IELTS practice test 11 reading academic test

IELTS PRACTICE TESTS READING TEST 11 IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Pra ctice Test / Rea ding Good Luck! 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and you will be considered to have accepted such changes if you use this web site after we have published the changed terms on this web site If you have any questions about this document or our privacy policy, please contact us © IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com , All Rights Reserved This content is for your ow n individua l study only You ca nnot sha re or tra nsm it it Non com plia nce could result in lega l a ction a ga inst you IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Pra ctice Test / Rea ding Reading Academic IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Test 11 IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com © IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com , All Rights Reserved This content is for your ow n individua l study only You ca nnot sha re or tra nsm it it Non com plia nce could result in lega l a ction a ga inst you IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com SECTION Pra ctice Test / Rea ding Questions – 13 The DNA database A At the start of the 20th century, Scotland Yard's fingerprint bureau began a quiet revolution in policing A hundred years on, detectives have a new tool at their disposal in the form of DNA matching In 1995 the government set up a national database recording the DNA of everyone who was convicted of a crime, hoping that it would make future cases easier to crack Since then the England and Wales database has swollen to 5.5m entries, covering 4.8m citizens, some profiles are duplicates, or some 9% of the population It is thought to be the biggest DNA database in the world Despite plans announced this week to limit its growth, it looks likely to stay that way B The reason for the database's size is that since 2004 it has included not just those convicted of crimes but those who have been merely arrested As far as police are concerned, the bigger the pool, the more chance of a match with their next crime scene But the inclusion of people who have never committed a crime has been controversial Up to a million of those in the database not have a conviction Chief constables have the discretion to remove profiles if they choose, but that seldom happens One MP, Diane Abbott, is running surgeries to show her constituents how to appeal Still, only a few hundred profiles are deleted each year IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com C Last December the European Court of Human Rights ruled that holding so many innocent people's DNA records "could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society" On November 11th the Home Office released plans to trim the number of people being included, a bit People arrested and released will still have their DNA held, but only for six years Under-18s in the same situation will stay on the database for three years D As is now customary, the plans include tougher rules on terrorism: those cleared of terror offences could still have their DNA held indefinitely, subject to regular reviews And the Home Office proposes to give the police the power to take DNA from people who have convictions pre-dating the database No one knows how many are in this group, but the back catalogue could inflate the database dramatically Chris Sims, the chief constable with responsibility for the database, expects forces to use the power "proactively" IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com E Whether the European Court will be satisfied with these tweaks remains to be seen The opposition Conservatives say that if they win power at the approaching general election they will copy the Scottish system, in which people who are not convicted usually have their DNA removed from the database as soon as the case against them is dropped Keeping the records of those who have done nothing wrong undermines the traditional presumption of innocence, the Tories say F The government argues that shrinking the pool of people on the database means that fewer crimes will be solved The Association of Chief Police Officers examined a set of homicide and rape cases from last year in which a DNA match had been made with a profile on the national database In about a tenth of these cases, the match was with someone who was on the database despite not having a conviction G Home Office boffins justify the six-year retention of innocents' DNA with research showing that people who are let off after an arrest are more likely than the general public to be rearrested Their likelihood of rearrest only drops back to average levels after six years, the number-crunchers found Interestingly, juveniles take longer to return to a 'normal' risk profile than adults, leading Home Office scientists to note that there is a case for retaining their DNA for longer than that of adults, not shorter, as the government has © IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com , All Rights Reserved This content is for your ow n individua l study only You ca nnot sha re or tra nsm it it Non com plia nce could result in lega l a ction a ga inst you IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Pra ctice Test / Rea ding decided H High profile cases have made even liberal-minded folk think twice about limiting the size of the database Last year Mark Dixie was jailed for a rape and murder that might never have been solved had he not had a DNA sample taken following his arrest, and subsequent release, over a pub brawl a few months later The prospect of even a handful of killers evading justice will make it hard for any government to cut the database back much more IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com © IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com , All Rights Reserved This content is for your ow n individua l study only You ca nnot sha re or tra nsm it it Non com plia nce could result in lega l a ction a ga inst you IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Pra ctice Test / Rea ding Questions - Match each heading to the most suitable paragraph i Records of non-convicts helps ii On record without conviction iii Database is too large iv Hardly democratic v Previous offenders vi Database unlikely to be cut by much vii Against the idea of innocence viii The largest of its kind ix included Higher chance of being arrested again IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Paragraph A Paragraph B Paragraph