IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 10

READING PASSAGE 1

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

Just add hot water: the invention of instant noodles

Every year, people around the world eat well over a hundred billion servings of instant noodles. They are sold in almost every country, in hundreds of flavours, and they are eaten by students, office workers, campers and even astronauts. Yet this most ordinary of foods first went on sale only in 1958. It was invented by one man working almost alone in a small wooden shed behind his house.

That man was Momofuku Ando. Born in 1910 in Taiwan, which was then under Japanese rule, he moved to Japan as a young man and went into business. By the end of the Second World War, he had been involved in a number of companies, some of which had done well and some of which had failed. According to the story that he often told later, one cold winter evening in the late 1940s, he passed a long queue of people outside a stall in Osaka that was selling bowls of hot ramen noodles. Food was scarce in Japan at the time, and the government was encouraging people to eat bread made from wheat flour imported from the United States. Ando believed that noodles, which Japanese people had eaten for centuries, would be a far more welcome way of using the same flour, if only a way could be found to make them cheaply and easily at home.

For several years, Ando did nothing with this idea. In 1957, however, a credit union of which he was chairman collapsed, and he lost almost everything he owned. Left with only his house in Ikeda, near Osaka, he built a small shed in the garden, bought a second-hand noodle-making machine and a large wok, and began to experiment. He was forty-seven years old, and although he had run several businesses, including one producing salt, he had never made noodles before. For about a year, he worked in the shed every day, often until the early hours of the morning, with occasional help from his family.

Ando had set himself five requirements. His noodles had to taste good. They had to be cheap and safe to eat. They had to keep for a long time without going bad. And, most difficult of all, they had to be ready to eat as soon as hot water was added. He solved the problem of flavour by soaking the noodles in a chicken soup before they were dried, so that the flavour was already inside them. Drying the noodles was much harder. Noodles dried in the sun or with hot air became hard and took a long time to soften again. The breakthrough came when he watched his wife, Masako, making tempura, a Japanese dish of vegetables or fish cooked quickly in hot oil. He noticed that the hot oil drove the water out of the batter, and he realised that the same thing might happen to noodles. He tried it, and it worked. When the seasoned noodles were briefly fried, the water in them escaped as steam, leaving the noodles full of tiny holes. They could then be stored for months, and when boiling water was poured over them, it quickly filled the holes and made the noodles soft again.

Ando called his product Chicken Ramen, and it went on sale in August 1958. At first, shopkeepers were doubtful. A packet of Chicken Ramen cost thirty-five yen, while a bundle of fresh udon noodles cost about six yen, so some shoppers regarded the new product as a luxury. Nevertheless, it quickly proved popular with customers, and within a few months, demand was far greater than Ando's small company could supply. He renamed the company Nissin Foods and built a large factory, and other manufacturers soon began to produce their own versions.

Ando's second great invention came after a visit to the United States in 1966, when he was trying to sell Chicken Ramen to American supermarkets. He noticed that the managers he met did not have bowls in their offices, so they broke the noodles into paper cups, poured hot water over them, and ate them with forks. This gave Ando the idea of selling noodles in a cup that would serve as packaging, cooking pot and bowl at the same time. After five years of development, Cup Noodles went on sale in Japan in 1971. The cup was made of light foam plastic, which kept the noodles hot but was comfortable to hold, and the block of noodles inside was shaped to be slightly wider at the top than at the bottom. This meant that it was held firmly in the middle of the cup, which protected it during transport and allowed the hot water to flow underneath as well as on top.

Sales of Cup Noodles were disappointing at first, partly because the product was much more expensive than Chicken Ramen. Its fortunes changed in early 1972, when Japanese television broadcast live coverage of a police operation that lasted more than a week in freezing mountain weather. Viewers watched police officers eating Cup Noodles, which were among the few hot foods that could be prepared at the scene, and the publicity made the product famous almost overnight.

Ando continued to work on new products for the rest of his life. In 2005, at the age of ninety-five, he saw his company produce "Space Ram", a version of instant noodles designed for astronauts, which used smaller blocks of noodles and a thicker soup that would not float away. He died two years later. Today, a museum in Ikeda includes a copy of his garden shed, and visitors can make their own cup of noodles, choosing the soup and toppings and decorating the cup themselves.

Questions 1–7

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
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

Questions 8–13

Complete the flow-chart below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

How Chicken Ramen was made and prepared

The noodles were soaked in chicken 81 word to give them flavour.
↓
They were then quickly fried in hot oil. The idea for this came from a dish called 91 word .
↓
As the water left the noodles in the form of 101 word , it left many small 111 word .
↓
The dry noodles could be kept for 121 word .
↓
When boiling water was added, it was quickly absorbed, and the noodles became 131 word again.

