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Academic IELTS Reading Test 88 With Answers

IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 88 With Answers Paul Nash , Wealth in a Cold Climate, Memory Decoding

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For Answers Academic IELTS Reading Test 88 Answers

Reading Passage 1 Academic IELTS Reading Test 88

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on the Academic IELTS Reading Test 88 Reading Passage 1 below.

Paul Nash, 

{A} Paul Nash, the elder son of William Nash and his first wife, Caroline Jackson, was born in London on 11th May 1889. His father was a successful lawyer who became the Recorder of Abingdon. According to Ronald Blythe: “In 1901 the family returned to its native Buckinghamshire, where the garden of Wood Lane House at Iver Heath, and the countryside of the Chiltern Hills, with its sculptural beeches and chalky contours, were early influences on the development of the three children. Their lives were overshadowed by their mother’s mental illness and Nash himself was greatly helped by his nurse who, with some elderly neighbors, introduced him to the universe of plants.”

{B} Nash was educated at St. Paul’s School and the Slade School of Art, where he met Dora Carrington. Unlike some of his contemporaries at the Slade School, Nash remained untouched by the two post-impressionist exhibitions organized by Roger Fry in 1910 and 1912. Instead, he was influenced by the work of William Blake. He also became a close friend of Gordon Bottomley, who took a keen interest in his career.

{C} Nash had his first one-man show, of ink and wash drawings, at the Carfax Gallery in 1912. The following year he shared an exhibition at the Dorian Leigh Gallery with his brother, John Nash. Myfanwy Piper has added: “Nash had a noteworthy sense of order and of the niceties of presentation; his pictures were beautifully framed, drawings mounted, his studio precisely and decoratively tidy, and oddments which he collected were worked up into compositions.”

{D} Paul Nash was strongly attracted to Dora Carrington: He later recalled: “Carrington… was the dominating personality, I got an introduction to her and eventually won her regard by lending her my braces for a fancy-dress party. We were on the top of a bus and she wanted them then and there.”

{E} On the outbreak Nash considered the possibility of joining the British Army. He told a friend: “I am not keen to rush off and be a soldier. The whole damnable war is too horrible of course and I am all against killing anybody, speaking off-hand, but besides all that I believe both Jack and I might be more useful as ambulance and red cross men, and to that end we are training. Nash enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles. He told Gordon Bottomley: “I have joined the Artists’ London Regiment of Territorials, the old Corps which started with Rossetti, Leighton, and Millais as members in 1860. Every man must do his bit in this horrible business so I have given up painting. There are many nice creatures in my company and I enjoy the burst of exercise – marching, drilling all day in the open air about the pleasant parts of Regents Park and Hampstead Heath.”

{F} In March 1917 he was sent to the Western Front Nash, who took part in the offensive at Ypres, had reached the rank of lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment by 1916. Whenever possible, Nash made sketches of life in the trenches. In May 1917 he was invalided home after a non-military accident. While recuperating in London, Nash worked from his sketches to produce a series of war paintings. This work was well-received when exhibited later that year. As a result of this exhibition, Charles Masterman, head of the government’s War Propaganda Bureau (WPB), and the advice of Edward Marsh and William Rothenstein, it was decided to recruit Nash as a war artist. In November 1917 in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Passchendaele Nash returned to France.

{G} Nash was unhappy with his work as a member of the War Propaganda Bureau. He wrote at the time: “I am no longer an artist. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may burn their lousy souls.” However, as Myfanwy Piper has pointed out: “The drawings he made then, of shorn trees in ruined and flooded landscapes, were the works that made Nash’s reputation. They were shown at the Leicester Galleries in 1918 together with his first efforts at oil painting, in which he was self-taught and quickly successful, though his drawings made in the field had a more immediate public impact.

{H} In 1919 Nash moved to Dymchurch in Kent, beginning his well-known series of pictures of the sea, the breakwaters, and the long wall that prevents the sea from flooding Romney Marsh. This included the Winter Sea and Dymchurch Steps. Nash also painted the landscapes of the Chiltern Hills. In 1924 and 1928 he had successful exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries. Despite this popular acclaim in 1929, his work became more abstract. In 1933 Nash founded Unit One, the group of experimental painters, sculptors, and architects.

{I} During the Second World War Nash was employed by the Ministry of Information and the Air Ministry and paintings produced by him during this period include the Battle of Britain and Totes Meer. His biographer, Myfanwy Piper, has argued: “This war disturbed Nash but did not change his art as the last one had. His style and his habits were formed, and in the new war, he treated his new subjects as he had treated those he had been thinking about for so long. His late paintings, both oils, and watercolors are alternately brilliant and somber in color with the light of setting suns and rising moons spreading over wooded and hilly landscapes. “Paul Nash died at 35 Boscombe Spa Road, Bournemouth, on 11th July 1946. 

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct letter, A-G? 

Write your answers in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet.

What four statements are correct concerning Nash’s story?

(A) He did not make an effort after becoming a high-ranking official in the army. 

(B) He had a dream since his childhood. 

(C) He once temporarily ceased his painting career for some reason. 

