IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 7

READING PASSAGE 1

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

The tin can

At the end of the eighteenth century, feeding an army or a ship's crew was a constant problem. Fresh food spoiled within days, and the traditional methods of preserving it, such as salting, drying and smoking, changed its taste and destroyed much of its nutritional value. Sailors on long voyages lived largely on salted meat and hard biscuits, and many suffered from scurvy, a disease caused by a lack of vitamin C. Governments were well aware that a better way of keeping food would give their forces a considerable advantage.

The first practical solution came from France. Nicolas Appert, a Paris confectioner and former brewer, spent around fifteen years experimenting with ways of preserving food. His method was to place food in thick glass bottles, seal them tightly with cork and wax, and then heat them in boiling water for several hours. Food treated in this way could be kept for months. Samples were tested on French naval ships, and in 1810 the French government awarded Appert 12,000 francs, on condition that he publish a full description of his method so that others could use it. He did so later the same year. Appert, however, had no idea why his technique worked. He believed that it was the exclusion of air that kept the food fresh. It was not until the 1860s that the work of Louis Pasteur showed that food goes bad because of microorganisms, and that heating kills them.

Glass bottles had obvious disadvantages. They were heavy, and they broke easily, which was a serious problem on board ship or in a soldier's pack. In the same year that Appert received his award, a British merchant named Peter Durand was granted a patent for preserving food in containers made of glass, pottery, tin or other metals. Durand did not go into production himself. Instead, he sold his patent to an engineer, Bryan Donkin, and his partner John Hall, who set up a factory in Bermondsey, in south London. Their containers were made of iron coated with a thin layer of tin, which stopped the iron from rusting. By 1813, they were supplying canned meat and vegetables to the Royal Navy, and to British forces overseas.

The early cans were very different from those we know today. Each one was made by hand: a skilled worker cut the metal, bent it into shape and sealed the joins with solder, and according to one estimate, could produce only about sixty cans a day. The cans were heavy, and their walls were thick. Some weighed more than the food inside them. Strangely, nobody seems to have thought about how they should be opened. Early cans carried instructions to cut round the top with a hammer and chisel, and soldiers in the field used knives, bayonets or even rifle fire. One of the first patents for a dedicated can opener was granted to the American inventor Ezra Warner in 1858, almost fifty years after the can itself. By then, cans were being made with thinner metal, which made them easier to open.

Canned food also had its failures. In 1845, the British explorer Sir John Franklin set off with two ships to search for the Northwest Passage, the sea route through the Arctic. The expedition carried thousands of cans of food, and none of the 129 men who continued the voyage returned. When the remains of some of the crew were examined in the 1980s, they were found to contain high levels of lead, and some researchers argued that the lead had come from the solder used to seal the cans, which had been made in a hurry and often poorly sealed. This theory became widely known, but others have questioned it, pointing out that the men could have been exposed to lead from other sources, including the ships' water systems, and that lead levels in the population at that time were generally high.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the canning industry grew rapidly. Machines took over much of the work of making cans, and the cost of production fell sharply. The American Civil War of the 1860s greatly increased demand, as both armies needed food that could be stored and transported in large quantities. Soldiers returning home brought a taste for canned food with them, and canned goods gradually became a normal part of ordinary family shopping, rather than something mainly for armies, navies and explorers.

The twentieth century brought further changes. In 1935, a brewery in the United States sold the first beer in cans, and canned drinks soon became common. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, manufacturers began producing cans made of aluminium, which were lighter than steel cans and did not rust. Today, many billions of cans are produced every year. Steel cans are still widely used for food, and because steel is magnetic, used cans can easily be separated from other waste with magnets, which helps to make them one of the most recycled forms of packaging in many countries.

Two centuries after Appert's experiments, the basic principle of canning has hardly changed: food is sealed in a container and then heated to destroy the microorganisms that would otherwise make it unsafe. It is a simple idea, but it changed what people ate and how far they could travel.

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 table below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Key dates in the history of the can

Date	Development	Details
1810	Appert's method	Food is sealed in glass 81 word , which are heated in boiling water
1810	Durand's patent	Covers containers of glass, pottery, tin or other 91 word
by 1813	Donkin and Hall's factory	Cans made of iron, coated with 101 word to prevent rust
1858	Early patent for a can opener	Before this, cans were opened with a hammer and a 111 word
1935	First canned 121 word	Sold by a brewery in the United States
late 1950s	New material	Cans made of 131 word , which were lighter and did not rust

READING PASSAGE 2

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

Finding the way

A Every year, billions of birds make journeys that would challenge the most experienced human navigator. The Arctic tern breeds in the far north and spends the northern winter in the seas around Antarctica. When researchers fitted small tracking devices to terns nesting in Greenland, they found that the birds flew an average of around 70,000 kilometres a year. In 2022, a young bar-tailed godwit fitted with a satellite tag flew more than 13,000 kilometres from Alaska to Tasmania without landing once. Many birds return year after year not just to the same region, but to the same nest. How they manage this has puzzled scientists for centuries, and although a great deal has been discovered, the full answer is still not known.

