Readingpracticetest2 v5 451
Readingpracticetest2 v5 451
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on
Reading Passage 1 below.
Going Bananas
The world's favourite fruit could disappear forever in 10 years’ time
The banana is among the world's oldest crops. Agricultural scientists believe
that the first edible banana was discovered around ten thousand years ago. It
has been at an evolutionary standstill ever since it was first propagated in the
jungles of South-East Asia at the end of the last ice age. Normally the wild
banana, a giant jungle herb called Musa acuminata, contains a mass of hard
seeds that make the fruit virtually inedible. But now and then, hunter-
gatherers must have discovered rare mutant plants that produced seedless,
edible fruits. Geneticists now know that the vast majority of these soft-fruited I
plants resulted from genetic accidents that gave their cells three copies of
each chromosome instead of the usual two. This imbalance prevents seeds and
pollen from developing normally, rendering the mutant plants sterile. And that
is why some scientists believe the world’s most popular fruit could be doomed.
In some ways, the banana today resembles the potato before blight brought
famine to Ireland a century and a half ago. But “it holds a lesson for other
crops, too,” says Emile Frison, top banana at the International Network for the
Improvement of Banana and Plantain in Montpellier, France. “The state of the
banana,” Frison warns, “can teach a broader lesson: the increasing
standardisation of food crops round the world is threatening their ability to
adapt and survive.”
The first Stone Age plant breeders cultivated these sterile freaks by replanting
cuttings from their stems. And the descendants of those original cuttings are
the bananas we still eat today. Each is a virtual clone, almost devoid of genetic
diversity. And that uniformity makes it ripe for disease like no other crop on
Earth. Traditional varieties of sexually reproducing crops have always had a
much broader genetic base, and the genes will recombine in new
arrangements in each generation. This gives them much greater flexibility in
evolving responses to disease - and far more genetic resources to draw on in
the face of an attack. But that advantage is fading fast, as growers increasingly
plant the same few, high-yielding varieties. Plant breeders work feverishly to
maintain resistance in these standardised crops. Should these efforts falter,
yields of even the most productive crop could swiftly crash. “When some pest
or disease comes along, severe epidemics can occur,” says Geoff Hawtin,
director of the Rome-based International Plant Genetic Resources Institute.
The banana is an excellent case in point. Until the 1950s, one variety, the Gros
Michel, dominated the world’s commercial banana business. Found by French
botanists in Asia in the 1820s, the Gros Michel was by all accounts a fine
banana, richer and sweeter than today’s standard banana and without the
latter’s bitter aftertaste when green. But it was vulnerable to a soil fungus that
produced a wilt known as Panama disease. “Once the fungus gets into the soil,
it remains there for many years. There is nothing farmers can do. Even
chemical spraying won’t get rid of it,” says Rodomiro Ortiz, director of the
International Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Ibadan, Nigeria. So plantation
owners played a running game, abandoning infested fields and moving to
“clean” land - until they ran out of clean land in the 1950s and had to abandon
the Gros Michel. Its successor, and still the reigning commercial king, is the
Cavendish banana, a 19th-century British discovery from southern China. The
Cavendish is resistant to Panama disease and, as a result, it literally saved the
international banana industry. During the 1960s, it replaced the Gros Michel on
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supermarket shelves. If you buy a banana today, it is almost certainly a
Cavendish. But even so, it is a minority in the world’s banana crop.
Half a billion people in Asia and Africa depend on bananas. Bananas provide
the largest source of calories and are eaten daily. Its name is synonymous with
food. But the day of reckoning may be coming for the Cavendish and its in‐
digenous kin. Another fungal disease, black Sigatoka, has become a global epi‐
demic since its first appearance in Fiji in 1963. Left to itself, black Sigatoka -
which causes brown wounds on leaves and premature fruit ripening - cuts fruit
yields by 50 to 70 per cent and reduces the productive lifetime of banana
plants from 30 years to as little as 2 or 3. Commercial growers keep black
Sigatoka at bay by a massive chemical assault. Forty sprayings of fungicide a
year is typical. But despite the fungicides, diseases such as black Sigatoka are
getting more and more difficult to control. “As soon as you bring in a new fun‐
gicide, they develop resistance,” says Frison. “One thing we can be sure of is
that black Sigatoka won't lose in this battle.” Poor farmers, who cannot afford
chemicals, have it even worse. They cap do little more than watch their plants
die. “Most of the banana fields in Amazonia have already been destroyed by
the disease,” says Luadir Gasparotto, Brazil’s leading banana pathologist with
the government research agency EMBRAPA. Production is likely to fall by 70
per cent as the disease spreads, he predicts. The only option will be to find a
new variety.
