IELTS Course Booklet

Reading Module

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 Table of Contents
Introduction to IELTS Reading Academic ................................................................................... 3
The Difference between Academic and General Training Reading .............................................. 4
Dealing with Reading Passages ................................................................................................... 5
Dealing with Unfamiliar Words ........................................................................................................... 5
Reading Strategies ............................................................................................................................... 7
Skimming ......................................................................................................................................... 7
Scanning .......................................................................................................................................... 8
In-depth Reading or Reading for Detail ......................................................................................... 10
Fatal Reading Habits ......................................................................................................................... 11
Frequently Asked Questions about IELTS Reading Section ...................................................... 12
Different types of Questions in IELTS Reading......................................................................... 14
Type A Questions ..................................................................................................................... 15
A-1- True / False / Not Given or Yes / No / Not Given Questions ...................................................... 15
A-2- Short Answer Questions ............................................................................................................ 25
A-3- Sentence Completion Questions................................................................................................. 29
A-4- Sentence Completion with a Box ............................................................................................... 33
A-5- Multiple Choice Questions ........................................................................................................ 37
Type B Questions ...................................................................................................................... 42
B-1- Labeling a Diagram Questions ................................................................................................... 42
B-2- Flowchart Completion Questions ............................................................................................... 47
B-3- Table Completion Questions ...................................................................................................... 52
B-4- Note Completion Questions ....................................................................................................... 57
Type C Questions ...................................................................................................................... 62
C-1- Summary Completion Questions ................................................................................................ 62
C-2- Summary Completion with a Box Questions .............................................................................. 67
C-3- Classification Questions............................................................................................................. 71
C-4- Matching Questions ................................................................................................................... 75
C-5- Pick from a List Questions ........................................................................................................... 79
C-6- Paragraph Headings Questions ................................................................................................... 83
C-7- Locating Information Questions .................................................................................................. 88
C-8- Global Multiple Choice Questions ............................................................................................... 93
How to Best Manage Your Time ............................................................................................... 97

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How to Calculate Your Score ....................................................................................................... 97
Top Tips on IELTS Reading ......................................................................................................... 98
How to Complete the Reading Answer Sheet............................................................................... 99

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Introduction to IELTS Reading Academic
The IELTS Reading Academic module consists of three passages totaling
approximately 2,500 words. The passages are similar to the kind of articles you
might read in a general interest magazine covering serious topics.
You have 60 minutes in which to read the three passages and answer 40 questions.
The passages are not the same length and the number of questions after each
passage varies, so careful time management is all-important in IELTS Reading.

IELTS Reading Overview

The three passages in the IELTS Reading module deal with a range of academic
subjects: one may be about ancient history, another about astronomy, another
about advertising techniques, and so on.
Each passage in IELTS Reading is followed by 11 to 15 questions. You can read
and answer questions at the same time. The questions are multiple choice,
matching, true/false/not given, sentence completion or summary completion tasks.
Write your answers in pencil on the separate answer sheet provided. You can also
make notes on the question sheet.
The IELTS Reading module lasts 60 minutes. You should be able to skim-read
approximately 170 words per minute and spend no more than 15 minutes in total
reading the three passages. That will leave you around one minute to attempt each
question plus a little extra time for checking.

How IELTS Reading Answers Are Scored

A human examiner marks your answers. You get one point for each correct answer,
giving you a „raw score‟ out of 40. This is converted into a „band score‟ from 0 to 9.
For example, you need 30 correct answers to get a band score of 7.0.

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The Difference between Academic and General Training Reading
The differences mainly lie within the context, type, and difficulty level of the texts
as can be seen in the tables below. It goes without saying that academic readings
are known to be more difficult than the general training ones.

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Dealing with Reading Passages
Through three passages, the reading section of IELTS, attempts to test the
following reading skills:

  Reading quickly to get a general idea or find a particular word,

  Finding detailed or factual information,
  Understanding themes and main ideas,
  Identifying views, arguments, and claims,
 Identifying the overall theme of the passage.
Dealing with Unfamiliar Words
It is believed that, nearly all applicants of IELTS face with a myriad new words
during the reading section. Certainly, checking a dictionary is not allowed while
taking the exam; therefore, the applicants had better be able to make speculations
on the meanings of the words necessary in answering the questions. It must be
noted that nearly half of the new words one may face during the test bear no
vitality to be known, as they have no share in the answers which means they are
merely a source of distraction. However, there are three main strategies one can
take up to guess the meanings of the relevant words:
1. Finding the part of speech of the word according to order of the sentence,
2. Trying to find a part of the word whose form is familiar to us,
3. Trying to make a guess according to the context in which the word is used.
For instance:
 .…It was exactly at that time when the mayor launched into an
interminable monologue about his last therapy session in which …..

interminable: Part of speech: adjective

Form: in + termin + able >>> “termin” reminds of the verb terminate
so long & boring
that seems endless. which means to end an activity, we also have “in” which is usually an
opposite maker prefix and “able” is a suffix talking about the ability
to do sth. I think it means sth that can’t be stopped.
Context: the verb ‘launch’ is used before it and after that the noun
‘monologue’. Monologues are usually very boring.

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  …. at the time, people were living in desperate conditions and measures to
ameliorate working conditions had little effect, therefore, ….
ameliorate:
Part of speech: verb
to make a bad From: I don’t get anything from the form!
situation less
harmful Context: some people are in ‘desperate’ situation and there have been
decisions taken which were not effective so I think these measurements
or decisions must have been some attempts to IMPROVE the situation.

N.B.
 you had better have a good command of affixes to be able to make guesses
 more quickly.
 Here are some books that you may want to study before the exam to be more
confident in your lexical knowledge. (Oxford Word Skills series is highly
suggested)

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Reading Strategies
To read the three passages in as short a time period as we are given in IELTS or
TOEFL test, we have to read very economically; that is exactly the reason we must
learn to skim and scan. In fact, there are three ways of reading: skimming,
scanning, and reading in-depth.

Skimming

By definition, to skim is to read quickly to find the main facts or ideas in a text.
We skim the passage first to get the main idea of each paragraph.

In a nutshell, skimming in IELTS Reading means to first, look at the picture and
the heading or sub heading (if they exist); next, read the thesis statement which
tends to be the last sentence of the first paragraph, then read the first sentence of
each body paragraph (topic sentence), and lastly, the first sentence of the
concluding paragraph. The picture below can be of some help.

The purpose of skimming, as mentioned before, is to understand the gist or general

idea of the text and break it into smaller pieces. It is always much easier to cope with
some small problems than an enormous one.

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Scanning

Sometimes we only need specific words or pieces of information in a text. When we

scan we ignore the information which is not relevant to our goal. In particular, when
the questions ask for specific factual information, scanning is the best strategy.
Scanning can be done in two stages: distant scanning and close scanning.
While scanning from a distance, as the name suggests, you hold the paper in a farther
distance than usual and just look at the eye-catching words. In such a case you are
more likely to find the proper nouns, dates, and numbers more quickly than normal.

On the other hand, close scanning does not only concern the distance from your
eyes; you can hold the paper at a normal distance while instead of reading the
words you just scan them with your eyes from right to left and bottom to top. The
picture below can help you better understand it. Doing so, you do not read, your
eyes literally scan the text.

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while scanning we no longer focus on the main ideas and topic sentences; instead,
all the words matter since we are looking for a specific key word perhaps taken
from the question or a paraphrase of that. Take the pictures below as an example.

By taking a good look around the word „china‟ we can simply find the answer.

The main point is to scan for the right words which tend to be the words that are
distinct in a text. The best words to scan for are proper nouns (names of places,
people‟s names, brands, &…) and numbers (percentages, dates, prices, &…).
However, you should bear in mind that finding the exact word is not always the case
in reading test.

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 You may also scan for parallel expressions which means you need to be totally
cognizant of the synonyms, antonyms, and paraphrases. The picture below presents
some examples of parallel expressions.

In-depth Reading or Reading for Detail

Through skimming and scanning we can find out what we are looking for and where
in the text to look at; then, we may feel free to read for detail to come up with the
right answer to each question, an answer that we are sure of. When you read in-depth
you read every sentence and think about its meaning at the same time although it does
not mean that you have to read all the sentences in a passage. Having spotted the place
which most likely includes the answer through skimming or scanning, we start
reading that part in detail to pinpoint where the correct answer exactly lies.

N.B.
 Do not judge too quickly in finding the answers since IELTS reading passages
have an obscure elusiveness embedded in themselves; think of them as a group of
cunning creatures who know how to utterly deceive the applicants yet they are a
bunch of words that can be outsmarted by you.

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Fatal Reading Habits
The following are some bad habits which cause the applicants to read slowly and
consequently lose marks:

 Reading aloud: when we read aloud we barely understand what we are

reading. So do not say the words to yourself.

 Reading everything at the same speed: whether you are in skimming and
scanning or in in-depth reading stage you should have a different pace of
reading. As a rule of thumb we can say that, skimming should be really fast
while scanning happens fast and a little more slowly than skimming. On the
other hand, reading in-depth happens at a fairly slow pace and should be the
slowest compared to the other two.

 Re-reading the words: Some of us have the habit of re-reading the words or
sentences we have read just now because we are only used to doing it and not
that the passage is difficult. Of course sometimes reading a sentence twice
helps us understand it fully to come up with the right answer but we should
bear in mind that reading again out of habit only lessens the speed of reading.

 Reading one word at a time: reading in phrases and sets of words improves
your understanding of what you have read. We should try to read in chunks
rather than single words.

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Frequently Asked Questions about IELTS Reading Section
The questions below are among those most frequently asked about the Reading
module of IELTS.

What is the difference between the General Training Reading module and the
Academic Reading module?

The reading passages and questions are easier in the General Training module of
IELTS. However, you need to get a higher number of correct answers to achieve the
same band score as someone taking the Academic module.

What are the reading passages about?

In the General Training IELTS module, they will usually be informational: the kind
of text you would expect to find in a leaflet, newspaper or magazine. In the Academic
IELTS module, the passages will cover three diverse academic topics. You do not
need any knowledge of these topics before taking the test.
Which should I read first: the passage or the questions?

Generally speaking, it is better to read the passage first to give yourself an idea of
the overall topic and organization of the text. It then becomes much easier to interpret
the questions and know where to look for the answers. However, it may be a good
idea to look briefly at the question types before you read. If there is a headings
matching task, for example, you may be able to do this as you skim-read.
How much time should I spend skim-reading each passage?

You do not want to spend more than five minutes reading a single passage. At this
stage, it is not important to understand all the details. You should only be reading
for the main idea of each paragraph. If you find you have spent more than five
minutes reading a single passage, stop reading and start working on the questions.
What question types are there in IELTS Reading?

Unlike TOEFL, IELTS includes more than just multiple-choice questions. You may
have to add match headings to paragraphs, complete sentences or a summary, or
match opinions to people mentioned in the text. There are also True/False/Not Given
questions which require a detailed understanding of the passage. Each passage will

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be followed by an average of 13 questions and these will generally be of three to
five different types.
How much time should I spend on each question?

Given that you will need up to fifteen minutes of reading time, that leaves you with
45 minutes to answer a total of 40 questions. It is advisable to spend no more than
one minute answering each individual question. You can always come back to
more difficult questions later.
Can I use a dictionary in IELTS Reading?

I think you already know that the answer to this question is no! You will therefore
need a good vocabulary and a range of strategies for guessing the meaning of an
unfamiliar word.
How many words do I need to know in order to get a high score in IELTS Reading?

There is no easy answer to this question because regardless of the size of your
vocabulary you will almost certainly encounter unfamiliar words in the test. While
learning vocabulary will definitely improve your reading speed and your IELTS
Reading score, it is also important to be able to look for and recognize definitions,
or guess the likely meaning of a word you don‟t know.
How are IELTS Reading scores calculated?

You will be given a score out of 40 and this will be converted into an IELTS band
score of 0 to 9 according to the IELTS band score calculator. The conversions are
different in the Academic and General Training modules.
What IELTS Reading score is required for university entry?

It varies by university and many do not specify a requirement for each module.
However, you should be aiming to achieve a score of at least 6 in IELTS Reading
(23-29 correct answers) if you intend to study at an English-speaking university. A
band score of 5 (16-22 correct answers) may be sufficient for some foundations
and processional English courses.

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Different types of Questions in IELTS Reading
Thoroughly speaking, there are 18 different types of questions one may face in the
reading section but to come up with a more general categorization we can divide
them into 3 main categories, according to how we can find the answers to them, as
follows:
1) Answers in passage order (Type A)
2) Answers grouped together in a specific part of the passage (Type B)
3) Answers scattered around the passage (Type C)

And the questions types in each group are shown in the picture below.

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Type A Questions
A-1- True / False / Not Given or Yes / No / Not Given Questions
To answer this question type you should investigate whether the statement in the
questions agrees with the text (true/yes), says the opposite of what is mentioned in
the text (false/no), or is only partially true and some of the information is not given
in the text (not given). The simple examples in the picture below may be of some
assistance to better understand how to answer this type of questions.

General Advice on T/F/NG or Y/N/NG Questions

 Skim the whole passage before you start working on any of the tasks. Then
read the instructions, so that you know what you need to do. They are not
always phrased in the same way.

 Read the first statement. It may help to underline keywords.

 Look through the passage to find the relevant information, and think carefully
about what it means. Underline the part of the text that contains the answer.

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 Decide if the statement agrees with or contradicts the passage or is Not
given. Remember you must base your answer on what is in the passage, not
on your own knowledge or what you think is likely to be true. Not given
means that there isn't enough information in the passage to decide if the
statement is True or False (or Yes or No).

 Continue with the other statements in turn. If you can't find the relevant part
of the passage, it probably means that the statement is Not given.

 Always give an answer - you won't lose any marks if it's wrong. If you're not
sure, choose Not given.

How to Approach This Question Type

1. Having skimmed the text, you should know that you don't have to always start
with the first question although it is suggested to go with the order.
2. Locate the relevant section in the passage with the help of your initial skimming
and by scanning for keywords in the question.
3. Once you have located the answer go back to the question and read every single
word, underlining the key words.
4. Study the relevant sentences in the passage carefully to see if:
a. the question completely agrees with the information in the passage => T
b. the question contradicts (says the opposite of) the information in the passage => F 1
c. there is no mention of this piece of information in the passage. => NG 6
5. Repeat the same procedure.

And you‟d better know:


Answers are in passage order.

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  Task Instruction:

 T/F/NG: Do the following statements agree with the information in
the passage?

 Y/N/NG: Do the following statements agree with the claims of the
writer?

