IELTS Academic Reading practice test 2 (with answers)

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

The Humble Pencil

Few objects are as familiar, or as overlooked, as the pencil. Billions are produced every year, and most people use one without giving any thought to how it came to exist. Yet the story of the pencil involves a lucky geological discovery, a wartime shortage and a series of technical inventions that took more than two centuries to perfect.

The story begins in the 1560s in Borrowdale, a valley in the north-west of England, where local shepherds found a deposit of an unusual black substance after a storm had uprooted a tree. At first they used it to mark their sheep. The material was graphite, a form of carbon, and the Borrowdale deposit was exceptionally pure – so pure that it could be cut into solid sticks. Because graphite left a darker mark than lead, which had previously been used for writing, and because it could be easily rubbed out, the sticks became popular with artists and merchants. The mistaken belief that the substance was a type of lead gave rise to the term ‘lead pencil’, which survives to this day, even though no pencil has ever contained lead in its core.

Graphite from Borrowdale proved so valuable that the mine was guarded and was opened only for a few weeks each year to prevent the market from being flooded. In the eighteenth century, stealing graphite became a serious crime, punishable by imprisonment or transportation to the colonies. The sticks, however, had a practical drawback: they were brittle and stained the user’s fingers. Writers first wrapped them in string or sheepskin; later, Italian craftsmen are believed to have been among the first to insert the graphite into hollowed-out wooden holders, an idea that was soon copied elsewhere.

The modern pencil owes much to a conflict. In 1794 France was at war with Britain and could no longer import English graphite. The French minister of war asked Nicolas-Jacques Conté, a painter and scientist, to find an alternative. Within a few days, Conté had developed a method of mixing powdered graphite of lower quality with clay, shaping the paste into rods and baking them in a kiln. His process had an important additional benefit: by changing the proportion of clay, manufacturers could control how hard or soft the core would be. More clay produced a harder, lighter line; less clay produced a softer, darker one. This is the basis of the grading system still used today, in which ‘H’ indicates hardness and ‘B’ indicates blackness.

During the nineteenth century, pencil-making grew into a major industry, particularly around the German city of Nuremberg and later in the United States. In 1858 an American, Hymen Lipman, received a patent for attaching an eraser to the end of a pencil, although the patent was later declared invalid on the grounds that he had merely combined two existing objects. American manufacturers also began to paint their pencils yellow in the 1890s. At the time, the finest graphite was thought to come from China, where yellow was associated with royalty, and the colour was intended to suggest quality. The practice was so successful that yellow remains the most common pencil colour in North America.

Today a single factory can make several million pencils a day, and the wood most often used is cedar, which is soft enough to sharpen easily and does not split. Despite the arrival of computers and touchscreens, demand has remained surprisingly stable. Pencils are cheap, they work in conditions where pens fail – including in space and under water – and their marks can be erased. For many artists, architects and schoolchildren, there is still no satisfactory substitute.

Questions 1–5

Complete the table below.

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

Write your answers in boxes 1–5 on your answer sheet.

Key stages in the history of the pencil

Questions 6–9

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 6–9 on your answer sheet, 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

6  Early pencils contained a small amount of lead mixed with graphite.

7  The Borrowdale mine was closed for most of the year to keep prices high.

8  Conté was paid a large sum of money for his invention.

9  Adding more clay to the mixture makes a darker line.

Questions 10–13

Answer the questions below.

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

Write your answers in boxes 10–13 on your answer sheet.

10. What did writers originally wrap around graphite sticks, apart from string? (10) ________

11. Which country was believed to produce the best graphite in the 1890s? (11) ________

12. Which type of wood is most commonly used for pencils today? (12) ________

13. Apart from space, in what conditions do pencils work when pens do not? (13) ________

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

Cooling the Urban Heat Island

A  On a summer afternoon, the centre of a large city can be several degrees hotter than the surrounding countryside. At night the difference is often greater still: measurements in some European capitals have recorded urban temperatures up to 10°C higher than those in nearby villages. This phenomenon, known as the urban heat island, was first described in the early nineteenth century by Luke Howard, an amateur meteorologist who noticed that thermometers in London consistently gave higher readings than those outside the city. Two hundred years later, with more than half of the world’s population living in urban areas, it has become a pressing concern for planners and health authorities.