But how? Almost all edible varieties are susceptible to the diseases, so growers
cannot simply change to a different banana. With most crops, such a threat
would unleash an army of breeders, scouring the world for resistant relatives
whose traits they can breed into commercial varieties. Not so with the banana.
Because all edible varieties are sterile, bringing in new genetic traits to help
cope with pests and diseases is nearly impossible. Nearly, but not totally. Very
rarely, a sterile banana will experience a genetic accident that allows an
almost normal seed to develop, giving breeders a tiny window for improve‐
ment. Breeders at the Honduran Foundation of Agricultural Research have tried
to exploit this to create disease-resistant varieties. Further back-crossing with
wild bananas yielded a new seedless banana resistant to both black Sigatoka
and Panama disease.
Neither Western supermarket consumers nor peasant growers like the new
hybrid. Some accuse it of tasting more like an apple than a banana. Not sur‐
prisingly, the majority of plant breeders have till now turned their backs on the
banana and got to work on easier plants. And commercial banana companies
are now washing their hands of the whole breeding effort, preferring to fund a
It sounds promising, but the big banana companies have, until now, refused to
get involved in GM research for fear of alienating their customers. “Biotech‐
nology is extremely expensive and there are serious questions about consumer
acceptance,” says David McLaughlin, Chiquita’s senior director for environ-
mental affairs. With scant funding from the companies, the banana genome
researchers are focusing on the other end of the spectrum. Even if they can
identify the crucial genes, they will be a long way from developing new
varieties that smallholders will find suitable and affordable. But whatever
biotechnology’s academic interest, it is the only hope for the banana. Without
it, banana production worldwide will head into a tailspin. We may even see the
extinction of the banana as both a lifesaver for hungry and impoverished
Africans and the most popular product on the world’s supermarket shelves.
READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on
Reading Passage 2 below.
D So great has been the rise in sea level and the consequent regression of the
coast that much of the archaeological evidence now exposed in the coastal
zone. Whether being eroded or exposed as a buried land surface, is derived
from what was originally terres-trial occupation. Its current location in the
coastal zone is the product of later unrelated processes, and it can tell us little
about past adaptations to the sea. Estimates of its significance will need to be
made in the context of other related evidence from dry land sites.
Nevertheless, its physical environment means that preservation is often
excellent, for example in the case of the Neolithic structure excavated at
the Stumble in Essex.
E In some cases these buried land surfaces do contain evidence for human
exploitation of what was a coastal environment, and elsewhere along the
modem coast there is similar evidence. Where the evidence does relate to past
human exploitation of the resources and the opportunities offered by the sea
and the coast, it is both diverse and as yet little understood. We are not yet in
a position to make even preliminary estimates of answers to such fundamental
questions as the extent to which the sea and the coast affected human life in
the past, what percentage of the population at any time lived within reach of
the sea, or whether human settlements in coastal environments showed a
distinct character from those inland.
F The most striking evidence for use of the sea is in the form of boats, yet we
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still have much to learn about their production and use. Most of the known
wrecks around our coast are not unexpectedly of post-medieval date, and offer
an unparalleled opportunity for research which has yet been little used. The
prehistoric sewn-plank boats such as those from the Humber estuary and Dover
all seem to belong to the second millennium BC; after this there is a gap in the
record of a millennium, which cannot yet be explained before boats reappear,
but it built using a very different technology. Boatbuilding must have been an
extremely important activity around much of our coast, yet we know almost
nothing about it. Boats were some of the most complex artefacts produced by
pre-modem societies, and further research on their production and use make
an important contribution to our understanding of past attitudes to technology
and technological change.