READING PASSAGE 2

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

Sleeping with one eye open: how animals sleep

A Sleep is a strange and, in many ways, a dangerous habit. A sleeping animal cannot look for food, look after its young or watch out for predators, and it may be easily caught by an enemy. If sleep had no important purpose, it seems likely that evolution would have got rid of it long ago. Yet every animal that has been carefully studied, from insects to whales, appears to sleep in some form. Over the last fifty years, researchers have found that the forms sleep takes are much more varied than anyone had imagined, and that some animals have developed remarkable ways of sleeping while remaining partly alert.

B One of the first discoveries was made in the 1970s by the Russian scientist Lev Mukhametov, who recorded the electrical activity in the brains of bottlenose dolphins. He found that dolphins never seemed to sleep with their whole brain at once. Instead, one half of the brain would show the slow waves typical of deep sleep, while the other half remained awake, and the eye controlled by the waking half stayed open. After a period of time, the two halves changed roles. Because dolphins must swim to the surface to breathe, and because they live in groups that need to stay together, this ability seems to allow them to rest without drowning or losing contact with each other.

C Many people had suspected that some birds could also sleep in the air, but for a long time, no one could prove it. In 2016, Niels Rattenborg and his colleagues fitted small devices to the heads of frigatebirds, large seabirds that can stay in the air for weeks at a time, and recorded their brain activity during flights over the ocean lasting up to ten days. The birds did indeed sleep while flying, sometimes with one half of the brain and sometimes with both. However, they slept in short bursts, each lasting only a few seconds, mostly while they were rising in circles on warm air currents. In total, they spent less than an hour a day asleep while flying, whereas after they landed, they slept for more than twelve hours a day.

D Large animals do not necessarily need large amounts of sleep. Animals in zoos often sleep far more than their wild relatives, because they are safe and well fed, so Paul Manger and his team decided to study wild elephants in Botswana. They fitted two females with activity monitors, placed in the trunk, the part of an elephant's body that is almost never still while it is awake, and treated long periods without trunk movement as sleep. By this estimate, the elephants slept for an average of only two hours a day, mostly standing up, and they lay down to sleep only every third or fourth night. On some occasions, apparently after being disturbed by lions or by people, they stayed awake for nearly two days.

E Animals that spend long periods at sea face particular risks. Northern elephant seals spend months at a time in the open ocean, where sharks and killer whales hunt near the surface. Using sensors attached to the seals' heads, Jessica Kendall-Bar and her colleagues found that the seals sleep while diving. A seal first swims down to a depth of a hundred metres or more. It then falls asleep, turns upside down and drifts slowly downwards in circles, in what the researchers called a "sleep spiral", before waking and swimming back to the surface. While at sea, the seals slept for only about two hours a day, but when they returned to the beach to breed, they slept for around ten.

F Other animals have broken their sleep into very small pieces. Chinstrap penguins in Antarctica must guard their eggs and chicks from predatory birds and from other penguins. When Paul-Antoine Libourel and his colleagues recorded the brain activity of nesting penguins, they found that the birds took more than ten thousand "microsleeps" a day, each lasting about four seconds. Added together, these short naps gave the penguins around eleven hours of sleep a day. What remains unknown is whether such brief periods of sleep provide the same benefits as a single long one.

G Perhaps the most surprising discovery is that sleep does not even seem to require a brain. In 2017, a team of three graduate students in California, Ravi Nath, Claire Bedbrook and Michael Abrams, studied an upside-down jellyfish called Cassiopea, an animal with a simple network of nerves but no central brain. They found that at night, the jellyfish pulsed about a third less often than during the day, and that they were slower to react when the researchers disturbed them. When the jellyfish were kept awake at night by regular pulses of water, they were less active the following day, just as a tired person would be. If even jellyfish sleep, then sleep may have appeared very early in the history of animal life, long before the evolution of the brain. Exactly why it is so important, however, is still one of the great mysteries of biology.

Questions 14–20

Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A–G.

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.

Write the correct number, i–ix, next to Questions 14–20.

List of Headings

• i A behaviour that is risky but found everywhere
• ii Sleeping in thousands of short episodes
• iii Estimating sleep from movements of the trunk
• iv Sleep without a central nervous organ
• v Resting one side of the brain at a time
• vi Why some animals do not sleep at all
• vii Sleeping safely below the surface
• viii Evidence of sleep during long journeys through the air
• ix How sleep helps animals to remember

Questions 21–24

Look at the following findings (Questions 21–24) and the list of researchers below.

Match each finding with the correct researcher or researchers, A–F.

Write the correct letter, A–F, next to Questions 21–24.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

List of Researchers

• A Lev Mukhametov
• B Niels Rattenborg
• C Paul Manger
• D Jessica Kendall-Bar
• E Paul-Antoine Libourel
• F Ravi Nath, Claire Bedbrook and Michael Abrams

Questions 25 and 26

Choose TWO letters, A–E.

Which TWO of the following statements are made in Reading Passage 2?

