IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 13

READING PASSAGE 1

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

Water from beneath the desert: the qanat

Across much of Iran, less than 250 millimetres of rain falls in an average year, and in summer the land can go for months without any rain at all. Yet for at least two and a half thousand years, towns and farming villages have flourished there, surrounded by orchards and fields of wheat. Their survival has depended on a remarkable piece of engineering called the qanat: a tunnel that carries water from deep underground to the surface, using nothing but the force of gravity.

The idea behind the qanat is simple. In dry, mountainous regions, the little rain and snow that falls on the hills soaks into the ground and collects in layers of gravel and rock known as aquifers. To reach this water, builders began by digging a vertical well, called the mother well, near the foot of the hills. If they found that it reached the aquifer, they then dug a tunnel from a point lower down the valley, where the water was needed, back towards the base of the mother well. The tunnel rose very gradually, often by no more than one or two metres for every kilometre of its length. This gentle slope was essential. If it was too steep, the flowing water would erode the floor of the tunnel and eventually cause it to collapse; if it was too flat, the water would hardly move at all.

Digging a tunnel many kilometres long by hand created two problems: how to get rid of the soil, and how to let the workers breathe. The solution was a line of vertical shafts, sunk from the surface at intervals of about 20 to 35 metres. The soil was hauled up these shafts in leather buckets, and they also provided ventilation for the men working below. When the qanat was finished, the shafts made it possible to reach the tunnel for cleaning and repairs. From the air, a qanat can still be recognised by the long line of circular mounds around the tops of its shafts, stretching across the plain like a row of giant ant hills. At the point where the tunnel finally reached the surface, known as the outlet, the water flowed into open channels that carried it to houses and fields.

The men who built and maintained qanats, known in Persian as muqannis, were highly respected, and their skills were usually handed down within families. The work was dangerous. Tunnels could collapse, and the air deep underground could become unsafe to breathe. To check the air, diggers worked by the light of an oil lamp; if its flame began to weaken, it was a sign that there was not enough oxygen, and they climbed out at once. The lamps had a second purpose: by lining up the lights of two lamps, workers could keep the tunnel straight.

Some qanats were enormous. One at Gonabad, in north-eastern Iran, has a mother well about 300 metres deep, and its water has been used for more than two thousand years. Because a large qanat might take decades to build and served a whole community, its water had to be shared fairly. In many villages, each family was entitled to the water for a fixed period of time, measured with a water clock: a small bowl with a hole in its base, which was placed in a larger container of water and slowly sank. Each time the bowl sank, one unit of time had passed.

The water also had uses beyond drinking and farming. In some desert towns, the cool water from a qanat was used to make ice in winter, which was then stored in thick-walled ice houses and kept for use during the hot summer months.

From Persia, the technique spread widely. Similar systems are found in Oman, where they are known as aflaj, in North Africa, and in Spain. Much later, the method reached the Turpan region of western China, where the tunnels are called karez and are still an important source of water today. In 2016, eleven Iranian qanats were added to UNESCO's World Heritage List in recognition of their value.

One great advantage of a qanat is that it is sustainable. Because the water flows out by itself, a qanat can take only as much water as reaches it naturally from the aquifer, and little is lost through evaporation, since the water travels underground. In the twentieth century, however, this balance was disturbed. Deep wells fitted with diesel pumps began to draw water far faster than the rain could replace it. As water tables fell, many qanats dried up, and as fewer people learned the skills needed to maintain them, others fell into disrepair.

Today, there is renewed interest in the qanat. In parts of Iran and Oman, villages have begun to clean and repair old tunnels, sometimes with help from universities and international organisations. Supporters argue that in a time of climate change, an ancient technology that uses no fuel and cannot exhaust its own water supply deserves a second look.

Questions 1–5

Label the diagram below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

If the diagram does not display, use this list. It contains the same labels.

A qanat (cross-section)

• Mother well: dug down until it reaches the 11 word
• Tunnel: slope kept gentle so that the water does not 21 word the floor
• Vertical 31 word : placed every 20–35 metres
• These were used to remove 41 word during digging and to provide 51 word for the workers.

Questions 6–9

Answer the questions below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

Questions 10–13

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.

Talking in whistles

On the steep volcanic island of La Gomera, in the Canary Islands, it is not unusual to hear a shepherd on one side of a valley whistle a message to a friend on the other side, and to hear the friend whistle back. To an outsider, the sounds might seem like birdsong. In fact, the two men are speaking Spanish. They are using Silbo Gomero, a whistled form of the language which can be understood across distances of several kilometres, far beyond the reach of a shout.