(D) He was not affected by certain shows attractive to his other peers. 

(E) He had cooperation in art with his relative. 

(F) Some of his paintings were presented in a chaotic way. 

(G) His achievement after being enlisted in the army did not as much attention as his previous works.

Questions 5-10 

The reading Passage has eleven paragraphs A-I.

Write the correct letter A-I, in boxes 5-10 on your answer sheet. 

Which paragraph contains the following information? 

NB You may use any letter more than once.

(5) a charming lady in Nash’s eyes

(6) Nash’s passion for following particularly appreciated artists

(7) Nash’s works with contrast elements

(8) the true cause for Nash to join the military service

(9) the noticeable impact on Nash’s growth exerted from the rearing environment

(10) high praise for Nash’s unique taste of presenting his works

Questions 11-13 

Answer the questions below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

(11) Because of a popular display of Nash’s works created in the army, what did his leader designate him as?

(12) How did Nash learn oil painting?

(13) What change took place for Nash’s painting style in the late second decade of the twentieth century?

Reading Passage 2 Academic IELTS Reading Test 88

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based on the Academic IELTS Reading Test 88 Reading Passage 2 below.

Wealth in a Cold Climate

{A} Dr. William Masters was reading a book about mosquitoes when inspiration struck. “There was this anecdote about the great yellow fever epidemic that hit Philadelphia in 1793,” Masters recalls. “This epidemic decimated the city until the first frost came.” The inclement weather froze out the insects, allowing Philadelphia to recover.

{B} If the weather could be the key to a city’s fortunes, Masters thought, then why not to the historical fortunes of nations? And could frost lie at the heart of one of the most enduring economic mysteries of all – why are almost all the wealthy, industrialized nations to be found at altitudes above 40 degrees? After two years of research, he thinks that he has found a piece of the puzzle. Masters, an agricultural economist from Purdue University in Indiana, and Margaret McMillan at Tufts University, Boston, show that annual frosts are among the factors that distinguish rich nations from poor ones. Their study is published this month in the Journal of Economic Growth. The pair speculates that cold snaps have two main benefits – they freeze pests that would otherwise destroy crops and also freeze organisms, such as mosquitoes, that carry disease. The result is agricultural abundance and a big workforce.

{C} The academics took two sets of information. The first was average income for countries, the second climate data from the University of East Anglia. They found a curious tally between the sets. Countries having five or more frosty days a month are uniformly rich; those with fewer than five are impoverished. The authors speculate that the five-day figure is important; it could be the minimum time needed to kill pests in the soil. Masters says: “For example, Finland is a small country that is growing quickly, but Bolivia is a small country that isn’t growing at all. Perhaps climate has something to do with that.” In fact, limited frosts bring huge benefits to farmers. The chills kill insects or render them inactive; cold weather slows the break-up of plant and animal material in the soil, allowing it to become richer; and frosts ensure a build-up of moisture in the ground for spring, reducing dependence on seasonal rains. There are exceptions to the “cold equals rich” argument. There are well-heeled tropical countries such as Hong Kong and Singapore (both city-states, Masters notes), a result of their superior trading positions. Likewise, not all European countries are moneyed – in the former communist colonies, the economic potential was crushed by politics.

{D} Masters stresses that climate will never be the overriding factor – the wealth of nations is too complicated to be attributable to just one factor. Climate, he feels, somehow combines with other factors – such as the presence of institutions, including governments, and access to trading routes – to determine whether a country will do well. Traditionally, Masters says, economists thought that institutions had the biggest effect on the economy because they brought order to a country in the form of, for example, laws and property rights. With the order, so the thinking went, came affluence. “But there are some problems that even countries with institutions have not been able to get around,” he says. “My feeling is that, as countries get richer, they get better institutions. And the accumulation of wealth and improvement in governing institutions are both helped by a favorable environment, including climate.”

{E} This does not mean, he insists, that tropical countries are beyond economic help and destined to remain penniless. Instead, richer countries should change the way in which foreign aid is given. Instead of aid being geared towards improving governance, it should be spent on technology to improve agriculture and combat disease. Masters cites one example: “There are regions in India that have been provided with irrigation – agricultural productivity has gone up and there has been an improvement in health.” Supplying vaccines against tropical diseases and developing crop varieties that can grow in the tropics would break the poverty cycle.

{F} Other minds have applied themselves to the split between poor and rich nations, citing anthropological, climatic, and zoological reasons for why temperate nations are the most affluent. In 350BC, Aristotle observed that “those who live in a cold climate … are full of spirit”. Jared Diamond, from the University of California at Los Angeles, pointed out in his book Guns, Germs and Steel that Eurasia is broadly aligned east-west, while Africa and the Americas are aligned north-south. So, in Europe, crops can spread quickly across latitudes because climates are similar. One of the first domesticated crops, einkorn wheat, spread quickly from the Middle East into Europe; it took twice as long for corn to spread from Mexico to what is now the eastern United States. This easy movement along similar latitudes in Eurasia would also have meant faster dissemination of other technologies such as the wheel and writing, Diamond speculates. The region also boasted domesticated livestock, which could provide meat, wool, and motive power in the fields. