IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 8

READING PASSAGE 1

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

A slow success: the story of the zip

Few inventions are as widely used, or as little noticed, as the zip. Billions are made every year for clothes, bags, tents and boots, and most of us open and close several every day without a second thought. Yet the zip took more than sixty years to develop, and for much of that time it seemed likely to fail.

The first attempt came from an unexpected direction. In 1851, Elias Howe, who had already patented a successful sewing machine, received a patent for what he called an "automatic, continuous clothing closure". It consisted of a series of clasps joined by a string, which could be pulled tight. Howe, however, was fully occupied with defending his sewing machine patent in the courts, and he never put his closure into production. It was soon forgotten.

The next inventor to take up the idea was Whitcomb Judson, an engineer from Chicago who had previously designed a street railway powered by compressed air. Judson was apparently tired of fastening the long rows of hooks on the high boots that were fashionable at the time, and in 1893 he patented a "clasp locker", in which a sliding piece joined two rows of hooks and eyes. According to some accounts, the device was shown to the public at the great World's Fair held in Chicago that year, although it attracted little attention. Judson and a business partner set up a company to manufacture it, but the clasp locker was expensive to make, and it had an annoying tendency to spring open without warning. Few customers wanted a fastener that might leave them embarrassed in the street.

The person who finally made the zip work was Gideon Sundback, a Swedish-born electrical engineer who joined Judson's company in 1906. Sundback spent several years trying to improve the existing design, with limited success. His breakthrough came in 1913, when he abandoned hooks altogether. His new fastener, which he called the "Hookless No. 2", used two rows of small metal teeth, each with a hollow on one side and a bump on the other. When the slider pulled the two rows together, the teeth locked into each other, and when it was pulled back, they separated. This is essentially the design we still use today. Sundback was granted a patent for his "separable fastener" in 1917. His manufacturing machine cut each tooth from a strip of specially shaped wire and fixed it to a cotton tape, wasting almost no metal in the process. Equally important, he designed a machine that could produce the fastener cheaply, turning out long lengths of it every day, where earlier methods had depended on skilled hand work.

Even so, the new fastener was not used on clothing at first. Its earliest customers were makers of money belts and tobacco pouches, small items where a secure closure mattered more than appearance. The fastener's big commercial opportunity came in 1923, when the rubber company B. F. Goodrich used it on a new range of rubber overshoes. Goodrich named the boots "Zippers", apparently after the sound the fastener made, and the boots sold well. The company had intended the name to belong to the boots alone, but people soon began using the word for the fastener itself. In Britain, the shorter form "zip" became the usual name.

Clothing manufacturers were slower to be convinced. Many people were suspicious of metal fasteners, which could rust, catch on fabric or break, and buttons were cheap and familiar. One of the first markets was children's clothing. In the 1930s, advertisements promoted zips as a way of helping young children to dress themselves, which would save time for busy parents. Around the same time, a number of fashion designers began to use zips in their collections, sometimes placing them where they could be seen, as a decorative feature. Many tailors still resisted, arguing that a broken zip could make a garment unwearable, whereas a lost button could be replaced in a minute. Nevertheless, in 1937 the men's magazine Esquire praised the zip as the newest tailoring idea for men, and zips began to replace buttons on the front of trousers.

The zip industry changed again after the Second World War. In 1934, a businessman named Tadao Yoshida had founded a small company in Tokyo to make zips. After the war, the company imported advanced manufacturing equipment from the United States, and it began to design its own machines, controlling every stage of production, from making the metal to producing the finished zip. This approach allowed it to keep its quality high and its costs low, and the company, now known as YKK, gradually became the largest zip maker in the world. Its initials can be seen on the sliders of a large proportion of the zips in use today.

Today, zips are made not only of metal but also of plastic, and some are designed to be completely waterproof, for use on diving suits and even spacesuits. Designers continue to experiment, too, with zips that can be closed with one hand, or whose two ends are guided together by magnets. Yet the basic principle is still the one Sundback developed more than a century ago. It is a reminder that a successful invention often depends less on a single brilliant idea than on years of patient improvement, and on finding the right use for it.

Questions 1–6

Complete the notes below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

The development of the zip

• Howe (1851): clasps were joined together by a 11 word , which could be pulled tight.
• Judson (1893): before this, Judson had designed a railway that was powered by compressed 21 word ; his clasp locker often opened unexpectedly.
• Sundback (1913): opposite its bump, each metal tooth had a 31 word ; he also designed a 41 word that reduced production costs.
• Early uses: the first buyers included makers of money belts and of pouches for 51 word .
• 1923: the fastener was used on rubber 61 word made by B. F. Goodrich.