 In case of T/F/NG questions, if you write Yes instead of True, your answer
will be wrong. (or No <=> False) and of course in case of Y/N/NG
questions, if you write True instead of Yes, your answer will be marked as
wrong. (or False <=> No)

 If a question is taking too long, just skip it and move on to the next/previous
question. You will come back to it later.

 Remember! Even Not Given items are from the passage, so you should not
select Not Given if you cannot find any relevant information in the passage.

 Do not answer the questions merely based on logic or your personal

experience or knowledge. Even this statement, for example, can be Not Given
if there is no evidence for it in the passage: “If you heat ice, it melts.”

 For a statement to be Not Given, it should usually (not always) contain
'additional information' that is not mentioned in the passage.

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Sample Reading Task (True / False / Not Given)

William Henry Perkin

The man who invented synthetic dyes William Henry Perkin was born on March
12, 1838, in London, England. As a boy, Perkin's curiosity prompted early interests
in the arts, sciences, photography, and engineering. But it was a chance stumbling
upon a run-down, yet functional, laboratory in his late grandfather's home that
solidified the young man's enthusiasm for chemistry.

As a student at the City of London School, Perkin became immersed in the study
of chemistry. His talent and devotion to the subject were perceived by his teacher,
Thomas Hall, who encouraged him to attend a series of lectures given by the
eminent scientist Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution. Those speeches fired
the young chemist's enthusiasm further, and he later went on to attend the Royal
College of Chemistry, which he succeeded in entering in 1853, at the age of 15.

At the time of Perkin's enrolment, the Royal College of Chemistry was headed by
the noted German chemist August Wilhelm Hofmann. Perkin's scientific gifts soon
caught Hofmann's attention and, within two years, he became Hofmann's youngest
assistant. Not long after that, Perkin made the scientific breakthrough that would
bring him both fame and fortune.

At the time, quinine was the only viable medical treatment for malaria. The drug is
derived from the bark of the cinchona tree, native to South America, and by 1856
demand for the drug was surpassing the available supply. Thus, when Hofmann
made some passing comments about the desirability of a synthetic substitute for
quinine, it was unsurprising that his star pupil was moved to take up the challenge.

During his vacation in 1856, Perkin spent his time in the laboratory on the top floor of
his family's house. He was attempting to manufacture quinine from aniline, an
inexpensive and readily available coal tar waste product. Despite his best efforts,
however, he did not end up with quinine. Instead, he produced a mysterious dark
sludge. Luckily, Perkin's scientific training and nature prompted him to investigate the
substance further. Incorporating potassium dichromate and alcohol into the aniline at
various stages of the experimental process, he finally produced a deep purple solution.
And, proving the truth of the famous scientist Louis Pasteur's words

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'chance favours only the prepared mind', Perkin saw the potential of his unexpected
find.
Historically, textile dyes were made from such natural sources as plants and animal
excretions. Some of these, such as the glandular mucus of snails, were difficult to
obtain and outrageously expensive. Indeed, the purple colour extracted from a snail
was once so costly that in society at the time only the rich could afford it. Further,
natural dyes tended to be muddy in hue and fade quickly. It was against this backdrop
that Perkin's discovery was made.
Perkin quickly grasped that his purple solution could be used to colour fabric, thus
making it the world's first synthetic dye. Realising the importance of this
breakthrough, he lost no time in patenting it. But perhaps the most fascinating of all
Perkin's reactions to his find was his nearly instant recognition that the new dye had
commercial possibilities.
Perkin originally named his dye Tyrian Purple, but it later became commonly known
as mauve (from the French for the plant used to make the colour violet). He asked
advice of Scottish dye works owner Robert Pullar, who assured him that
manufacturing the dye would be well worth it if the colour remained fast (i.e. would
not fade) and the cost was relatively low. So, over the fierce objections of his mentor
Hofmann, he left college to give birth to the modern chemical industry.
With the help of his father and brother, Perkin set up a factory not far from London.
Utilising the cheap and plentiful coal tar that was an almost unlimited byproduct of
London's gas street lighting, the dye works began producing the world's first
synthetically dyed material in 1857. The company received a commercial boost from
the Empress Eugenie of France, when she decided the new colour flattered her. Very
soon, mauve was the necessary shade for all the fashionable ladies in that country.
Not to be outdone, England's Queen Victoria also appeared in public wearing a
mauve gown, thus making it all the rage in England as well. The dye was bold and
fast, and the public clamoured for more. Perkin went back to the drawing board.
Although Perkin's fame was achieved and fortune assured by his first discovery, the
chemist continued his research. Among other dyes he developed and introduced
were aniline red (1859) and aniline black (1863) and, in the late 1860s, Perkin's
green. It is important to note that Perkin's synthetic dye discoveries had outcomes

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far beyond the merely decorative. The dyes also became vital to medical research
in many ways. For instance, they were used to stain previously invisible microbes
and bacteria, allowing researchers to identify such bacilli as tuberculosis, cholera,
and anthrax. Artificial dyes continue to play a crucial role today. And, in what
would have been particularly pleasing to Perkin, their current use is in the search
for a vaccine against malaria.

Questions 1-7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?

In boxes 1-7 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

1 Michael Faraday was the first person to recognise Perkin's ability as a student of chemistry.
2 Michael Faraday suggested Perkin should enrol in the Royal College of Chemistry.
3 Perkin employed August Wilhelm Hofmann as his assistant.
4 Perkin was still young when he made the discovery that made him rich and famous
5 The trees from which quinine is derived grow only in South America.
6 Perkin hoped to manufacture a drug from a coal tar waste product.
7 Perkin was inspired by the discoveries of the famous scientist Louis Pasteur.

1- FALSE 2- NOT GIVEN 3- FALSE 4- TRUE 5- NOT GIVEN 6- TRUE 7- NOT GIVEN

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Sample Reading Task (Yes / No / Not Given)

The question of whether we are alone in the

Universe has haunted humanity for centuries,
but we may now stand poised on the brink of the
answer to that question, as we search for radio
signals from other intelligent civilisations. This
search, often known by the acronym SETI
(search for extra-terrestrial intelligence), is a
difficult one. Although groups around the world
have been searching intermittently for three decades, it is only now that we have
reached the level of technology where we can make a determined attempt to search
all nearby stars for any sign of life.

The primary reason for the search is basic curiosity - the same curiosity about the
natural world that drives all pure science. We want to know whether we are alone in
the Universe. We want to know whether life evolves naturally if given the right
conditions, or whether there is something very special about the Earth to have fostered
the variety of life forms that we see around us on the planet. The simple detection of a
radio signal will be sufficient to answer this most basic of all questions. In this sense,
SETI is another cog in the machinery of pure science which is continually pushing out
the horizon of our knowledge. However, there are other reasons for being interested in
whether life exists elsewhere. For example, we have had civilisation on Earth for
perhaps only a few thousand years, and the threats of nuclear war and pollution over
the last few decades have told us that our survival may be tenuous. Will we last
another two thousand years or will we wipe ourselves out? Since the lifetime of a
planet like ours is several billion years, we can expect that, if other civilisations do
survive in our galaxy, their ages will range from zero to several billion years. Thus
any other civilisation that we hear from is likely to be far older, on average, than
ourselves. The mere existence of such a civilisation will

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tell us that long-term survival is possible, and gives us some cause for optimism. It
is even possible that the older civilisation may pass on the benefits of their
experience in dealing with threats to survival such as nuclear war and global
pollution, and other threats that we haven't yet discovered.
In discussing whether we are alone, most SETI scientists adopt two ground rules.
First, UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) are generally ignored since most scientists
don't consider the evidence for them to be strong enough to bear serious
consideration (although it is also important to keep an open mind in case any really
convincing evidence emerges in the future). Second, we make a very conservative
assumption that we are looking for a life form that is pretty well like us. since if it
differs radically from us we may well not recognise it as a life form, quite apart from
whether we are able to communicate with it. In other words, the life form we are
looking for may well have two green heads and seven fingers, but it will nevertheless
resemble us in that it should communicate with its fellows, be interested in the
Universe, live on a planet orbiting a star like our Sun, and perhaps most restrictively,
have a chemistry, like us, based on carbon and water.
Even when we make these assumptions, our understanding of other life forms is still
severely limited. We do not even know, for example, how many stars have planets,
and we certainly do not know how likely it is that life will arise naturally, given the
right conditions. However, when we look at the 100 billion stars in our galaxy (the
Milky Way), and 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe, it seems
inconceivable that at least one of these planets does not have a life form on it; in fact,
the best educated guess we can make, using the little that we do know about the
conditions for carbon-based life, leads us to estimate that perhaps one in 100,000
stars might have a life-bearing planet orbiting it. That means that our nearest
neighbours are perhaps 100 light years away, which is almost next door in
astronomical terms.
An alien civilisation could choose many different ways of sending information
across the galaxy, but many of these either require too much energy, or else are
severely attenuated while traversing the vast distances across the galaxy. It turns out
that, for a given amount of transmitted power, radio waves in the frequency range
1000 to 3000 MHz travel the greatest distance, and so all searches to date have
concentrated on looking for radio waves in this frequency range. So far there have

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been a number of searches by various groups around the world, including
Australian searches using the radio telescope at Parkes, New South Wales. Until
now there have not been any detections from the few hundred stars which have
been searched. The scale of the searches has been increased dramatically since
1992, when the US Congress voted NASA $10 million per year for ten years to
conduct a thorough search for extra-terrestrial life. Much of the money in this
project is being spent on developing the special hardware needed to search many
frequencies at once. The project has two parts. One part is a targeted search using
the world's largest radio telescopes, the American-operated telescope in Arecibo,
Puerto Rico and the French telescope in Nancy in France. This part of the project is
searching the nearest 1000 likely stars with high sensitivity for signals in the
frequency range 1000 to 3000 MHz. The other part of the project is an undirected
search which is monitoring all of space with a lower sensitivity, using the smaller
antennas of NASA's Deep Space Network.

There is considerable debate over how we should react if we detect a signal from
an alien civilisation. Everybody agrees that we should not reply immediately. Quite
apart from the impracticality of sending a reply over such large distances at short
notice, it raises a host of ethical questions that would have to be addressed by the
global community before any reply could be sent. Would the human race face the
culture shock if faced with a superior and much older civilisation? Luckily, there is
no urgency about this. The stars being searched are hundreds of light years away,
so it takes hundreds of years for their signal to reach us, and a further few hundred
years for our reply to reach them. It's not important, then, if there's a delay of a few
years, or decades, while the human race debates the question of whether to reply,
and perhaps carefully drafts a reply.

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Questions 1 - 6

Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage?

YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

1. Alien civilisations may be able to help the human race to overcome serious problems.
2. SETI scientists are trying to find a life form that resembles humans in many ways
3. The Americans and Australians have co-operated on joint research projects.
4. So far SETI scientists have picked up radio signals from several stars.
5. The NASA project attracted criticism from some members of Congress.
6. If a signal from outer space is received, it will be important to respond promptly.

24
A-2- Short Answer Questions
To answer this question type you should first consider the word limit and then locate
the information which corresponds with the question. Although at first sight short-
answer questions seem pretty straightforward, it is surprising how many people trip
up on them, not because they don't understand the question and not because they
were unable to find the answer, but because they failed to read the rubric properly.
If it says NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS, then your answer should not contain
more, even if you feel this is a more complete answer. Similarly, the words used
must be words FROM THE PASSAGE, even if you feel you could express the
answer more effectively with other words.

General Advice on Short Answer Questions

 Read the questions (which follow the order of the text) and underline key
 words.
  Scan the text, looking for the key words or synonyms and paraphrases.
  Check the word limit required and stick to it!
  Look at what structure (e.g. plural, verb form, prepositions) is required.
  Make sure you copy words accurately.
  You can write numbers as words or figures (eleven or 11).
 Hyphenated words count as one word.

How to Approach This Question Type

1. Having skimmed the text, read each question carefully so that you know what
you are looking for and whether you need to scan (e.g. to find a
word/name/number).
2. Locate the relevant section in the passage with the help of your initial
skimming and by scanning for keywords.
3. Repeat this action for other questions.
4. Be careful not to exceed the word limit (if so, your answer is definitely wrong)
5. Double check the spelling.

25
And you‟d better know:
 Answers are in passage order.

 Task instruction: Answer the questions below.

 Be wary of the word limit: NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A
NUMBER from the passage‟, „ONE WORD ONLY‟ or „NO MORE
THAN TWO WORDS‟.

 You can write the word limit on the top of the instruction in digits so
that you will not forget it.

 The questions often begin with wh- words. So look for facts/information.

Sample Reading Task

Stepwells
A millennium ago, stepwells were fundamental to life in the driest parts of India.
Richard Cox travelled to north-western India to document these spectacular
monuments from a bygone era
During the sixth and seventh centuries, the inhabitants of the modern-day states of
Gujarat and Rajasthan in north-western India developed a method of gaining access to
clean, fresh groundwater during the dry season for drinking, bathing, watering animals
and irrigation. However, the significance of this invention - the stepwell -
goes beyond its utilitarian application.
Unique to this region, stepwells are often architecturally complex and vary widely
in size and shape. During their heyday, they were places of gathering, of leisure and
relaxation and of worship for villagers of all but the lowest classes. Most stepwells
are found dotted round the desert areas of Gujarat (where they are called vav) and
Rajasthan (where they are called baori), while a few also survive in Delhi. Some
were located in or near villages as public spaces for the community; others were
positioned beside roads as resting places for travellers.
As their name suggests, stepwells comprise a series of stone steps descending from
ground level to the water source (normally an underground aquifer) as it recedes

26
following the rains. When the water level was high, the user needed only to descend a
few steps to reach it; when it was low, several levels would have to be negotiated.

Some wells are vast, open craters with hundreds of steps paving each sloping side,
often in tiers. Others are more elaborate, with long stepped passages leading to the
water via several storeys. Built from stone and supported by pillars, they also
included pavilions that sheltered visitors from the relentless heat. But perhaps the
most impressive features are the intricate decorative sculptures that embellish
many stepwells, showing activities from fighting and dancing to everyday acts
such as women combing their hair or churning butter.

Down the centuries, thousands of wells were constructed throughout northwestern

India, but the majority have now fallen into disuse; many are derelict and dry, as
groundwater has been diverted for industrial use and the wells no longer reach the
water table. Their condition hasn't been helped by recent dry spells: southern
Rajasthan suffered an eight-year drought between 1996 and 2004.

However, some important sites in Gujarat have recently undergone major

restoration, and the state government announced in June last year that it plans to
restore the stepwells throughout the state.

