Reading for IELTS Academic Practice Test- 30 | Reading Practice Tests for IELTS Academic PDF Download

Section - 1

(A) However much we may abhor it, deception comes naturally to all living things. Birds do it by feigning injury to lead hungry predators away from nesting young. Spider crabs do it by disguise: adorning themselves with strips of kelp and other debris, they pretend to be something they are not-and so escape their enemies. Nature amply rewards successful deceivers by allowing them to survive long enough to mate and reproduce. So it may come as no surprise to learn that human beings-who, according to psychologist Gerald Jellison of the University of South California, are lied to about 200 times a day, roughly one untruth every five minutes—often deceive for exactly the same reasons: to save their own skins or to get something they can’t get by other means.

(B) But knowing how to catch deceit can be just as important a survival skill as knowing how to tell a lie and get away with it. A person able to spot falsehood quickly is unlikely to be swindled by an unscrupulous business associate or hoodwinked by a devious spouse. Luckily, nature provides more than enough clues to trap dissemblers in then own tangled webs-if you know where to look. By closely observing facial expressions, body language and tone of voice, practically anyone can recognize the telltale signs of lying. Researchers are even programming computers-like those used on Lie Detector-to get at the truth by analyzing the same physical cues available to the naked eye and ear. "With the proper training, many people can learn to reliably detect lies," says Paul Ekman, professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, who has spent the past 15 years studying the secret art of deception.

(C) In order to know what kind of lies work best, successful liars need to accurately assess other people’s emotional states. Ekman’s research shows that this same emotional intelligence is essential for good lie detectors, too. The emotional state to watch out for is stress, the conflict most liars feel between the  truth and what they actually say and do.

(D) Even high-tech lie detectors don’t detect lies as such; they merely detect the physical cues of emotions, which may or may not correspond to what the person being tested is saying. Polygraphs, for instance, measure respiration, heart rate and skin conductivity, which tend to increase when people are nervous as they usually are when lying. Nervous people typically perspire, and the salts contained in perspiration conduct electricity. That’s why a sudden leap in skin conductivity indicates nervousness about getting caught, perhaps? -- which might, in turn, suggest that someone is being economical with the truth. On the other hand, it might also mean that the lights in the television studio are too hot-which is one reason polygraph tests are inadmissible in court. "Good lie detectors don’t rely on a single sign," Ekman says, "but interpret clusters of verbal and nonverbal clues that suggest someone might be lying."

(E) Those clues are written all over the face. Because the musculature of the face is directly connected to the areas of the brain that process emotion, the countenance can be a window to the soul. Neurological studies even suggest that genuine emotions travel different pathways through the brain than insincere ones. If a patient paralyzed by stroke on one side of the face, for example, is asked to smile deliberately, only the mobile side of the mouth is raised. But tell that same person a funny joke, and the patient breaks into a full and spontaneous smile. Very few people-most notably, actors and politicians-are able to consciously control all of their facial expressions. Lies can often be caught when the liar’s true feelings briefly leak through the mask of deception. "We don’t think before we feel," Ekman says. "Expressions tend to show up on the face before we’re even conscious of experiencing an emotion."

(F) One of the most difficult facial expressions to fake—or conceal, if it is genuinely felt—is sadness. When someone is truly sad, the forehead wrinkles with grief and the inner comers of the eyebrows are pulled up. Fewer than 15% of the people Ekman tested were able to produce this eyebrow movement voluntarily. By contrast, the lowering of the eyebrows associated with an angry scowl can be replicated at will by almost everybody. "If someone claims they are sad and the inner comers of their eyebrows don’t go up," Ekman says, "the sadness is probably false."

(G) The smile, on the other hand, is one of the easiest facial expressions to counterfeit. It takes just two muscles-the zygomaticus major muscles that extend from the cheekbones to the comers of the lips-to produce a grin. But there’s a catch. A genuine smile affects not only the comers of the lips but also the orbicularis oculi, the muscle around the eye that produces the distinctive "crow’s-feet" associated with people who laugh a lot. A counterfeit grin can be unmasked if the lip comers go up, the eyes crinkle but the inner comers of the eyebrows are not lowered, a movement controlled by the orbicularis oculi that is difficult to fake. The absence of lowered eyebrows is one reason why false smiles look so strained and stiff.

Questions 1-5: Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet:

• TRUE: if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE: if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN: if the information is not given in the passage

Q.1. All living animals can lie.
Q.2. Some people tell lies for self-preservation.
Q.3. The fact of lying is more important than detecting one.
Q.4. Researchers are using equipment to study which part of the brain is responsible for telling lies.
Q.5. To be a good liar, one has to understand other people’s emotions.

