dominate the international
banana trade.
H
Last year, a global consortium of scientists led by Frison announced plans to sequence
the banana genome within five years. It would be the first edible fruit to be sequenced.
Well, almost edible. The group will actually be sequencing inedible wild bananas from
East Asia because many of these are resistant to black Sigatoka. If they can pinpoint the
genes that help these wild varieties to resist black Sigatoka, the protective genes could
be introduced into laboratory tissue cultures of cells from edible varieties. These could
then be propagated into new, resistant plants and passed on to farmers.
I
It sounds promising, but the big banana companies have, until now, refused to get
involved in GM research for fear of alienating their customers. "Biotechnology is extremely
expensive and there are serious questions about consumer acceptance,11 says David
McLaughlin, Chiquita's senior director for environmental affairs. With scant funding from
the companies, the banana genome researchers are focusing on the other end of the
spectrum. Even if they can identify the crucial genes, they will be a long way from
developing new varieties that smallholders will find suitable and affordable. But whatever
biotechnology’s academic interest, it is the only hope for the banana. Without banana
production worldwide will head into a tailspin. We may even see the extinction of the
banana as both a lifesaver for hungry and impoverished Africans and as the most popular
product on the world's supermarket shelves.
Complete the sentences below with NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage. In boxes 1-3 on your answer sheet, write Write your answers in boxes 1-3 on your answer sheet
1. Banana was first eaten as a fruit by humans .................................years ago.
2. Banana was first planted in...............................
3. Wild banana’s taste is adversely affected by its.....................................
Look at the following statements (Questions 4-10) and the list of people below.
Match each statement with the correct person, A-I.
Write the correct letter: A-I, in boxes 4-10 On your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
4. Pest invasion may seriously damage banana industry.
5. The effect of fungal infection in soil is often long-lasting.
6. A commercial manufacturer gave up on breeding bananas for disease resistant.
7. Banana disease may develop resistance to chemical sprays.
8. A banana disease has destroyed a large number of banana plantations.
9. Consumers would not accept genetically altered crop.
10. Lessons can be learned from bananas for other crops.
List of People
A Rodomiro
B David Maclaughlin
C Emile Frison
D Ronald Romero
E Luadir Gasparotto
F Geoff Hawtin
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 11-13 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
12. Gros Michel is still being used as a commercial product
13. Banana is a main food in some countries
READING PASSAGE 2
Computer Provides More Questions Than Answers
A.
The island of Antikythera lies 18 miles north of Crete, where the Aegean Sea meets the
Mediterranean. Currents there can make shipping treacherous and one ship bound for
ancient Rome never made it. The ship that sank there was a giant cargo vessel measuring
nearly 500 feet long. It came to rest about 200 feet below the surface, where it stayed for
more than 2,000 years until divers looking for sponges discovered the wreck a little more
than a century ago.
B.
Inside the hull were a number of bronze and marble statues. From the look of things,
the ship seemed to be carrying luxury items, probably made in various Greek islands and
bound for wealthy patrons in the growing Roman Empire. The statues were retrieved,
along with a lot of other unimportant stuff, and stored. Nine months later, an enterprising
archaeologist cleared off a layer of organic material from one of the pieces of junk and
found that it looked like a gearwheel. It had inscriptions in Greek characters and seemed
to have something to do with astronomy.
C.
That piece of “Junk” went on to become the most celebrated find from the shipwreck; it
is displayed at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Research has shown that
the wheel was part of a device so sophisticated that its complexity would not be matched
for a thousand years — it was also the world's first known analog computer. The device
is so famous that an international conference organized in Athens a couple of weeks ago
had only one subject: the Antikythera Mechanism.
D.
Every discovery about the device has raised new questions. Who built the device, and
for what purpose? Why did the technology behind it disappear for the next thousand
years? What does the device tell us about ancient Greek culture? And does the marvelous
construction, and the precise knowledge of the movement of the sun and moon and Earth
that it implies, tell us how the ancients grappled with ideas about determinism and human
destiny?
E.
"We have gear trains from the 9th century in Baghdad used for simpler displays of the
solar and lunar motions relative to one another — they use eight gears,’ said Frangois
Charette, a historian of science in Germany who wrote an editorial accompanying a new
study of the mechanism two weeks ago in the journal Nature. “
In this case, we have more than 30 gears. To see it on a computer animation makes it mind-boggling. There is no
doubt it was a technological masterpiece."