Silbo Gomero is the best known of the world's whistled languages, but it is far from the only one. The French linguist Julien Meyer, who has spent more than two decades recording whistled speech, has identified around seventy communities, from the mountains of Mexico and Turkey to the forests of the Amazon and the hills of northern Laos, where people have used whistling to communicate. Meyer stresses that these are not separate languages with their own vocabulary and grammar. Rather, they are a way of transforming an existing spoken language into whistles, in the same way that writing is a way of representing speech on paper. A whistler who speaks Spanish whistles Spanish; a whistler who speaks Turkish whistles Turkish.

How the whistle carries the language depends on the type of language being spoken. In tonal languages, such as Mazatec in southern Mexico or Hmong in South-East Asia, a change in the pitch of a word can change its meaning entirely. In these languages, whistlers mainly reproduce the melody of speech, following the rise and fall of the tones. In non-tonal languages like Spanish or Turkish, the whistle has to do something different. Here, whistlers imitate the way the vowels sound, using a higher pitch for vowels such as "i" and a lower pitch for vowels such as "o", while consonants are shown by the way the whistle rises, falls or is briefly interrupted. Because so much information is lost, whistled messages in these languages tend to rely heavily on context. Experienced whistlers, however, are able to exchange surprisingly complex information, including messages they have never heard before.

Almost every whistling community lives in a similar landscape: steep mountains or dense forest, where people are often scattered and walking between them would take a long time. A whistle travels further than a shout because its sound is concentrated in a narrow range of frequencies that stand out clearly against background noise, such as wind or running water. It also requires much less effort than shouting. For centuries, whistling allowed farmers and herders to warn each other of danger, arrange to meet, or pass on news across distances that would otherwise take hours to cover on foot.

In recent decades, however, many whistled languages have begun to disappear. Roads have made remote villages easier to reach, and mobile phones have replaced the need to call across valleys. In the village of Kuşköy, in the mountains near Turkey's Black Sea coast, whistled Turkish was once used by almost everyone, and the village became known as the "bird village". By the early twenty-first century, it was mainly older people who whistled fluently, and in 2017 UNESCO added the practice to its list of cultural traditions in need of urgent protection. In Aas, a village in the French Pyrenees, whistled speech died out completely in the mid-twentieth century, and today it is known mainly from recordings made by researchers, although some enthusiasts have tried to bring it back to life.

La Gomera offers a more hopeful example. In the 1990s, Silbo Gomero was also in decline, but in 1999 the island's government made it a compulsory subject in local primary schools. Today, thousands of children on the island have learned at least the basics, and in 2009 the language was recognised by UNESCO as part of the world's intangible cultural heritage. Critics point out that a language learned in the classroom is not the same as one used naturally in daily life, but supporters argue that without the school programme, Silbo Gomero might already have vanished.

Whistled languages are also of great interest to scientists studying the brain. In most people, language is processed mainly in the left half of the brain, while the right half plays a larger role in processing music and melody. In 2015, the biopsychologist Onur Güntürkün and his colleagues tested this idea in Kuşköy. They played spoken and whistled Turkish syllables to fluent whistlers, sending a different sound to each ear at the same time, and asked the volunteers to report what they heard. With spoken Turkish, the results showed the usual strong advantage for the left side of the brain. With whistled Turkish, however, both sides of the brain were used almost equally. The study suggested that the brain's division of labour is less fixed than had been believed, and that the form in which language reaches us may affect how it is processed.

For researchers like Meyer, recording whistled languages before they disappear is a matter of urgency. Each one, he argues, shows a different way in which humans have adapted speech to their surroundings, and once the last fluent whistlers are gone, that knowledge may be impossible to recover.

Questions 14–17

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

• A a simplified language with a small vocabulary.
• B a way of expressing an existing spoken language.
• C a separate language that developed alongside speech.
• D a system of signals with fixed meanings.

• A interrupting the whistle.
• B changing the loudness of the whistle.
• C using different pitches.
• D copying the melody of a sentence.

• A can only express a small number of fixed phrases.
• B are easier to understand than tonal whistled messages.
• C are often misunderstood by inexperienced listeners.
• D depend a great deal on context.

• A Young people regard whistling as old-fashioned.
• B Modern technology and transport have made them less necessary.
• C Governments have discouraged their use in schools.
• D People have moved away from mountain villages.

Questions 18–22

Look at the following statements (Questions 18–22) and the list of places below.

Match each statement with the correct place, A–D.

You may use any letter more than once.

List of places

• A La Gomera
• B Kuşköy
• C Aas
• D southern Mexico

Questions 23–26

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

• A it suggests that the brain may process language more flexibly than previously thought.
• B its sound is less affected by noise from the surrounding environment.
• C it saved them long journeys on foot.
• D it proves that whistled languages are older than spoken ones.
• E a language studied in lessons is different from one used in everyday life.
• F the language has too few speakers to survive.

