IELTS Mock Test 2025 October Reading Practise Test 2

Fishbourne Roman Palace is in the village of Fishbourne in West Sussex, England. This large palace was built in the 1st century AD, around thirty years after the Roman conquest of Britain, on the site of Roman army grain stores which had been established after the invasion, during the reign of the Roman Emperor Claudius in 43 AD. The rectangular palace was built around formal gardens, the northern half of which has been reconstructed. There were extensive alterations in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, with many of the original black and white mosaic floors being overlaid with more sophisticated colored ones, including a perfectly preserved mosaic of a dolphin in the north wing. More alterations were in progress when the palace burned down around 270 AD, after which it was abandoned. Local people had long believed that a Roman palace once existed in the area. However, it was not until 1960 that the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe, of Oxford University, first systematically excavated the site, after workmen accidentally uncovered a wall while laying a water main. The Roman villa excavated by Cunliffe’s team was so grand that it became known as Fishbourne Roman Palace, and a museum was erected to preserve some of the remains. This is administered by the Sussex Archaeological Society. In its day, the completed palace would have comprised four large wings with colonnaded fronts. The north and east wings consisted of suites of private rooms built around courtyards, with a monumental entrance in the middle of the east wing. In the north-east corner, there was an assembly hall. The…

It has long been held that decision made collectively by large groups of people are more likely to turn out to be accurate than decisions made by individuals. The idea goes back to the 'jury theorem' of Nicolas de Condorcet, an 18th-century French philosopher who was one of the first to apply mathematics to the social sciences. Condorcet's theory describes collective decisions , outlining how democratic decisions tend to outperform dictatorial ones. If, for example , each member of a jury has only partial information ,the majority decision is more likely to be correct than a decision arrived at by a single juror. Moreover, the probability of a correct decision increases with the size of the jury. Now it is becoming clear that group decisions are also extremely valuable for the success of social animals, such as ants ,bees ,birds and dolphins .Bees make collective decisions ,and they do it rather well, according to Christian List of the London School of Economics ,who has studied group decision-making in humans and animals. Researchers led by Dr List looked at colonies once the original colony reaches a certain size. The queen goes off with about two-thirds of the worker bees to live in a new home or nest , leaving a daughter queen in the old nest with the remaining workers. Among the bees that depart are some that have searched for and found some new nest sites , and reported back using a characteristic body movement known as a 'waggle dance' to indicate to the other bees the suitable places they have located. The longer the dance , the better the site. After a while ,…

A. In the small Umagic office in Midtown Manhattan, a team of 30 computer programmers is working on setting up websites that will allow subscribers to input details about themselves and their problems and receive advice from ‘virtual’ versions of personalities regarded as experts in their fields. For example, a well-known dietitian, a celebrity fitness trainer, and a psychologist well-known in the media for work on parent-child relationships. Umagic Systems is a young firm, and it’s hard to predict how far they’ll go. In ten years time, consulting a computer about your diet problems might seem natural, or it might seem absurd. But the company and others like it are beginning to seriously worry large American firms, who see such half-crazy, new, and innovative ideas as a threat to their own future success. B. Innovation has become a major concern of American management. Firms have found that it is increasingly difficult to redesign existing products or produce them more economically. The stars of American business today tend to be innovators such as Amazon (the internet bookstore) and Wal-Mart (the supermarket chain), which have produced completely new ideas or products that have changed their industries. C. Over the past 15 years, the firms that have achieved the greatest profits have been the ones that have had the most innovations. But such profits aren’t easy to come by. One of the reasons for the increasing number of mergers between companies is a desperate search for new ideas. A fortune is spent nowadays on identifying and protecting intellectual property: people’s…