In Patan, the state's ancient capital, the stepwell of Rani Ki Vav (Queen's Stepwell)
is perhaps the finest current example. It was built by Queen Udayamati during the
th
late 11th century, but became silted up following a flood during the 13 century.
But the Archaeological Survey of India began restoring it in the 1960s, and today it
is in pristine condition. At 65 metres long, 20 metres wide and 27 metres deep,
Rani Ki Vav features 500 sculptures carved into niches throughout the monument.
Incredibly, in January 2001, this ancient structure survived an earthquake that
measured 7.6 on the Richter scale.

Another example is the Surya Kund in Modhera, northern Gujarat, next to the Sun
Temple, built by King Bhima I in 1026 to honour the sun god Surya. It actually
resembles a tank (kund means reservoir or pond) rather than a well, but displays
the hallmarks of stepwell architecture, including four sides of steps that descend to
the bottom in a stunning geometrical formation. The terraces house 108 small,
intricately carved shrines between the sets of steps.

Rajasthan also has a wealth of wells. The ancient city of Bundi, 200 kilometres south
of Jaipur, is renowned for its architecture, including its stepwells. One of the larger
examples is Raniji Ki Baori, which was built by the queen of the region, Nathavatji,

27
in 1699.At 46 metres deep, 20 metres wide and 40 metres long, the intricately carved
monument is one of 21 baoris commissioned in the Bundi area by Nathavatji.

In the old ruined town of Abhaneri, about 95 kilometres east of Jaipur, is Chand Baori, one
of India's oldest and deepest wells; aesthetically it's perhaps one of the most dramatic. Built
in around 850 AD next to the temple of Harshat Mata, the baori comprises hundreds of
zigzagging steps that run along three of its sides, steeply descending 11 storeys, resulting in
a striking pattern when seen from afar. On the fourth side, verandas which are supported by
ornate pillars overlook the steps.

Still in public use is Neemrana Ki Baori, located just off the Jaipur-Delhi highway.
Constructed in around 1700, it is nine storeys deep, with the last two being underwater.
At ground level, there are 86 colonnaded openings from where the visitor descends 170
steps to the deepest water source.

Today, following years of neglect, many of these monuments to medieval engineering

have been saved by the Archaeological Survey of India, which has recognised the
importance of preserving them as part of the country's rich history. Tourists flock to
wells in far-flung corners of northwestern India to gaze in wonder at these architectural
marvels from hundreds of years ago, which serve as a reminder of both the ingenuity and
artistry of ancient civilisations and of the value of water to human existence.
Questions 1 – 3

Answer the questions below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes on your answer sheet.

1. Which part of some stepwells provided shade for people?

2. What type of serious climatic event, which took place in southern Rajasthan, is
mentioned in the article?
3. Who are frequent visitors to stepwells nowadays?
A-3- Sentence Completion Questions
In this type of questions, you will be presented with a set of incomplete sentences
(lacking an ending or having a blank space in the middle) which you have to

28
complete using the words from the text, and at the same time, paying attention to
the word limit determined in the task instruction.

General Advice on Sentence Completion Questions

 Skim the whole passage before you start working on any of the tasks and
work out what it is about. Remember skimming doesn‟t imply reading
the passage thoroughly by any means, just let your eyes move over the
words of the text to spot the major ones.

 Read the first sentence. Then find the relevant part of the passage, and look
for something that means the same. Find the words that fit the question.
Consider all the words in the relevant part of the passage. Think about both
the meaning and the grammar.

 Remember that the questions follow the order of information in the passage.

 Remember that you should use the exact word(s) from the passage or box.
Copy your answers carefully.

How to Approach This Question Type

1. Having skimmed the passage, read the first sentence and ignore the gaps.

2. Find the part of the passage that contains the idea through initial skimming.

3. To better find the part of speech and form of the answer, you can change the
sentence into a QUESTION (in your mind!), and then work out what the
missing words are. Look for parallel expressions.
4. Your answer must fit both logically and grammatically after it is added.

29
And you‟d better know:
 The answers are in passage order.

 Task instruction: Complete the sentences.

 Be wary of the word limit: NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A

NUMBER from the passage‟, „ONE WORD ONLY‟ or „NO MORE
THAN TWO WORDS‟.

 You can write the word limit on the top of the instruction in digits so that
you will not forget it.

 Be careful not to exceed the word limit (if so, your answer is definitely wrong)

 Double check the spelling.

Sample Reading Task

The sense of smell, or a/faction, is powerful. Odours affect us on a physical,

psychological and social level. For the most part, however, we breathe in the
aromas which surround us without being consciously aware of their importance to
us. It is only when the faculty of smell is impaired for some reason that we begin to
realise the essential role the sense of smell plays in our sense of well-being

A survey conducted by Anthony Synott at Montreal's Concordia University asked

participants to comment on how important smell was to them in their lives. It
became apparent that smell can evoke strong emotional responses. A scent
associated with a good experience can bring a rush of joy, while a foul odour or
one associated with a bad memory may make us grimace with disgust.
Respondents to the survey noted that many of their olfactory likes and dislikes
were based on emotional associations. Such associations can be powerful enough
so that odours that we would generally label unpleasant become agreeable, and
those that we would generally consider fragrant become disagreeable for particular
individuals. The perception of smell, therefore, consists not only of the sensation of
the odours themselves, but of the experiences and emotions associated with them.

30
Odours are also essential cues in social bonding. One respondent to the survey
believed that there is no true emotional bonding without touching and smelling a
loved one. In fact, infants recognise the odours of their mothers soon after birth
and adults can often identify their children or spouses by scent. In one well-known
test, women and men were able to distinguish by smell alone clothing worn by
their marriage partners from similar clothing worn by other people. Most of the
subjects would probably never have given much thought to odour as a cue for
identifying family members before being involved in the test, but as the experiment
revealed, even when not consciously considered, smells register.

In spite of its importance to our emotional and sensory lives, smell is probably the
most undervalued sense in many cultures. The reason often given for the low regard in
which smell is held is that, in comparison with its importance among animals, the
human sense of smell is feeble and undeveloped. While it is true that the olfactory
powers of humans are nothing like as fine as those possessed by certain animals, they
are still remarkably acute. Our noses are able to recognize thousands of smells, and to
perceive odours which are present only in extremely small quantities.

Smell, however, is a highly elusive phenomenon. Odours, unlike colours, for

instance, cannot be named in many languages because the specific vocabulary
simply doesn't exist. 'It smells like …..,' we have to say when describing an odour,
struggling to express our olfactory experience. Nor can odours be recorded: there is
no effective way to either capture or store them over time. In the realm of
olfaction, we must make do with descriptions and recollections. This has
implications for olfactory research.

Most of the research on smell undertaken to date has been of a physical scientific
nature. Significant advances have been made in the understanding of the biological
and chemical nature of olfaction, but many fundamental questions have yet to be
answered. Researchers have still to decide whether smell is one sense or two – one
responding to odours proper and the other registering odourless chemicals in the
air. Other unanswered questions are whether the nose is the only part of the body
affected by odours, and how smells can be measured objectively given the
nonphysical components. Questions like these mean that interest in the psychology
of smell is inevitably set to play an increasingly important role for researchers.

However, smell is not simply a biological and psychological phenomenon. Smell is

cultural, hence it is a social and historical phenomenon. Odours are invested with
cultural values: smells that are considered to be offensive in some cultures may be

31
perfectly acceptable in others. Therefore, our sense of smell is a means of, and
model for, interacting with the world. Different smells can provide us with intimate
and emotionally charged experiences and the value that we attach to these
experiences is interiorised by the members of society in a deeply personal way.
Importantly, our commonly held feelings about smells can help distinguish us from
other cultures. The study of the cultural history of smell is, therefore, in a very real
sense, an investigation into the essence of human culture.

Questions 1 - 4
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes on your answer sheet.
1. Tests have shown that odours can help people recognise the -------------
belonging to their husbands and wives.
2. Certain linguistic groups may have difficulty describing smell because they
lack the appropriate ------------.
3. The sense of smell may involve response to ------------ which do not smell,
in addition to obvious odours.
4. Odours regarded as unpleasant in certain -------------- are not regarded as
unpleasant in others.

32
A-4- Sentence Completion with a Box
You will be provided with some sentence beginnings and a box including the
endings to those sentences. Each complete sentence contains an idea from the
passage, therefore; you need to match the two halves of the sentences to make a
complete one according to the content of the text.

General Advice on Sentence Completion + a Box Questions

 Skim the whole passage before you start working on any of the tasks and
work out what it is about.

 Read the first sentence or note. Then find the relevant part of the passage,
and look for something that means the same. Find the words (in the passage
or box) that fit the question. Consider all the words in the box, or all the
words in the relevant part of the passage. Think about both the meaning and
the grammar.

 Remember that you must use the exact word(s) from the box. Copy your
answers carefully.

 Check that your answers fit both the meaning and grammar, that the spelling
is correct, and that you haven't written more than the maximum number of
words. Words must be spelt correctly to gain marks.

 Sentences in the Reading Modules may relate to different parts of the
passage while they follow the order of information in the passage.

 The sentences normally use different words from the words in the passage to
express the same ideas.

How to Approach This Question Type

1. Read the questions and underline the main features.
2. Read the endings and underline the main features. It is important because the
underlined words should summarize the whole idea.
3. Start with the clearest question item which you have seen in the passage.
Directly, go for that part.

4. Turn to the text and read that part to find the answer.

33
 5. The question and the ending must fit logically. Read the full sentence after
its completion to see if the sentence sounds OK and logical.

And you‟d better know:

 The questions are in passage order.

 Of course, the endings are NOT in passage order.

 Task instruction: Complete the sentences with the correct ending A - ?

Sample Reading Task

In the last decade a revolution has occurred in the way that scientists think about the
brain. We now know that the decisions humans make can be traced to the firing
patterns of neurons in specific parts of the brain. These discoveries have led to the
field known as neuroeconomics, which studies the brain's secrets to success in an
economic environment that demands innovation and being able to do things
differently from competitors. A brain that can do this is an iconoclastic one. Briefly,
an iconoclast is a person who does something that others say can't be done.
This definition implies that iconoclasts are different from other people, but more
precisely, it is their brains that are different in three distinct ways: perception, fear
response, and social intelligence. Each of these three functions utilizes a different
circuit in the brain. Naysayers might suggest that the brain is irrelevant, that thinking
in an original, even revolutionary, way is more a matter of personality than brain
function. But the field of neuroeconomics was born out of the realization that the
physical workings of the brain place limitations on the way we make decisions. By
understanding these constraints, we begin to understand why some people march to
a different drumbeat.

34
The first thing to realize is that the brain suffers from limited resources. It has a fixed
energy budget, about the same as a 40 watt light bulb, so it has evolved to work as
efficiently as possible. This is where most people are impeded from being an
iconoclast. For example, when confronted with information streaming from the eyes,
the brain will interpret this information in the quickest way possible. Thus it will
draw on both past experience and any other source of information, such as what
other people say, to make sense of what it is seeing. This happens all the time. The
brain takes shortcuts that work so well we are hardly ever aware of them. We think
our perceptions of the world are real, but they are only biological and electrical
rumblings. Perception is not simply a product of what your eyes or ears transmit to
your brain. More than the physical reality of photons or sound waves, perception is
a product of the brain.
Perception is central to iconoclasm. Iconoclasts see things differently to other
people. Their brains do not fall into efficiency pitfalls as much as the average
person's brain. Iconoclasts, either because they were born that way or through
learning, have found ways to work around the perceptual shortcuts that plague most
people. Perception is not something that is hardwired into the brain. It is a learned
process, which is both a curse and an opportunity for change. The brain faces the
fundamental problem of interpreting physical stimuli from the senses. Everything
the brain sees, hears, or touches has multiple interpretations. The one that is
ultimately chosen is simply the brain's best theory. In technical terms, these
conjectures have their basis in the statistical likelihood of one interpretation over
another and are heavily influenced by past experience and, importantly for potential
iconoclasts, what other people say.
The best way to see things differently to other people is to bombard the brain with
things it has never encountered before. Novelty releases the perceptual process from
the chains of past experience and forces the brain to make new judgments.
Successful iconoclasts have an extraordinary willingness to be exposed to what is
fresh and different. Observation of iconoclasts shows that they embrace novelty
while most people avoid things that are different.
The problem with novelty, however, is that it tends to trigger the brain's fear system.
Fear is a major impediment to thinking like an iconoclast and stops the average
person in his tracks. There are many types of fear, but the two that inhibit
iconoclastic thinking and people generally find difficult to deal with are fear of
uncertainty and fear of public ridicule. These may seem like trivial phobias. But fear

35
of public speaking, which everyone must do from time to time, afflicts one-third of the
population. This makes it too common to be considered a mental disorder. It is simply a
common variant of human nature, one which iconoclasts do not let inhibit their
reactions.

Finally, to be successful iconoclasts, individuals must sell their ideas to other people.
This is where social intelligence comes in. Social intelligence is the ability to
understand and manage people in a business setting. In the last decade there has been an
explosion of knowledge about the social brain and how the brain works when groups
coordinate decision making. Neuroscience has revealed which brain circuits are
responsible for functions like understanding what other people think, empathy, fairness,
and social identity. These brain regions play key roles in whether people convince
others of their ideas. Perception is important in social cognition too. The perception of
someone's enthusiasm, or reputation, can make or break a deal. Understanding how
perception becomes intertwined with social decision making shows why successful
iconoclasts are so rare.

Iconoclasts create new opportunities in every area from artistic expression to

technology to business. They supply creativity and innovation not easily accomplished
by committees. Rules aren't important to them. Iconoclasts face alienation and failure,
but can also be a major asset to any organization. It is crucial for success in any field to
understand how the iconoclastic mind works.

36
A-5- Multiple Choice Questions
A set of multiple choice questions having three or four distractors are presented to
you in this type of questions. All the distractors are from the text therefore
meticulous care must be exercised in answering these questions.

General Advice on Multiple Choice Questions

 The different options for the answers include plausible distractors and only
close reading will show which to be correct. All the options often contain
key words from the passage, so be careful.

 You will not be expected to have any specialist knowledge of the subject.

 Read the questions and options before you read the text and try to predict the
answer. Underline the key words, which are usually nouns, names, verbs,
dates, etc.

 Scan the text and underline the key words and synonyms or paraphrases
from the questions.

 Be careful: if the same word(s) are in the option and in the text, it might be
a distracter. Check the logic and meaning, not just the words.

 Remember that the questions may focus on specific facts or opinions.

 The final question may test your understanding of the text as a whole - its
purpose or style, etc.

 When you have identified the right place in the text, carefully analyze each
option (A- D) one by one.

