IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 12

READING PASSAGE 1

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

Clearing the dust: the story of the vacuum cleaner

Before vacuum cleaners, much of the dust swept up by a broom simply settled somewhere else. In wealthier homes, servants took the carpets outside once or twice a year, hung them over a line and beat the dust out of them with sticks.

The first popular machine for cleaning carpets did not use suction at all. In 1876, Melville Bissell, who ran a china shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan, patented a carpet sweeper. It had brushes that turned as the sweeper was pushed across the floor, throwing dirt into a small box. Bissell's sweeper was light, cheap and easy to use, and it sold well for decades. However, it could only pick up dirt from the surface of a carpet, not the fine dust that had settled deep inside it.

Inventors in the United States had already tried to clean carpets by suction. Some of their machines used bellows, while others had a handle that the operator had to turn while pushing the machine along. They were awkward to use and sold poorly. In 1901, the British engineer Hubert Cecil Booth watched a demonstration of an American machine that blew compressed air at a carpet. It was supposed to drive the dust into a container, but much of it simply escaped into the room. Booth wondered whether suction would work better. In a restaurant, he placed a handkerchief against the fabric of a seat and sucked air through it. When he looked, dirt had collected on the underside.

Booth patented his machine later that year. It was very different from a modern vacuum cleaner. It was so large that it had to be pulled through the streets by horses, and it was powered by a petrol engine. The machine stayed outside in the street, while long hoses were passed through the windows of the building to be cleaned. Customers did not buy the machine; instead, they hired Booth's company to clean their homes, offices and theatres. Booth's machines received valuable publicity in 1902, when they were used to clean the carpets of Westminster Abbey before the coronation of King Edward VII.

Booth's invention removed dust far more effectively than anything before it, but it was of no use to ordinary families. The machine that brought suction cleaning into the home was the work of an American named James Murray Spangler. Spangler worked as a caretaker in a department store in Canton, Ohio, and he suffered from asthma, which was made worse by the dust that his carpet sweeper stirred up. In 1907, he built a lightweight machine from a tin box, a small electric motor and a broom handle. The motor drove a fan, which created suction, and a rotating brush loosened dirt from the carpet. A pillowcase attached to the back collected the dust.

Spangler patented his invention in 1908 but did not have the money to manufacture it in large numbers. One of the first machines was bought by his cousin, Susan Hoover, whose husband, William Hoover, ran a company making leather goods for horses. Hoover could see that motor cars were likely to replace horses, and he was looking for a new product. He bought the rights to Spangler's design. Spangler was given a share of the profits on every machine sold and continued to work for the company. Hoover was an energetic salesman. He advertised in national magazines and offered customers a ten-day free trial in their own homes, and his machines were soon being sold across North America and Europe. In Britain, the company's name became so closely linked with the product that people still talk about "hoovering" the carpet, whatever make of machine they use.

For much of the twentieth century, the basic design changed little. Machines became smaller and quieter, and in the 1920s the Swedish company Electrolux made popular the "cylinder" design, in which the motor sits in a separate unit that is pulled along behind the user. But almost all machines still collected dust in a bag, and as the bag filled, the suction became steadily weaker. In 1978, the British designer James Dyson became frustrated with this problem when using his own machine. He had recently seen a cyclone, a tall cone-shaped device that removes sawdust from the air by spinning it at high speed, at a sawmill, and he wondered whether the same principle could be used in a vacuum cleaner. Over the next five years, he built 5,127 prototypes. British manufacturers showed little interest in his design, which would have ended their profitable sales of replacement bags. His G-Force model later went on sale in Japan through a company called Apex. In 1993, he began producing his own machines in Britain, and within a few years they were among the best-selling models in the country.

The latest change has been the arrival of robot vacuum cleaners, which move around a room by themselves. Early models appeared in the early 2000s, and many now use cameras or sensors to build a map of the home. Yet it is not clear that all this technology has given people more free time. The historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan argued in the 1980s that machines such as the vacuum cleaner did not reduce the number of hours spent on housework. Instead, she suggested, they raised standards of cleanliness, so that tasks once performed twice a year came to be done every week.

Questions 1–8

Complete the table below.

Choose ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

Three important vacuum cleaners

Questions 9–13

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

READING PASSAGE 2

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

Darwin's worms

A
Charles Darwin is best known for his theory of evolution by natural selection, but the last book he published, in 1881, was about a much humbler subject: earthworms. The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms was the result of more than forty years of observation, and Darwin was not sure that anyone would want to read it. Some people found it amusing that one of the most famous scientists in the world had devoted so much time to worms, and the humorous magazine Punch published a cartoon that made fun of it. Yet the book proved surprisingly popular with the public, and it is now regarded as one of the first serious studies of the animals that live in soil.