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.

Why we laugh

A Laughter is one of the most familiar of all human behaviours. It is found in every culture that has been studied, and the sound of a laugh is recognised immediately by people everywhere, whatever language they speak. Babies begin to laugh at around three or four months of age, long before they can say their first words, and children who are born deaf laugh too, even though they have never heard anyone else laugh. All of this suggests that laughter is not something we learn, but something we are born with. Yet until relatively recently, scientists paid it surprisingly little attention.

B One of the first researchers to study laughter systematically was the American psychologist Robert Provine. Instead of bringing people into a laboratory, Provine and his students listened to conversations in shopping centres, on university campuses and on city streets, and noted down what was said just before someone laughed. Of more than 1,200 cases they recorded, only a small minority, between 10 and 20 per cent, followed anything that could be described as a joke. Most laughter followed quite ordinary remarks, such as "I'll see you later" or "Are you sure?" Provine also found that people who were speaking laughed more than the people listening to them. He also noticed that speakers almost never laughed in the middle of a phrase. Instead, laughter came at the end of a sentence or in a pause, rather like punctuation in writing. He concluded that laughter is not mainly a response to humour, but a social signal, which shows friendliness and helps conversations run smoothly. Supporting this, his research suggested that we are around thirty times more likely to laugh when we are with other people than when we are alone.

C Laughter is not unique to humans. In the late 1990s, the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp discovered that young rats make high-pitched chirping sounds, too high for humans to hear without special equipment, when they play together or are tickled. Rats that had been tickled followed the researcher's hand and seemed to want more. In 2009, a team led by Marina Davila-Ross recorded the sounds made by human babies and by young orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos when they were tickled. When the researchers compared the sounds, they found that the similarities and differences between them matched the family relationships between the species. One researcher has even argued that dogs produce a particular breathy panting sound during play, which encourages other dogs to join in. The 2009 findings suggest that human laughter developed gradually from the play sounds of an ancestor that we share with the great apes, millions of years ago.

D Laughter is also highly contagious. Most people have had the experience of starting to laugh simply because someone nearby is laughing, even without knowing what the joke was. Research by the neuroscientist Sophie Scott and her colleagues has shown that hearing laughter activates areas of the brain that prepare the muscles of the face to move, as if the listener were getting ready to join in. This may explain why television comedies have long used recordings of laughter in the background. Many viewers say they dislike these recordings, but studies have found that they can make people laugh more. The same effect lies behind "laughter clubs", which began in India in the 1990s and have since spread to many countries. Members meet in groups and laugh on purpose, without jokes. At first the laughter is forced, but because each person can hear the others, it often turns into the real thing within a few minutes, and members say that they leave feeling more cheerful than when they arrived.

E However, not all laughter is the same. Scott's research has also distinguished between two kinds: the uncontrollable laughter we produce when something genuinely amuses us, and the more deliberate laughter we use to show agreement or politeness, for example when a manager makes a weak joke. The two kinds sound different, and listeners are generally able to tell them apart. Brain scans also suggest that the brain processes them differently. Hearing deliberate laughter seems to make listeners work harder to understand what the speaker means, perhaps because they are trying to work out why the person is laughing.

F Why should laughter matter so much to a social species? One answer comes from the psychologist Robin Dunbar. In experiments published in 2012, his team asked volunteers to watch either comedy videos or documentaries, in small groups. Afterwards, the volunteers who had been laughing could tolerate more pain than before, for example by keeping their arm in a tight cuff for longer. Dunbar believes that laughter causes the brain to release endorphins, chemicals that reduce pain and produce feelings of pleasure and closeness. Because many people can laugh together at the same time, laughter may allow humans to build bonds within larger groups than would otherwise be possible. Seen in this way, laughter is far from a trivial matter. It may be one of the things that hold human societies together.

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–ix, next to Questions 14–19.

List of Headings

• i Why some people never laugh
• ii A behaviour we are born with
• iii The spread of laughter from one person to another
• iv What really causes people to laugh
• v The health benefits of laughing alone
• vi Evidence from other species
• vii How laughter helps to build relationships
• viii Laughter that is genuine and laughter that is not
• ix Differences in laughter between cultures

Questions 20–23

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A–F.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

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

Questions 24–26

Complete the sentences below.

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

READING PASSAGE 3

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

When a number becomes a target

In 1902, the French authorities in Hanoi, then part of French Indochina, faced a serious problem. The city's new sewers had become home to an enormous population of rats, and there were fears that they would spread disease. The authorities hired rat catchers, and then, when that proved insufficient, offered the public a small reward for every rat killed. To avoid having to handle dead rats, officials asked only for the tail as proof. Before long, people noticed rats running around the city without tails. Some rat hunters, it seemed, were cutting off the tails and releasing the animals, so that they could breed and produce more tails. According to the historian Michael Vann, there were even reports of people raising rats for the purpose. The scheme was eventually abandoned.

