IELTS Mock Test 2025 January Reading Practice Test 1

Some years ago, Professor Robert Havighurst of the University of Chicago, USA, proposed that stages in human development can best be thought of in terms of the developmental ‘tasks’ that are part of the normal transition. He identified ten developmental tasks associated with the adolescent transition. Each of the Havighurst tasks can also be seen as elements of the overall sense of self that adolescents carry with them as they move towards and into young adulthood. Adolescents do not progress through these multiple developmental tasks separately; at any given time they may be dealing with several. The adolescent must adjust to a new physical sense of self. At no other time since birth does an individual undergo such profound physical changes as during early adolescence. Puberty is marked by sudden rapid growth in height and weight. Also, the young person experiences the emergence and accentuation of those physical traits that make the person a boy or a girl. The young person looks less like a child and more like a physically mature adult. The effect of this rapid change is that mid-adolescents are body-conscious, and their concerns are directed towards their opposite-sexed peers. The adolescent must adjust to new intellectual abilities. In addition to a sudden spurt in physical growth, adolescents experience a sudden increase in their ability to think about their world. As a normal part of maturity, they are able to think more things. However, they are also able to conceive of their world with awareness. Before adolescence, children’s thinking is dominated by a concrete…

A. Sometime in the early Cretaceous period of the Earth's history, hunting wasps of a certain type became bees by adopting a vegetarian diet: they began to rely more and more on the pollen of plants as a source of protein for themselves and their offspring, as an alternative to insects. In so doing, they accidentally transported pollen on their bodies to other plants of the same species, bringing about pollination. The stage was thus set for a succession of ever-closer mutual adaptations of bees and flowering plants. In particular, flowers began to reward bees for their unwitting role in their reproduction by providing richer sources of pollen and another source of nutrition, nectar. B. Today about 15 per cent of our diet consists of crops which are pollinated by bees. The meat and other animal products we consume are ultimately derived from bee- pollinated forage crops, and account for another 15 per cent. It follows that around one third of our food is directly or indirectly dependent on the pollinating services of bees. On a global basis, the annual value of agricultural crops dependent on the pollination services of bees is estimated at £1,000 million (US$1,590 million). Much of this pollination is due to honey bees, and in monetary terms it exceeds the value of the annual honey crop by a factor of fifty. C. But the apparently harmonious relationship between bees and plants conceals a conflict of interests. Although flowers need bees and vice versa, it pays each partner to minimise its costs and maximise its profits. This may sound like an extreme case of attributing…

For hundreds of years, historians have relied on written or printed documents to provide the bulk of their source materials, and they have largely communicated with students and the wider public by writing books and journal articles. Today, however, the printed word is being superseded by a diversity of forms of communication, above all moving images on video or film A. The development of this new form of communication is leading to a growing gap between the practice of professional historians based in academia, and the practice of those aiming to popularise the study of history among the general public, and to encourage people to create their own records for the future. On the one hand, there are mainstream academics who continue to use only the written word as they examine more and more fields with an ever- increasing number of sophisticated methodologies. On the other hand, film and video, especially as broadcast on television, are probably the major influence on the public's consciousness of history, as they see film of events of fifty or a hundred years ago, events they had previously only read about. B. In a related development, a great many people now document local and family events in the form of videos; many schools, too, produce video yearbooks. All these visual records may well prove to be invaluable sources of information for future historians. The glaring contradiction is that the two approaches-the academic and what we might term the popular - have intersected very little: with a few notable exceptions, professional historians have tended to avoid…