C Paragraph D Paragraph E Paragraph F Paragraph G Paragraph H IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Questions - 13 Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text The European Court of Human Rights believes that having non-convicts on the database is 10 Chris Sims thinks that the should have a proactive approach to using the database 11 In Scotland, innocent people's DNA records are removed when the case 12 The time needed for young people to return to normal risk profile is for adults 13 Mark Dixie was convicted as a result if a DNA sample taken after a © IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com , All Rights Reserved This content is for your ow n individua l study only You ca nnot sha re or tra nsm it it Non com plia nce could result in lega l a ction a ga inst you IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com SECTION Pra ctice Test / Rea ding Questions 14 – 26 The Switch to Farming When our Stone Age ancestors first began cultivating their food instead of foraging for it in the wild, they could not have foreseen what a momentous step they were taking Almost all the trappings of modern life flow from that fateful decision Farming allowed people to live together in large, permanent settlements Its regular surpluses gave some the freedom to spend their lives pursuing goals other than food production And ultimately agriculture let us create the sort of complex stratified society we live in today With so much seemingly going for it, archaeologists have long seen the transition to farming as a crucial step in the march of human progress Once our ancestors realised they could plant seeds in springtime and reap a nourishing harvest a few months later, everyone wanted a slice of the action, and the idea spread quickly But studies of modern hunter-gatherers suggest that farming may be far more labour-intensive than foraging for food And skeletal remains of Stone Age farmers show more signs of tooth decay, malnutrition and infectious disease than those of their hunter-gatherer predecessors It seems that farming may not have been such a slam-dunk improvement after all IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com So why were our ancestors so eager to adopt a lifestyle that left them worse off Some experts think hunter-gatherers may have been forced into farming by overpopulation or climate changes that strained their old food supplies to breaking point Others contend the rise of agriculture had less to with filling hungry bellies than with feeding a hunger for status So far, our window into the past is too small to be sure which explanation is right But the answers should get clearer in the next few years as researchers gather crucial new data Part of the difficulty in explaining the rise of farming is that it was not a single event Agriculture had at least seven independent origins around the world, each with its own unique set of conditions Then there is the fact that the switch did not happen overnight, or even within a few generations The archaeological record shows that when people first domesticated crop plants they remained a minor part of the diet for centuries or even millennia Only much later did farmed crops move to centre stage as the main source of food Any explanation for the rise of farming must consider the driving forces behind these two separate steps IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Initial cultivation began in the eastern Mediterranean region near the end of the last ice age, around 12,000 years ago At that time floras and faunas were changing rapidly North American hunter-gatherers would have been especially distressed by the extinction of many of the large game animals that once provided them with relatively easy and nutritious food "We know for a fact that the ecological circumstances were changing dramatically The animals weren't there for them to take any more It's at that point that we see people start intensively utilising plants," says Dolores Piperno of the Smithsonian Institution in Balboa, Panama, and Washington DC Such adaptability is certainly a characteristic of modern hunter-gatherer societies "They're constantly fiddling with their sources of food to see if there are any ways they can improve predictability or reduce risk," says Bruce Smith, director of the archaeobiology programme at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC So it is reasonable to assume that as the glaciers receded and the climate became more suitable for cereal grasses, Stone Age foragers would naturally have added them to their diet and learned ways to improve their growth such as selective weeding and burning to clear land Such semi-domesticated species might then have remained as one option on the menu of people who were still primarily © IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com , All Rights Reserved This content is for your ow n individua l study only You ca nnot sha re or tra nsm it it Non com plia nce could result in lega l a ction a ga inst you IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Pra ctice Test / Rea ding hunter-gatherers for many generations Many archaeologists, though, are turning away from this scenario in favour of a completely different explanation The first domesticated crops, they suggest, may have been the Stone Age equivalent of peacock tongues or caviar - in other words, luxury foods intended for feasts Throwing a feast would allow the giver to assert their status, cement alliances and accumulate favours that they could later cash in for political gain "It's an incredibly powerful motor for cultural transformation, and the fuel this motor uses is food," says Brian Hayden, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada Today's high-powered socialites will recognise the impulse - and the need for exotic ingredients to impress guests Certainly, many of the earliest domesticated plants seem better suited to the role of palate-teasing delicacies than staples, Hayden notes Lentils, for example, usually grow just two per wild plant and would have been terribly finicky to harvest A hungry person could have filled his belly quicker with any number of other plants, yet lentils are among the first crops of the near East In Central America, the earliest crops include chillies, avocados and gourds "These were things that would have virtually no impact on people's diets if they were starving," says Hayden Indeed, these gourds are completely inedible - but they make fine serving vessels for a feast IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Even