IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 14

READING PASSAGE 1

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

Records in string: the khipu of the Inca

A In the early sixteenth century, the Inca ruled the largest empire in the Americas. It stretched for more than 4,000 kilometres along the Andes mountains, from what is now Ecuador in the north to central Chile in the south, and it included perhaps ten million people. Running a state of this size required careful record-keeping. Officials needed to know how many people lived in each village, how much food was stored in each warehouse, and how much work each community owed the state. Yet the Inca had no writing system of the kind used in Europe or Asia. Instead, they kept their records on knotted cords known as khipu, a word that simply means "knot" in Quechua, the language of the empire.

B A khipu looks at first like a tangled mop of string. At its top is a thick main cord, sometimes more than a metre long, from which dozens or even hundreds of thinner pendant cords hang down. Some pendant cords have further cords, called subsidiaries, attached to them. The cords were usually spun from cotton or from the hair of llamas and alpacas, and many were dyed in a range of colours. When a khipu was not in use, it could be rolled up into a bundle small enough to carry in one hand, which made it ideal for an empire whose messengers travelled on foot.

C The people who made and read khipus were known as khipukamayuq, or "knot-makers". According to Spanish writers of the sixteenth century, they were trained from childhood, and every town of any size had several of them. Some kept records of local matters, such as harvests and the number of animals in a herd, while others worked for the state and were responsible for information about tax and labour. Their position was a serious one: an early Spanish account claims that a khipukamayuq who made a mistake in his records could be severely punished.

D How the knots recorded numbers was finally explained in 1912 by Leland Locke, an American historian of mathematics. Locke showed that khipus used a decimal system, very similar to the one we use today. Knots were tied in clusters along each pendant cord, with the cluster for units at the bottom, tens above that, then hundreds, and so on. Within these clusters, three kinds of knot were used. A single knot stood for one ten, one hundred or one thousand, depending on its position. In the units position, the numbers two to nine were shown by a long knot, in which the cord was wrapped around itself several times; the number of turns gave the digit. The number one in the units position had its own special knot, shaped like a figure eight. And where a position was left empty, it stood for zero. Using this system, a skilled reader could record any number quickly and with great accuracy.

E When Spanish soldiers arrived in Peru in 1532, they were astonished by the khipus. For several decades, colonial officials relied on them. Khipukamayuq were called to read their records aloud so that they could be written down in Spanish, and khipus were even accepted as evidence in law courts; in a number of disputes, communities used them to prove that they had already paid goods or labour to Spanish landowners. But the Catholic Church grew suspicious of the cords, which it associated with traditional religion, and in 1583 a church council in Lima ordered that khipus used for religious purposes should be destroyed. Many more were simply lost as Spanish writing replaced them. Today only about a thousand khipus survive, most of them in museums in South America, Europe and the United States.

F Numbers, however, may not be the whole story. Many khipus contain knots that do not seem to follow Locke's system, and the Spanish writers claimed that khipus also recorded histories, songs and even messages. Researchers have therefore looked at other features of the cords, including their colour, the material they were made from, and the direction in which the fibres were twisted. One important step came in 2005, when a team using a computer database studied a group of khipus from Puruchuco, near Lima. They found that the totals recorded on some khipus matched the figures on others, which suggests that information collected in local records was added together and passed up to higher levels of the administration. More recently, a study of two khipus kept by a village in the central Andes found that they used fourteen colours and six kinds of animal fibre, which together may have allowed the knot-makers to record the names of family groups. If this interpretation is correct, it would mean that at least some khipus recorded sounds and words, and not only numbers.

G Researchers are cautious, as none of these ideas has yet been confirmed. There is no equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, the famous inscription that allowed scholars to read Egyptian hieroglyphs because it gave the same text in three scripts. But there are reasons for hope. Scholars continue to search archives in Peru and Spain for Spanish documents that might have been copied directly from particular khipus. And in a few villages in the Andes, khipus are still kept today. In San Andrés de Tupicocha, in Peru, the community's khipus are no longer read, but they are carefully looked after and are displayed at an important village ceremony every year. The knowledge of how to read them may have been lost, but the cords themselves remain part of everyday life.

Questions 1–4

Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A–G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A–G.

Questions 5–9

Complete the table below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

How a khipu works

Questions 10–13

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

• A They were difficult for enemies to read.
• B They could be easily carried long distances.
• C They lasted longer than written documents.
• D They could be made by anyone in a village.

• A Officials refused to accept them from the beginning.
• B Officials and the Church both wanted them destroyed immediately.
• C Officials found them useful, but the Church came to distrust them.
• D The Church encouraged their use in law courts.

• A Khipus recorded the names of family groups.
• B Different colours were used for different types of goods.
• C Local figures were combined into larger totals.
• D Khipus were used to record religious songs.

