IELTS Practice Test 1: Reading

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

The Return of the Water Meadow

A   Anyone walking the chalk valleys of southern England in late winter may notice, in certain riverside fields, a faint pattern of low ridges and shallow channels running at odd angles to the river. Ploughing has softened them and grass has covered them, but from the right angle in low sunlight they are unmistakable. They are the remains of water meadows: one of the most sophisticated pieces of agricultural engineering ever built in Britain, and, for two hundred years, one of the most profitable.

B   The principle was not flooding, and it is important to be clear about that, because the name misleads. A field left under standing water for weeks will produce nothing but rushes. What the water meadow did was quite different. In late winter, water was diverted out of the river along a main channel known as a carrier, taken along the tops of a series of low parallel ridges, and allowed to spill over their sides in a thin, continuous, moving sheet no deeper than a coin. It ran down the slope of each ridge, collected in drains at the bottom, and was returned to the river further down. The water was never still. Managing it - opening and closing dozens of small sluices to keep the sheet even across the whole meadow - was a full-time job for a skilled man called a drowner, and a valley might support several.

C   The reason for all this effort lay in a simple fact of physics. In January and February, river water fed by chalk springs sits at around nine or ten degrees, while the air above the fields may be at freezing point for weeks. A continuous film of moving water over the grass therefore acted as a blanket. It kept frost off the roots, raised the temperature of the soil, and started the grass growing four to six weeks before grass in an ordinary field. As a secondary benefit, the river water carried fine silt, which it deposited on the meadow, and this was fertiliser of a kind that no farmer of the period could otherwise obtain in quantity.

D   What this bought the farmer was the solution to the worst problem in the pre-industrial farming year. Between the exhaustion of the previous summer's hay in early spring and the first growth of new grass in May, there lay a period of six or seven weeks in which there was simply not enough to feed livestock. It was known as the hungry gap, and it killed more animals than any disease. The water meadow closed it. By late March the drowner would shut off the water, let the meadow drain, and turn the sheep onto grass that no neighbouring field could match - the early bite, as it was called.

E   The economics went further than that, and this is the part that is usually missed. The sheep grazed the meadow during the day, but they were not left there. Every evening they were driven up onto the arable land on the higher ground and penned there overnight behind movable hurdles, so that their manure fell on the fields where the corn would be grown. The water meadow, in other words, was not primarily a way of feeding sheep. It was a way of using sheep to move the fertility of the river valley uphill onto the cornfields. Contemporary estimates suggest that an acre of well-managed water meadow could support three or four times the stock of an ordinary meadow, and the value of the whole system was reckoned not in wool or mutton but in the extra wheat it produced.

F   The decline, when it came, was rapid. The system depended on cheap skilled labour and on there being no alternative source of early feed or of fertility. From the 1870s, cheap imported grain from North America undercut English wheat, and the arithmetic that justified the whole arrangement collapsed. Artificial fertilisers removed the need for the sheep-and-corn cycle; root crops and, later, silage removed the need for the early bite. The drowners went to the towns, the sluices rotted, the channels silted up, and by the 1930s almost every water meadow in the country had been abandoned. Many were ploughed.

G   They are now coming back, though for reasons that would have puzzled the men who built them. A restored water meadow holds a great deal of water and releases it slowly, which makes it valuable to anyone trying to reduce the height of a flood peak downstream. It supports breeding wading birds - snipe, redshank, lapwing - which have declined severely on ordinary farmland. And a handful of them still carry the snake's-head fritillary, a flower that survives almost nowhere else. Restoration is not cheap, and the skills have largely to be relearned from written accounts; there are those who argue that the money would save more birds if it were spent elsewhere, and that the appeal of the water meadow is partly nostalgia. The counter-argument is straightforward enough. The hydrology has not changed since 1750. What worked then still works.

Questions 1 to 6

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

Write TRUE if the statement agrees with the information, FALSE if the statement contradicts the information, or NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this.

1. Water meadows were designed to keep water standing on the fields for long periods.
2. In midwinter the river water was warmer than the air above the fields.
3. Grass on a water meadow was ready for grazing earlier than grass in ordinary fields.
4. The sheep were kept on the water meadows overnight.
5. Water meadows produced more hay per acre than any other kind of grassland.
6. Running a water meadow required specialist knowledge.

Questions 7 to 13

Complete the notes below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

1. Water was taken out of the river along a channel called a ............................ .
2. The moving sheet of water protected the roots of the grass from ............................ .
3. As well as warmth, the water deposited ............................ on the meadow.
4. The early grass was valuable during the period known as the hungry ............................ .
5. At night the sheep were penned on ............................ land so that it received their manure.
6. From the 1870s English farmers faced competition from cheap ............................ grain.
7. Water meadows are now restored partly because they slow down a ............................ peak.

