IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 15

READING PASSAGE 1

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

The walking statues of Rapa Nui

Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, is one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth. A triangle of volcanic rock only about 160 square kilometres in area, it lies in the Pacific Ocean more than 3,500 kilometres from the coast of Chile, the country it now belongs to. Polynesian voyagers settled the island, probably around 800 years ago, and over the following centuries their descendants produced one of the most remarkable bodies of sculpture in the world: nearly a thousand giant stone figures known as moai.

The statues represent important ancestors, and most of them once stood on stone platforms called ahu, which were built around the coast. Contrary to popular belief, the great majority of them did not look out to sea. Instead, they faced inland, towards the villages, as if watching over the people who lived there. Most moai are around four metres tall and weigh several tonnes, although the largest that was ever erected, on a platform on the north coast, is nearly ten metres high and weighs over eighty tonnes.

Almost all the statues were carved at a single quarry, on the slopes of an extinct volcano called Rano Raraku. The rock there is volcanic tuff, a material formed from compressed ash, which is soft enough to be cut with hand tools. The carvers used tools made of basalt, a much harder volcanic stone, and thousands of these have been found scattered around the quarry. Working directly into the rock face, they shaped the front and sides of the figure first. The statue was then cut free from the surrounding rock, until it remained attached only by a narrow ridge running down its back. Once this ridge was broken, the statue was lowered down the slope, where the details of the back were completed.

Rano Raraku still looks rather like a workshop that was abandoned in a hurry. Nearly half of all the known moai remain at or near the quarry, many of them buried up to their shoulders in soil that has washed down the slope over the centuries. Among them are hundreds at different stages of completion, including one giant that, had it been finished, would have stood around 21 metres tall. It has never been explained how its makers expected to move it.

That question has puzzled visitors to the island for centuries. Rano Raraku is up to 18 kilometres from some of the platforms, and the islanders had no wheels, no large animals to pull loads and, by the time Europeans arrived, few trees. When the first European visitors asked how the statues had reached the coast, they were told that the moai had walked there, moved by a spiritual force called mana. Most outsiders treated this as legend. Instead, researchers suggested that the statues had been laid on their backs on wooden sledges and dragged along tracks made of logs. This theory had important consequences. If moving each statue required large numbers of trees, the work of statue-building might explain why the island's forests disappeared, and the island's history came to be told as a warning about a society that destroyed its own environment.

In 2012, however, two American archaeologists, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, carried out one of the most detailed tests of the islanders' account. They had noticed that the statues lying beside the ancient roads that lead away from the quarry are different from those on the platforms. Their bases are wider, and their bodies lean slightly forward. These features, they argued, would make a statue unstable on a platform but ideal for "walking". To test the idea, they built a concrete copy of a moai weighing about four and a half tonnes. With three long ropes tied around its head, one on each side and one behind, a team of just eighteen people was able to rock the statue from side to side, so that it moved forward in a series of small steps, rather like someone moving a heavy fridge. The replica travelled a hundred metres in under an hour.

The roads themselves support this explanation. They are slightly curved in cross-section, which would have helped to keep a rocking statue upright. When a moai finally arrived at its platform, the researchers believe, its base was reshaped so that the figure stood straight. Only then was it given its eyes, made of white coral, which seem to have been fitted for ceremonies. Some statues were also crowned with a large cylinder of red stone, cut at a different quarry.

The walking theory has not convinced everyone, and it does not explain how the very largest statues were moved. But it has helped to change the way the island's history is understood. If statues could be moved upright by a small team with ropes, the building of moai need not have destroyed the island's forests. Researchers now point to other causes, including rats that arrived with the first settlers and ate the seeds of the island's palm trees. Studies of ancient settlements also suggest that the islanders' numbers remained fairly stable for centuries. The sharp fall in population came only after European ships began to arrive in the eighteenth century, bringing diseases and, later, slave traders. The story of Rapa Nui, in other words, may be less a warning about environmental collapse than an example of how a small community managed to thrive on a remote island for hundreds of years.

Questions 1–6

Complete the flow-chart below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

How a moai was made and, according to one theory, moved

The front and sides were carved into the rock face, using tools made of a hard stone called 11 word

↓

The statue was cut free, apart from a ridge along its 21 word , then lowered down the slope.

↓

The statue was moved upright along specially shaped 31 word towards the coast.

↓

A team pulled on 41 word tied around the statue's head, rocking it from side to side.

↓

At the platform, the statue's 51 word was reshaped so that it stood straight.

↓

Coral 61 word were fitted, probably for ceremonies.

Questions 7–13

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.

When grasshoppers become a plague: understanding the desert locust

A In early 2020, farmers in Kenya watched as clouds of insects darkened the sky above their fields. It was the country's worst invasion of desert locusts for seventy years, and similar scenes were reported from Ethiopia and Somalia to Pakistan and India. Locust plagues have been recorded since ancient times, but the 2019–2021 outbreak was a reminder that, even in the twenty-first century, a single species of insect can threaten the food supply of millions of people.