• A The meaning of most khipus will never be understood.
• B Many questions remain, but there are ways in which they might be answered.
• C Villagers in the Andes can still read khipus.
• D A document like the Rosetta Stone has recently been found.

READING PASSAGE 2

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

Seeing through the trees: how lidar is changing archaeology

For more than a century, archaeologists working in tropical forests have faced the same problem. The remains of ancient towns and farms lie beneath a thick canopy of trees, and the only way to map them has been to cut paths through the forest and record each wall and mound on foot. A single season of such work might map a few square kilometres. Over the last fifteen years or so, however, a technology called lidar has transformed the picture. In some regions, it has revealed more ancient structures in a few days of flying than had been recorded in the previous hundred years.

Lidar, which stands for "light detection and ranging", works rather like radar, but it uses light instead of radio waves. An aircraft, or increasingly a drone, flies back and forth over the area to be surveyed, while an instrument underneath it fires hundreds of thousands of laser pulses at the ground every second. Each pulse is reflected back to the aircraft, and by measuring the time it takes to return, the instrument can calculate the distance to whatever the pulse has hit. Most pulses strike leaves and branches, but even in the densest forest, a small proportion find their way through gaps in the canopy and reach the ground. After the flight, software is used to separate these ground points from the rest. When the trees have been digitally removed in this way, what remains is a detailed model of the bare earth, showing features as small as a low wall or a farmer's ditch.

The first major demonstration of what the technology could do in a tropical forest came in 2009, in Belize, at the ancient Maya city of Caracol. Two archaeologists had spent more than twenty years mapping the site on foot. A lidar survey, flown over just four days, covered a far larger area than they had managed to map in two decades, and it showed that the city had been much bigger and more densely populated than anyone had thought. Its houses and fields were linked by a network of roads and surrounded by thousands of terraces, where crops had once been grown on the hillsides.

Since then, the surveys have grown more ambitious. In 2018, a project in northern Guatemala mapped more than 2,000 square kilometres of forest and identified over 60,000 structures, including houses, fortifications and raised roads, many of them previously unknown. The results led many researchers to raise their estimates of the region's population at its peak, more than a thousand years ago. In Cambodia, flights over the area around the famous temple of Angkor Wat have shown that the temple was once surrounded by a planned city, with streets laid out in a grid, which had left almost no trace on the surface.

Perhaps the most surprising discoveries have come from the Amazon. For a long time, many scholars believed that the soils of the rainforest were too poor to support large populations, and that the people who lived there before the arrival of Europeans had been small groups who moved from place to place. Lidar surveys in Bolivia and Ecuador have challenged that view. They have revealed large settlements, connected by straight roads that run for kilometres, with platforms, canals and reservoirs, some of them more than two thousand years old.

The technology is not only being used in forests. In countries such as the United Kingdom, government agencies, which collected lidar data for much of the country mainly to help with flood planning, have made it freely available online. Amateur researchers have used this data to trace the routes of Roman roads that had disappeared under farmland, and they have found several previously unknown sections without leaving their homes.

Yet archaeologists are keen to point out that lidar has limits. A model of the ground can show the shape of a structure, but not what it was used for or when it was built. A low mound might be the remains of a house, a temple or simply a natural feature. To answer these questions, archaeologists still have to visit the site, a process known as "ground-truthing", and carry out excavations. In practice, lidar has not replaced work on the ground, but it has changed how that work is planned, allowing teams to choose the most promising sites before they set off.

There are other concerns, too. Although the cost of surveys has fallen sharply, a large project can still be expensive. More seriously, publishing detailed maps of unknown sites might help looters, who dig up ancient objects to sell them illegally. For this reason, some research teams now share their most detailed data only with other researchers and with the authorities responsible for protecting the sites.

Despite these concerns, few archaeologists doubt that lidar has changed their field for good. As one researcher has put it, it is like being given glasses after years of looking at the world without them. The ancient landscapes of the tropics, once thought to have been thinly populated and largely untouched by human hands, now appear to have been busy, carefully managed places, and some of the most important questions about them are only just beginning to be asked.

Questions 14–20

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?

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 21–26

Complete the summary below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

The limits of lidar

Lidar reveals the 211 word of an ancient structure, but it tells archaeologists nothing about its function or date. A slight rise in the ground, known as a 221 word , might be a building or might have formed naturally. Teams must therefore still travel to sites and carry out 231 word there. What lidar does offer is a way of identifying in advance which locations look most 241 word . There is also a danger that people who steal ancient objects to sell, known as 251 word , could benefit from published maps, so some teams now keep their most precise 261 word away from the public.