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

The Deadline Effect

A   Almost everyone has noticed that a task somehow takes as long as the time available for it. An essay that could be written in three days will, if four weeks are allowed, take four weeks; the same essay, if the four weeks are lost to illness and three days remain, will be written in three. The observation is old and is usually offered as a joke about bureaucracy. It is, however, one of the more reliable findings in the study of how people organise their own work, and the explanations for it are considerably more interesting than the observation itself.

B   The first part of the explanation is that human beings are systematically bad at estimating how long their own work will take. Ask people to predict when they will finish a piece of work and the average prediction will be optimistic - not occasionally, but nearly always, and by a wide margin. What makes this striking is that experience does not correct it. People who have missed their own estimates on nine consecutive occasions will make an equally optimistic estimate on the tenth. The reason appears to be that when we plan, we imagine the task going as intended, and we do not imagine the interruptions, the false starts and the small disasters, because these are by definition unforeseen. We predict from the plan rather than from the record.

C   The second part concerns how the mind values costs at a distance. A cost that must be paid today feels heavy; the identical cost paid in six weeks feels light, and the further away it is, the lighter it feels. Work is a cost; the reward for having done it is usually distant and abstract. Early in a long project, therefore, the cost of working today is vivid and the cost of not working is barely perceptible, and the rational-feeling decision is to begin tomorrow. What a deadline does is change the arithmetic. As the date approaches, the cost of not working stops being distant and becomes immediate, and behaviour changes sharply - not because the person has become more disciplined, but because the sums have altered.

D   If that account is right, it produces a testable prediction: people who know they are prone to delay should benefit from imposing deadlines on themselves, and they should be willing to do so even at a cost. A well-known series of studies on university students tested exactly this. Students on the same course were divided into three groups. One group was given a single deadline at the end of term for all three of their assignments. A second was given three deadlines spaced evenly through the term, imposed by the instructor. The third was allowed to set its own deadlines at the start of term, on the condition that once set, they could not be changed, and that late work would be penalised.

E   The results were consistent and, in one respect, surprising. The group with evenly spaced imposed deadlines performed best. The group with the single end-of-term deadline performed worst. The self-imposed group came in between - better than the single deadline, worse than the imposed schedule. Two things are worth drawing out of this. The first is that most of the students in the third group did choose to spread their deadlines, even though choosing a single late deadline was permitted and would have given them more freedom; they knew themselves well enough to see the danger. The second is that they did not spread them far enough. Self-knowledge, it appears, is real but insufficient: people can recognise the problem and still under-correct for it.

F   None of this means that more pressure is always better, and the literature is quite clear about the limits. Under time pressure, attention narrows. For a task where the goal is known and the method is known, that narrowing is helpful: it strips out distraction and the work gets done. For a task where the goal is to find an approach that nobody has thought of yet, the same narrowing is damaging, because it suppresses exactly the wandering, apparently unproductive thought from which unexpected solutions come. Organisations that impose tight deadlines on everything tend to get reliable execution and very little invention, and are often puzzled by the combination.

G   The practical conclusions are unglamorous. Deadlines work, and frequent intermediate deadlines work better than a single distant one. They should be set by someone other than the person doing the work, or, failing that, made public, because a deadline that can be quietly moved is not a deadline. And they should be applied where the task is execution rather than discovery. This is not a complicated body of advice. Its main difficulty is that it requires organisations to admit that their staff are not the rational planners the organisation chart implies, and that is a harder thing to concede than it looks.

Questions 14 to 19

Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A to G.

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B to G from the list of headings below.

List of headings

i   A design for testing the idea

ii   Why distant costs feel small

iii   An old joke that turns out to be true

iv   When pressure does harm

v   The financial cost of missed deadlines

vi   What the experiment showed

vii   Why experience fails to improve our estimates

viii   Advice, and why it is resisted

ix   Differences between students and employees

x   How to measure attention

Example: Paragraph A - iii

1. Paragraph B
2. Paragraph C
3. Paragraph D
4. Paragraph E
5. Paragraph F
6. Paragraph G

Questions 20 to 23

Complete the summary below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

The student experiment

Students were divided into three groups. One had a single deadline at the end of the (20) ............................ , one had three deadlines set by the (21) ............................ , and one was allowed to choose its own. The group that did best was the one with (22) ............................ deadlines. Most students in the third group chose to spread their deadlines out, showing that they had some (23) ............................ , although they did not spread them out far enough.

Questions 24 to 26

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

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

Naming What We Smell

Note: the researchers named in this passage are invented for the purposes of this practice test.

A   Ask an English speaker to describe a colour and they will produce a word without effort: the wall is blue, the fruit is orange. Ask the same person to describe a smell and something curious happens. They hesitate, and then, in the great majority of cases, they do not name the smell at all - they name its source. It smells of coffee. It smells like a hospital. It smells the way my grandmother's house smelled. This failure is so consistent that it has been called the olfactory naming deficit, and for most of the twentieth century it was assumed to be a fact about human beings, arising from the way the nose is wired to the brain.