B  Several factors combine to create the effect. Dark surfaces such as asphalt roads and tar roofs absorb a large proportion of the sunlight that falls on them and release the stored heat slowly after sunset. Tall buildings trap warm air and block the breezes that would otherwise carry it away, while traffic, air-conditioning units and industry add heat directly. Perhaps most important is the lack of vegetation. In the countryside, plants release water vapour through their leaves, a process called evapotranspiration, which cools the air in much the same way that sweating cools the human body. Paved surfaces offer no such relief.

C  The consequences go beyond discomfort. During the European heatwave of 2003, tens of thousands of deaths were linked to extreme temperatures, and studies found that the risk was considerably higher in densely built city districts than in greener suburbs. Older people, young children and those with heart or lung conditions are especially vulnerable. Higher temperatures also increase demand for electricity, as more air-conditioning is used, which in turn can raise emissions from power stations and place strain on supply networks at exactly the moment they are needed most.

D  One of the simplest responses is to change the colour of the city. Light-coloured materials reflect more sunlight and therefore absorb less heat. In Los Angeles, a programme to coat streets with a grey-white sealant reduced surface temperatures by around 6°C on sunny days, and several cities now require new flat roofs to be painted white or covered with reflective membranes. Critics point out, however, that reflective pavements can increase glare and may bounce heat back onto pedestrians and nearby walls, so the benefits depend heavily on where the materials are used.

E  A second approach is to bring nature back into the city. Trees provide shade and evapotranspiration at the same time, and research in Melbourne found that streets with a full canopy of trees could be up to 4°C cooler at ground level than similar streets without them. ‘Green roofs’, planted with grasses or low-growing shrubs, insulate buildings as well as cooling the air around them, while small urban parks can create pockets of cooler air that extend into neighbouring streets. Such measures require long-term investment, since trees take years to mature, and in dry climates they must be watered – a significant cost where water is scarce.

F  Increasingly, planners are recognising that no single measure is sufficient. The city of Medellín in Colombia, for example, has created a network of thirty ‘green corridors’ along roads and waterways, combining trees, gardens and shaded paths. The project has been credited with lowering temperatures along the corridors by around 2°C, and it also employs local residents, many from poor neighbourhoods, as gardeners. Its success has encouraged other cities to think of cooling not as a technical problem to be solved with one product, but as part of a wider effort to make urban life healthier.

Questions 14–18

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A–F.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A–F, in boxes 14–18 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

Paragraphs

A  Paragraph A

B  Paragraph B

C  Paragraph C

D  Paragraph D

E  Paragraph E

F  Paragraph F

14  a comparison between plants and a natural process in the human body

15  a reference to the person who first identified the urban heat island

16  a possible disadvantage of making surfaces more reflective

17  an example of a project that also created jobs

18  groups of people who are most at risk from high temperatures

Questions 19–22

Complete the sentences below.

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

Write your answers in boxes 19–22 on your answer sheet.

19. Asphalt and tar roofs release the heat they have absorbed slowly after (19) ________.

20. Tall buildings stop (20) ________ from removing warm air.

21. During heatwaves, greater use of air-conditioning can put pressure on electricity (21) ________.

22. In dry places, the need to water trees is a (22) ________.

Questions 23–24

Choose TWO letters, A–E.

Write the correct letters in boxes 23 and 24 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO benefits of trees in cities are mentioned in the passage?

A  They reduce noise from traffic.

B  They give shade.

C  They lower air pollution.

D  They cool the air by releasing water.

E  They increase the value of houses.

Questions 25–26

Choose TWO letters, A–E.

Write the correct letters in boxes 25 and 26 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO statements about the Medellín project are true?

A  It was the first project of its kind in South America.

B  It includes routes beside rivers and streams.

C  It reduced temperatures across the whole city.

D  It gives work to people from poorer areas.

E  It was paid for by a private company.

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

The Placebo Puzzle

In modern medicine, the word ‘placebo’ is usually spoken with a hint of dismissal. A placebo is a treatment with no active ingredient – a sugar pill or a saline injection – and its main role is as a point of comparison in clinical trials. If a new drug performs no better than a placebo, it is judged to be ineffective. Yet the very need for this comparison reveals something remarkable: patients who receive nothing more than a sugar pill often get better. Explaining why has become one of the more intriguing problems in medical science.