B One of the first clues came from experiments in Germany in the 1950s. The biologist Gustav Kramer noticed that caged starlings became restless during the migration season and tended to face in the direction in which they would normally have flown. Kramer placed the birds in circular cages with windows, and then used mirrors to change the apparent position of the sun. The birds changed their direction to match. This showed that starlings were using the sun as a compass. Since the sun moves across the sky during the day, this also meant that the birds must have an accurate internal clock, which allowed them to take the time of day into account.

C Many songbirds, however, migrate at night. In the 1960s, the American researcher Stephen Emlen tested indigo buntings in a planetarium, where he could control the pattern of stars on the ceiling. When the artificial sky matched the real one, the birds faced in the right direction for their migration. When the stars were switched off, they became disoriented. Emlen then showed that young buntings learn which part of the sky to use by watching the stars rotate around a fixed point during the night. Birds raised under a planetarium sky that rotated around a different star later used that star as their guide.

D Birds can also find their way when neither the sun nor the stars are visible. In the 1960s and 1970s, Wolfgang Wiltschko and his colleagues showed that European robins could detect the Earth's magnetic field. Surprisingly, the birds did not respond to the north or south direction of the field, as a ship's compass does. Instead, they detected the angle at which the field lines meet the Earth's surface, which tells them whether they are heading towards the pole or towards the equator. How birds sense the magnetic field is still being investigated. One leading theory is that the answer lies in a protein in the eye called cryptochrome, which may allow birds to see the magnetic field as a pattern of light and shade. In 2021, a team including Henrik Mouritsen reported that a type of cryptochrome taken from robins was sensitive to magnetic fields in the laboratory. Mouritsen's group had earlier found that robins kept on a university campus in the German city of Oldenburg lost their ability to use their magnetic compass because of weak electromagnetic noise from electronic equipment. When the birds were kept in huts screened with aluminium, the ability returned.

E A more surprising sense may also play a part. In the 1970s, Italian scientists led by Floriano Papi found that homing pigeons whose sense of smell had been blocked had difficulty finding their way home. For many years, these results were treated with suspicion. However, in 2013, a team led by Anna Gagliardo studied Cory's shearwaters, seabirds that travel long distances over the open ocean. Birds whose sense of smell had been temporarily removed had great difficulty finding their way back to their nests when released far out at sea, while birds whose magnetic sense had been disrupted had no such difficulty. Over open water, it seems, smell may matter more than magnetism.

F A compass, however, is not enough. A bird that has been blown off course needs to know not only which direction is south, but where it is. In the 1950s, the Dutch researcher A. C. Perdeck caught thousands of starlings migrating through the Netherlands and released them in Switzerland. The adults, which had made the journey before, corrected their course and reached their normal winter quarters. The young birds simply continued flying in the same direction as before, and ended up hundreds of kilometres away in Spain and southern France. Experience, it appears, gives birds a kind of map that inexperienced birds lack. Some scientists believe that this map may be based on small differences in the strength of the magnetic field from place to place, while others have suggested smells carried on the wind, or even sounds too low for humans to hear. How this map works, and which senses it relies on, remains one of the great unanswered questions in biology.

Questions 14–19

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A–F.

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.

Write the correct number, i–viii, next to Questions 14–19.

List of Headings

• i The difference between direction and position
• ii A sense that may be most useful at sea
• iii Remarkable journeys and an unsolved mystery
• iv Why some birds no longer migrate
• v Learning from patterns in the night sky
• vi Responding to an invisible force
• vii Using the daytime sky to choose a direction
• viii The dangers of long-distance flight

Questions 20–23

Look at the following findings (Questions 20–23) and the list of researchers below.

Match each finding with the correct researcher, A–E.

Write the correct letter, A–E, next to Questions 20–23.

List of Researchers

• A Gustav Kramer
• B Stephen Emlen
• C Wolfgang Wiltschko
• D Anna Gagliardo
• E A. C. Perdeck

Questions 24–26

Complete the summary below.

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

How do birds sense the magnetic field?

Scientists still do not know exactly how birds detect the Earth's magnetic field. According to one theory, a type of 242 words in the bird's eye, called cryptochrome, may make the magnetic field visible. Research on robins supports this idea. However, robins in a city could not use their magnetic sense because of weak 252 words from electronic equipment. Their magnetic sense came back when they were kept in 262 words that had been screened with aluminium.

