IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 9

READING PASSAGE 1

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

The paperback revolution

Today, cheap paperback books are so familiar that it is hard to imagine a time without them. They are sold in supermarkets, airports and railway stations, and many of the most famous novels of the last hundred years are best known in paperback form. Yet the modern paperback is less than a century old, and its success was far from certain when it first appeared.

Cheap books were not a new idea. In nineteenth-century Britain, novels with brightly coloured paper covers were sold at railway bookstalls for travellers who wanted something to read on a long journey. In Germany, the publisher Christian Bernhard Tauchnitz began in 1841 to produce inexpensive editions of British and American novels in English. These were intended for British and American travellers on the European continent, and an agreement with publishers in Britain meant that they could not legally be sold there. Then, in 1932, a Hamburg company called Albatross launched a series of paperbacks that were carefully designed. The books were all the same convenient size, the typefaces were clear and elegant, and the colour of each cover indicated the kind of book inside.

The person who turned the paperback into a mass-market product, however, was a British publisher named Allen Lane. According to a story that Lane himself told many times, the idea came to him in 1934 at Exeter railway station, on his way back to London after spending a weekend with the crime writer Agatha Christie. Looking for something to read on the train, he found nothing at the station bookstall except magazines and cheap reprints of old-fashioned Victorian novels. Historians have pointed out that the details of this story changed from one telling to the next, and that Lane was certainly aware of the Albatross books. Whatever its origins, his idea was simple: good, modern books should be available to everyone for the price of a packet of cigarettes, which in 1935 was sixpence.

Few people in the book trade believed that this could work. Booksellers feared that cheap paperbacks would take sales away from the more expensive hardback editions on which their profits depended. Many authors were worried that they would earn very little from each copy sold. Publishers pointed out that, at sixpence a book, a profit could be made only if enormous numbers of copies were sold. Lane was at that time the managing director of a publishing company called The Bodley Head, but its board refused to support the scheme. As a result, Lane and his two brothers, Richard and John, used their own money to start the new series, which they called Penguin Books. They bought the rights to reprint ten titles that had already been published in hardback, including novels by Agatha Christie and the American writer Ernest Hemingway, and a biography of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley by the French writer André Maurois.

The turning point came when Lane showed the books to Clifford Prescott, a buyer for the Woolworths chain of stores, which sold a wide range of goods at low prices. Prescott was not convinced at first that books would sell in his stores. According to one account, it was his wife who persuaded him, after she saw the books on his desk and said that she would buy them. Whatever the reason, Prescott ordered 63,500 copies, and this single order meant that the series could go ahead. Within twelve months, Penguin had sold more than three million books.

Part of the series' appeal lay in its design. The name was chosen because it sounded friendly but dignified, and a young member of staff, Edward Young, was sent to London Zoo to make sketches of penguins for the logo. The covers were divided into three horizontal bands, and their colour showed the type of book: orange for general fiction, green for crime and dark blue for biography. Unlike many cheap books of the time, the covers carried no pictures. Instead, they showed only the title, the author's name and the Penguin logo, which suggested that these were serious books rather than sensational entertainment. In 1937, Lane started a second series, Pelican Books, which offered serious non-fiction on subjects such as science, economics and history.

The Second World War helped the paperback to become established. When paper was rationed in Britain, each publisher was given a share based on the amount it had used before the war. Because Penguin had been printing such large numbers of books, it received a generous supply. Paperbacks were also ideal for soldiers, who could carry them easily, and in the United States, a scheme called the Armed Services Editions produced more than 120 million copies of around 1,300 titles for American troops. These books were specially shaped so that they would fit into the pocket of a soldier's uniform. Many young people who had never owned a book before became regular readers as a result.

By the 1950s, the paperback was accepted as a normal part of publishing, and the fears of booksellers had proved largely unfounded: cheap editions had created millions of new readers rather than simply replacing sales of hardbacks. Lane's real achievement was not to invent the cheap book, which already existed, but to show that serious books could be sold cheaply in very large numbers.

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.

Penguin Books

Price and design

• Price was the same as that of a packet of 81 word .
• The drawings for the logo were made at a 91 word .
• Cover colours: orange for general fiction, green for 101 word , dark blue for biography.
• Covers had no 111 word , to show that the books were serious.

The war years

• Penguin received a large share of the 121 word that was available.
• In the USA, the Armed Services Editions were designed to fit in a soldier's 131 word .