Questions 6-9: Choose the correct letter. A, B, c or D. Write the correct letter in box 6-9 on your answer sheet.
Q.6. How does a lie-detector work?
(a) It analyzes one’s verbal response to a question.
(b) It records the changes in one’s facial expression,
(c) It illustrates the reasons about the emotional change when one is tested.
(d) It monitors several physical reactions in the person undergoing the test. 

Q.7. Why couldn’t lie detectors be used in a court of law?
(a) because the nonverbal clues are misleading.
(b) because there could be other causes of a certain change in the equipment,
(c) because the lights are too hot.
(d) because the statistic data on the lie detectors are not accurate.

Q.8. The writer quotes from the paralyzed patients
(a) to exemplify people’s response to true feelings.
(b) to show the pathways for patients to recover,
(c) to demonstrate the paralyzed patient’s ability to smile.
(d) to emphasize that the patient is in a state of stroke.

Q.9. According to the passage, politicians
(a) can express themselves clearly.
(b) are good at masking their emotions,
(c) are conscious of the surroundings.
(d) can think before action.

Questions 10-13: Classify the following facial traits as referring to 
(a) Happiness
(b) Anger
(c) Sadness

Write the correct letter A, B, C or D in boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet.
Q.10. Lines formed above eyebrows
Q.11. Movement from muscle that orbits the eye
Q.12. Eyebrows down
Q.13. Inner comer of eyebrows raised

(A) The ants and then agriculture have been extensively studied over the years, but the recent research has uncovered intriguing new findings about the fungus they cultivate, how they domesticated it and how they cultivate it and preserve it from pathogens. For example, the fungus farms, which the ants were thought to keep free of pathogens, turn out to be vulnerable to a devastating mold, found nowhere else but in ants’ nests. To keep the mold in check, the ants long ago made a discovery that would do credit to any pharmaceutical laboratory.

(B) Leaf-cutting ants and then fungus farms are a marvel of nature and perhaps the best known example of symbiosis, the mutual dependence of two species. The ants’ achievement is remarkable - the biologist Edward o. Wilson has called it "one of the major breakthroughs in animal evolution" — because it allows them to eat, courtesy of their mushroom’s digestive powers, the otherwise poisoned harvest of tropical forests whose leaves are laden with terpenoids, alkaloids and other chemicals designed to sicken browsers.

(C) Fungus growing seems to have originated only once in evolution, because all gardening ants belong to a single tribe, the descendants of the first fungus farmer. There are more than 200 known species of the attine ant tribe, divided into 12 groups, or genera. The leaf-cutters use fresh vegetation; the other groups, known as the lower attines because their nests are smaller and their techniques more primitive, feed their gardens with detritus like dead leaves, insects and feces.

(D) The leaf-cutters’ fungus was indeed descended from a single strain, propagated clonally, or just by budding, for at least 23 million years. But the lower attine ants used different varieties of the fungus, and in one case a quite separate species, the four biologists discovered. The pure strain of fungus grown by the leaf-cutters, it seemed to Mr. Currie, resembled the monocultures of various human crops, that are very productive for a while and then succumb to some disastrous pathogen, such as the Irish potato blight. Monocultures, which lack the genetic diversity to respond to changing environmental threats, are sitting ducks for parasites. Mr. Currie felt there had to be a parasite in the ant-fungus system. But a century of ant research offered no support for the idea. Textbooks describe how leaf-cutter ants scrupulously weed their gardens of all foreign organisms. "People kept telling me, ’You know the ants keep then gardens free of parasites, don’t you?’" Mr. Currie said of his efforts to find a hidden interloper.

(E) But after three years of sifting through attine ant gardens, Mr. Currie discovered they are far from free of infections. In last month’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he and two colleagues, Dr. Mueller and David Mairoch, isolated several alien organisms, particularly a family of parasitic molds called Escovopsis.

(F) Escovopsis turns out to be a highly virulent pathogen that can devastate a fungus garden in a couple of days. It blooms like a white cloud, with the garden dimly visible underneath. In a day or two the whole garden is enveloped. "Other ants won’t go near it and the ants associated with the garden just starve to death," Dr. Rehner said. "They just seem to give up, except for those that have rescued their larvae." The deadly mold then turns greenish-brown as it enters its sporeforming stage.