READING PASSAGE 3

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

The multitasking myth

Most of us like to think that we are good at doing several things at once. We answer emails during meetings, check our phones while watching television, and listen to podcasts while we work. Job advertisements routinely ask for candidates who can "multitask", as if it were a skill like typing or speaking a foreign language. Yet there is now a large body of research suggesting that, for most of us, most of the time, multitasking does not exist, or at least not in the form we imagine.

It is worth remembering where the word comes from. "Multitasking" was first used in the 1960s to describe computers that appeared to run several programs at the same time. In fact, early computers did nothing of the kind. They switched rapidly between tasks, working on each for a fraction of a second. The human brain, it turns out, behaves in a similar way. When we believe we are doing two demanding things at once, we are usually switching our attention back and forth between them, and every switch has a cost.

Psychologists have been measuring that cost for decades. In an influential 1995 study, Robert Rogers and Stephen Monsell asked people to alternate between two simple tasks involving letters and numbers. Even when the participants knew exactly which task was coming next and had time to prepare, they were slower and made more mistakes immediately after a switch than when they repeated the same task. The delay for each switch is small, often a fraction of a second, but it adds up. The psychologist David Meyer has estimated that frequent switching can cost as much as 40 per cent of a person's productive time.

The obvious response is that some people are simply better at it than others, and that regular practice makes us better still. The evidence for this is weak. In 2009, researchers at Stanford University led by Eyal Ophir and Clifford Nass compared people who regularly used several forms of media at once, such as messaging, video and web browsing, with people who rarely did so. They expected the heavy multitaskers to be better at switching. Instead, they found the opposite: the heavy multitaskers were more easily distracted by irrelevant information, and were slower at switching between tasks. It is not clear which way the cause and effect run. Multitasking may weaken our ability to concentrate, or people who are easily distracted may be more likely to multitask. Either way, practice does not appear to make perfect.

There is one interesting exception. In 2010, Jason Watson and David Strayer tested 200 people in a driving simulator while they also carried out a difficult memory and arithmetic task. For almost everyone, driving performance got worse. But about 2.5 per cent of the participants, whom the researchers called "supertaskers", showed no decline at all. The existence of supertaskers is fascinating, but it should not encourage the rest of us. When asked, most people believe they are better than average at multitasking, and most people are wrong.

The consequences can be serious. Strayer's earlier research found that drivers talking on a mobile phone were as impaired as drivers at the legal limit for alcohol. Importantly, hands-free phones were no safer than hand-held ones, because the problem was not holding the phone but dividing attention. Many countries have banned hand-held phones while driving, but few have banned hands-free devices, which suggests that the law has not kept up with the science.

At work, the problem is less dramatic but more widespread. The researcher Gloria Mark, who has studied office workers for many years, has found that people now switch between screens and tasks every minute or so, and that after an interruption, people take on average more than twenty minutes to get back to the task they were working on. Some of these interruptions come from others, but a surprising number are self-inflicted: we interrupt ourselves to check email or messages, even when nothing has arrived.

None of this means that we can never do two things at once. Walking while holding a conversation is easy for most adults, because walking has become automatic and needs almost no conscious attention. Similarly, many people find that familiar background music does not interfere with routine work. The difficulty arises when two tasks both require our attention, particularly if they involve the same kind of mental resource, such as two tasks involving language.

What, then, should we do? Banning phones from offices is neither realistic nor desirable. A better approach is to organise our work so that we switch less often: dealing with emails at set times rather than as they arrive, for example, or turning off notifications when we need to concentrate. Employers could help by not expecting immediate replies to every message. And perhaps job advertisements should stop asking for multitaskers, and start asking for people who can concentrate on one thing at a time. That, after all, is a rarer and more valuable skill.

Questions 27–31

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

• A It was invented by psychologists in the 1960s.
• B It originally described something that was not really happening.
• C It is used more often in job advertisements than elsewhere.
• D It has always had a negative meaning.

• A were not told which task would come next.
• B made fewer mistakes as the experiment went on.
• C were slower after changing tasks, even when they knew a change was coming.
• D found number tasks harder than letter tasks.

• A that heavy multitaskers would switch between tasks more effectively
• B that people who rarely multitask would be easily distracted
• C that using several forms of media would damage memory
• D that there would be no difference between the two groups

• A They are more common than most people think.
• B They can be identified by a simple test.
• C They should not make most people feel confident about their own ability.
• D They became better at multitasking through practice.

• A It is too strict in many countries.
• B It does not reflect what research has shown.
• C It has reduced the number of accidents.
• D It is difficult for the police to enforce.

Questions 32–36

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

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

• A drove less well when given an extra task.
• B often interrupt their own work.
• C requires very little conscious attention.
• D can greatly reduce how much work a person gets done.
• E were less able to ignore information that did not matter.
• F improved with regular practice.
• G should only be done with background music.

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