F.
The device was probably built between 100 and 140 BC, and the understanding of
astronomy it displays seems to have been based on knowledge developed by the
Babylonians around 300-700 BC, said Mike Edmunds, a professor of astrophysics at
Cardiff University in Britain. He led a research team that reconstructed what the gear
mechanism would have looked like by using advanced three- dimensional-imaging
technology. The group also decoded a number of the inscriptions. The mechanism
explores the relationship between lunar months __ the time it takes for the moon to cycle
through its phases, say, full moon to full moon -and calendar years. The gears had to be
cut precisely to reflect this complex relationship; 19 calendar years equal 235 lunar
months.
G.
By turning the gear mechanism, which included what Edmunds called a beautiful
system of epicyclic gears that factored in the elliptical orbit of the moon, a person could
check what the sky would have looked like on a date in the past, or how it would appear
in the future. The mechanism was encased in a box with doors in front and back covered
with inscriptions -- a sort of instruction manual. Inside the front door were pointers
indicating the date and the position of the sun, moon and zodiac, while opening the back
door revealed the relationship between calendar years and lunar months, and a
mechanism to predict eclipses.
H.
"If they needed to know when eclipses would occur, and this related to the rising and
setting of stars and related them to dates and religious experiences, the mechanism
would directly help," said Yanis Bitsakis, a physicist at the University of Athens who co wrote the Nature paper. "It is a mechanical computer. You turn the handle and you have
a date on the front.” Building it would have been expensive and required the interaction
of astronomer, engineers, intellectuals and craftspeople. Charette said the device
overturned conventional ideas that the ancient Greeks were primarily ivory tower thinkers
who did not deign to muddy their hands with technical stuff. It is a reminder, he said, that
while the study of history often focuses on written texts, they can tell us only a fraction of
what went on at a particular time.
I.
Imagine a future historian encountering philosophy texts written in our time ~ and an
aircraft engine. The books would tell that researcher what a few scholars were thinking
today, but the engine would give them a far better window into how technology influenced
our everyday lives. Charette said it was unlikely that the device was used by practitioners
of astrology, then still in its infancy. More likely, he said, it was bound for a mantelpiece
in some rich Roman’s home. Given that astronomers of the time already knew how to
calculate the positions of the sun and the moon and to predict eclipses without the device,
it would have been the equivalent of a device built for a planetarium today __ something
to spur popular interest, or at least claim bragging rights.
J.
Why was the technology that went into the device lost? "The time this was built, the
jackboot of Rome was coming through, “Edmunds said. "The Romans were good at town
planning and sanitation but were not known for their interest in science.” The fact that the
device was so complex, and that it was being shipped with a quantity of other luxury items,
tells Edmunds that it is very unlikely to have been the on ever made. Its sophistication "is
such that it can’t have been the only one," Edmunds said. "There must have been a
tradition of making them. We're always hopeful a better one will surface." Indeed, he said,
he hopes that his study and the renewed interest in the Antikythera Mechanism will
prompt second looks by both amateurs and professionals around the world. "The
archaeological world may look in their cupboards and maybe say, “That isn’t a bit of rusty
old metal in the cupboard.”
The reading Passage has ten paragraphs A- J.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter A-J, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.
14. Content inside the wreck ship
15. Ancient astronomers and craftsman might involve
16. The location of Antikythera Mechanism
17. Details of how it was found
18. Appearance and structure of the mechanism
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using no more than two words from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 19-22 on your answer sheet.
An ancient huge sunk 19_______________ was found accidentally by sponges searcher. The ship loaded with 20____________ such as bronze and sculptures. However, an archaeologist found a junk similar to a 21_____________ which has Greek script on it. This inspiring and elaborated device was found to be the first 22 ______________ in the world
Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-C) with opinions or deeds below. Write the appropriate letters A-F in boxes 23-27 on your answer sheet. NB you may use any letter more than once
A Yanis Bitsakis
B Mike Edmunds
C Francois Charette
23. More complicated than previous device
24. Anticipate to find more Antikythera Mechanism in the future
25. Antikythera Mechanism was found related to moon
26. Mechanism assisted ancient people to calculate movement of stars
READING PASSAGE 3
Save Endangered Language
"Obviously we must do some serious rethinking of our priorities, lest linguistics go down
in history as the only science that presided obviously over the disappearance of 90
percent of the very field to which it is dedicated." - Michael Krauss, “The World’s
Languages in Crisis”.