37
How to Approach This Question Type
1. Read the question and options to find the place of the answer.
2. Locate the relevant section using skimming and scanning having all
options at the back of your mind.
3. Read the relevant section.
4. Go back to the options and decide each question focuses on what aspect of
the topic.
5. Read the relevant section to check each option.
6. Repeat this action to see what option is the best answer.

And you‟d better know:

 The answers are in passage order.


 Task instruction: Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D

 All options are important even the wrong ones will come from the same
part of the passage as the answer.

 Be careful when you transfer answers to the answer sheet especially
when you don‟t start from the first question.

Sample Reading Task

Neuroaesthetics
An emerging discipline called neuroaesthetics is seeking to bring scientific
objectivity to the study of art, and has already given us a better understanding of
many masterpieces. The blurred imagery of Impressionist paintings seems to
stimulate the brain's amygdala, for instance. Since the amygdala plays a crucial
role in our feelings, that finding might explain why many people find these pieces
so moving.

38
Could the same approach also shed light on abstract twentieth-century pieces, from
Mondrian's geometrical blocks of colour, to Pollock's seemingly haphazard
arrangements of splashed paint on canvas? Sceptics believe that people claim to like
such works simply because they are famous. We certainly do have an inclination to
follow the crowd. When asked to make simple perceptual decisions such as matching
a shape to its rotated image, for example, people often choose a definitively wrong
answer if they see others doing the same. It is easy to imagine that this mentality
would have even more impact on a fuzzy concept like art appreciation, where there
is no right or wrong answer.
Angelina Hawley-Dolan, of Boston College, Massachusetts, responded to this
debate by asking volunteers to view pairs of paintings - either the creations of famous
abstract artists or the doodles of infants, chimps and elephants. They then had to
judge which they preferred. A third of the paintings were given no captions, while
many were labelled incorrectly - volunteers might think they were viewing a chimp's
messy brushstrokes when they were actually seeing an acclaimed masterpiece. In
each set of trials, volunteers generally preferred the work of renowned artists, even
when they believed it was by an animal or a child. It seems that the viewer can sense
the artist's vision in paintings, even if they can't explain why.
Robert Pepperell, an artist based at Cardiff University, creates ambiguous works that
are neither entirely abstract nor clearly representational. In one study, Pepperell and
his collaborators asked volunteers to decide how 'powerful' they considered an
artwork to be, and whether they saw anything familiar in the piece. The longer they
took to answer these questions, the more highly they rated the piece under scrutiny,
and the greater their neural activity. It would seem that the brain sees these images
as puzzles, and the harder it is to decipher the meaning, the more rewarding is the
moment of recognition.
And what about artists such as Mondrian, whose paintings consist exclusively of
horizontal and vertical lines encasing blocks of colour? Mondrian's works are
deceptively simple, but eye-tracking studies confirm that they are meticulously
composed, and that simply rotating a piece radically changes the way we view it.
With the originals, volunteers' eyes tended to stay longer on certain places in the
image, but with the altered versions they would flit across a piece more rapidly. As

39
a result, the volunteers considered the altered versions less pleasurable when they
later rated the work.

In a similar study, Oshin Vartanian of Toronto University asked volunteers to

compare original paintings with ones which he had altered by moving objects
around within the frame. He found that almost everyone preferred the original,
whether it was a Van Gogh still life or an abstract by Miro Vartanian also found
that changing the composition of the paintings reduced activation in those brain
areas linked with meaning and interpretation.

In another experiment, Alex Forsythe of the University of Liverpool analysed the

visual intricacy of different pieces of art, and her results suggest that many artists
use a key level of detail to please the brain. Too little and the work is boring, but
too much results in a kind of „perceptual overload‟ according to Forsythe. What's
more, appealing pieces both abstract and representational, show signs of 'fractals' -
repeated motifs recurring in different scales. Fractals are common throughout
nature, for example in the shapes of mountain peaks or the branches of trees. It is
possible that our visual system, which evolved in the great outdoors, finds it easier
to process such patterns.

It is also intriguing that the brain appears to process movement when we see a
handwritten letter, as if we are replaying the writer's moment of creation. This has
led some to wonder whether Pollock's works feel so dynamic because the brain
reconstructs the energetic actions the artist used as he painted. This may be down
to our brain's 'mirror neurons: which are known to mimic others' actions. The
hypothesis will need to be thoroughly tested, however. It might even be the case
that we could use neuroaesthetic studies to understand the longevity of some pieces
of artwork. While the fashions of the time might shape what is currently popular,
works that are best adapted to our visual system may be the most likely to linger
once the trends of previous generations have been forgotten.

It's still early days for the field of neuroaesthetics - and these studies are probably only
a taste of what is to come. It would, however, be foolish to reduce art appreciation to a
set of scientific laws. We shouldn't underestimate the importance of the style of a
particular artist, their place in history and the artistic environment of their time.
Abstract art offers both a challenge and the freedom to play with different
interpretations. In some ways, it's not so different to science, where we are

40
constantly looking for systems and decoding meaning so that we can view and
appreciate the world in a new way.

Questions 1 - 4
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.

1. In the second paragraph, the writer refers to a shape-matching test in order to

illustrate
A. the subjective nature of art appreciation.
B. the reliance of modern art on abstract forms.
C. our tendency to be influenced by the opinions of others.
D. a common problem encountered when processing visual data.

2. Angelina Hawley-Dolan's findings indicate that people

A. mostly favour works of art which they know well.
B. hold fixed ideas about what makes a good work of art.
C. are often misled by their initial expectations of a work of art.
D. have the ability to perceive the intention behind works of art.

3. Results of studies involving Robert Pepperell's pieces suggest that people

A. find it satisfying to work out what a painting represents.
B. can appreciate a painting without fully understanding it.
C. vary widely in the time they spend looking at paintings.
D. generally prefer representational art to abstract art.

4. What do the experiments described in the fifth paragraph suggest about the
paintings of Mondrian?
A. They are more carefully put together than they appear.
B. They can be interpreted in a number of different ways.
C. They challenge our assumptions about shape and colour.
D. They are easier to appreciate than many other abstract works.

41
Type B Questions
B-1- Labeling a Diagram Questions
In this type of question, you are usually provided with a diagram which has some
phrases with gaps or simply just some gaps directing to some parts of it. using the
title of the diagram, you can spot the location in which you will find the answers to
fill in the gaps.

General Advice on Labeling a Diagram Questions

 Skim the whole passage before you start working on any of the tasks.

 Read the instructions carefully. Study the drawing, and the heading, if it has
one. Try to work out what the drawing shows.

 Find the part of the passage that is relevant to the drawing - the heading will
help you. Read this part carefully, and look for the first answer. Write your
answer, making sure you spell it correctly and write no more than the
maximum number of words.

 Look for the other answers in tum.

 Check your answers. Make sure that they make sense: for example, if you
are giving the names of parts of a machine, they should all be nouns or noun
phrases.

How to Approach This Question Type

1. Check if there is a title. This will help you identify the relevant section in the
text much easier.
2. Study the information (any words or figures) given and notice what kind of
information is missing/needed. Do not ignore any details provided.

42
 3. Skim/Scan the text until you find one required topic and you‟ll see
that the rest will be found in its vicinity.
4. Start with the clearest question! It doesn‟t matter which item you
look for first.

And you‟d better know:

 The answers will not necessarily occur in the same order as in the text.
However, they will usually come from one section rather than the entire text.

 Task instruction: Complete the labels on the given diagram.

 Be careful of the word limit: NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR

A NUMBER from the passage‟, „ONE WORD ONLY‟ or „NO MORE
THAN TWO WORDS‟.
 Have a good overall look at the diagram to see what it is about.

 The diagram is carefully designed according to the details in the text.

 Be careful not to exceed the word limit (if so, your answer will be definitely
wrong)

 Make sure you use the exact words from the passage in your answers.

 Double check the spelling.

 Answers are not usually in the form of full sentences but words or short
phrases.

43
Sample Reading Task
THE FALKIRK WHEEL
A unique engineering achievement

The Falkirk Wheel in Scotland is the world's first and only rotating boat lift.
Opened in 2002, it is central to the ambitious £84.5m Millennium Link project to
restore navigability across Scotland by reconnecting the historic waterways of the
Forth & Clyde and Union Canals.

The major challenge of the project lay in the fact that the Forth & Clyde Canal is
situated 35 metres below the level of the Union Canal. Historically, the two canals
had been joined near the town of Falkirk by a sequence of 11 locks – enclosed
sections of canal in which the water level could be raised or lowered - that stepped
down across a distance of 1.5 km. This had been dismantled in 1933, thereby
breaking the link. When the project was launched in 1994, the British Waterways
authority were keen to create a dramatic twenty-first century landmark which
would not only be a fitting commemoration of the Millennium, but also a lasting
symbol of the economic regeneration of the region .

Numerous ideas were submitted for the project, including concepts ranging from
rolling eggs to tilting tanks, from giant see-saws to overhead monorails. The
eventual winner was a plan for the huge rotating steel boat lift which was to
become The Falkirk Wheel. The unique shape of the structure is claimed to have
been inspired by various sources, both manmade and natural, most notably a Celtic
double- headed axe, but also the vast turning propeller of a ship, the ribcage of a
whale or the spine of a fish.

The various parts of The Falkirk Wheel were all constructed and assembled, like one
giant toy building set, at Butterley Engineering's Steelworks in Derbyshire, some 400
km from Falkirk. A team there carefully assembled the 1,200 tonnes of steel,
painstakingly fitting the pieces together to an accuracy of just 10 mm to ensure a
perfect final fit. In the summer of 2001, the structure was then dismantled and
transported on 35 lorries to Falkirk, before all being bolted back together again on the
ground, and finally lifted into position in five large sections by crane. The Wheel
would need to withstand immense and constantly changing stresses as it rotated, so to
make the structure more robust, the steel sections were bolted rather than welded

44
together. Over 45,000 bolt holes were matched with their bolts, and each bolt was
hand-tightened.
The Wheel consists of two sets of opposing axe-shaped arms, attached about 25
metres apart to a fixed central spine.Two diametrically opposed water-filled
'gondolas', each with a capacity of 360,000 litres, are fitted between the ends of the
arms. These gondolas always weigh the same, whether or not they are carrying boats.
This is because, according to Archimedes' principle of displacement, floating objects
displace their own weight in water. So when a boat enters a gondola, the amount of
water leaving the gondola weighs exactly the same as the boat. This keeps the Wheel
balanced and so, despite its enormous mass, it rotates through 180° in five and a half
minutes while using very little power. It takes just 1.5 kilowatt-hours (5.4 MJ) of
energy to rotate the Wheel - roughly the same as boiling eight small domestic kettles
of water.
Boats needing to be lifted up enter the canal basin at the level of the Forth & Clyde
Canal and then enter the lower gondola of the Wheel. Two hydraulic steel gates are
raised, so as to seal the gondola off from the water in the canal basin. The water
between the gates is then pumped out. A hydraulic clamp, which prevents the arms
of the Wheel moving while the gondola is docked, is removed, allowing the Wheel
to turn. In the central machine room an array of ten hydraulic motors then begins to
rotate the central axle. The axle connects to the outer arms of the Wheel, which begin
to rotate at a speed of 1/8 of a revolution per minute. As the wheel rotates, the
gondolas are kept in the upright position by a simple gearing system. Two eight-
metre-wide cogs orbit a fixed inner cog of the same width, connected by two smaller
cogs travelling in the opposite direction to the outer cogs - so ensuring that the
gondolas always remain level. When the gondola reaches the top, the boat passes
straight onto the aqueduct situated 24 metres above the canal basin.
The remaining 11 metres of lift needed to reach the Union Canal is achieved by
means of a pair of locks. The Wheel could not be constructed to elevate boats over
the full 35-metre difference between the two canals, owing to the presence of the
historically important Antonine Wall, which was built by the Romans in the second
century AD. Boats travel under this wall via a tunnel, then through the locks, and
finally on to the Union Canal.

45
Questions 1 – 7
Label the diagram below.
Choose ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.
Write your anwers in boxes on your answer sheet.

.1 gates .2 Clamp .3 Axle .4 Cogs .5 aqueduct .6 wall .7 locks

46
B-2- Flowchart Completion Questions
In these questions you will be asked to complete the gaps in a flowchart, or simply
some sentences connected to each other by some arrows, using a limited number of
words from the text.

General Advice on Flowchart Completion Questions

 Pay attention to the heading so that you can locate the place of information
needed.

 Look at any completed examples provided for further guidance.

 Look at the gaps and predict the type of the word(s) required.

 Scan the text for the relevant keywords.

How to Approach This Question Type

1. Check if there is a title. This will help you identify the relevant section in
the text much easier.
2. Study the information (any words or figures) given and notice what kind
of information is missing/needed. Do not ignore any details provided.
3. Skim/Scan the text until you find one required topic and you‟ll see
that the rest will be found in its vicinity.
4. Start with the clearest question! It doesn‟t matter which item you look
for first.

47
And you‟d better know:

 The answers will not necessarily occur in the same order as in the text.
However, they will usually come from one section rather than the entire text.

 Task instruction: Complete the given flow chart.

 Be wary of the word limit: NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A

NUMBER from the passage‟, „ONE WORD ONLY‟ or „NO MORE
THAN TWO WORDS‟.
 Have a good overall look at the flow chart to see what it is about.

 The flow chart is carefully designed according to the details in the text.

 Be careful not to exceed the word limit (if so, your answer will be definitely
wrong)

 Make sure you use the exact words from the passage in your answers.

 Double check the spelling.

 Answers are not usually in the form of full sentences but words or short
phrases.

48
Sample Reading Task

49
50
.4 cracks .5 Fractures .6 Passage .7 streams .8 erosion

51
B-3- Table Completion Questions
In this type, you are asked to complete the gaps in a table using a limited
number of words from the text according to the task instruction.

General Advice on Table Completion Questions

 First read the headings of the columns. Think about what word class
would fit the heading and notes (if there are any).

 All the answers are words from the passage, but they may not be in the
same order as in the questions.

 Make sure you write no more than the maximum number of words and
copy them exactly as they are written in the passage.

How to Approach This Question Type

1. Check if there is a title. This will help you identify the relevant section in the
text much easier.
2. Study the information (any words or figures) given and notice what kind of
information is missing/needed. Do not ignore any details provided.
3. Skim/Scan the text until you find one required topic and you‟ll see that
the rest will be found in its vicinity.
4. Start with the clearest question! It doesn‟t matter which item you look for first.
5
2

And you‟d better know:

The answers will not necessarily occur in the same order as in the text.
However, they will usually come from one section rather than the entire text.

Task Instruction: Complete the given table.