G Boats need landing places, yet here again our knowledge is very patchy. In
many cases the natural shores and beaches would have sufficed, leaving little
or no archaeological trace, but especially in later periods, many ports and
harbors, as well as smaller facilities such as quays, wharves, and jetties, were
built. Despite a growth of interest in the waterfront archaeology of some of our
more important Roman and medieval towns, very little attention has been paid
to the multitude of smaller landing places. Redevelopment of harbor sites and
other development and natural pressures along the coast are subject these
important locations to unprecedented threats, yet few surveys of such sites
have been undertaken.
H One of the most important revelations of recent research has been the
extent of industrial activity along the coast. Fishing and salt production are
among the better documented activities, but even here our knowledge is
patchy. Many forms of fishing will leave little archaeological trace, and one of
the surprises of recent survey has been the extent of past investment in
facilities for procuring fish and shellfish. Elaborate wooden fish weirs, often of
considerable extent and responsive to aerial photography in shallow water,
have been identified in areas such as Essex and the Severn estuary. The
production of salt, especially in the late Iron Age and early Roman periods, has
been recognized for some time, especially in the Thames estuary and around
the Solent and Poole Harbor, but the reasons for the decline of that industry
and the nature of later coastal salt working are much less well understood.
Other industries were also located along the coast, either because the raw
materials outcropped there or for ease of working and transport: mineral
resources such as sand, gravel, stone, coal, ironstone, and alum were all
READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on
Reading Passage 3 below.
Records of foreign travel appeared soon after the invention of writing, and
fragmentary travel accounts appeared in both Mesopotamia and Egypt in an‐
cient times. After the formation of large, imperial states in the classical world,
travel accounts emerged as a prominent literary genre in many lands, and they
held especially strong appeal for rulers desiring useful knowledge about their
realms. The Greek historian Herodotus reported on his travels in Egypt and
Anatolia in researching the history of the Persian wars. The Chinese envoy
Zhang Qian described much of central Asia as far west as Bactria (modern- day
Afghanistan) on the basis of travels undertaken in the first century BCE while
searching for allies for the Han dynasty. Hellenistic and Roman geographers
such as Ptolemy, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder relied on their own travels through
much of the Mediterranean world as well as reports of other travellers to
compile vast compendia of geographical knowledge.
During the post-classical era (about 500 to 1500 CE), trade and pilgrimage j?
emerged as major incentives for travel to foreign lands. Muslim merchants
sought trading opportunities throughout much of the eastern hemisphere. They
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described lands, peoples, and commercial products of the Indian Ocean basin
from East Africa to Indonesia, and they supplied the first written accounts of
societies in sub-Saharan West Africa. While merchants set out in search of
trade and profit, devout Muslims travelled as pilgrims to Mecca to make their
hajj and visit the holy sites of Islam. Since the prophet Muhammad’s original
pilgrimage to Mecca, untold millions of Muslims have followed his example, and
thousands of hajj accounts have related their experiences. East Asian travellers
were not quite so prominent as Muslims during the post-classical era, but they
too followed many of the highways and sea lanes of the eastern hemisphere.
Chinese merchants frequently visited South-East Asia and India, occasionally
venturing even to East Africa, and devout East Asian Buddhists undertook
distant pilgrimages. Between the 5th and 9th centuries CE, hundreds and
possibly even thousands of Chinese Buddhists travelled to India to study with
Buddhist teachers, collect sacred texts, and visit holy sites. Written accounts
recorded the experiences of many pilgrims, such as Faxian, Xuanzang, and
Yijing. Though not so numerous as the Chinese pilgrims, Buddhists from Japan,
Korea, and other lands also ventured abroad in the interests of spiritual
enlightenment.
Medieval Europeans did not hit the roads in such large numbers as their Muslim
and East Asian counterparts during the early part of the post-classical era, al‐
though gradually increasing crowds of Christian pilgrims flowed to Jerusalem,
Rome, Santiago de Compostela (in northern Spain), and other sites. After the
12th century, however, merchants, pilgrims, and missionaries from medieval
Europe travelled widely and left numerous travel accounts, of which Marco
Polo’s description of his travels and sojourn in China is the best known. As they
became familiar with the larger world of the eastern hemisphere - and the
profitable commercial opportunities that it offered - European peoples worked
to find new and more direct routes to Asian and African markets. Their efforts
took them not only to all parts of the eastern hemisphere, but eventually to the
Americas and Oceania as well.