B What makes the desert locust so unusual is that, for most of its life, it is a rather harmless grasshopper. It lives in the deserts that stretch from West Africa to India, where it is usually found in small numbers, scattered over enormous areas. In this "solitary" phase, individuals are green or brown, which helps them to blend in with the sparse vegetation. They avoid one another, and the adults fly mainly at night. Under certain conditions, however, the same insects can change into a completely different form, known as the "gregarious" phase. Gregarious locusts are bright yellow and black, they are strongly attracted to one another, and they are active by day. For many years, the two forms looked so different that scientists believed they were separate species.

C The trigger for this transformation is crowding. After heavy rain, desert plants grow quickly and the locusts breed. As the plants dry out again, the insects are forced together on the few patches of green that remain. In the early 2000s, researchers at the University of Oxford set out to discover exactly which aspect of crowding was responsible. In a series of laboratory experiments, they found that repeatedly touching the back legs of solitary locusts was enough to make them behave like gregarious ones within a few hours. A later study, carried out with colleagues at Cambridge, showed that this change was linked to a sharp rise in serotonin, a chemical that carries signals in the nervous system. When the locusts were given a substance that blocked serotonin, they did not change; when they were given extra serotonin, they became gregarious even without being crowded. The change in colour, by contrast, takes longer and develops over a generation or more.

D Once the change has begun, it can quickly get out of control. Young locusts, which have no wings, group together in "bands" that march across the ground, eating as they go. When they become adults, they take to the air as swarms that may contain tens of millions of insects per square kilometre. Carried by the wind, a swarm can travel well over 100 kilometres in a day. Each locust eats roughly its own weight in fresh plants every day, and according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), even a small swarm covering one square kilometre can consume as much food in a day as about 35,000 people.

E The 2019–2021 upsurge had its origins in a remote desert in the south of the Arabian Peninsula, known as the Empty Quarter. In 2018, two unusual cyclones brought heavy rain to this region, creating ideal breeding conditions. Satellite images showed that plants were growing, but the area is so isolated that no survey teams went there to check whether locusts were present. As a result, the insects were able to breed for several generations without being noticed. By the time the swarms appeared, they had already spread to Yemen, where conflict made it impossible for control teams to work, and from there they crossed the Red Sea into East Africa.

F Keeping track of locusts across some thirty countries is the job of the FAO's Desert Locust Information Service, based in Rome. Every day, it receives reports from national field teams, who travel through the desert recording where they find locusts and how many there are. These officers once wrote their observations on paper forms, which might take weeks to arrive. Today, they enter them on handheld tablets that send the data by satellite, so it can be seen in Rome almost immediately. The information is combined with satellite measurements of rainfall, soil moisture and vegetation, and with weather forecasts, so that the service can warn countries of approaching swarms several weeks in advance.

G Once swarms have formed, the main weapon against them is pesticide, usually sprayed from vehicles or aircraft. Chemical pesticides work fast, but they can harm other insects, birds and fish, as well as people who handle them carelessly. An alternative is a biological pesticide made from a fungus that infects only grasshoppers and locusts. It is harmless to other wildlife and to people, but it acts more slowly, taking a week or more to kill the insects, so it is best used against young bands before they can fly. Its use increased considerably during the recent upsurge, and some countries relied on it heavily.

H Experts agree that the most effective approach is to find and control locusts early, before swarms form. Doing so is relatively cheap; once a plague is under way, the costs rise enormously. The problem is that long quiet periods between plagues can last a decade or more, and when there are no swarms, governments and donors understandably move their money elsewhere. Field teams lose experienced staff, and equipment is not replaced. The question for the future is whether this pattern can be broken, especially as scientists are still uncertain how a changing climate, which may bring both more droughts and more extreme storms, will affect the locust.

Questions 14–18

Reading Passage 2 has eight paragraphs, A–H.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A–H.

Questions 19–22

Complete the sentences below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Questions 23–24

Choose TWO letters, A–E.

Which TWO of the following are stated about the biological pesticide?

Questions 25–26

Choose TWO letters, A–E.

Which TWO of the following helped the 2019–2021 upsurge to grow?

READING PASSAGE 3

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

Who owns the past? The debate over returning museum objects

For decades, the question of whether museums should return objects to the countries they came from was discussed mainly by academics and politicians. In recent years, it has moved from argument to action. In 2022, Germany agreed to transfer the ownership of more than a thousand of the Benin Bronzes, the brass and bronze sculptures taken from the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria, when British forces attacked its capital in 1897. In the same year, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington returned twenty-nine such pieces. Museums that once refused even to discuss the matter now publish policies on how requests for return will be considered.