READING PASSAGE 3

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

How far should a restorer go?

A
When a great painting is returned to public view after restoration, the reaction is rarely unanimous. Some visitors are delighted by colours they have never seen before; others are horrified, convinced that something essential has been lost. These arguments are not new, and they are unlikely ever to be settled, because they rest on a question to which there is no simple answer: when we restore a work of art, what exactly are we trying to bring back?

B
It is worth remembering first that every old painting has already changed. Oil paint becomes more transparent with age, so that an artist's first sketch may begin to show through the layers above it. Colours fade in sunlight, and some pigments darken. Above all, most old paintings were covered with varnish, which turns yellow and then brown as it ages, giving the whole picture a warm, golden tone. Many people have come to think of this tone as the natural appearance of an Old Master, yet in most cases it is simply dirt and chemistry. The artist would not have recognised it. The canvas or wooden panel underneath moves too, expanding and shrinking with changes in humidity, so that the paint gradually develops a fine network of cracks.

C
The most famous dispute of modern times concerned Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, which were cleaned between 1980 and 1994. As centuries of candle smoke, dust and darkened glue were removed, the dark, heavy figures familiar from countless books were replaced by figures in brilliant pinks, greens and oranges. Some critics were outraged. They argued that Michelangelo had added a final layer of shadow to his work once the plaster was dry, and that the restorers had washed this away. The restorers insisted that they had found no evidence of such a layer, and that the bright colours were exactly what Michelangelo intended. Decades later, experts still disagree, which illustrates how difficult it can be to know what an artist's original intentions were.

D
In response to controversies of this kind, the profession of conservation has developed a set of principles which are now widely accepted. The first is that any treatment should be reversible: a later restorer, perhaps with better knowledge or tools, must be able to undo it. The second is minimal intervention, meaning that a conservator should do no more than is necessary to stabilise and present the work. The third is that additions should be recognisable. In Italy, for example, restorers developed a technique in which missing areas are filled with fine vertical lines of colour. From a distance, the eye blends the lines into the surrounding paint, but close up, they can easily be distinguished from the original.

E
These principles are sensible, but in my view they do not resolve the deeper problem, which is that restoration always involves interpretation. Deciding which layers belong to the "real" painting is a judgement, not a scientific fact. A varnish added fifty years after the artist's death is clearly not original, but what about changes the artist made late in life, or repairs carried out by a respected painter a century later, which have become part of the work's history? Or consider an altarpiece that was cut into separate panels in the eighteenth century and sold to different collectors: should a restorer try to make the panels look like parts of a single work again, or treat each one as an object with a history of its own? Scientific analysis can tell us what is there; it cannot tell us what ought to be kept.

F
Nor should we imagine that the danger lies only in doing too much. Doing too little can also be harmful. A painting covered in darkened varnish may hide damage which, left untreated, will become worse. And a picture that the public cannot properly see is, in a sense, a picture that has already been partly lost. When the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam began a major investigation of Rembrandt's The Night Watch in 2019, it placed the painting inside a glass room so that visitors could watch the specialists at work. This openness seems to me the right approach. It reminds the public that every restoration involves decisions, and invites them to understand those decisions rather than simply accept or reject the result.

G
What, then, should a restorer aim for? I would suggest that the goal is not to return a painting to the exact moment when the artist put down the brush, which is usually impossible, but to allow it to be seen as clearly as its condition permits, while respecting the marks that time has left. What can happen when confidence replaces care was seen in an extreme form in Borja, in Spain, where in 2012 a well-meaning local amateur with no training in restoration decided to repaint a damaged wall painting of Christ in a small church. The result made headlines around the world, but for all the wrong reasons. Good restoration requires the opposite quality, humility: the recognition that today's methods, however advanced, will one day seem as crude as those of the past. The best restorers I have met share this attitude. They see themselves not as the final authority on a work of art, but as its temporary caretakers.

Questions 27–32

Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A–G.

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B–G from the list of headings below.

List of headings

• i Agreed rules for modern conservation work
• ii The risks of failing to act
• iii How time alters a painting's appearance
• iv A disagreement that remains unresolved
• v Why the choice of what to keep cannot be purely scientific
• vi A public divided over restored paintings
• vii The cost of restoring a famous work
• viii The proper aim of restoration, and the attitude it needs
• ix New technology that has replaced traditional methods

Example: Paragraph A — vi

Questions 33–36

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 37 and 38

Choose TWO letters, A–E.

Which TWO of the following are mentioned as principles of modern conservation?

Questions 39 and 40

Choose TWO letters, A–E.

Which TWO of the following does the writer say about the restorer's aim?