If Muslim and Chinese peoples dominated travel and travel writing in post-
classical times, European explorers, conquerors, merchants, and missionaries
took centre stage during the early modern era (about 1500 to 1800 CE). By no
means did Muslim and Chinese travel come to a halt in early modern times. But
European peoples ventured to the distant corners of the globe, and European
printing presses churned out thousands of travel accounts that described
foreign lands and peoples for a reading public with an apparently insatiable
During the 19th century, European travellers made their way to the interior
regions of Africa and the Americas, generating a fresh round of travel writing as
they did so. Meanwhile, European colonial administrators devoted numerous
writings to the societies of their colonial subjects, particularly in Asian and
African colonies they established. By mid-century, attention was flowing also in
the other direction. Painfully aware of the military and technological prowess of
European and Euro-American societies, Asian travellers in particular visited
Europe and the United States in hopes of discovering principles useful for the
organisation of their own societies. Among the most prominent of these
travellers who made extensive use of their overseas observations and
experiences in their own writings were the Japanese reformer Fukuzawa Yu-
kichi and the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen.
With the development of inexpensive and reliable means of mass transport, the
20th century witnessed explosions both in the frequency of long-distance travel
and in the volume of travel writing. While a great deal of travel took place for
reasons of business, administration, diplomacy, pilgrimage, and missionary
work, as in ages past, increasingly effective modes of mass transport made it
possible for new kinds of travel to flourish. The most distinctive of them was
mass tourism, which emerged as a major form of consumption .for individuals
living in the world’s wealthy societies. Tourism enabled consumers to get away
from home to see the sights in Rome, take a cruise through the Caribbean,
walk the Great Wall of China, visit some wineries in Bordeaux, or go on safari in
Kenya. A peculiar variant of the travel account arose to meet the needs of
these tourists: the guidebook, which offered advice on food, lodging, shopping,
local customs, and all the sights that visitors should not miss seeing. Tourism
has had a massive economic impact throughout the world, but other new forms
of travel have also had considerable influence in contemporary times.
Questions 4-10
Look at the statements (Questions 4-10) and the list of people. Match
each statement with the correct person A-F.
Write the correct letter A-F in boxes 4-10 on your answer sheet.
List of People
A Rodomiro Ortiz
B David McLaughlin
C Emile Frison
D Ronald Romero
E Luadir Gasparotto
F Geoff Hawtin
Questions 11-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading
Passage 1?
In boxes 11-13 on your answer sheet write
Questions 14-16
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
14
C The use of boats had not been recorded for a thousand years.
Answer: C
16 What can be discovered from the air?
A Salt mines
B Roman towns
C Harbours
D Fisheries
Answer: D
Questions 17-23
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading
Passage 2?
In boxes 17-23 on your answer sheet write
17 England lost much of its land after the ice age due
to the rising sea level.
18 The coastline of England has changed periodically.
Questions 24-26
Choose THREE letters A-G.
Questions 27-28
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in boxes 27-28 on your answer sheet.
B Business
Answer: C
28
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Why did the author say writing travel books is also “a mirror” for travellers
themselves?
Answer: B
Questions 29-36
Complete the table on the next page.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from Reading Passage 3 for each
answer.
PURPOSE OF
TIME TRAVELLER DESTINATION TRAVEL
Early
modern era To satisfy public
(about 1500 curiosity for the New
To provide
information for the
During 19th 34
Colonial
century
administrators Asia, Africa they set up
People from
36
countries
20th For entertainment
century Mass tourism and pleasure
Questions 37-40
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
37
Answer: D
38
Who were the largest group to record their spiritual trips during the post-
classical era?
A Muslim traders
B Muslim pilgrims
C Chinese Buddhists
Answer: B
39
During the early modern era, a large number of travel books were
published to
Answer: B
40 What’s the main theme of the passage?
Answer: D