(G) Evidently the ants usually manage to keep Escovopsis and other parasites under control. But with any lapse in control, or if the ants are removed, Escovopsis will quickly burst forth. Although new leaf-cutter gardens start off free of Escovopsis, within two years some 60 percent become infected. The discovery of Escovopsis’s role brings a new level of understanding to the evolution of the attine ants. "In the last decade, evolutionary biologists have been increasingly aware of the role of parasites as driving forces in evolution," Dr. Schultz said. There is now a possible reason to explain why the lower attine species keep changing the variety of fungus in their mushroom gardens, and occasionally domesticating new ones — to stay one step ahead of the relentless Escovopsis.

(H) Interestingly, Mr. Currie found that the leaf-cutters had in general fewer alien molds in their gardens than the lower attines, yet they had more Escovopsis infections. It seems that the price they pay for cultivating a pure variety of fungus is a higher risk from Escovopsis. But the leaf-cutters may have little alternative: they cultivate a special variety of fungus which, unlike those grown by the lower attines, produces nutritious swollen tips for the ants to eat.

(I) Discovery of a third partner in the ant-fungus symbiosis raises the question of how the attine ants, especially the leaf-cutters, keep this dangerous interloper under control. Amazingly enough, Mr. Currie has again provided the answer. "People have known for a hundred years that ants have a whitish growth on the cuticle," said Dr. Mueller, referring to the insects’ body surface. "People would say this is like a cuticular wax. But Cameron was the first one in a hundred years to put these things under a microscope. He saw it was not inert wax. It is alive." Mr. Currie discovered a specialized patch on the ants’ cuticle that harbors a particular kind of bacterium, one well known to the pharmaceutical industry, because it is the source of half the antibiotics used in medicine. From each of 22 species of attine ant studied, Mr. Cameron and colleagues isolated a species of Streptomyces bacterium, they reported in Nature in April. The Streptomyces does not have much effect on ordinary laboratory funguses. But it is a potent poisoner of Escovopsis, inhibiting its growth and suppressing spore formation. It also stimulates growth of the ants’ mushroom fungus. The bacterium is carried by virgin queens when they leave to establish new nests, but is not found on male ants, playboys who take no responsibility in nest-making or gardening.

(J) Because both the leaf-cutters and the lower attines use Streptomyces, the bacterium may have been part of their symbiosis for almost as long as the Escovopsis mold. If so, some Alexander Fleming of an ant discovered antibiotics millions of years before people did. Even now, the ants are accomplishing two feats beyond the powers of human technology. The leaf-cutters are growing a monocultural crop year after year without disaster, and they are using an antibiotic apparently so wisely and prudently that, unlike people, they are not provoking antibiotic resistance in the target pathogen.

Questions 14-19: Use the information in the passage to match the options (listed A-C) with activities or features of ants below. Write the appropriate letters A-C in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.
NB: You may use any letter more than once 
Q.14. Build small nests and live with different foreign fungus.
Q.15. Use toxic leaves to feed fungus
Q.16. Raise fungus which don’t live with other foreingers.
Q.17. Use substance to fight against escovopsis.
Q.18. Use dead vegetable to feed fungus.
Q.19. Are free of parasites explained previously.

Questions 20-24: The reading Passage has ten paragraphs A-J. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter A-J, in boxes 20-24 on your answer sheet.
Q.20. Dangerous outcome of Escovopsis.
Q.21. Disadvantage of growing single fungus.
Q.22. Comparison of features of two different nests.
Q.23. Two achievements made by ants earlier than human.
Q.24. Advantage of growing new breed of fungus.

Questions 25-26: Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write your answers in boxes 25-26 on your answer sheet.
Q.25. How does author think of Currie's opinion?
(a) his viewpoint was verified later.
(b) earlier study has sufficient evidence,
(c) no details mentioned in article.
(d) his opinion was proved to be wrong.

Q.26. What did scientists find on the skin of ants under microscope?
(a) some white cloud mold embed in their skin
(b) that Wax is all over their skin,
(c) a substance which is useful to humans.
(d) a substance which suppresses growth of fungus.

"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 bad 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 any—are 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.” 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), Waima’a (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 theft own voices.

Questions 27-33: 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     

Q.27. Paragraph A
Q.28. Paragraph B
Q.29. Paragraph D
Q.30. Paragraph E
Q.31. Paragraph F
Q.32. Paragraph G
Q.33. Paragraph H

Questions 34-38: 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

Questions 39-40: Choose the correct letter, A, B, c or D. Write your answers in boxes 39-40 on your answer sheet.
Q.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

Q.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

Answers

Section - 1

Section - 2

Section - 3