IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 6

READING PASSAGE 1

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

The potato's long journey

Today the potato is one of the world's most important food crops, grown in more than 150 countries and eaten in almost every kitchen on Earth. Yet for most of human history it was known only in one small region of the world. The potato was first domesticated at least 7,000 years ago in the high Andes of South America, probably close to Lake Titicaca, on the border of present-day Peru and Bolivia. Wild potatoes contain bitter and poisonous substances, and the first farmers gradually selected plants whose tubers were safer to eat. Over thousands of years, the people of the Andes developed a remarkable range of varieties, each suited to a particular altitude, soil or climate, and many of these are still grown in the region today.

Andean farmers also found a way to store their harvest for long periods. Potatoes were spread on the ground and left out on freezing nights, then warmed by the sun during the day. After several days, people trod on them to squeeze out the remaining water, and the potatoes were left to dry. The result, known as chuño, was light and easy to carry, and it could be kept for years without spoiling. The Inca, who ruled a vast empire in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, kept enormous stores of chuño to feed their soldiers and workers. The technique itself, however, is far older than their empire, and is still used in Andean villages.

Spanish soldiers encountered the potato in the 1530s, and within a few decades it had crossed the Atlantic. One of the earliest written records of potatoes in Europe dates from 1567, when barrels of them were shipped from the Canary Islands to the port of Antwerp. Yet Europeans were in no hurry to eat them. For many years, potatoes were grown mainly as a curiosity, in the gardens of wealthy collectors and in botanical gardens, where they were admired for their flowers. The potato plant belongs to the same family as deadly nightshade, and its leaves are poisonous, which did nothing to improve its reputation. Some people believed that potatoes caused leprosy, and others pointed out that they were not mentioned in the Bible. In many regions, they were considered fit only for animals and the very poor.

That this attitude changed was partly the result of determined efforts by governments. In 1756, King Frederick II of Prussia ordered the farmers of his kingdom to plant potatoes, and sent officials to explain how to grow them. In France, the most famous champion of the potato was Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, an army pharmacist who had been held as a prisoner of war in Prussia, where he had survived largely on potatoes. After returning to France, he entered a competition, organised following a series of poor harvests, to find foods that could be eaten in times of famine. He went on to promote the potato tirelessly, serving potato dinners to important guests. According to a popular story, he also planted a field of potatoes near Paris and had it guarded by soldiers during the day but not at night, so that local people, convinced that the crop must be valuable, came and stole it. Historians doubt that events happened exactly as the story describes, but it shows how hard it was to overcome the public's suspicion.

The potato's greatest advantages were practical. A field of potatoes produces two to four times as many calories as the same area planted with wheat or barley, and the crop is ready to harvest in as little as three months. Potatoes grow well in poor, cold or wet soils where grain does badly, and, unlike grain, they need no milling before they can be cooked. They also proved valuable in times of war. Grain was usually stored in barns, where passing armies could easily seize or burn it, but potatoes could be left underground until they were needed.

Some historians believe that the potato played a major part in the growth of Europe's population. According to one study by the economists Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, the introduction of the potato may explain around a quarter of the growth in the population of Europe, Asia and Africa between 1700 and 1900. Cheap and plentiful potatoes also helped to feed the workers who moved to the rapidly growing cities of the industrial age.

However, depending heavily on a single crop carried serious dangers, as Ireland discovered. By the 1840s, around a third of the Irish population relied almost entirely on potatoes for food, and most of them grew the same high-yielding variety. Because potatoes are normally grown from pieces of tuber rather than from seed, every plant of a variety is genetically identical to the others. When a disease known as potato blight arrived from the Americas in 1845, it spread with devastating speed, and in 1846 almost the entire crop was lost. Around a million people died, and at least another million emigrated.

The lesson has not been forgotten. At a research centre in Lima, Peru, scientists maintain a collection of thousands of potato varieties and their wild relatives, many of them from the Andes. Plant breeders use this collection to search for varieties that can resist disease, or survive the higher temperatures expected as the climate changes. The potato's future, it seems, may depend on the diversity of the region where its story began.

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 notes below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Why the potato spread

• Produces more 81 word per field than wheat or barley
• Grows in soils that are poor, cold or wet
• Unlike grain, does not require 91 word before cooking
• Safer than grain during wars, because it could be kept 101 word until it was needed
• May account for about a quarter of the increase in 111 word in Europe, Asia and Africa between 1700 and 1900
• Fed workers who moved to 121 word during industrialisation

A warning from Ireland

• Most farmers grew a single variety, so the plants were genetically identical, and the crop was destroyed by 131 word .