52
  Be careful of the word limit: NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR

A NUMBER from the passage‟, „ONE WORD ONLY‟ or „NO MORE
THAN TWO WORDS‟.
 Have a good overall look at the table to see what it is about.

 The table is carefully designed according to the details in the text.

 Be careful not to exceed the word limit (if so, your answer will be definitely
wrong)

 Make sure you use the exact words from the passage in your answers.
Double check the spelling.

 Answers are not usually in the form of full sentences but words or short
phrases.

Sample Reading Task

Telepathy
Can human beings communicate by thought alone? For more than a century the
issue of telepathy has divided the scientific community, and even today it still
sparks bitter controversy among top academics.
Since the 1970s, parapsychologists at leading universities and research institutes
around the world have risked the derision of sceptical colleagues by putting the
various claims for telepathy to the test in dozens of rigorous scientific studies. The
results and their implications are dividing even the researchers who uncovered them.

Some researchers say the results constitute compelling evidence that telepathy is
genuine. Other parapsychologists believe the field is on the brink of collapse, having
tried to produce definitive scientific proof and failed. Sceptics and advocates alike do
concur on one issue, however: that the most impressive evidence so far has come from
the so-called 'ganzfeld' experiments, a German term that means 'whole field'. Reports
of telepathic experiences had by people during meditation led parapsychologists to
suspect that telepathy might involve 'signals' passing between people that were so
faint that they were usually swamped by normal brain activity.

53
In this case, such signals might be more easily detected by those experiencing
meditation-like tranquillity in a relaxing 'whole field1 of light, sound and warmth.

The ganzfeld experiment tries to recreate these conditions with participants sitting
in soft reclining chairs in a sealed room, listening to relaxing sounds while their
eyes are covered with special filters letting in only soft pink light. In early ganzfeld
experiments, the telepathy test involved identification of a picture chosen from a
random selection of four taken from a large image bank. The idea was that a
person acting as a 'sender' would attempt to beam the image over to the 'receiver'
relaxing in the sealed room. Once the session was over, this person was asked to
identify which of the four images had been used. Random guessing would give a
hit-rate of 25 per cent; if telepathy is real, however, the hit-rate would be higher. In
1982, the results from the first ganzfeld studies were analysed by one of its
pioneers, the American parapsychologist Charles Honorton. They pointed to
typical hit-rates of better than 30 per cent - a small effect, but one which statistical
tests suggested could not be put down to chance.

The implication was that the ganzfeld method had revealed real evidence for
telepathy. But there was a crucial flaw in this argument - one routinely overlooked in
more conventional areas of science. Just because chance had been ruled out as an
explanation did not prove telepathy must exist; there were many other ways of getting
positive results. These ranged from 'sensory leakage' - where clues about the pictures
accidentally reach the receiver -to outright fraud. In response, the researchers issued a
review of all the ganzfeld studies done up to 1985 to show that 80 per cent had found
statistically significant evidence. However, they also agreed that there were still too
many problems in the experiments which could lead to positive results, and they drew
up a list demanding new standards for future research.

After this, many researche.rs switched to autoganzfeld tests - an automated variant

of the technique which used computers to perform many of the key tasks such as
the random selection of images. By minimising human involvement, the idea was
to minimise the risk of flawed results. In 1987, results from hundreds of
autoganzfeld tests were studied by Honorton in a 'meta-analysis', a statistical
technique for finding the overall results from a set of studies. Though less
compelling than before, the outcome was still impressive.

Yet some parapsychologists remain disturbed by the lack of consistency between

individual ganzfeld studies. Defenders of telepathy point out that demanding
impressive evidence from every study ignores one basic statistical fact: it takes large

54
samples to detect small effects. If, as current results suggest, telepathy produces
hit-rates only marginally above the 25 per cent expected by chance, it's unlikely to
be detected by a typical ganzfeld study involving around 40 people: the group is
just not big enough. Only when many studies are combined in a meta-analysis will
the faint signal of telepathy really become apparent. And that is what researchers
do seem to be finding.

What they are certainly not finding, however, is any change in attitude of mainstream
scientists: most still totally reject the very idea of telepathy. The problem stems at
least in part from the lack of any plausible mechanism for telepathy. Various theories
have been put forward, many focusing on esoteric ideas from theoretical physics.
They include 'quantum entanglement', in which events affecting one group of atoms
instantly affect another group, no matter how far apart they may be. While physicists
have demonstrated entanglement with specially prepared atoms, no-one ·knows if it
also exists between atoms making up human minds. Answering such questions would
transform parapsychology. This has prompted some researchers to argue that the
future lies not in collecting more evidence for telepathy, but in probing· possible
mechanisms. Some work has begun already, with researchers trying to identify people
who are particularly successful in autoganzfeld trials. Early results show that creative
and artistic people do much better than average: in one study at the University of
Edinburgh, musicians achieved a hit-rate of 56 per cent. Perhaps more tests like these
will eventually give the researchers the evidence they are seeking and strengthen the
case for the existence of telepathy.

55
Questions 1 - 10
Complete the table below.
Choose No More Than Three Words from the passage for each answer.

56
B-4- Note Completion Questions
You will be presented with a set of notes that summarize or paraphrase a part of
the passage or even all of it. some of the notes are complete which can be used as
a cue to locate the information needed and some others have gaps in them which
need to be completed with words from the passage.

General Advice on Note Completion Questions

 Skim the whole passage before you start working on any of the tasks and
work out what it is about. Remember skimming doesn‟t imply reading
the passage thoroughly by any means, just let your eyes move over the
words of the text to spot the major ones.

 Read the first sentence. Then find the relevant part of the passage, and look
for something that means the same. Find the words that fit the question.
Consider all the words in the relevant part of the passage. Think about both
the meaning and the grammar.

 Remember that the questions follow the order of information in the passage.

 Remember that you should use the exact word(s) from the passage or box.
Copy your answers carefully.

How to Approach This Question Type

1. Check if there is a title. This will help you identify the relevant section in the
text much easier.
2. Study the information (any words or figures) given and notice what kind
of information is missing/needed. Do not ignore any details provided.

57
 3. Skim/Scan the text until you find one required topic and you‟ll see
that the rest will be found in its vicinity.
4. Start with the clearest question! It doesn‟t matter which item you
look for first.

And you‟d better know:

 The answers will not necessarily occur in the same order as in the text.
However, they will usually come from one section rather than the entire text.

 Task instruction: Complete the given note.

 Be careful of the word limit: NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR

A NUMBER from the passage‟, „ONE WORD ONLY‟ or „NO MORE
THAN TWO WORDS‟.
 Have a good overall look at the note to see what it is about.

 The note is carefully designed according to the details in the text.

 Be careful not to exceed the word limit (if so, your answer will be definitely
wrong)

 Make sure you use the exact words from the passage in your answers.

 Double check the spelling.

 Answers are not usually in the form of full sentences but words or short
phrases.

58
Sample Reading Task

Information theory lies at the heart of everything - from DVD players and the
genetic code of DNA to the physics of the universe at its most fundamental. It has
been central to the development of the science of communication, which enables
data to be sent electronically and has therefore had a major impact on our lives

In April 2002 an event took place which demonstrated one of the many applications of
information theory. The space probe, Voyager I, launched in 1977, had sent back
spectacular images of Jupiter and Saturn and then soared out of the Solar System on a
one-way mission to the stars. After 25 years of exposure to the freezing temperatures
of deep space, the probe was beginning to show its age. Sensors and circuits were on
the brink of failing and NASA experts realised that they had to do something or lose
contact with their probe forever. The solution was to get a message to Voyager I to
instruct it to use spares to change the failing parts. With the probe 12 billion
kilometres from Earth, this was not an easy task. By means of a radio dish belonging
to NASA's Deep Space Network, the message was sent out into the depths of space.
Even travelling at the speed of light, it took over 11 hours to reach its target, far
beyond the orbit of Pluto. Yet, incredibly, the little probe managed to hear the faint
call from its home planet, and successfully made the switchover.
It was the longest-distance repair job in history, and a triumph for the NASA
engineers. But it also highlighted the astonishing power of the techniques developed
by American communications engineer Claude Shannon, who had died just a year
earlier. Born in 1916 in Petoskey, Michigan, Shannon showed an early talent for
maths and for building gadgets, and made breakthroughs in the foundations of
computer technology when still a student. While at Bell Laboratories, Shannon
developed information theory, but shunned the resulting acclaim. In the 1940s, he
single-handedly created an entire science of communication which has since
inveigled its way into a host of applications, from DVDs to satellite communications
to bar codes - any area, in short, where data has to be conveyed rapidly yet
accurately.

59
This all seems light years away from the down-to-earth uses Shannon originally
had for his work, which began when he was a 22-year-old graduate engineering
student at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1939. He set
out with an apparently simple aim: to pin down the precise meaning of the concept
of 'information'. The most basic form of information, Shannon argued, is whether
something is true or false - which can be captured in the binary unit, or ' bit', of the
form 1 or 0. Having identified this fundamental unit, Shannon set about defining
otherwise vague ideas about information and how to transmit it from place to
place. In the process he discovered something surprising: it is always possible to
guarantee information will get through random interference - 'noise' - intact.

Noise usually means unwanted sounds which interfere with genuine information.
Information theory generalises this idea via theorems that capture the effects of noise
with mathematical precision. In particular, Shannon showed that noise sets a limit on
the rate at which information can pass along communication channels while
remaining error-free. This rate depends on the relative strengths of the signal and
noise travelling down the communication channel, and on its capacity (its
'bandwidth'). The resulting limit, given in units of bits per second, is the absolute
maximum rate of error-free communication given signal strength and noise level. The
trick, Shannon showed, is to find ways of packaging up - 'coding' - information to
cope with the ravages of noise, while staying within the information-carrying capacity
- 'bandwidth' - of the communication system being used.
Over the years scientists have devised many such coding methods, and they have
proved crucial in many technological feats. The Voyager spacecraft transmitted data
using codes which added one extra bit for every single bit of information; the result
was an error rate of just one bit in 10,000 - and stunningly clear pictures of the
planets. Other codes have become part of everyday life - such as the Universal
Product Code, or bar code, which uses a simple error-detecting system that ensures
supermarket check-out lasers can read the price even on, say, a crumpled bag of
crisps. As recently as 1993, engineers made a major breakthrough by discovering
so-called turbo codes - which come very close to Shannon's ultimate limit for the
maximum rate that data can be transmitted reliably, and now play a key role in the
mobile videophone revolution.

60
Shannon also laid the foundations of more efficient ways of storing information, by
stripping out superfluous ('redundant') bits from data which contributed little real
information. As mobile phone text messages like 'I CN C U' show, it is often possible
to leave out a lot of data without losing much meaning. As with error correction,
however, there's a limit beyond which messages become too ambiguous. Shannon
showed how to calculate this limit, opening the way to the design of compression
methods that cram maximum information into the minimum space.

Questions 1 - 5
Complete the notes below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
The Voyager 1 Space Probe
 The probe transmitted pictures of both 1 ...................... and ………… then
left the 2 ……………. .

 The freezing temperatures were found to have a negative effect on parts of
 the space probe.
 Scientists feared that both the 3 .…….... and ……… were about to stop
 working.
 The only hope was to tell the probe to replace them with 4 ………….. but
 distance made communication with the probe difficult.
  A 5 …………. was used to transmit the message at the speed of light.
 The message was picked up by the probe and the switchover took place.

1- Jupiter/Saturn 2- solar system 3- sensors/circuit 4- spares 5- radio dish

61
Type C Questions
C-1- Summary Completion Questions
There is a summary of the whole or part of the text which you need to complete with
the words from the passage according to word limitation presented in the instruction.

General Advice on Summary Completion Questions

 Skim the whole passage before you start working on any of the tasks.

 Read the instructions. Check the maximum number of words for each space.
Consider what information is likely to fit each space. Think about both the
meaning and the grammar.

 Read the first gapped sentence. Find the relevant part of the passage - the
heading will help you - and look for something that means the same. Find
the words (in the passage or box) that fit the question. Copy them exactly.
Continue with the next space.

How to Approach This Question Type

1. Look at the title of the summary (if there is one). When the title is generally
similar to the heading of the text, the summary is probably from the whole
text; otherwise, it is taken from a part of the text.
2. Start reading the summary and ignore the gaps. Through this, you can find the
paragraph(s) where the summary is located.
3. Read the words in the box to get familiar with the options you have.
4. Choose what part of speech is needed for each gap as you read (i.e. n, v, adj,
adv)
5. Start with the easiest gap. The more gaps you can answer, the more you will
understand and you can go back to the ones you left blank.

62
 6. Choose the appropriate word that matches the part of speech you need for
the gap and ignore others.
7. Having found the answers, rule out the word from the box

And you‟d better know:

 The answers are scattered throughout the passage.

 Task instruction: Complete the summary using the list of words.

 Be careful of the word limit: NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR

A NUMBER from the passage‟, „ONE WORD ONLY‟ or „NO MORE THAN

TWO WORDS‟.

 Sometimes the task regards the whole text, sometimes only a part of the text.

Sample Reading Task

What destroyed the civilisation of Easter Island?

Easter Island, or Rapu Nui as it is known locally, is home to several hundred ancient
human statues - the moai. After this remote Pacific island was settled by the
Polynesians, it remained isolated for centuries. All the energy and resources that went
into the moai - some of which are ten metres tall and weigh over 7,000 kilos - came
from the island itself. Yet when Dutch explorers landed in 1722, they met a Stone Age
culture. The moai were carved with stone tools, then transported for many kilometres,
without the use of animals or wheels, to massive stone platforms. The identity of the
moai builders was in doubt until well into the twentieth century. Thor Heyerdahl, the
Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer, thought the statues had been created by pre-
Inca peoples from Peru. Bestselling Swiss author Erich van Daniken believed they
were built by stranded extraterrestrials. Modern science - linguistic, archaeological
and genetic evidence - has definitively proved the moai builders were Polynesians, but
not how they moved their creations. Local folklore maintains that the statues walked,
while researchers have tended to assume the ancestors dragged the statues somehow,
using ropes and logs.