B
Much of the book describes experiments that Darwin carried out at his home in Kent, often with the help of his family. Worms have no eyes, but Darwin found that they could still detect light, and that they quickly moved away from a bright lamp. To find out whether they could hear, he and his sons whistled at them, shouted at them, and played the bassoon and the piano next to them. The worms showed no reaction at all. However, when pots containing worms were placed on top of the piano and a note was played, the worms immediately went back into their burrows, showing that they were sensitive to vibration. Darwin also studied the way that worms pull leaves into their burrows. By giving them triangles of paper, he found that they usually seized the narrow end, which is the easiest way to pull a flat object into a small hole.

C
Darwin's most important discovery concerned what worms do to the soil itself. Earthworms swallow soil as they burrow, digest the organic matter in it, and leave the rest on the surface in small piles known as casts. Darwin collected and weighed the casts from areas of ground, and calculated that in some places worms brought up more than ten tonnes of soil per acre every year. As a result, objects lying on the surface are gradually buried. Darwin noticed that a field near his house, which had been covered with stones when it was first turned into grassland, was smooth enough to ride a horse across at speed thirty years later. To measure the process more precisely, his son Horace designed an instrument known as a "wormstone": a heavy, flat stone placed on the ground. Two metal rods passed through the stone and were fixed deep in the ground, and by measuring how far the stone moved against these reference points, the family could record how quickly it was sinking. Darwin also visited the remains of Roman buildings in England and concluded that worms had played a large part in burying them.

D
Modern scientists have confirmed that Darwin was largely right. Earthworms are now described as "ecosystem engineers", animals that change their environment in ways that affect many other species. Their burrows allow rainwater to drain into the soil instead of running off the surface, and they also let air reach the roots of plants. By pulling dead leaves underground and mixing them with soil, worms speed up the breakdown of organic material, and their casts contain more of the nutrients that plants need than the surrounding soil. In healthy grassland, there may be several million earthworms in a single hectare, and their combined weight can be greater than that of the animals grazing above them.

E
These benefits have made earthworms important to farmers. Research has shown that their numbers are strongly affected by how land is managed. Ploughing, which turns the soil over, destroys burrows and kills many worms, and it also exposes them to birds. A review that brought together the results of more than a hundred studies, published in 2017, found that fields that were not ploughed generally contained considerably more earthworms than fields that were ploughed regularly. Many farmers now use methods that disturb the soil less, partly in order to protect the worms that help to keep it healthy.

F
In some parts of the world, however, earthworms are a cause for concern. During the last ice age, thick sheets of ice covered much of northern North America and destroyed the earthworms that lived there. When the ice retreated, around 12,000 years ago, the worms were slow to return, and forests grew up without them. Instead of being eaten by worms, fallen leaves built up into a deep layer on the forest floor, which many plants and animals came to depend on. European settlers, however, unknowingly brought earthworms with them, in soil around the roots of plants and in the material that ships carried to keep them stable. Later, worms that escaped from anglers' bait added to the problem. In forests where the invaders have spread, the leaf layer can disappear within a few years. Some native wildflowers have become much less common as a result. Birds that nest on the ground may also suffer, as they rely on the leaf layer for cover and for the insects that live in it: in one Wisconsin study, two ground-nesting birds, the ovenbird and the hermit thrush, were less common in woodland invaded by earthworms.

G
Darwin ended his book by asking whether many other animals had done so much to shape the earth. The contrast between farmland and the northern forests gives his question a further twist: the effect of earthworms depends on the ecosystem they enter.

Questions 14–18

Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A–G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A–G, next to Questions 14–18.

Questions 19–22

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

Write the correct letter, A–I, next to Questions 19–22.

Darwin's experiments

Darwin found that although worms do not have 19Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer , they can sense light. They did not react to 20Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer , but they did respond to vibration. When pulling a flat object into a burrow, they generally took hold of its 21Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer end. Over many years, the soil that worms carry to the surface can 22Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer objects lying on the ground.

• A eyes
• B sound
• C narrow
• D bury
• E smell
• F wide
• G lift
• H heat
• I ears

Questions 23 and 24

Choose TWO letters, A–E.

Which TWO effects of earthworms on soil are mentioned in paragraph D?

Questions 25 and 26

Choose TWO letters, A–E.

Which TWO results of the spread of earthworms in North American forests does the writer mention?

READING PASSAGE 3

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

The shrinking world of childhood

Many grandparents remember walking to school with other children and without an adult. Their grandchildren are far more likely to travel with one. Researchers use the term "independent mobility" for the freedom children have to move around without adult supervision, and many regard its decline in wealthy countries as a major change in childhood that has attracted relatively little discussion.