The story is often used to illustrate an idea known as Goodhart's law. Charles Goodhart, a British economist who advised the Bank of England, observed in 1975 that economic statistics which had behaved in a predictable way tended to stop doing so once the government tried to control them. His point was later expressed more simply by the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." His original concern was with figures for the amount of money circulating in the economy, but the idea has since been applied far more widely. A number that tells us something useful about the world can lose that value once people are rewarded or punished according to it. At about the same time as Goodhart, the American social scientist Donald Campbell made a similar argument about social policy: the more a single number is used to make important decisions, the more pressure there is to distort it, and the less it can be trusted.

Examples are not hard to find. When schools are judged mainly by their pupils' examination results, teachers may feel pressure to concentrate on the skills that are tested, and to spend less time on those that are not, such as music, art or independent thinking. The results may improve, but it is far from clear that the pupils are better educated. Results alone, in other words, can be a misleading guide. When hospitals in England were set a target of treating or admitting patients within four hours of their arrival in an emergency department, waiting times fell considerably. However, some reports suggested that patients were sometimes kept in ambulances outside the hospital, so that the clock did not start, or admitted to a ward simply to meet the deadline. In business, a sales team rewarded only for the number of contracts signed may sign contracts with customers who are unlikely to pay. In a well-known case in the United States, staff at the bank Wells Fargo, under pressure to meet demanding sales targets, opened millions of accounts that customers had never asked for, and in 2016 the bank was fined 185 million dollars.

It is important to be clear about what Goodhart's law does and does not say. It does not say that people who respond to targets in these ways are dishonest. Most are simply doing what the system rewards. Nor does it say that measurement is useless. Without numbers, it would be very difficult to know whether a hospital is getting better or worse, or whether one school is serving its pupils better than another. The problem arises when a single number is treated as if it were the thing that really matters, rather than an imperfect sign of it. The number of rat tails was meant to indicate a reduction in the number of rats. Once it became the target, it no longer did.

What, then, can be done? One common suggestion is to use several measures instead of one, so that improving one number at the expense of everything else becomes more difficult. A hospital might be judged not only on waiting times, but also on how many patients return within a week, and on what patients themselves say about their treatment. Another approach is to change the measures from time to time, so that people focus on the underlying goal rather than on any particular figure. A third is to combine numbers with the judgement of experienced people, such as school inspectors who visit classrooms rather than simply reading results tables. Some organisations also invite the people who will be measured to help choose the measures, on the grounds that nobody understands better how a particular figure could be manipulated.

None of these solutions is perfect. Using many measures can create so much paperwork that it takes time away from the work itself, and human judgement brings its own biases. Some critics argue that the answer is to abandon targets altogether and simply trust professionals to do their jobs well. This, I believe, goes too far. Targets have sometimes produced real improvements, and the public has a right to know how well services funded by their taxes are performing. The lesson of Goodhart's law is not that we should stop counting, but that we should never forget why we are counting. Those who design targets would do well to ask, before they start, how the people being measured are likely to respond, and to keep asking that question long after the target has been introduced.

Questions 27–30

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

• A It was introduced because rat catchers refused to work in the sewers.
• B It led some people to increase the number of rats.
• C It was successful in the short term.
• D It required people to hand in whole rats.

• A disagreed with Goodhart's original idea.
• B applied Goodhart's idea to social policy.
• C expressed Goodhart's idea in a more accessible way.
• D was the first person to describe the problem.

• A It had no effect on waiting times.
• B It was abandoned after a few years.
• C It may have encouraged some practices that did not benefit patients.
• D It was more successful than targets in schools.

• A are usually acting dishonestly.
• B are generally reacting to the way the system works.
• C should be punished.
• D are often unaware of what the target is.

Questions 31–35

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

Write the correct letter, A–I, next to Questions 31–35.

Possible solutions

One way to reduce the problem is to judge an organisation using a number of different 31Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer . For example, a hospital could be assessed partly on the 32Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer of its patients. Measures could also be 33Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer regularly. In schools, results could be considered together with the views of 34Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer who observe lessons. However, each of these approaches has drawbacks: having too many measures, for instance, can lead to an increase in 35Choose…ABCDEFGHISelect an answer .

• A opinions
• B costs
• C measures
• D politicians
• E paperwork
• F replaced
• G inspectors
• H patients
• I published

Questions 36–40

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