63
When the Europeans arrived, Rapa Nui was grassland, with only a few scrawny
trees. In the 1970s and 1980s, though, researchers found pollen preserved in lake
sediments, which proved the island had been covered in lush palm forests for
thousands of years. Only after the Polynesians arrived did those forests disappear.
US scientist Jared Diamond believes that the Rapanui people - descendants of
Polynesian settlers - wrecked their own environment. They had unfortunately settled
on an extremely fragile island - dry, cool, and too remote to be properly fertilised by
windblown volcanic ash. When the islanders cleared the forests for firewood and
farming, the forests didn't grow back. As trees became scarce and they could no
longer construct wooden canoes for fishing, they ate birds. Soil erosion decreased
their crop yields. Before Europeans arrived, the Rapanui had descended into civil
war and cannibalism, he maintains. The collapse of their isolated civilisation,
Diamond writes, is a 'worst-case scenario for what may lie ahead of us in our own
future'.
The moai, he thinks, accelerated the self-destruction. Diamond interprets them as
power displays by rival chieftains who, trapped on a remote little island, lacked other
ways of asserting their dominance. They competed by building ever bigger figures.
Diamond thinks they laid the moai on wooden sledges, hauled over log rails, but that
required both a lot of wood and a lot of people. To feed the people, even more land
had to be cleared. When the wood was gone and civil war began, the islanders began
toppling the moai. By the nineteenth century none were standing.
Archaeologists Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii and Carl Lipo of California
State University agree that Easter Island lost its lush forests and that it was an
'ecological catastrophe' - but they believe the islanders themselves weren't to blame.
And the moai certainly weren't. Archaeological excavations indicate that the
Rapanui went to heroic efforts to protect the resources of their wind-lashed, infertile
fields. They built thousands of circular stone windbreaks and gardened inside them,
and used broken volcanic rocks to keep the soil moist. In short, Hunt and Lipo argue,
the prehistoric Rapanui were pioneers of sustainable farming.
E Hunt and Lipo contend that moai-building was an activity that helped keep the
peace between islanders. They also believe that moving the moai required few
people and no wood, because they were walked upright. On that issue, Hunt and
Lipo say, archaeological evidence backs up Rapanui folklore. Recent experiments

64
indicate that as few as 18 people could, with three strong ropes and a bit of
practice, easily manoeuvre a 1,000 kg moai replica a few hundred metres. The
figures' fat bellies tilted them forward, and a 0-shaped base allowed handlers to roll
and rock them side to side.

F Moreover, Hunt and Lipo are convinced that the settlers were not wholly
responsible for the loss of the island's trees. Archaeological finds of nuts from the
extinct Easter Island palm show tiny grooves, made by the teeth of Polynesian rats.
The rats arrived along with the settlers, and in just a few years, Hunt and Lipo
calculate, they would have overrun the island. They would have prevented the
reseeding of the slow-growing palm trees and thereby doomed Rapa Nui's forest, even
without the settlers' campaign of deforestation. No doubt the rats ate birds' eggs too.
Hunt and Lipo also see no evidence that Rapanui civilisation collapsed when the palm
forest did. They think its population grew rapidly and then remained more or less
stable until the arrival of the Europeans, who introduced deadly diseases to which
islanders had no immunity. Then in the nineteenth century slave traders decimated the
population, which shrivelled to 111 people by 1877.

G Hunt and Lipo's vision, therefore, is one of an island populated by peaceful and
ingenious moai builders and careful stewards of the land, rather than by reckless
destroyers ruining their own environment and society. 'Rather than a case of abject
failure, Rapu Nui is an unlikely story of success', they claim. Whichever is the
case, there are surely some valuable lessons which the world at large can learn
from the story of Rapa Nui.

65
Questions 1-4
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes on your answer sheet.

Jared Diamond's View

Diamond believes that the Polynesian settlers on Rapa Nui destroyed its forests, cutting
down its trees for fuel and clearing land for 1 ....................... Twentieth-century discoveries
of pollen prove that Rapu Nui had once been covered in palm forests, which had turned
into grassland by the time the Europeans arrived on the island. When the islanders were
no longer able to build the 2 ...................... they needed to go fishing, they began using the
island's 3 ...................... as a food source, according to Diamond. Diamond also claims that

the moai were built to show the power of the island's chieftains, and that the methods of
transporting the statues needed not only a great number of people, but also a great deal
of 4 ....................... .

66
C-2- Summary Completion with a Box Questions
There is a summary of the whole or part of the text which you need to complete
with the words or phrases presented in a box. The words in the box are mere
paraphrases of the content of the passage.

How to Approach This Question Type

1. Look at the title of the summary (if it has one). When the title is generally
similar to the heading of the text, the summary is probably from the
whole text; otherwise, it is taken from a part of the text.
2. Start reading the summary and ignore the gaps. Through this, you can
find the paragraph(s) where the summary is located.
3. Read the words in the box to get familiar with the options you have. Keeping
the keywords in your mind.
4. Choose what part of speech is needed for each gap as you read (i.e. n, v,
adj, adv) so that some words from the box might be crossed out.
5. The more gaps you can answer, the more you will understand and you can
go back to the ones you left blank. You do not need to complete the
summary in order of the text.
6. Choose the appropriate word that matches the part of speech you need
for the gap and ignore others.
7. Having found the answers, rule out the word from the box.

And you‟d better know:

 The answers are scattered throughout the passage.

 Task instruction: Complete the summary using the list of words.

 Sometimes the task regards the whole text, some other times only a part of
the text.

67
Sample Reading Task

Neuroaesthetics
An emerging discipline called neuroaesthetics is seeking to bring scientific
objectivity to the study of art, and has already given us a better understanding of
many masterpieces. The blurred imagery of Impressionist paintings seems to
stimulate the brain's amygdala, for instance. Since the amygdala plays a crucial
role in our feelings, that finding might explain why many people find these pieces
so moving.

Could the same approach also shed light on abstract twentieth-century pieces, from
Mondrian's geometrical blocks of colour, to Pollock's seemingly haphazard
arrangements of splashed paint on canvas? Sceptics believe that people claim to
like such works simply because they are famous. We certainly do have an
inclination to follow the crowd. When asked to make simple perceptual decisions
such as matching a shape to its rotated image, for example, people often choose a
definitively wrong answer if they see others doing the same. It is easy to imagine
that this mentality would have even more impact on a fuzzy concept like art
appreciation, where there is no right or wrong answer.

Angelina Hawley-Dolan, of Boston College, Massachusetts, responded to this debate

by asking volunteers to view pairs of paintings - either the creations of famous
abstract artists or the doodles of infants, chimps and elephants. They then had to judge
which they preferred. A third of the paintings were given no captions, while many
were labelled incorrectly - volunteers might think they were viewing a chimp's messy
brushstrokes when they were actually seeing an acclaimed masterpiece. In each set of
trials, volunteers generally preferred the work of renowned artists, even when they
believed it was by an animal or a child. It seems that the viewer can sense the artist's
vision in paintings, even if they can't explain why.

Robert Pepperell, an artist based at Cardiff University, creates ambiguous works that
are neither entirely abstract nor clearly representational. In one study, Pepperell and
his collaborators asked volunteers to decide how 'powerful' they considered an
artwork to be, and whether they saw anything familiar in the piece. The longer they
6
8

took to answer these questions, the more highly they rated the piece under scrutiny,
and the greater their neural activity. It would seem that the brain sees these images

68
as puzzles, and the harder it is to decipher the meaning, the more rewarding is the
moment of recognition.

And what about artists such as Mondrian, whose paintings consist exclusively of
horizontal and vertical lines encasing blocks of colour? Mondrian's works are
deceptively simple, but eye-tracking studies confirm that they are meticulously
composed, and that simply rotating a piece radically changes the way we view it.
With the originals, volunteers' eyes tended to stay longer on certain places in the
image, but with the altered versions they would flit across a piece more rapidly. As
a result, the volunteers considered the altered versions less pleasurable when they
later rated the work.

In a similar study, Oshin Vartanian of Toronto University asked volunteers to

compare original paintings with ones which he had altered by moving objects
around within the frame. He found that almost everyone preferred the original,
whether it was a Van Gogh still life or an abstract by Miro Vartanian also found
that changing the composition of the paintings reduced activation in those brain
areas linked with meaning and interpretation.

In another experiment, Alex Forsythe of the University of Liverpool analysed the

visual intricacy of different pieces of art, and her results suggest that many artists
use a key level of detail to please the brain. Too little and the work is boring, but
too much results in a kind of „perceptual overload‟ according to Forsythe. What's
more, appealing pieces both abstract and representational, show signs of 'fractals' -
repeated motifs recurring in different scales. Fractals are common throughout
nature, for example in the shapes of mountain peaks or the branches of trees. It is
possible that our visual system, which evolved in the great outdoors, finds it easier
to process such patterns.

It is also intriguing that the brain appears to process movement when we see a
handwritten letter, as if we are replaying the writer's moment of creation. This has led
some to wonder whether Pollock's works feel so dynamic because the brain
reconstructs the energetic actions the artist used as he painted. This may be down to
our brain's 'mirror neurons: which are known to mimic others' actions. The hypothesis
will need to be thoroughly tested, however. It might even be the case that we could
use neuroaesthetic studies to understand the longevity of some pieces of artwork.
While the fashions of the time might shape what is currently popular, works

69
that are best adapted to our visual system may be the most likely to linger once the
trends of previous generations have been forgotten.

It's still early days for the field of neuroaesthetics - and these studies are probably
only a taste of what is to come. It would, however, be foolish to reduce art
appreciation to a set of scientific laws. We shouldn't underestimate the importance
of the style of a particular artist, their place in history and the artistic environment
of their time. Abstract art offers both a challenge and the freedom to play with
different interpretations. In some ways, it's not so different to science, where we
are constantly looking for systems and decoding meaning so that we can view and
appreciate the world in a new way.

Questions 1-3
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-H, below.
Write the correct letters, A-H, in boxes on your answer sheet.

Art and the Brain

The discipline of neuroaesthetics aims to bring scientific objectivity to the study of art.
Neurological studies of the brain, for example, demonstrate the impact which Impressionist

paintings have on our 1 ...................... . Alex Forsythe of the University of Liverpool believes many
artists give their works the precise degree of 2 ...................... which most appeals to the viewer's
brain. She also observes that pleasing works of art often contain certain repeated 3 ......................
which occur frequently in the natural world.

70
C-3- Classification Questions
In this type, you are asked to classify several pieces of information from the
passage in some way, choosing among the same options (normally three or four) in
each case. The options are all of the same. Examples you could be asked to classify
include: characteristics and who/what they belong to, dates or periods and events
that happened then, opinions and people who held them, places and features
associated with them, and etc.

How to Approach This Question Type

1. Skim the whole passage before you start working on any of the tasks.
2. Read the instructions carefully and think about the meaning of the three
options. Check what letters you should use for your answers: they may be A,
B, C, and D or other letters.
3. Locate the options in the passage through your initial skimming.
4. Read the first question, and underline the key words. Find the relevant part
of the passage. Read it carefully and consider all options before choosing the
correct one.
5. Read the next question and find the relevant part of the passage. It might be
anywhere in the passage.

And you‟d better know:

 The answers are scattered throughout the passage.

 Task instruction: Classify the following statements/phrases as referring
to
A -----

B -----

C -----

D -----

71
Sample Reading Task
Collecting ants can be as simple as picking up stray ones and placing them in a glass
jar, or as complicated as completing an exhaustive survey of all species present in
an area and estimating their relative abundances. The exact method used will depend
on the final purpose of the collections. For taxonomy, or classification, long series,
from a single nest, which contain all castes (workers, including majors and minors,
and, if present, queens and males) are desirable, to allow the determination of
variation within species. For ecological studies, the most important factor is
collecting identifiable samples of as many of the different species present as
possible. Unfortunately, these methods are not always compatible. The taxonomist
sometimes overlooks whole species in favour of those groups currently under study,
while the ecologist often collects only a limited number of specimens of each
species, thus reducing their value for taxonomic investigations.
To collect as wide a range of species as possible, several methods must be used.
These include hand collecting, using baits to attract the ants, ground litter sampling,
and the use of pitfall traps. Hand collecting consists of searching for ants everywhere
they are likely to occur. This includes on the ground, under rocks, logs or other
objects on the ground, in rotten wood on the ground or on trees, in vegetation, on
tree trunks and under bark. When possible, collections should be made from nests or
foraging columns and at least 20 to 25 individuals collected. This will ensure that all
individuals are of the same species, and so increase their value for detailed studies.
Since some species are largely nocturnal, collecting should not be confined to
daytime. Specimens are collected using an aspirator (often called a pooter), forceps,
a fine, moistened paint brush, or fingers, if the ants are known not to sting. Individual
insects are placed in plastic or glass tubes (1.5-3.0 ml capacity for small ants, 5-8 ml
for larger ants) containing 75% to 95% ethanol. Plastic tubes with secure tops are
better than glass because they are lighter, and do not break as easily if mishandled.
Baits can be used to attract and concentrate foragers. This often increases the number
of individuals collected and attracts species that are otherwise elusive. Sugars and
meats or oils will attract different species and a range should be utilised. These baits
can be placed either on the ground or on the trunks of trees or large shrubs. When
placed on the ground, baits should be sin1ated on small paper cards or other flat,

72
light-coloured surfaces, or in test-tubes or vials. This makes it easier to spot ants
and to capture them before they can escape into the surrounding leaf litter.

Many ants are small and forage primarily in the layer of leaves and other debris on the
ground. Collecting these species by hand can be difficult. One of the most successful
ways to collect them is to gather the leaf litter in which they are foraging and extract
the ants from it. This is most commonly done by placing leaf litter on a screen over a
large funnel, often under some heat. As the leaf litter dries from above, ants (and other
animals) move downward and eventually fall out the bottom and are collected in
alcohol placed below the funnel. This method works especially well in rain forests and
marshy areas. A method of improving the catch when using a funnel is to sift the leaf
litter through a coarse screen before placing it above the funnel. This will concentrate
the litter and remove larger leaves and twigs. It will also allow more litter to be
sampled when using a limited number of funnels.

The pitfall trap is another commonly used tool for collecting ants. A pitfall trap can be
any small container placed in the ground with the top level with the surrounding
surface and filled with a preservative. Ants are collected when they fall into the trap
while foraging. The diameter of the traps can vary from about 18 mm to 10 cm and
the number used can vary from a few to several hundred. The size of the traps used is
influenced largely by personal preference (although larger sizes are generally better),
while the number will be determined by the study being undertaken. The preservative
used is usually ethylene glycol or propylene glycol, as alcohol will evaporate quickly
and the traps will dry out. One advantage of pitfall traps is that they can be used to
collect over a period of time with minimal maintenance and intervention. One
disadvantage is that some species are not collected as they either avoid the traps or do
not commonly encounter them while foraging.

73
Questions 1 - 6
Classify the following statements as referring to
A hand collecting C sampling ground litter
B using bait D using a pitfall trap
Write the correct letter, A, B, C or D, in boxes on your answer sheet.

1. It is preferable to take specimens from groups of ants.

2. It is particularly effective for wet habitats.
3. It is a good method for species which are hard to find.
4. Little time and effort is required.
5. Separate containers are used for individual specimens
6. Non-alcoholic preservative should be used.