The best-known evidence comes from England. In 1971, a team led by the researcher Mayer Hillman surveyed children in a number of schools about how they travelled and what they were allowed to do. When the survey was repeated in 1990, the changes were striking. In 1971, 80 per cent of seven- and eight-year-olds had gone to school without an adult; by 1990, the figure was just 9 per cent. Over the same period, the proportion of children of that age who were allowed to cross main roads alone had also fallen steeply. The children of 1990 were not less capable than those of 1971. What had changed was what their parents would permit.

Several explanations are usually offered. The most obvious is traffic. The number of cars on the roads grew enormously during the second half of the twentieth century, and parents are understandably afraid of accidents. Ironically, fewer children are killed on the roads now than in the 1970s, but this is at least partly because fewer children are out on the streets. A second explanation is fear of strangers. Stories of children being harmed by people they do not know receive enormous attention in the media, and this may lead parents to believe that such events are far more common than they really are. Crimes of this kind are extremely rare. A third factor is distance. In many places, families now have more choice about which school their children attend, and the school they choose is often not the nearest one. A journey that might once have been a ten-minute walk becomes a drive across town.

There is also a social explanation, which is perhaps the most powerful of all. As fewer children walk to school alone, the ones who do become more noticeable, and their parents may be judged harshly. In 2008, the American journalist Lenore Skenazy wrote a newspaper column describing how she had allowed her nine-year-old son to travel home alone on the New York subway, at his request and after careful preparation. The reaction was extraordinary. She was described in the media as "America's worst mom", and the story was discussed around the world. Skenazy went on to found a movement promoting what she called "free-range kids", but her experience showed how difficult it had become for parents to make a different choice from their neighbours.

Does any of this matter, if children are safe? There are good reasons to think that it does. Children who walk or cycle to school get regular physical activity, at a time when many are not active enough. There is also evidence that children who move around their neighbourhood independently develop a better understanding of it: when asked to draw maps of the area where they live, they tend to include more detail and to show the relationships between places more accurately than children who are driven everywhere. Perhaps most importantly, managing small risks, such as crossing a road or finding the way home, gives children confidence and helps to prepare them for the far greater independence of adulthood. A child who has never been allowed to make a mistake may find it harder to cope when they eventually have to.

Not every country has followed the same path. A comparison of sixteen countries, published in 2015 by researchers at the Policy Studies Institute in London, found large differences in how much freedom children were given, with Finland at the top of the table. In Japan, too, it is common for children of six or seven to travel to school on their own, often by public transport, and a long-running television programme follows children as young as two or three as they carry out small errands alone for the first time. The differences suggest that local attitudes and street design may influence how much freedom children have.

What, then, can be done? It would be unfair to blame individual parents, since each family's decision is a reasonable response to the conditions around it. The problem is that these decisions add up. Every parent who drives a child to school because the roads are dangerous adds another car to the road outside the school, and makes it a little more dangerous for everyone else. For this reason, the most promising solutions involve action by whole communities. Some towns have introduced "school streets", in which roads outside schools are closed to traffic at the beginning and end of the school day. Others have organised "walking buses", in which a group of children walk to school along a fixed route, collecting others on the way, with adult volunteers at the front and the back. Neither idea is complicated or expensive, and both allow parents to give their children more freedom without feeling that they are taking a risk alone.

None of this means that children should simply be sent out into busy streets without preparation. Independence has to be learned gradually, and what is suitable for one child may not be suitable for another of the same age. But it is worth remembering that keeping children close is not without risks of its own. They are simply harder to see.

Questions 27–31

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

• A The term was invented by Mayer Hillman.
• B Its decline has attracted relatively little discussion.
• C It refers only to children's journeys to school.
• D It is used differently by different researchers.

• A children in 1990 were less able to cross roads safely.
• B parents in 1990 allowed their children less freedom.
• C children in 1990 lived further from their schools.
• D most children in 1971 went to school with friends.

• A Children know more about road safety.
• B Fewer cars use the roads near schools.
• C Children spend less time out on the streets.
• D Drivers take more care around children.

• A how much pressure parents feel to behave like other parents.
• B that children in large cities are more independent.
• C that newspapers exaggerate the dangers of public transport.
• D how a parent's careful preparation can reduce risk.

• A Finland has the safest roads of the countries studied.
• B Children in Japan are more mature than children elsewhere.
• C Television has made Japanese parents more relaxed.
• D Children's freedom may depend partly on attitudes and on how towns are planned.

Questions 32–35

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

Write

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

Questions 36–40

Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A–G, below.

Write the correct letter, A–G, next to Questions 36–40.

• A tend to know their local area in greater detail.
• B helps children to become more self-assured.
• C are regularly physically active.
• D are simple and inexpensive to set up.
• E are only effective in small towns.
• F make parents more anxious about traffic.
• G adds slightly to the danger faced by other children.