The case for return rests on a simple moral principle: objects that were taken by force, or under conditions in which their owners could not refuse, should be given back. The Benin Bronzes are the clearest example, since they were removed during a military attack and later sold to pay for it. But supporters of return also make a broader argument about identity. For many communities, these objects are not simply works of art; they are records of history, religion and family. It seems unjust that people in Lagos or Accra should have to apply for a visa and buy an expensive plane ticket in order to see their own heritage, while visitors to London can see it free of charge.

The museums that hold such collections have offered several replies. The most influential is the idea of the "universal museum". In 2002, the directors of a number of leading museums in Europe and North America signed a declaration arguing that their institutions serve "the people of every nation". By bringing together objects from many cultures under one roof, they claimed, such museums allow visitors to compare civilisations and to understand what humanity has in common. Some museums have added a legal argument. The British Museum, for example, is prevented by an Act of Parliament passed in 1963 from permanently removing objects from its collection, except in a small number of special cases. Finally, there is the argument from care: that objects might be less well protected, or less widely seen, if they were returned.

I find the last of these arguments the least convincing. It assumes that only wealthy Western institutions are capable of looking after valuable objects, an assumption that is both inaccurate and somewhat insulting. Many of the countries requesting returns have skilled conservators and are building new museums with modern facilities. The argument for comparison deserves more respect, but it is weaker in practice than in theory. Most visitors to a large museum spend only a few hours there, moving quickly from one famous object to the next, and few of them take the time to compare a Benin plaque with a Greek sculpture in another wing. In practice, the universal museum is a place of comparison mainly for scholars, who could equally well travel to see objects elsewhere.

This is not to say that returning objects is always simple. When Nigeria began to receive the first of the bronzes, an unexpected question arose: to whom, exactly, should they belong? In 2023, a decision by the then president recognised the Oba, the traditional ruler of Benin, as the owner of the returned objects, which surprised some of those who had expected the bronzes to go to a new public museum. Some politicians in Europe suggested that this called the returns into question. In my view, it does no such thing. Once an object has been returned, decisions about its future belong to the people who receive it. A museum that insists on deciding where a returned object will be displayed has not really returned it at all.

Other alternatives to return have been proposed. One is the long-term loan, under which an object travels back to its place of origin for a period of years, while remaining legally the property of the museum that lends it. Another is the digital copy. Modern scanning and printing techniques can now produce replicas so accurate that only experts can tell them apart from the originals, and online collections allow anyone with an internet connection to examine objects in detail. These developments are valuable, and they will certainly make heritage more accessible. But they cannot settle the question of ownership. A community that asks for the return of a sacred object is unlikely to be satisfied with a perfect copy, any more than a museum would be happy to exhibit one in place of its original.

None of this means that every object in a Western museum should be sent back. Many objects in museum collections were bought legally, given as gifts, or made by artists specifically for sale to foreign travellers and traders, and there is no reason why they should not stay where they are. What is needed is careful research into the history of each object, known as provenance research, so that those taken by force can be identified. This work is slow and often expensive, and many museums have only recently begun to fund it properly. In the meantime, museums can at least be honest with their visitors. A label that explains that a sculpture was "acquired in 1897" tells the visitor almost nothing; one that explains how it was acquired would tell them a great deal.

The debate over return is sometimes presented as a battle between museums and the countries that want their heritage back. It need not be. The museums that have returned objects have, in many cases, gained new partners, new research projects and new exhibitions. The past cannot be owned in the way that a house or a car can be owned. But the people whose history it is have the strongest claim to decide what becomes of it.

Questions 27–31

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

• A to show that the debate has led to real changes
• B to compare the size of two museum collections
• C to suggest that some museums have acted too quickly
• D to explain why the Benin Bronzes were taken

• A are more valuable as works of art than as historical records.
• B are of great importance to the communities they came from.
• C should be shown in Europe and in Africa at the same time.
• D should be bought back by the governments that request them.

• A It signed the declaration on universal museums in 1963.
• B It has stopped accepting requests for return.
• C The law prevents it from permanently giving away most of its objects.
• D It has returned objects only in a small number of special cases.

• A Comparing different civilisations can be misleading.
• B Large museums do not display enough objects from Africa.
• C Scholars prefer to study objects in their countries of origin.
• D Most visitors do not use museums in this way.

• A returns should be delayed until ownership has been agreed.
• B the bronzes should have been placed in a public museum.
• C the returning country should not control what happens next.
• D European politicians were right to question the returns.

Questions 32–36

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

• A leave the lending museum as the legal owner.
• B give visitors very little useful information.
• C have been rejected by most countries that request returns.
• D make it possible to identify objects that were taken by force.
• E can be told apart from the originals only by experts.
• F are usually paid for by the countries of origin.