74
C-4- Matching Questions
You are asked to match questions with options from a box. Options usually contain
names of people which need to be matched with statements said by those people.
Some options from the box may be used more than once, while others may not be
used at all. Sometimes there are more questions than options, and you will see the
instruction 'NB You may use any letter more than once'.

General Advice on Matching Questions

 Skim the whole passage before you start working on any of the tasks. Then
read the instructions and the task carefully. It may help to underline the key
 words in the questions.
 If the options in the box are names, underline them in the text.


7
5
 Read the first option in the box and then find the part of the passage that
mentions it. Read what is written about it. Look through the questions. If you
find one that matches what is in the passage, write your answer. If nothing
matches, it may be one that you don't need to use, so go on to the next option.

 You might find it helpful to underline the part of the text that contains the
answer.

 Remember that the words in the questions or in the box may be paraphrases
of words in the passage.

How to Approach This Question Type

1. Scan the text and underline the words in the box (names of people, cities, etc.)
so that you can easily refer back to relevant sections quickly.
2. Read the list of statements, e.g. 1-8, and underline the key words.
3. Read the information about one of the items and check the information in the
questions to see if any of them apply. In case of people's views, skim through
the passage until you get to the first name and their view. Read the viewpoint
completely.
4. Skim through the list of statements looking for one that matches.

75
And you‟d better know:

 The answers are scattered throughout the text

 Task instruction: Match each statement with the correct person.
 The words in the box (names of people, cities, etc.) will be in passage order

 Generally, it is best to do these questions in order of the items in the box,
NOT in question order.

Sample Reading Task

Young children's sense of identity

sense of self develops in young children by degrees. The process can usefully be
thought of in terms of the gradual emergence of two somewhat separate features: the
self as a subject, and the self as an object. William James introduced the distinction in
1892, and contemporaries of his, such as Charles Cooley, added to the developing
debate. Ever since then psychologists have continued building on the theory.

According to James, a child's first step on the road to self-understanding can be

seen as the recognition that he or she exists. This is an aspect of the self that he
labelled 'self-as-subject', and he gave it various elements. These included an
awareness of one's own agency (i.e. one's power to act), and an awareness of one's
distinctiveness from other people. These features gradually emerge as infants
explore their world and interact with caregivers. Cooley (1902) suggested that a
sense of the self-as-subject was primarily concerned with being able to exercise
power. He proposed that the earliest examples of this are an infant's attempts to
control physical objects, such as toys or his or her own limbs. This is followed by
attempts to affect the behaviour of other people. For example, infants learn that
when they cry or smile someone responds to them.

Another powerful source of information for infants about the effects they can have on
the world around them is provided when others mimic them. Many parents spend a lot
of time, particularly in the early months, copying their infant's vocalizations and
expressions. In addition, young children enjoy looking in mirrors, where the
movements they can see are dependent upon their own movements. This is not to say
that infants recognize the reflection as their own image (a later development).

76
However, Lewis and Brooks-Gunn (1979) suggest that infants' developing
understanding that the movements they see in the mirror are contingent on their
own, leads to a growing awareness that they are distinct from other people. This is
because they, and only they, can change the reflection in the mirror.

This understanding that children gain of themselves as active agents continues to

develop in their attempts to co-operate with others in play. Dunn (1988) points out
that it is in such day-to-day relationships and interactions that the child's
understanding of his- or herself emerges. Empirical investigations of the self-as-
subject in young children are, however, rather scarce because of difficulties of
communication: even if young infants can reflect on their experience, they
certainly cannot express this aspect of the self directly.

Once children have acquired a certain level of self-awareness, they begin to place
themselves in a whole series of categories, which together play such an important
part in defining them uniquely as 'themselves'. This second step in the development
of a full sense of self is what James called the 'self-as-object'. This has been seen
by many to be the aspect of the self which is most influenced by social elements,
since it is made up of social roles (such as student, brother, colleague) and
characteristics which derive their meaning from comparison or interaction with
other people (such as trustworthiness, shyness, sporting ability).

Cooley and other researchers suggested a close connection between a person's own
understanding of their identity and other people's understanding of it. Cooley
believed that people build up their sense of identity from the reactions of others to
them, and from the view they believe others have of them. He called the self-as-
object the 'looking-glass self', since people come to see themselves as they are
reflected in others. Mead (1934) went even further, and saw the self and the social
world as inextricably bound together: 'The self is essentially a social structure, and
it arises in social experience ... it is impossible to conceive of a self arising outside
of social experience.'

Lewis and Brooks-Gunn argued that an important developmental milestone is reached

when children become able to recognize themselves visually without the support of
seeing contingent movement. This recognition occurs around their second birthday. In
one experiment, Lewis and Brooks-Gunn (1979) dabbed some red powder on the
noses of children who were playing in front of a mirror, and then

77
observed how often they touched their noses. The psychologists reasoned that if
the children knew what they usually looked like, they would be surprised by the
unusual red mark and would start touching it. On the other hand, they found that
children of 15 to 18 months are generally not able to recognize themselves unless
other cues such as movement are present.

Finally, perhaps the most graphic expressions of self-awareness in general can be seen
in the displays of rage which are most common from 18 months to 3 years of age. In a
longitudinal study of groups of three or four children, Bronson (1975) found that the
intensity of the frustration and anger in their disagreements increased sharply between
the ages of 1 and 2 years. Often, the children's disagreements involved a struggle over
a toy that none of them had played with before or after the tug-of-war: the children
seemed to be disputing ownership rather than wanting to play with it. Although it may
be less marked in other societies, the link between the sense of 'self' and of 'ownership'
is a notable feature of childhood in Western societies.

Questions 1 - 4
Look at the following findings and the list of researchers below.
Match each finding with the correct researcher or researchers, A – E.
1. A sense of identity can never be formed without relationships with other
people.
2. A child‟s awareness of self is related to a sense of mastery over things and
people.
3. At a certain age children‟s sense of identity leads to aggressive behavior.
4. Observing their own reflection contributes to children‟s self-awareness.

78
C-5- Pick from a List Questions

In this type, you are provided with a question whose answer includes different
points mentioned in the passage. The points, along with some distractors, are
presented in a list of letters, e.g. A-E, from which you need to choose the right ones
according to the instruction.

General Advice on Pick from a List Questions

 Read the instructions carefully. Note how many answers are required for the
question.

 Read the question. Look for the relevant part of the passage. Read carefully,
 considering all the options.
 Always choose only the required number of options for each question.

 Make sure you fill all boxes on your answer sheet - you won't lose marks for
wrong answers.

How to Approach This Question Type

1. Underline the key words in the question and options.

2. Read the passage and find words or expressions that match the options.
3. Remember that the correct options are paraphrases of the sentences in the
corresponding location of the text.
4. Check that the options you choose mean the same as the passage.

And you‟d better know:

7
9

The answers are scattered throughout the passage

Task instruction:Choose two (or three/four/etc.) from A-F.
Read the question carefully and note how many options you must pick.

The order of answers on the answer sheet is not important.

79
Sample Reading Task
TIDAL POWER
Undersea turbines which produce electricity from the tides are set to become an
important source of renewable energy for Britain. It is still too early to predict the
extent of the impact they may have, but all the signs are that they will play a
significant role in the future

Operating on the same principle as wind turbines, the power in sea turbines comes
from tidal currents which turn blades similar to ships' propellers, but, unlike wind,
the tides are predictable and the power input is constant. The technology raises the
prospect of Britain becoming self-sufficient in renewable energy and drastically
reducing its carbon dioxide emissions. If tide, wind and wave power are all
developed, Britain would be able to close gas, coal and nuclear power plants and
export renewable power to other parts of Europe. Unlike wind power, which
Britain originally developed and then abandoned for 20 years allowing the Dutch
to make it a major industry, undersea turbines could become a big export earner to
island nations such as Japan and New Zealand.

Tidal sites have already been identified that will produce one sixth or more of the
UK's power - and at prices competitive with modern gas turbines and undercutting
those of the already ailing nuclear industry. One site alone, the Pentland Firth,
between Orkney and mainland Scotland, could produce 10% of the country's
electricity with banks of turbines under the sea, and another at Alderney in the
Channel Islands three times the 1,200 megawatts of Britain's largest and newest
nuclear plant, Sizewell B, in Suffolk. Other sites identified include the Bristol
Channel and the west coast of Scotland, particularly the channel between
Campbeltown and Northern Ireland.

Work on designs for the new turbine blades and sites are well advanced at the
University of Southampton's sustainable energy research group. The first station is
expected to be installed off Lynmouth in Devon shortly to test the technology in a
venture jointly funded by the department of Trade and Industry and the European
Union. AbuBakr Bahaj, in charge of the Southampton research, said: 'The prospects
for energy from tidal currents are far better than from wind because the flows of water
are predictable and constant. The technology for dealing with the hostile saline
environment under the sea has been developed in the North Sea oil industry and much
is already known about turbine blade design, because of wind power and ship
propellers. There are a few technical difficulties, but I believe in the next five to ten

80
years we will be installing commercial marine turbine farms.' Southampton has
been awarded £215,000 over three years to develop the turbines and is working
with Marine Current Turbines, a subsidiary of IT power, on the Lynmouth project.
EU research has now identified 106 potential sites for tidal power, 80% round the
coasts of Britain. The best sites are between islands or around heavily indented
coasts where there are strong tidal currents.

A marine turbine blade needs to be only one third of the size of a wind generator to
produce three times as much power. The blades will be about 20 metres in diameter,
so around 30 metres of water is required. Unlike wind power, there are unlikely to be
environmental objections. Fish and other creatures are thought unlikely to be at risk
from the relatively slow-turning blades. Each turbine will be mounted on a tower
which will connect to the national power supply grid via underwater cables. The
towers will stick out of the water and be lit, to warn shipping, and also be designed to
be lifted out of the water for maintenance and to clean seaweed from the blades.

Dr Bahaj has done most work on the Alderney site, where there are powerful
currents. The single undersea turbine farm would produce far more power than
needed for the Channel Islands and most would be fed into the French Grid and be
re-imported into Britain via the cable under the Channel.

One technical difficulty is cavitation, where low pressure behind a turning blade
causes air bubbles. These can cause vibration and damage the blades of the turbines.
Dr Bahaj said: 'We have to test a number of blade types to avoid this happening or at
least make sure it does not damage the turbines or reduce performance. Another slight
concern is submerged debris floating into the blades. So far we do not know how
much of a problem it might be. We will have to make the turbines robust because the
sea is a hostile environment, but all the signs that we can do it are good.'

81
82
C-6- Paragraph Headings Questions

In this type, you will be provided with a set of headings for each paragraph of the
text. The number of headings is always more than the number of paragraphs and
you have to match each paragraph with its corresponding heading.

General Advice on Paragraph Headings Questions

 Skim the passage quickly to get a general idea of its meaning.

 Make sure you cross out the example (if there is one) so that you won‟t
waste your time on that.

 Re-read the first labelled paragraph or section, and decide what it is about.
Read all the headings, and write beside the paragraph the number of all those
that might be suitable. Make sure they fit the meaning of the whole
paragraph and don't simply use some of the same words.

 Do the same with the other paragraphs, in each case reading all the headings.

 Where you have chosen more than one heading, decide which one fits best.
Remember that every paragraph or section will have a different heading and
there will always be more headings than paragraphs. If you are given an
example, make sure you don't use that heading for other questions.

How to Approach This Question Type

1. Skim-read the passage. Underline what you think are the main ideas and
key words that summarize the main idea of the paragraph.
2. Read through the list of headings to familiarize yourself with them.

3. Start from the clearest (or shortest) paragraph carefully and try to say what
it is about in a few words in your mind before looking at the headings.

4. Make sure you choose the heading that focuses on key information (the
main idea) rather than a minor detail.

83
 5. Cross the answer out both in headings and paragraphs.
6. Repeat actions 4 to 6 for all the paragraphs.

And you‟d better know:

 Task instruction: Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the
 list of headings.
  This is the first question you answer right after global text skimming.
 Always study the example (If available) and cross it out both from the list of
headings and the paragraphs.
 Match ideas not words. Don‟t fall for obvious words available in both
given headings and text. IELTS uses this as a very common trick.
  Remember there will always be extra headings that you will not need to use.
 Start from the text and then look at the headings. NEVER start finding a
paragraph for a heading.

Sample Reading Task

A Software that can identify the significant events in live TV sports coverage should
soon be able to compile programmes of highlights without any human intervention.
When this technology becomes commercially available, it will save millions in
editing costs.

B Picking out the key moments from a game - whether it be snooker, rugby,

baseball, football or basketball - is extremely labour-intensive at present. As the

footage streams into a TV station or outside-broadcast truck, someone has to watch
the action and keep notes on what happens and when. Only after that are the clips
retrieved and put together to form a highlights package, which will probably amount
to less than five minutes' viewing per game when it is finally broadcast.

C However, as sports follow fixed rules, and take place in 1s predictable locations,
computers ought to be able to pick out the key pieces of play and string them

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together. Anil Kokaram and colleagues at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, are
among the research teams trying to turn the idea into reality. They have decided to
analyse table-based ball games like snooker and pool. These are the sports that a
computer should find relatively easy to handle as the action is slow, the lighting is
fairly consistent and cameras mostly shoot from fixed positions.

D The Trinity team uses the edges of the table and the positions of the pockets to

work out where the balls are on the table. The software has the rules of the game
programmed in, so it can track the moving balls and work out what has happened.
For example, if a ball approaches a pocket and then disappears from view, the
program assumes it has been potted. By working out how to detect foul shots -
when a player hits the wrong ball - the team hopes to find a way to create a
compelling highlights package for the sport.

E Until recently, the chances of getting similar software tor football were not high.
Involving a far greater number of moving objects (22 players and a ball) on a
playing field whose appearance can vary with the weather and lighting, football
had been proving an impossible challenge to developers, but then Carlo Colombo
and his colleagues at the University of Florence in Italy started to approach the task
in another way. They have found that they can compile highlights from footage
without tracking either the ball or the moving players. Instead, they have looked at
the position of the players in set pieces. Their software detects the position of the
pitch markings in a shot to work out which area is in the frame. Then, by checking
the positions the players adopt in relation to the markings, the software can decide
whether a player is about to take a penalty, free kick or corner, and whether a goal
is scored as a result.

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F The Florence team has not yet worked out how to enable the computer to determine when
a goal is scored in open play. However, Ahmat Ekin, a computer scientist from the
University of Rochester in New York, may be close to solving that problem. He has
designed software that looks for a specific sequence of camera shots to work out whether a
goal has been scored. For example, player close-ups often indicate a gap in play when
something important has happened, and slow-motion footage is another useful cue. Ekin also
includes sound analysis so it is conceivable that the software could hunt for the
commentator's extravagant shouts of 'Gooooaaal!'