crops that we now think of as quintessential staples, such as rice, tend to be used as high-status specialty foods by traditional societies today In the Torajan culture on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, for example, poorer families subsist mostly on manioc and other root crops and hoard their precious rice for feasts Even the rich tend to eat other foods for everyday meals and pull out the rice for company In the Stone Age, something similar may have happened with grains such as wheat and barley Many experts think that beer, not bread, was the most important early product of these grains - and the importance of alcohol in a feast is obvious Animals, too, were probably used for celebrations rather than everyday meals, as they still are in today's subsistence societies If the first crops were prestige items, not staples, that would explain why they remained such a minor part of the diet for so long And the times and places where crops first appear fit the expectations of Hayden's "competitive feasting" scenario "We expect domestication to occur in fairly affluent societies, and where there's some social and economic complexity and inequality, and I think that's exactly what we find," he says Storable, status-enhancing grains could also have been bartered for other luxury items, such as polished stone axes, the production of which seems to coincide with early grain cultivation in many societies IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com © IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com , All Rights Reserved This content is for your ow n individua l study only You ca nnot sha re or tra nsm it it Non com plia nce could result in lega l a ction a ga inst you IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Pra ctice Test / Rea ding Questions 14 - 26 Write True, False or Not Given 14 As farming became established many people had more free time 15 Research suggests that early farming was harder work than previous methods of getting food 16 Farming may have developed as a result of changes in weather conditions 17 In many parts of the world, farming changed eating habits overnight 18 The earliest signs of farming can be traced back to the ice-age 19 Modern hunter-gatherers were constantly looking for more reliable sources of food IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Questions 20 - 23 Choose A, B or C A Brian Hayden B Bruce Smith C Dolores Piperno 20 asserts the role of food in cultural development 21 explains why people became more interested in plants IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com 22 explains why people were very interested in where their food came from 23 questions the reason behind the growth of certain crops Questions 24 - 26 Complete the summary with NO MORE THAN ONE WORD from the text As some crops were difficult to grow and did not provide much in the way of basic food, they might have been grown to gain 24 Some of these crops may have been 25 in exchange for other products, for instance tools like 26 © IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com , All Rights Reserved This content is for your ow n individua l study only You ca nnot sha re or tra nsm it it Non com plia nce could result in lega l a ction a ga inst you IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com SECTION Pra ctice Test / Rea ding Questions 27 – 40 Fabrics and Weaving in Early Societies A The postcard shows a fur-clad woman cowering in the back of a cave In the foreground, her manly-looking husband deftly carves a female figurine This image from a French archaeological museum reflects current ideas of human society in the Ice Age, about 28,000 years ago Man the hunter is also cast in the role of sensitive artist, while his partner fades into the background "The image is almost certainly wrong," says Jim Adovasio B Beautifully carved female forms, the so-called Venus figurines, are some of the earliest works of art Their often explicit sexuality has led archaeologists to see them as fertility symbols or mother goddesses But Adovasio, from Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania, and his colleagues want to rewrite the history books They have discovered what look like carvings of woven fabric detailed on the figurines If they are correct, it means that textiles were being made long before anyone ever suspected It also challenges old ideas about the status of men and women, and who did what to fill the larder IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com C Notions about how our Palaeolithic ancestors lived come mostly from evidence in ancient stones and bones They paint a picture of macho men wielding stone-tipped spears as they hunted for mammoths In reality, though, the great majority of material that Ice Age people worked with probably came from plants In technologically simple societies today, and in more recent archaeological sites, people used 20 times as much plant matter as stone But it is only in the past couple of decades that archaeologists have started to get a handle on this "missing matter" D Adovasio's lab is leading the way He got his first glimpse of evidence for Palaeolithic weaving five years ago when, lacking a proper screen, he projected a slide showing a strangely embossed piece of ancient ceramic onto the door of a refrigerator belonging to his colleague Olga Soffer from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "It was immediately obvious to us that the image was of the warp and weft of woven fabric," recalls Adovasio, who has spent many years working with ancient textiles IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com E That set them off scrambling for more evidence Working with David Hyland, also at Mercyhurst College, they found a rich vein in the archaeological sites of the Czech Republic, where ancient domestic conflagrations had fired wet clay, leaving traces of textiles on the surfaces So far, they have analysed 100-odd small fragments "It's clear to us that by 28,000 years ago people had developed technologies for sophisticated weaving of textiles, making nets, and plaiting and coiling baskets, using plant material," says Soffer F "The work is very exciting," says Sarah Nelson from the University of Denver in Colorado "It fits into what people have begun to say must be there." G There are no known fragments of woven fabric in the archaeological record from this time, but Adovasio and his colleagues realised that there might be clues on the Venus figurines About half of them have patterns on the head that have