READING PASSAGE 2

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

City life: how wildlife is adapting to urban environments

A Cities are among the fastest-changing environments on Earth. In the space of a few generations, fields and forests can be replaced by roads, buildings and artificial light, and the animals that remain must cope with noise, pollution and a diet that includes human food waste. For much of the twentieth century, most biologists assumed that evolution worked too slowly to be observed in a human lifetime. It now appears, however, that cities are producing measurable changes in some species within a few decades, and researchers have begun to treat urban areas as natural laboratories for studying evolution as it happens. Finding that town and country animals differ, however, is only the first step. Biologists must still ask how each difference arose, and whether young animals inherit it or simply acquire it during their own lives.

B The best-known early example comes from the industrial cities of nineteenth-century England. The peppered moth normally has pale wings with dark spots, which allow it to rest unseen on tree trunks covered with pale lichens. As factory smoke killed the lichens and blackened the trees, a rare dark form of the moth became more and more common, until in some areas it made up almost the entire population. In the 1950s, the biologist Bernard Kettlewell carried out experiments which suggested that birds were finding and eating the pale moths more easily on the darkened trees. After laws were introduced to reduce air pollution, the trees gradually became paler again, and the dark form of the moth became rare once more.

C Not every change seen in city animals, however, is the result of evolution. In the Dutch city of Leiden, Hans Slabbekoorn and his colleagues recorded the songs of great tits, a common garden bird, in quiet and noisy parts of the city. They found that birds living near busy roads sang at a higher pitch than those in quieter areas. Low sounds are easily drowned out by the rumble of traffic, so a higher song is more likely to be heard by other birds. Because young great tits learn their songs by listening to older birds, though, this difference may simply be the result of each bird adjusting its behaviour to its surroundings, rather than of any change in its genes.

D Other changes appear to be physical. Kristin Winchell studied small lizards called anoles in Puerto Rico, comparing populations in towns with those in nearby forests. The urban lizards had longer legs and more of the tiny, sticky scales on their toes that help them to grip. These features seem to help the lizards to run across and cling to smooth surfaces such as painted walls, metal and glass, which are much more slippery than tree bark. Importantly, the same differences were found in three separate cities, which makes it unlikely that they arose by chance.

E In some cases, the changes may even be saving lives. In the American state of Nebraska, Charles Brown and Mary Bomberger Brown studied cliff swallows, birds which often build their nests under road bridges. Over thirty years, they noticed that the wings of the swallows in their study area were becoming shorter, and they also found that the birds killed by passing cars tended to have longer wings than the population as a whole. A shorter wing allows a bird to rise more steeply and turn more quickly, which may help it to escape an approaching vehicle. During the same period, the number of dead swallows that the researchers found on the roads fell sharply, although they accept that other factors may also have been involved.

F City landscapes can also divide animal populations. In New York, Jason Munshi-South found that white-footed mice living in different city parks had become genetically distinct from one another, because roads and buildings prevented them from moving between parks and breeding. Some of the genetic differences between city and country mice involved genes linked to digestion, and Munshi-South has suggested that this may reflect a diet that includes more fatty food, possibly including food thrown away by people.

G There may also be differences in behaviour and intelligence. On the Caribbean island of Barbados, Jean-Nicolas Audet and his colleagues tested bullfinches caught in towns and in the countryside. The town birds were bolder, and they were quicker to solve problems, such as opening a small drawer to get at food. The researchers had expected that this advantage would come at a cost, and that the clever town birds would have weaker immune systems. In fact, the town birds also had stronger immune systems than their country relatives. It is still not clear how many species are able to adapt in these ways, and many cannot survive in cities at all. Nevertheless, studies like these are changing the way biologists think about the relationship between people and the natural world.

Questions 14–18

Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A–G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

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

Questions 19–23

Look at the following statements (Questions 19–23) and the list of researchers below.

Match each statement with the correct researcher or researchers, A–F.

Write the correct letter, A–F, next to Questions 19–23.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

List of Researchers

• A Hans Slabbekoorn
• B Kristin Winchell
• C Charles Brown and Mary Bomberger Brown
• D Jason Munshi-South
• E Jean-Nicolas Audet
• F Bernard Kettlewell

Questions 24–26

Complete the summary below.

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

The peppered moth

The pale colouring of the peppered moth once made it hard to see on trees that were covered in 242 words . However, 252 words from industry killed these and turned the trees black, and the dark form of the moth became widespread. Experiments carried out in the 1950s indicated that the pale moths were more easily found by 262 words . Once the air became cleaner, the pale form became common again.

READING PASSAGE 3

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

In praise of forgetting

Most of us regard forgetting as a failure. We are annoyed when we cannot remember where we left our keys, embarrassed when a familiar name escapes us, and anxious when we start to forget things more often as we get older. There is a large industry of books, apps and courses that promise to improve our memories, and we tend to admire people who can remember huge amounts of information. There is nothing wrong with these techniques, which can be genuinely useful to students preparing for examinations, for example. However, the assumption behind them, that forgetting is simply something that goes wrong with memory, is in my view mistaken, or at least seriously incomplete.