G A Japanese electronics company has been trialling a simple highlights package that can
cut down an hour of American football to around 14 minutes and an hour's baseball to 10
minutes. Eventually, the firm wants to 65 develop highlights software for a new generation
of video recorders, which would allow people to customise their own sports highlights
packages from the comfort of their living rooms.

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Questions 1 - 6
The reading passage has seven paragraphs A-G.
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number i-x next to questions 1-6.
List of Headings
i. The development costs of highlights software
ii. Commercial applications for the home
iii. Tackling a fast-moving outdoor team sport
iv. Good news for efficiency-minded broadcasters
v. The attraction of indoor sport for software developers
vi. Considering both visual and audio Input
vii. Job prospects in the broadcasting industry
viii. One team's innovative processing of snooker
ix. Challenging the public's TV viewing habits
x. The current approach to sports editing

Example : Paragraph A >> iv

1 Paragraph B ------- 4 Paragraph E -------

2 Paragraph C ------- 5 Paragraph F -------
3 Paragraph D ------- 6 Paragraph G -------

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C-7- Locating Information Questions

You are asked to match a set of ideas, presented by some sentences, with paragraphs
of the text. This question type is quite similar to “matching headings” but instead of
headings we have a set short summaries or parts of each paragraph which have
been paraphrased.

General Advice on Paragraph Headings Questions

 Skim the whole passage before you start working on any of the tasks. Read
the instructions carefully.

 Read the questions and think about what they mean. Underline the key
words in the questions, both the type of information (explanation, how, etc.)
and the topic itself.

 Read the first labelled paragraph carefully. Read all the questions, and write
the paragraph letter by any questions that match information in the
paragraph. Remember to check both the type of information and the topic.

 Continue with each of the labelled paragraphs in turn. Where you have more
than one possible answer, re-read those paragraphs and choose the one that
fits the question best.

 Unless the instructions tell you that you can use any letter more than once,
make sure all your answers are different.

How to Approach This Question Type

1. Skim ALL the question items and underline the key words.

2. Start with the easiest question item which you have seen in the
passage. Directly, go for that paragraph.

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 3. Read the paragraph completely and see if you were right, but you
must also see if any of the information in the question items can be
found there too.

4. When you are certain that you cannot find any (or other) sentences in
this paragraph, rule the paragraph out.

5. Go for another paragraph. Preferably, a paragraph you think might

contain any of the question items (or choose the shortest paragraph).

6. Repeat this procedure until there is time for this passage.

And you‟d better know:

 Task instruction: Which paragraph contains the following information?

 This must be the last question you answer.
 The answers are scattered throughout the text.
 See if NB is given (NB: You may use any letter more than once)
 Always go from paragraphs to question items
 Do not look for exact words. Most of the sentences are paraphrased.
 If there are 1 or 2 question items left, and you don‟t know where to find
them, it is best to leave them.

Sample Reading Task

A Hearing impairment or other auditory function deficit in young children can have a
major impact on their development of speech and communication, resulting in a
detrimental effect on their ability to learn at school. This is likely to have major
consequences for the individual and the population as a whole. The New Zealand
Ministry of Health has found from research carried out over two decades that 6-10%
of children in that country are affected by hearing loss.

B A preliminary study in New Zealand has shown that classroom noise presents a major
concern for teachers and pupils. Modern teaching practices, the organisation
8
9

of desks in the classroom, poor classroom acoustics, and mechanical means of

ventilation such as air-conditioning units all contribute to the number of children

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 unable to comprehend the teacher's voice. Education researchers Nelson and Soli
have also suggested that recent trends in learning often involve collaborative
interaction of multiple minds and tools as much as individual possession of
information. This all amounts to heightened activity and noise levels, which have
the potential to be particularly serious for children experiencing auditory function
deficit. Noise in classrooms can only exacerbate their difficulty in comprehending
and processing verbal communication with other children and instructions from the
teacher.

C Children with auditory function deficit are potentially failing to learn to their
maximum potential because of noise levels generated in classrooms. The effects of
noise on the ability of children to learn effectively in typical classroom environments
are now the subject of increasing concern. The International Institute of Noise Control
Engineering (l-INCE), on the advice of the World Health Organization, has
established an international working party, which includes New Zealand, to evaluate
noise and reverberation control for school rooms.

D While the detrimental effects of noise in classroom situations are not limited to
children experiencing disability, those with a disability that affects their processing of
speech and verbal communication could be extremely vulnerable. The auditory
function deficits in question include hearing impairment, autistic spectrum disorders
(ASD) and attention deficit disorders (ADD/ADHD).

E Autism is considered a neurological and genetic life-long disorder that causes

discrepancies in the way information is processed. This disorder is characterised by
interlinking problems with social imagination, social communication and social
interaction. According to Janzen, this affects the ability to understand and relate in
typical ways to people, understand events and objects in the environment, and
understand or respond to sensory stimuli. Autism does not allow learning or thinking
in the same ways as in children who are developing normally. Autistic spectrum
disorders often result in major difficulties in comprehending verbal information and
speech processing. Those experiencing these disorders often find sounds such as
crowd noise and the noise generated by machinery painful and distressing. This is
difficult to scientifically quantify as such extra-sensory stimuli vary greatly from one
autistic individual to another. But a child who finds any type of noise in their

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 classroom or learning space intrusive is likely to be adversely affected in their
ability to process information.

F The attention deficit disorders are indicative of neurological and genetic disorders and
are characterised by difficulties with sustaining attention, effort and persistence,
organisation skills and disinhibition. Children experiencing these disorders find it
difficult to screen out unimportant information, and focus on everything in the
environment rather than attending to a single activity. Background noise in the
classroom becomes a major distraction, which can affect their ability to concentrate.

G Children experiencing an auditory function deficit can often find speech and
communication very difficult to isolate and process when set against high levels of
background noise. These levels come from outside activities that penetrate the
classroom structure, from teaching activities, and other noise generated inside, which
can be exacerbated by room reverberation. Strategies are needed to obtain the
optimum classroom construction and perhaps a change in classroom culture and
methods of teaching. In particular, the effects of noisy classrooms and activities on
those experiencing disabilities in the form of auditory function deficit need thorough
investigation. It is probable that many undiagnosed children exist in the education
system with 'invisible' disabilities. Their needs are less likely to be met than those of
children with known disabilities.

H The New Zealand Government has developed a New Zealand Disability Strategy and
has embarked on a wide-ranging consultation process. The strategy recognises that
people experiencing disability face significant barriers in achieving a full quality of
life in areas such as attitude, education, employment and access to services. Objective
3 of the New Zealand Disability Strategy is to 'Provide the Best Education for
Disabled People' by improving education so that all children, youth learners and adult
learners will have equal opportunities to learn and develop within their already
existing local school. For a successful education, the learning environment is vitally
significant, so any effort to improve this is likely to be of great benefit to all children,
but especially to those with auditory function disabilities.

I A number of countries are already in the process of formulating their own standards for
the control and reduction of classroom noise. New Zealand will probably follow

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 their example. The literature to date on noise in school rooms appears to focus on
the effects on schoolchildren in general, their teachers and the hearing impaired.
Only limited attention appears to have been given to those students experiencing
the other disabilities involving auditory function deficit. It is imperative that the
needs of these children are taken into account in the setting of appropriate
international standards to be promulgated in future.

Questions 1-6
Reading Passage 1 has nine sections, A-l. Which section contains the following
information?
Write the correct letter, A-I, in boxes on your answer sheet.

1 an account of a national policy initiative

2 a description of a global team effort
3 a hypothesis as to one reason behind the growth in classroom noise
4 a demand for suitable worldwide regulations

5 a list of medical conditions which place some children more at risk from noise
than others
6 the estimated proportion of children in New Zealand with auditory problems

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C-8- Global Multiple Choice Questions

This type is a single multiple choice question which usually comes at the end of all
other question types in a specific text. It usually regards the view of the writer or a
general idea posed in the text. Therefore, the answer is often bound to be found in
either the introduction or the conclusion.

How to Approach This Question Type

1. Read all the options.

2. Cross out those options which are about a specific part of the passage.

3. Read the first and last paragraph to find the paraphrases of the key
words in question and the distractors.

4. If the answer was not in the first or last paragraph, skim the other
paragraphs.
5. Finally, choose the best option based on topic sentences.

And you‟d better know:

 Task instruction: Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.

 It is just a single question which has only one mark out of forty.

 In most cases, the answer can be found in either the conclusion or the
introduction.

Sample Reading Task

Neuroaesthetics
An emerging discipline called neuroaesthetics is seeking to bring scientific
objectivity to the study of art, and has already given us a better understanding of
many masterpieces. The blurred imagery of Impressionist paintings seems to
stimulate the brain's amygdala, for instance. Since the amygdala plays a crucial role

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in our feelings, that finding might explain why many people find these pieces so
moving.

Could the same approach also shed light on abstract twentieth-century pieces, from
Mondrian's geometrical blocks of colour, to Pollock's seemingly haphazard
arrangements of splashed paint on canvas? Sceptics believe that people claim to
like such works simply because they are famous. We certainly do have an
inclination to follow the crowd. When asked to make simple perceptual decisions
such as matching a shape to its rotated image, for example, people often choose a
definitively wrong answer if they see others doing the same. It is easy to imagine
that this mentality would have even more impact on a fuzzy concept like art
appreciation, where there is no right or wrong answer.

Angelina Hawley-Dolan, of Boston College, Massachusetts, responded to this debate

by asking volunteers to view pairs of paintings - either the creations of famous
abstract artists or the doodles of infants, chimps and elephants. They then had to judge
which they preferred. A third of the paintings were given no captions, while many
were labelled incorrectly - volunteers might think they were viewing a chimp's messy
brushstrokes when they were actually seeing an acclaimed masterpiece. In each set of
trials, volunteers generally preferred the work of renowned artists, even when they
believed it was by an animal or a child. It seems that the viewer can sense the artist's
vision in paintings, even if they can't explain why.

Robert Pepperell, an artist based at Cardiff University, creates ambiguous works

that are neither entirely abstract nor clearly representational. In one study,
Pepperell and his collaborators asked volunteers to decide how 'powerful' they
considered an artwork to be, and whether they saw anything familiar in the piece.
The longer they took to answer these questions, the more highly they rated the
piece under scrutiny, and the greater their neural activity. It would seem that the
brain sees these images as puzzles, and the harder it is to decipher the meaning, the
more rewarding is the moment of recognition.

And what about artists such as Mondrian, whose paintings consist exclusively of
horizontal and vertical lines encasing blocks of colour? Mondrian's works are
deceptively simple, but eye-tracking studies confirm that they are meticulously
composed, and that simply rotating a piece radically changes the way we view it.
With the originals, volunteers' eyes tended to stay longer on certain places in the

94
image, but with the altered versions they would flit across a piece more rapidly. As
a result, the volunteers considered the altered versions less pleasurable when they
later rated the work.

In a similar study, Oshin Vartanian of Toronto University asked volunteers to

compare original paintings with ones which he had altered by moving objects
around within the frame. He found that almost everyone preferred the original,
whether it was a Van Gogh still life or an abstract by Miro Vartanian also found
that changing the composition of the paintings reduced activation in those brain
areas linked with meaning and interpretation.

In another experiment, Alex Forsythe of the University of Liverpool analysed the

visual intricacy of different pieces of art, and her results suggest that many artists
use a key level of detail to please the brain. Too little and the work is boring, but
too much results in a kind of „perceptual overload‟ according to Forsythe. What's
more, appealing pieces both abstract and representational, show signs of 'fractals' -
repeated motifs recurring in different scales. Fractals are common throughout
nature, for example in the shapes of mountain peaks or the branches of trees. It is
possible that our visual system, which evolved in the great outdoors, finds it easier
to process such patterns.

It is also intriguing that the brain appears to process movement when we see a
handwritten letter, as if we are replaying the writer's moment of creation. This has
led some to wonder whether Pollock's works feel so dynamic because the brain
reconstructs the energetic actions the artist used as he painted. This may be down
to our brain's 'mirror neurons: which are known to mimic others' actions. The
hypothesis will need to be thoroughly tested, however. It might even be the case
that we could use neuroaesthetic studies to understand the longevity of some pieces
of artwork. While the fashions of the time might shape what is currently popular,
works that are best adapted to our visual system may be the most likely to linger
once the trends of previous generations have been forgotten.

It's still early days for the field of neuroaesthetics - and these studies are probably
only a taste of what is to come. It would, however, be foolish to reduce art
appreciation to a set of scientific laws. We shouldn't underestimate the importance
of the style of a particular artist, their place in history and the artistic environment
of their time. Abstract art offers both a challenge and the freedom to play with

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different interpretations. In some ways, it's not so different to science, where we
are constantly looking for systems and decoding meaning so that we can view and
appreciate the world in a new way.

Question 40
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in box 40 on your answer sheet.

40. What would be the most appropriate subtitle for the article?
A. Some scientific insights into how the brain responds to abstract art
B. Recent studies focusing on the neural activity of abstract artists
C. A comparison of the neurological bases of abstract and representational art
D. How brain research has altered public opinion about abstract art

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How to Best Manage Your Time
The thought of reading 2500 to 3000 words is scary for most candidates but if you
manage your time judiciously the chances are you finish the reading tasks before
the time finishes.

IELTS test suggest spending 20 minutes for each reading task, which makes sense,
but we should not overlook the fact that the passages and questions get progressively
harder and that we should not spend equal amount of time on each section. Therefore,
the preferred timing for each passage is as follows: passage 1: 17 minutes, passage 2:
18 minutes, passage 3: 25 minutes. This is shown in the table below.

How to Calculate Your Score

The major difference between academic and general training IELTS is the scoring.
Although general training passages are easier, scoring is tougher for general
training candidates.

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By a simple look at the conversion table for IELTS Reading, you can see that for
example 30 correct answers out of 40 will give you the score of 7 in academic test
but 6 in the general training IELTS.

Top Tips on IELTS Reading

1. Read the instructions for each task carefully. Especially the ones
regarding the maximum number of words you can use.
2. Give the text a quick read-through (skimming) so that you get familiar
with the topic and how the text is developed.
3. There is no transferring time for your answers in reading section of
IELTS. You should transfer your answers within the 60-minute time you
have for reading and finding the answers. You can also write the answers
directly onto the answer sheet.
4. Every question gives you one mark so do not spend an extended amount
of time on any of the questions. Go on to the next and go back if you find
the time at the end.

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How to Complete the Reading Answer Sheet

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