been interpreted as Ice Age hairdos, or around the arms, chest and waist that are usually thought to be tattoos or cloth made of animal skins When the researchers started to look at these patterns under low-power microscopy, however, they saw depictions of twined or plain woven cloth, just like the indentations Adovasio and Soffer had noticed on the ceramics © IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com , All Rights Reserved This content is for your ow n individua l study only You ca nnot sha re or tra nsm it it Non com plia nce could result in lega l a ction a ga inst you IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Pra ctice Test / Rea ding H "People have been handling these figurines for 100 years, and they have been so overwhelmed by the sexual imagery that they barely saw these patterns, let alone analysed them," says Adovasio "But when you point it out to people, they say, `Of course, it's so obvious'." I The detail of the carving is extraordinary On the famous Venus of Willendorf, for example, the criss-cross pattern on the head, once thought to represent plaited hair, turns out to be a representation of a fibre-based woven cap The patterns on the lower body of the Venus of Lespuge depict a kind of skirt made from 11 cords The carver even went to the trouble of depicting the cords in one section as fraying at the hem "It's not something you could carve just by looking at textiles," says Adovasio "You have to know how the weaving or plaiting is done technically." J In today's technologically simple societies, women most of the weaving If the carvers were also the weavers, then it might have been the women who fashioned the figurines "That challenges a lot of unquestioned assumptions in archaeology," says Soffer What's more, the sophistication of the textiles implies that their production was very labour intensive and required great skill The researchers believe that these were probably ritual items, symbols of achievement, not daily garb If so, they say, Ice Age women were not just the subservient preparers of food and bearers of children as has been assumed, but individuals with social prestige and power IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com K Margaret Conkey from the University of California, Berkeley, believes that such inferences about social status may be "getting onto shaky ground" Nevertheless, she concedes: "This work is important because it forces people to sit back and figure out what questions need to be asked to get a deeper understanding of past societies They are rattling a few cages, and that's terrific." L In the practical realm of subsistence, for example, the ability to make nets would bring new ways of acquiring meat Armed with nets, Palaeolithic people, including women, children and older people, could have caught rabbits and other small game "This is a much more realistic picture of what was probably going on in the Upper Palaeolithic," says Conkey IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com M The new findings challenge our thinking about what technologies characterise advances at this critical time in human evolution "It may be that the explosion of weaving was one of the signature technological elements of our species," says Adovasio For Soffer, the work has a personal side, too Before becoming an archaeologist, she was a fashion promoter and coordinator for Federated Department Stores in New York "Yes," she says, "it closes the circle for me very nicely." © IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com , All Rights Reserved This content is for your ow n individua l study only You ca nnot sha re or tra nsm it it Non com plia nce could result in lega l a ction a ga inst you IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Pra ctice Test / Rea ding Questions 27 - 32 Which paragraph contains 27 how a problem of research resources led to a interesting discovery 28 a date by which time people were highly skilful in interlacing cloth 29 compares the employment of two materials 30 an image of early man which is probably inaccurate 31 a fact neglected for a long time 32 a finding which probably changes our view of the roles of the sexes IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Questions 33 - 37 Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text 33 The detail on the Venus of Willendorf includes the of her skirt 34 Producing fine detail requires a technical understanding of 35 There is some evidence to suggest that the carvings were by women 36 The quality if the carvings seem to suggest that the women of that time had 37 Conkey thinks the findings are important because they make people IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Questions 38 - 40 Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the box Perhaps one of the main advantages of this research is that it challenges previously 38 about the roles of men, women and children in these 39 All members of the family, for example, could have taken part in the search for food In addition, the findings may add to our understanding of which 40 that period technologies, processes, weaving, defined, carvings, people, early, challenges, social, take, hard, societies, held, potentially, dated, views © IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com , All Rights Reserved This content is for your ow n individua l study only You ca nnot sha re or tra nsm it it Non com plia nce could result in lega l a ction a ga inst you IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Pra ctice Test / Rea ding Answers IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com © IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com , All Rights Reserved This content is for your ow n individua l study only You ca nnot sha re or tra nsm it it Non com plia nce could result in lega l a ction a ga inst you IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com Pra ctice Test / Rea ding 10 11 12 13 viii ii iv v vii i ix iii not necessary forces is dropped longer than pub brawl 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 Not Given True True False True True A C B A prestige bartered axes 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 D E C A F B fraying weaving fashioned social prestige / power sit back held views early societies technologies deined IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com © IELTS-PRACTICE-TESTS.com , All Rights Reserved This content is for your ow n individua l study only You ca nnot sha re or tra nsm it it Non com plia nce could result in lega l a ction a ga inst you