A
Ten years ago Michael Krauss sent a shudder through the discipline of linguistics with
his prediction that half the 6,000 or so languages spoken in the world would cease to be
uttered within a century.
Unless scientists and community leaders directed a worldwide effort to stabilize the
decline of local languages, he warned, nine tenths of the linguistic diversity of humankind
would probably be doomed to extinction. Krauss’s prediction was little more than an
educated guess, but other respected linguists had been clanging out similar alarms.
Keneth L. Hale of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted in the same journal
issue that eight languages on which he had done fieldwork had since passed into
extinction. A 1990 survey in Australia found that 70 of the 90 surviving Aboriginal
languages were no longer used regularly by all age groups. The same was true for all but
20 of the 175 Native American languages spoken or remembered in the US, Krauss told
a congressional panel in 1992.
B
Many experts in the field mourn the loss of rare languages, for several reasons. To
start, there is scientific self-interest: some of the most basic questions in linguistics have
to do with the limits of human speech, which are far from fully explored. Many researchers
would like to know which structural elements of grammar and vocabulary—if anyare truly
universal and probably therefore hardwired into the human brain. Other scientists try to
reconstruct ancient migration patterns by comparing borrowed words that appear in
otherwise unrelated languages. In each of these cases, the wider the portfolio of
languages you study, the more likely you are to get the right answers.
C
Despite the near constant buzz in linguistics about endangered languages over the
past 10 years, the field has accomplished depressingly little. “You would think that there
would be some organized response to this dire situation”,some attempt to determine
which language can be saved and which should be documented before they disappear,
says Sarah G. Thomason, a linguist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “But there
isn’t any such effort organized in the profession. It is only recently that it has become
fashionable enough to work on endangered languages.55 Six years ago, recalls Douglas
H. Whalen of Yale University, “when I asked linguists who was raising money to deal with
these problems, I mostly got blank stares.” So Whalen and a few other linguists founded
the Endangered Languages Fund. In the five years to 2001 they were able to collect only
$80,000 for research grants. A similar foundation in England, directed by Nicholas Ostler,
has raised just $8,000 since 1995.
D
But there are encouraging signs that the field has turned a comer. The Volkswagen
Foundation, a German charity, just issued its second round of grants totaling more than
$2 million. It has created a multimedia archive at the Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands that can house recordings, grammars, dictionaries
and other data on endangered languages. To fill the archive, the foundation has
dispatched field linguists to document Aweti (100 or so speakers in Brazil) ,Ega (about
300 speakers in Ivory Coast), Waimaa (a few hundred speakers in East Timor), and a
dozen or so other languages unlikely to survive the century. The Ford Foundation has
also edged into the arena. Its contributions helped to reinvigorate a master-apprentice
program created in 1992 by Leanne Hinton of Berkeley and Native Americans worried
about the imminent demise of about 50 indigenous languages in California. Fluent
speakers receive $3,000 to teach a younger relative (who is also paid) their native tongue
through 360 hours of shared activities, spread over six months. So far about 5 teams
have completed the program, Hinton says, transmitting at least some knowledge of 25
languages. “It’s too early to call this language revitalization,” Hinton admits. “In California
the death rate of elderly speakers will always be greater than the recruitment rate of young
speakers. But at least we prolong the survival of the language•” That will give linguists
more time to record these tongues before they vanish.
E
But the master-apprentice approach hasn’t caught on outside the U.S., and Hinton’s
effort is a drop in the sea. At least 440 languages have been reduced to a mere handful
of elders, according to the Ethnologue, a catalogue of languages produced by the Dallas based group SIL International that comes closest to global coverage. For the vast majority
of these languages, there is little or no record of their grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation
or use in daily life. Even if a language has been fully documented, all that remains once
it vanishes from active use is a fossil skeleton, a scattering of features that the scientist
was lucky and astute enough to capture. Linguists may be able to sketch an outline of the
forgotten language and fix its place on the evolutionary tree, but little more. “How did
people start conversations and talk to babies? How did husbands and wives converse?”