READING PASSAGE 2

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

The mind of the octopus

A In 2016, an octopus called Inky escaped from his tank at the National Aquarium of New Zealand. Staff believe that he squeezed through a small gap at the top of the tank, crossed the floor at night, and slid down a narrow drain pipe that led to the sea. Aquarium keepers have many similar tales, of octopuses that put out lights by squirting water at them, or that leave their tanks at night to raid neighbouring ones. Stories like this have given octopuses a reputation for cleverness, and the reputation appears to be deserved. The common octopus has around 500 million neurons, the nerve cells that carry information through the body. That is roughly the same number as in the outer layer of a dog's brain, and far more than in most other animals without a backbone.

B What makes this intelligence so remarkable is where it came from. The last common ancestor of octopuses and humans lived more than 500 million years ago, and was probably a small, simple, worm-like creature with very few neurons. This means that the octopus brain and the brains of mammals and birds developed entirely separately, along completely different evolutionary paths. The philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith has suggested that meeting an octopus is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. Studying octopuses, he argues, may reveal which features of intelligence are universal, and which are simply the result of our own particular history.

C The octopus nervous system is also organised in a very different way from ours. About two-thirds of its neurons are not in the brain at all, but in the eight arms. Each arm can taste and touch through its suckers, and can carry out complicated movements, such as reaching for food and passing it towards the mouth, with little direction from the brain. In some experiments, arms that had been separated from the body continued to grasp objects for some time afterwards. Researchers are still debating how the brain and the arms share control, but it seems that the arms are far more independent than our own limbs. The skin, too, is extraordinary. It contains thousands of tiny bags of colour, which can be opened and closed in a fraction of a second, allowing an octopus to change its colour and pattern to match its surroundings. Strangely, octopuses appear to be colour-blind, and some researchers believe that the skin itself may be able to detect light.

D Laboratory studies have shown that octopuses can learn quickly. They can find their way through simple mazes, and they can learn to unscrew the lids of jars to reach the food inside. Some of the most striking evidence concerns their ability to recognise people. In one study at an aquarium in Seattle, the biologist Roland Anderson asked two members of staff, wearing identical blue uniforms, to approach a group of giant Pacific octopuses. One person always fed them, while the other always touched them with a bristly stick. Within a week, most of the octopuses behaved differently towards the two people, moving towards one and away from the other. In the wild, too, octopuses show behaviour that suggests careful planning. In 2009, the marine biologist Julian Finn reported that veined octopuses in Indonesia collect empty coconut shells and carry them across the sea floor, sometimes for long distances, to use later as a shelter. Some scientists regard this as the first example of tool use by an animal without a backbone, although others argue that it does not meet the strict definition of a tool.

E In other ways, however, octopuses are puzzling. In most animals, large brains are linked to long lives and complex social groups. Elephants, dolphins and apes live for decades and learn much of their behaviour from others in their group. Most octopuses, by contrast, live for only one or two years, and they spend their lives alone. Females usually die soon after their eggs hatch, so the young never meet their parents and must learn everything for themselves. One explanation is that, at some point in their evolution, the ancestors of octopuses lost their protective shells. Without a shell, an octopus is a soft, tasty meal for many predators, and it may be that only animals able to hide, escape and hunt in flexible ways could survive.

F The growing evidence of octopus intelligence has had practical consequences. In 2021, a review for the UK government, led by the philosopher Jonathan Birch, concluded that there was strong scientific evidence that octopuses, along with crabs and lobsters, are capable of feeling pain. As a result, they were included in a new animal welfare law the following year. At around the same time, a company announced plans to build the world's first commercial octopus farm in Spain. The proposal was strongly criticised by scientists and animal welfare groups, who argued that solitary, curious animals would suffer if they were kept in crowded tanks, and several states in the USA have since passed laws banning octopus farming.

Questions 14–18

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A–F.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

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

NB You may use any letter more than once.

Questions 19–22

Complete the sentences below.

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

Questions 23–26

Look at the following statements (Questions 23–26) and the list of people below.

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

Write the correct letter, A–D, next to Questions 23–26.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

List of People

• A Peter Godfrey-Smith
• B Roland Anderson
• C Julian Finn
• D Jonathan Birch

READING PASSAGE 3

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

Why we put things off

Almost everyone has, at some time, put off a task that they knew they should do: a tax form left until the night before the deadline, an essay started at midnight, a difficult phone call delayed for weeks. Psychologists define procrastination as voluntarily delaying an intended action despite expecting to be worse off as a result. It is that final part of the definition that makes procrastination so puzzling. We are not simply choosing to do something more urgent; we are choosing an option that we know will make our lives harder. Estimates suggest that around one adult in five procrastinates so regularly that it causes them real problems, and among students the figure is considerably higher.

For a long time, procrastination was seen as a problem of character or organisation. Procrastinators, it was assumed, were lazy, or simply did not know how to manage their time, and the solution was to make lists, plan more carefully and try harder. Over the past thirty years, however, research has painted a rather different picture. Many chronic procrastinators are not lazy at all; they may work extremely hard on other tasks. Nor do they necessarily lack planning skills. What they find difficult is coping with the unpleasant feelings that certain tasks produce.