The modern study of the effect is often traced to Henry Beecher, an American anaesthetist who served with the army during the Second World War. According to an account he later gave, when supplies of morphine ran out, a nurse injected a wounded soldier with salt water while telling him it was a powerful painkiller, and the soldier’s pain was relieved. In 1955 Beecher published an influential paper claiming that around a third of patients in a range of studies had responded to placebos. Later researchers criticised his methods, noting that many of the patients might have recovered anyway, but the paper helped to establish the placebo-controlled trial as the standard method for testing new treatments.

Part of what is called the placebo effect is indeed not a real effect at all. Many conditions, from colds to back pain, improve naturally over time, and people tend to seek treatment when their symptoms are at their worst, so some improvement would be expected whatever was done. Patients in trials may also report feeling better in order to please the doctors who are treating them. Nevertheless, careful experiments have shown that placebos can produce genuine physical changes. In studies of pain, for instance, brain scans have shown that patients who believe they have received a painkiller release natural pain-relieving chemicals called endorphins. When these chemicals are blocked with another drug, the placebo’s effect on pain largely disappears.

Expectation appears to be central. The more a patient believes in a treatment, the stronger the response tends to be, and the details of how a placebo is presented make a measurable difference. Studies have found that two pills are more effective than one, that injections work better than pills, and that expensive-looking tablets outperform cheap ones. The doctor’s manner matters too. In an experiment led by Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard Medical School, patients with irritable bowel syndrome who received placebo treatment from a warm, attentive practitioner improved significantly more than those treated in a brief, impersonal way.

Kaptchuk’s team later produced an even more surprising result. They gave patients pills that were openly labelled as placebos and told them clearly that the pills contained no medicine – but also explained that placebos had been shown to help in previous studies. Remarkably, these patients still improved more than a group who received no treatment at all. Such ‘open-label’ placebos have since been tested for conditions including chronic back pain and fatigue, with encouraging if modest results. If confirmed, they could allow doctors to use the placebo effect without deceiving patients, which has long been regarded as the main ethical objection.

There are limits, however. Placebos do not shrink tumours, cure infections or repair broken bones; their effects are largest for symptoms that depend on the brain’s interpretation of signals from the body, such as pain, nausea and fatigue. Moreover, the same mechanism can work in reverse. In the so-called nocebo effect, patients who expect a treatment to cause harm often experience side effects, even when they have taken a dummy pill. The psychologist Irving Kirsch has argued that such findings should make doctors think carefully about how they describe risks, since warning patients about possible side effects may itself make those effects more likely.

For all its mysteries, the placebo effect offers an important lesson. It shows that the experience of illness is shaped not only by biology but also by belief, context and the relationship between patient and doctor. A treatment, in other words, is never just a chemical; it is also a ritual, and that ritual has power of its own.

Questions 27–30

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

Write the correct letter in boxes 27–30 on your answer sheet.

27  According to the first paragraph, placebos are mainly used

A  to treat patients who refuse real medicine.

B  as a basis for judging new medicines.

C  to reduce the cost of clinical trials.

D  for patients with mild symptoms.

28  What was a weakness of Beecher’s 1955 paper, according to later researchers?

A  It relied on evidence from a single soldier.

B  It ignored the effects of morphine.

C  It did not consider natural recovery.

D  It was based on too few studies.

29  The experiment involving endorphins showed that

A  placebos work only for minor pain.

B  patients exaggerate the effects of placebos.

C  placebo pain relief has a physical cause.

D  brain scans are unreliable in placebo research.

30  What is the main advantage of open-label placebos?

A  They are cheaper than other treatments.

B  They work faster than hidden placebos.

C  They avoid the need to mislead patients.

D  They can be used for any illness.

Questions 31–35

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 31–35 on your answer sheet, 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

31  Some of the improvement seen in placebo groups would have happened without any treatment.

32  The colour of a placebo pill has a greater influence than its price.

33  Placebos can be effective in curing infections.

34  The way doctors explain side effects may influence whether patients experience them.

35  The placebo effect demonstrates that illness is purely a matter of biology.

Questions 36–40

Look at the following statements (Questions 36–40) and the list of people below.

Match each statement with the correct person, A, B or C.

Write the correct letter, A, B or C, in boxes 36–40 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

List of People

A  Henry Beecher

B  Ted Kaptchuk

C  Irving Kirsch

36  described a case in which salt water relieved a patient’s pain

37  showed that a doctor’s behaviour affects the response to a placebo

38  suggested that warnings about risks may cause harm

39  found that patients improved even when they knew they were taking a placebo

40  helped to make placebo-controlled trials the normal way of testing treatments