Hinton asks. “Those are the first things you want to learn when you want to revitalize the
language.
F
But there is as yet no discipline of “conservation linguistics” as there is for biology.
Almost every strategy tried so far has succeeded in some places but failed in others, and
there seems to be no way to predict with certainty what will work where. Twenty years
ago in New Zealand, Maori speakers set up “language nests, “in which preschoolers were
immersed in the native language. Additional Maori-only classes were added as the
children progressed through elementary and secondary school. A similar approach was
tried in Hawaii, with some success - the number of native speakers has stabilized at 1,000
or so, reports Joseph E. Grimes of SIL International, who is working on Oahu. Students
can now get instruction in Hawaiian all the way through university.
G
One factor that always seems to occur in the demise of a language is that the speakers
begin to have collective doubts about the usefulness of language loyalty. Once they start
regarding their own language as inferior to the majority language, people stop using it for
all situations. Kids pick up on the attitude and prefer the dominant language. In many
cases, people don’t notice until they suddenly realize that their kids never speak the
language, even at home. This is how Cornish and some dialects of Scottish Gaelic is still
only rarely used for daily home life in Ireland, 80 years after the republic was founded with
Irish as its first official language.
H
Linguists agree that ultimately, the answer to the problem of language extinction is
multilingualism. Even uneducated people can learn several languages, as long as they
start as children. Indeed, most people in the world speak more than one tongue, and in
places such as Cameroon (279 languages), Papua New Guinea (823) and India (387) it
is common to speak three or four distinct languages and a dialect or two as well. Most
Americans and Canadians, to the west of Quebec, have a gut reaction that anyone
speaking another language in front of them is committing an immoral act. You get the
same reaction in Australia and Russia. It is no coincidence that these are the areas where
languages are disappearing the fastest. The first step in saving dying languages is to
persuade the world’s majorities to allow the minorities among them to speak with their
own voices.
The reading passage has eight paragraphs, A-H.
Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-H from the list below.
Write the correct number, i – xi, in boxes 27-33 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i. data consistency needed for language
ii. consensus on an initiative recommendation for saving dying out languages
iii. positive gains for protection
iv. minimum requirement for saving a language
v. Potential threat to minority language
vi. a period when there was absent of real effort made
vii. native language programs launched
viii. Lack in confidence in young speakers as a negative factor
ix. Practise in several developing countries
x. Value of minority language to linguists
xi. government participation in language field
27. Paragraph A
28. Paragraph B
29. Paragraph D
30. Paragraph E
31. Paragraph F
32. Paragraph G
33. Paragraph H
Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-F) with opinions or deeds below. Write the appropriate letters A-F in boxes 34-38 on your answer sheet.
A Nicholas Ostler
B Michael Krauss
C Joseph E. Grimes
D Sarah G. Thomason
E Keneth L. Hale
F Douglas H. Whalen
34. Reported language conservation practice in Hawaii
35. Predicted that many languages would disappear soon
36. Experienced process that languages die out personally
37. Raised language fund in England
38. Not enough effort on saving until recent work
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in boxes 39-40 on your answer sheet.
39. What is real result of master-apprentice program sponsored by The Ford Foundation!
A Teach children how to speak
B Revive some endangered languages in California
C postpone the dying date for some endangered languages
D Increase communication between students
40. What should majority language speakers do according to the last paragraph?
A They should teach their children endangered language in free lessons
B They should learn at least four languages
C They should show their loyalty to a dying language
D They should be more tolerant to minority language speaker
1 Ten thousand
2 South – East Asia
3 Hard seeds/ seeds
4 F
5 A
6 D
7 C
8 E
9 B
10 C
11 NOT GIVEN
12 FALSE
13 TRUE
14 B
15 H
16 C
17 A
18 G
19 Cargo vessel
20 Luxury items
21 Gearwheel
22 Analog computer
23 C
24 B
25 B
26 A
27 v
28 X
29 iii
30 i
31 Vii
32 Viii
33 ii
34 C
35 B
36 E
37 A
38 D
39 C
40 D
Join Our Online Classes For More Tips & Tricks