According to this view, which is associated with researchers such as Tim Pychyl and Fuschia Sirois, procrastination is essentially a problem of managing emotions. Tasks that are boring, difficult or uncertain, or that might lead to failure or criticism, create feelings of anxiety, frustration or self-doubt. Putting the task off brings immediate relief, and that relief acts as a reward, making it more likely that we will avoid the task again next time. The cost, of course, is paid later, but it is paid by what psychologists sometimes call our "future self". Brain-imaging studies by Hal Hershfield and his colleagues found that when people think about themselves in ten years' time, their pattern of brain activity is more similar to the pattern when they think about a stranger than when they think about themselves in the present. If our future self feels like someone else, it is not surprising that we are willing to hand them our problems.

The consequences of procrastination have been studied in some detail. In a well-known study published in 1997, Dianne Tice and Roy Baumeister followed a group of university students through a term. At the start, the procrastinators actually appeared to be doing better than the others: they reported less stress and fewer symptoms of illness. By the end of the term, however, the situation had reversed. The procrastinators were more stressed and more often ill than their classmates, and they received lower grades. Overall, the researchers concluded, procrastination brought short-term benefits but much greater long-term costs.

If procrastination is a way of escaping bad feelings, then strategies that make us feel worse are unlikely to help. This is one of the more surprising findings of recent research. In a 2010 study, students who reported that they had forgiven themselves for procrastinating before a first exam procrastinated less when preparing for the next one. Those who were harder on themselves, by contrast, procrastinated more. The explanation appears to be that self-forgiveness reduces the negative feelings associated with a task, making it easier to approach next time. It does not mean pretending that procrastination does not matter; rather, it means accepting what has happened and concentrating on doing better.

Other researchers have looked at the role of planning. The psychologist Peter Gollwitzer has studied what he calls "implementation intentions": plans that state precisely when and where a task will be done, often in the form "If it is Tuesday at nine o'clock, I will start my report in the library". In one often-cited study, students who had to write a report during the Christmas holidays were asked to decide exactly when and where they would write it. About three-quarters of these students completed the report, compared with only around a third of those who had made no such plan. A later review of almost a hundred studies concluded that this kind of planning generally helps people to act on their intentions, although the size of the effect varied considerably from one study to another. Such plans are not the same as a detailed timetable; they seem to work because the decision about when to start has already been made, leaving less room for avoidance when the moment arrives.

Another approach, which the economist Katherine Milkman has called "temptation bundling", involves linking an unpleasant task with something enjoyable. In one study, people who were allowed to listen to gripping audiobooks only while they were at the gym visited the gym considerably more often than those in a control group. The pleasure, in effect, compensated for the effort.

In recent years, a number of popular writers have argued that procrastination is not always harmful, and may even encourage creativity, because ideas continue to develop in the mind while a task is postponed. There may be something in this, but the evidence so far comes from a small number of studies, and it is easy to confuse deliberately delaying a decision in order to think about it, which can be sensible, with the anxious avoidance that most procrastinators experience. The same caution applies to the many apps and techniques that promise to cure procrastination by blocking distractions or breaking work into short periods. These may be helpful for some people, but they deal with the symptoms rather than the cause. If procrastination is fundamentally about emotion, then the most effective long-term solution is to understand which feelings we are avoiding, and to find better ways of dealing with them.

Questions 27–31

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

• A rarely realise that they are doing it.
• B delay tasks even though they know this will harm them.
• C prefer tasks that are more urgent.
• D are unable to estimate how long a task will take.

• A It has been fully supported by recent research.
• B It was mainly applied to students.
• C It explained procrastination as a weakness of character or organisation.
• D It encouraged people to forgive themselves.

• A think about their future selves in a similar way to people they do not know.
• B can easily imagine how they will feel in ten years' time.
• C procrastinate more as they grow older.
• D are more generous to strangers than to themselves.

• A were more stressed than other students throughout the term.
• B felt better than other students at first but worse later.
• C received similar grades to the other students.
• D became ill less often than the others by the end of the term.

• A help people to set themselves more ambitious goals.
• B are most effective when they are kept private.
• C state exactly when and where a task will be carried out.
• D were found to be equally effective in every study.

Questions 32–36

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

Write the correct letter, A–I, next to Questions 32–36.

Procrastination and emotion

Researchers such as Pychyl and Sirois argue that procrastination is a way of avoiding unpleasant 32Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer . Delaying a task gives a sense of 33Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer , which encourages people to repeat the behaviour. One study found that students who showed 34Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer towards themselves after delaying their exam preparation were less likely to do the same thing again. Other strategies change the way tasks are organised: for example, combining a dull activity with a source of 35Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer , such as an exciting story. The writer believes that tools that block distractions do not address the 36Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer of the problem.

• A pleasure
• B relief
• C criticism
• D emotions
• E forgiveness
• F origin
• G deadlines
• H exercise
• I effort

Questions 37–40

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