READING PASSAGE 3

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

Bringing back the dead? The debate over de-extinction

In 2003, a team of Spanish and French scientists did something that had never been done before. Using cells taken from the last known Pyrenean ibex, a wild mountain goat that had died three years earlier, they produced a clone. The kid was born alive, but it had a serious lung defect and died within minutes. For those few minutes, however, an extinct animal had lived again. Two decades later, advances in genetic engineering have made the idea of "de-extinction" seem far less like science fiction, and several projects now aim to bring back versions of lost species, from the passenger pigeon to the woolly mammoth. Whether they should do so is a question that divides scientists, conservationists and philosophers.

It is important to understand what de-extinction actually means. For most extinct species, cloning is impossible, because no living cells survive. Instead, scientists read the genetic code, or genome, of the extinct animal from ancient remains, compare it with that of its closest living relative, and then edit the relative's DNA so that it carries some of the extinct animal's genes. A "mammoth", in this sense, would really be an Asian elephant that had been altered to have thick hair, a layer of fat and other features that allowed its ancestors to survive the cold. Critics say this is misleading. "What you get is not a mammoth," says the evolutionary biologist Dr Maria Lindqvist. "It is a new animal that looks a bit like one. Calling it de-extinction is a marketing decision, not a scientific one."

Supporters accept the point but argue that it misses the purpose of the work. According to the ecologist Dr Samuel Adeyemi, what matters is not whether the animal is genetically identical to the original, but whether it can do the same job in nature. Mammoths, he points out, once kept the Arctic grasslands open by knocking down trees and trampling the snow, which allowed the cold to reach the frozen ground beneath. "If a cold-adapted elephant can do the same thing, it might help to slow the thawing of the permafrost," he says. Since the permafrost holds enormous amounts of carbon, he believes such a project could, in the long term, help in the fight against climate change.

Others are unconvinced. The conservation biologist Professor Helen Ashby argues that the money spent on de-extinction would be far better used protecting species that still exist. "We are losing animals and plants faster than at any time in human history," she says. "Every pound spent on bringing back a mammoth is a pound not spent on saving the elephants we already have." She also worries that the promise of de-extinction could make people less concerned about extinction itself. If lost species can simply be recreated, she asks, why should governments go to the trouble and expense of protecting their habitats?

Supporters reply that the money for de-extinction largely comes from private investors who would not otherwise give it to conservation, so there is no real competition for funds. They also point out that the same techniques could help endangered species. The genetic tools developed to recreate extinct animals might, for example, be used to restore genetic variety to small populations, such as the northern white rhinoceros, of which, at the time of writing, only two animals, both female, remain.

A further set of concerns relates to the animals themselves. The philosopher Dr Ravi Menon has argued that the welfare of the first animals produced must come first. Elephants are highly social, intelligent animals, and a calf raised by scientists, without a herd of its own kind, might live a lonely and confused life. "We have a duty to any animal we bring into the world," he says, "and we should not create one simply to show that it can be done." There is also the question of where the animals would live. The world in which the mammoth or the passenger pigeon thrived has changed. Forests have been cleared, cities have grown, and climates have shifted. An animal released into a habitat that no longer suits it is unlikely to survive for long.

Some scientists take a more cautious middle position. The geneticist Dr Claire Fontaine believes that the most realistic targets are not famous animals such as the mammoth, but species that disappeared recently and whose habitats still exist. "If a bird became extinct fifty years ago because of hunting, and the forest it lived in is still there and is now protected, then there is a reasonable case for trying," she says. In her view, the question should be decided species by species, and only after the reasons for the original extinction have been removed.

My own view is that the strongest argument for this work is the one that its supporters mention least. The technology will probably never produce a herd of mammoths walking across the Arctic, but in learning how to rebuild lost species, scientists are developing tools that could help to save many living ones. That alone justifies some of the research. What would be harder to justify is to treat de-extinction as a solution to the loss of species, rather than as a small and uncertain addition to the far more urgent task of protecting what we still have.

Questions 27–32

Look at the following statements (Questions 27–32) and the list of people below.

Match each statement with the correct person, A–E.

You may use any letter more than once.

List of people

• A Maria Lindqvist
• B Samuel Adeyemi
• C Helen Ashby
• D Ravi Menon
• E Claire Fontaine

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 37–40

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

The mammoth project

Scientists cannot produce a true mammoth. Instead, they plan to change the 37Choose…ABCDEFGHSelect an answer of an Asian elephant so that it has some of the mammoth's features. Supporters claim that such animals could help to slow the 38Choose…ABCDEFGHSelect an answer of the frozen ground in the Arctic. However, a calf would grow up without other members of its own species, which could harm its 39Choose…ABCDEFGHSelect an answer and leave it lonely. In addition, many of the 40Choose…ABCDEFGHSelect an answer in which extinct animals once lived have changed.

• A behaviour
• B DNA
• C habitats
• D melting
• E welfare
• F diet
• G freezing
• H herds