IELTS reading

Cambridge 17 · Academic Reading Test 4

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Section 1

Reading Passage 1

Bats To The Rescue

How Madagascar’s bats are helping to save the rainforest There are few places in the world where relations between agriculture and conservation are more strained. Madagascar’s forests are being converted to agricultural land at a rate of one percent every year. Much of this destruction is fuelled by the cultivation of the country’s main staple crop: rice. And a key reason for this destruction is that insect pests are destroying vast quantities of what is grown by local subsistence farmers, leading them to clear forest to create new paddy fields. The result is devastating habitat and biodiversity loss on the island, but not all species are suffering. In fact, some of the island’s insectivorous bats are currently thriving and this has important implications for farmers and conservationists alike. Enter University of Cambridge zoologist Ricardo Rocha. He’s passionate about conservation, and bats. More specifically, he’s interested in how bats are responding to human activity and deforestation in particular. Rocha’s new study shows that several species of bats are giving Madagascar’s rice farmers a vital pest control service by feasting on plagues of insects. And this, he believes, can ease the financial pressure on farmers to turn forest into fields. Bats comprise roughly one-fifth of all mammal species in Madagascar and thirty-six recorded bat species are native to the island, making it one of the most important regions for conservation of this animal group anywhere in the world. Co-leading an international team of scientists, Rocha found that several species of…

Questions 1–6

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

1.Many Madagascan forests are being destroyed by attacks from insects.

2.Loss of habitat has badly affected insectivorous bats in Madagascar.

Section 2

Reading Passage 2

Does Education Fuel Economic Growth?

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Over the last decade, a huge database about the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900 has been compiled by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Economics. It includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries. Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer to a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s economic growth. As Ogilvie explains, ‘Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, and earn more … surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier.’ Between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy grew fast and it was the first country to industrialise. During this period, Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly and they industrialised late. ‘Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education,’ she adds. In the handwritten inventories that Ogilvie is analysing are the belongings of…

Questions 14–18

The Reading Passage has six paragraphs, A-F.

14.an explanation of the need for research to focus on individuals with a fairly consistent income

Section 3

Reading Passage 3

Timur Gareyev – Blindfold Chess Champion

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Next month, a chess player named Timur Gareyev will take on nearly 50 opponents at once. But that is not the hard part. While his challengers will play the games as normal, Gareyev himself will be blindfolded. Even by world record standards, it sets a high bar for human performance. The 28-year-old already stands out in the rarefied world of blindfold chess. He has a fondness for bright clothes and unusual hairstyles, and he gets his kicks from the adventure sport of BASE jumping. He has already proved himself a strong chess player, too. In a 10-hour chess marathon in 2013, Gareyev played 33 games in his head simultaneously. He won 29 and lost none. The skill has become his brand: he calls himself the Blindfold King. But Gareyev’s prowess has drawn interest from beyond the chess-playing community. In the hope of understanding how he and others like him can perform such mental feats, researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) called him in for tests. They now have their first results. The ability to play a game of chess with your eyes closed is not a far reach for most accomplished players,’ said Jesse Rissman, who runs a memory lab at UCLA. ‘But the thing that’s so remarkable about Timur and a few other individuals is the number of games they can keep active at once. To me it is simply astonishing.’ Gareyev learned to play chess in his native Uzbekistan when he was six years old. Tutored by his grandfather, he entered his first tournament aged eight and soon became obsessed with competitions. At 16, he was crowned Asia’s youngest ever chess…

Questions 27–32

The Reading Passage has eight paragraphs, A-H.

27.a reference to earlier examples of blindfold chess

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Answers & explanations

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40 answers3 explanations open

1
FALSE
The correct answer is 'FALSE' because the passage does not attribute the destruction of Madagascan forests to attacks from insects but rather to the conversion of forests into agricultural land for rice cultivation.
2
FALSE
The correct answer is 'FALSE' because the passage explicitly states that some insectivorous bats in Madagascar are thriving, indicating that they have not been badly affected by the loss of habitat. This contrasts with the idea that all insectivorous bats are negatively impacted.
3
NOT GIVEN
The correct answer is 'NOT GIVEN' because the passage only mentions Rocha's study related to bats helping rice farmers in Madagascar, but it doesn't mention anything about Ricardo Rocha carrying out studies of bats in different parts of the world.
4
TRUE
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5
NOT GIVEN
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6
TRUE
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7
droppings
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8
coffee
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9
mosquitoes/mosquitos
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10
protein
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11
unclean
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12
culture
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13
houses
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14
E
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15
A
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16
D
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17
F
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18
C
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19
descendants
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20
sermon
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21
fine
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22
innovation
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23
B
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24
E
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25
B
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26
D
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27
D
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28
E
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29
F
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30
B
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31
H
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32
E
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33
FALSE
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34
NOT GIVEN
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35
NOT GIVEN
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36
TRUE
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37
memory
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38
numbers
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39
communication
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40
visual
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Understand why, not only what.

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