The scientific study of forgetting began in the 1880s with the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. Using himself as his only subject, he learned lists of meaningless syllables, put them aside, and then learned them again after different intervals. By comparing the effort a list required the first time with the effort it took on the second occasion, he could measure how much of the original learning remained, even when he could no longer recite the list. After a short delay, he could relearn a list quite quickly, but as the interval grew, this advantage shrank, steeply at first and then much more slowly. This pattern, which became known as the forgetting curve, has been confirmed many times since. Ebbinghaus himself saw forgetting as a gradual fading of memories over time, and for most of the following century, researchers continued to treat it in the same way, as a loss to be measured and, if possible, prevented.

A very different picture emerges from the case of Solomon Shereshevsky, a Russian journalist who was studied for around thirty years by the psychologist Alexander Luria. Shereshevsky could repeat long lists of numbers or words after hearing them once, and he could still recall them perfectly many years later. Yet his remarkable memory was not always an advantage. He found it hard to recognise people's faces, because a face looked different to him every time its owner's expression changed. He also had great difficulty understanding poetry and other writing in which words are used in a non-literal way, because each word called up such a vivid image that the overall meaning was lost. His case suggests that a memory which keeps every detail can make it harder, not easier, to make sense of the world.

More recently, a number of neuroscientists have argued that forgetting is an essential part of how memory works. In an influential paper published in 2017, Blake Richards and Paul Frankland of the University of Toronto suggested that the purpose of memory is not to preserve information as accurately as possible, but to help us make good decisions. From this point of view, forgetting is useful in two ways. First, it allows us to get rid of information that is out of date, such as where we parked the car last week, so that it does not interfere with what we need to remember now. Second, by allowing the details of individual experiences to fade, it helps us to keep the general lesson that they have in common, and to apply that lesson to new situations that are similar but not identical. Computer scientists recognise a similar problem: a computer program that learns every detail of its training examples often performs badly when it meets new examples, because it cannot tell the important features from the unimportant ones.

There is also growing evidence that some forgetting involves active changes in the brain, rather than simple decay. New nerve cells continue to be produced in adult animals in a region called the hippocampus, which plays an important part in forming memories. In one experiment, researchers increased the production of these new cells in adult mice after the animals had learned a task, and the mice later had more difficulty retrieving what they had learned. It seems that a change which helps the brain to form new connections may also make older memories harder to reach.

Psychologists have found that we may even be able to influence what we forget. Michael Anderson and his colleagues have shown that when people practise recalling some items from a list, they become worse at remembering related items they did not practise, an effect known as retrieval-induced forgetting. Anderson has also found that people can be trained to push unwanted memories out of their minds, and that memories which are repeatedly pushed away in this way become harder to recall later. Some researchers hope that this could eventually help people who suffer from distressing memories. It is still too early to say whether this will be possible, however, and the results of laboratory experiments do not always apply to real life.

None of this means, of course, that all memory loss is harmless. The severe memory loss caused by illnesses such as dementia is a serious problem, and it is quite different from the everyday forgetting that I have been describing. Nor do I share the anxiety of those commentators who believe that by storing information on our phones, rather than in our heads, we are damaging our ability to remember. Human beings have always relied on external aids to memory, from shopping lists to libraries, and I see no convincing evidence that phones are any different. Forgetting the name of an actor in a film is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It may instead be a sign that the brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Questions 27–31

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

• A spend too much money on improving their memory.
• B regard forgetting as a fault in the way the mind works.
• C have better memories than they realise.
• D do not notice how often they forget things.

• A how well he remembered familiar words and unfamiliar syllables
• B the effort needed to learn the same list on two different occasions
• C the performance of two people after the same delay
• D the number of syllables he remembered with and without a prompt

• A he was not very interested in other people.
• B his memory was less reliable than Luria believed.
• C an exceptional memory can make some tasks more difficult.
• D memories of faces are stored differently from memories of words.

• A allows people to concentrate for longer periods.
• B stops the brain from running out of storage space.
• C helps people to use past experience in new situations.
• D makes unpleasant experiences less painful to remember.

• A Most forgetting is caused by damage to brain cells.
• B Changes in the brain can make earlier learning harder to retrieve.
• C New brain cells help to make old memories stronger.
• D All memories are formed in a single region of the brain.

Questions 32–36

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

Questions 37–40

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

Write the correct letter, A–F, next to Questions 37–40.

• A was the same for meaningful and meaningless material.
• B fell most sharply at first.
• C improves with regular practice.
• D can make it harder to find the car on a later visit.
• E can make other items on the same list harder to recall.
• F should not be confused with the normal lapses of memory that everyone experiences.