READING PASSAGE 3

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

The surprising rewards of talking to strangers

On a crowded train, a bus or an aeroplane, most of us follow the same unwritten rules. We avoid eye contact, we put on headphones or look at our phones, and if we must sit next to someone, we try not to disturb them. Talking to a stranger, unless there is a practical reason for it, is widely regarded as odd or even rude. It is easy to see why. Strangers may be dangerous, they may be boring, and they may simply want to be left alone. But a growing body of research suggests that, in ordinary situations, our reluctance to talk to the people around us is based largely on mistaken beliefs, and that it may be costing us more than we realise.

Some of the best-known evidence comes from studies carried out by the psychologists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder in Chicago. In one experiment, they approached commuters at railway stations and asked them to do one of three things on their journey: to start a conversation with the person sitting next to them, to keep to themselves, or to behave as they normally would. At the end of the journey, the commuters who had talked to a stranger reported having had a more pleasant journey than those in the other two groups. Yet when a separate group of commuters was asked to imagine the same three situations, most predicted exactly the opposite: they expected that talking to a stranger would make the journey less pleasant. Further studies suggested a reason for this mistake. People assumed that others would not want to talk to them, and that a conversation would be difficult to start. In fact, almost everyone who tried found that the other person was willing to talk, and many of the conversations were described as enjoyable.

A second line of research concerns the many brief contacts we have with people we do not know well. As a graduate student, Gillian Sandstrom often passed a hot-dog stand on her way across campus. She and the woman at the stand would smile and wave to each other, although they never actually spoke. The exchange made Sandstrom feel that she belonged on campus, and it prompted her to ask how much such brief contacts matter. Psychologists use the term "weak ties" for acquaintances like this, outside a person's close circle of friends and family. In one study, Sandstrom and her colleague Elizabeth Dunn asked customers entering a busy coffee shop either to have a genuine, friendly conversation with the person serving them, or to be as efficient as possible and get in and out quickly. Those who chatted left the shop in a better mood and with a greater sense of belonging than those who did not, even though the conversations lasted only a few moments. In another study, students who kept a record of their daily social contacts were found to be happier on days when they had more interactions with weak ties, such as classmates they did not know well.

Why do we underestimate the value of such encounters? One explanation is what researchers have called the "liking gap". In studies led by Erica Boothby, pairs of strangers were asked to have a short conversation and then to say how much they had liked their partner and how much they believed their partner had liked them. Consistently, people underestimated how much they had been liked. They tended to focus on their own awkward moments and on things they wished they had said, while their partners, who were busy worrying about their own performance, hardly noticed them. Surprisingly, the gap was still detectable months later among first-year students living in the same university suite, which suggests that it does not simply disappear as people get to know each other.

None of this means that we should all start conversations with everyone we meet. There are times when people genuinely want to be left alone, and there are situations in which caution is sensible, particularly for women travelling alone at night. Expectations also differ between cultures: in some countries, chatting to a stranger in a queue is perfectly normal, while in others it is unusual, and the research I have described was carried out mainly in North America and Britain. Nor is it true, as is sometimes claimed, that people who prefer quiet are simply missing out. Introverts in these studies benefited from conversations with strangers just as extroverts did, but for many people, a quiet journey is a pleasure in itself, and there is nothing wrong with that.

My concern is a different one. Many of the small, unplanned contacts that once filled our days are gradually disappearing. We order food through apps, pay at self-service machines in supermarkets and work from home, and each of these changes removes a few more opportunities to exchange a word with someone new. Individually, these losses seem trivial, and the technologies concerned have obvious advantages. Taken together, however, they may be making our lives less pleasant in ways that we do not notice, precisely because we do not expect to miss conversations that we never had. If the research is right, a small amount of courage, a comment about the weather, a question about a book, may be rewarded far more often than we think.

Questions 27–30

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

• A they are often too busy to talk.
• B they have false ideas about what would happen.
• C they have had unpleasant experiences in the past.
• D they think it is against the law in some places.

• A Most commuters refused to take part in the study.
• B The commuters who were told to keep to themselves enjoyed their journey most.
• C One group expected a conversation to make the journey less pleasant, but commuters who tried it reported the reverse.
• D Conversations with strangers were usually shorter than expected.

• A to explain how a researcher first became interested in a topic
• B to give an example of a strong social tie
• C to show that some workers dislike talking to customers
• D to describe a participant in a study

• A It disappears after a few minutes of conversation.
• B It is greater among university students than among older people.
• C It is caused by people paying too much attention to their partner's mistakes.
• D It can persist for months while people are getting to know each other.

Questions 31–35

Complete the summary using the list of phrases, A–I, below.

Write the correct letter, A–I, next to Questions 31–35.

Brief contacts with other people

Psychologists use the term "weak ties" for people who are neither 31Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer nor complete strangers. In a study in a coffee shop, customers who had a short but 32Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer with the person serving them felt more cheerful afterwards, and felt more strongly that they 33Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer . Customers who were told to be 34Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer did not experience the same benefits. In another study, students' 35Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer was higher on days when they had more contact with people they did not know well.

• A belonged
• B close friends
• C quick
• D sincere exchange
• E self-confidence
• F general happiness
• G long argument
• H were recognised
• I polite

Questions 36–40

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

Write

• YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
• NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
• NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this