B   The anatomical case was persuasive. Visual information passes through the thalamus, a structure closely connected to the language areas of the cortex; olfactory information does not, reaching instead older parts of the brain associated with emotion and memory before any linguistic processing occurs. On this account, the difficulty of naming smells is a piece of neural plumbing. Marisol Vantrease, who set out the argument most fully in the 1980s, concluded that the deficit was universal and that no amount of practice would remove it: humans, she wrote, are built to be moved by smells and not to talk about them.

C   The evidence for universality, however, rested almost entirely on speakers of European languages, and when researchers began testing elsewhere the picture changed. Working with a small forager community in Southeast Asia, Ilse Karadag found speakers who named odours as quickly, as consistently and as abstractly as they named colours. Their language contained a dozen or so basic smell terms - not words for the things that smell, but words for kinds of smell, in the way that blue is a word for a kind of colour rather than for the sky. One term covered the smell of petrol, smoke and bat droppings; another covered the smell of certain flowers and of a particular species of fruit. Presented with a standard set of odours, these speakers agreed with each other about what to call them to a degree that English speakers never approach.

D   The finding has been replicated in several unrelated languages, and it makes the anatomical explanation difficult to sustain in its strong form. The wiring of the human nose does not differ between populations. What differs is the vocabulary available, and, Karadag argues, the cultural attention paid to smell: the communities in which abstract smell terms are found tend to be ones in which smell carries real practical and social weight, in hunting, in food, in ritual, or in judging illness. Where a distinction matters, a word appears for it, and where a word exists, people can use it quickly and agree about it.

E   Not everyone accepts this conclusion. Devan Achebe has pointed out that the odour sets used in these experiments are usually assembled by Western researchers and may happen to suit the vocabulary of the language being tested; he also notes that the number of speakers in some of the studies is very small. His own position is more moderate than it is sometimes represented: he does not deny that some languages name odours better than English, only that the gap has been shown to be as large as is claimed, and he has called for larger samples and for odour sets chosen by native speakers. A separate line of criticism comes from Hana Lindqvist, who accepts the cross-linguistic findings entirely but argues that they have been over-interpreted. English speakers, she notes, are perfectly capable of learning abstract smell vocabulary: wine tasters, perfumers and coffee graders acquire exactly such systems and use them consistently within their trade. If a few months of training can produce the ability, then it was never absent - it was simply unused.

F   That last observation points to what may be the most useful way of framing the whole question. The dispute is often presented as a contest between biology and culture, and framed that way it cannot really be settled, since both are obviously involved. But there is a more specific claim available, and it is the one the evidence now supports reasonably well: that the capacity to name odours abstractly is general, that its development depends on whether a community has reason to make such distinctions, and that the resulting vocabulary then makes further distinctions easier to notice and to remember. Language does not create the ability. It maintains it and passes it on, which for practical purposes amounts to much the same thing.

G   There is a postscript worth recording. Several of the languages in which rich smell vocabularies have been documented are spoken by very small communities, in some cases by fewer than a thousand people, and most are under considerable pressure. When such a language ceases to be spoken, what is lost is not only a set of words. It is a demonstration, available nowhere else, of something the human mind can do.

Questions 27 to 31

Look at the following statements and the list of researchers below.

Match each statement with the correct researcher, A, B, C or D.

You may use any letter more than once.

List of researchers

A   Marisol Vantrease   B   Ilse Karadag   C   Devan Achebe   D   Hana Lindqvist

1. The difficulty of naming smells cannot be overcome by practice.
2. The materials used in these experiments may have favoured particular languages.
3. Abstract smell words are found where smell matters to a community's daily life.
4. The existence of trained professionals shows the ability was always present.
5. The number of people tested in some studies has been too small.

Questions 32 to 36

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?

Write YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer, NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer, or NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this.

1. English speakers usually identify a smell by referring to what produces it.
2. The anatomical explanation of the naming deficit is now completely discredited.
3. Achebe's views have sometimes been described as more extreme than they are.
4. Wine tasters agree with one another more consistently than perfumers do.
5. The debate is best understood as a straightforward contest between biology and culture.

Questions 37 to 40

Complete the summary below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Where the argument now stands

The writer suggests that the ability to name smells abstractly is (37) ............................ , but that it develops only where a community has a reason to make such distinctions. Once the words exist, they make further distinctions easier to notice and to (38) ............................ . The writer adds a warning: many of the languages with rich smell vocabularies have fewer than a (39) ............................ speakers, and when such a language disappears, what is lost is not only vocabulary but a (40) ............................ of what the human mind is capable of.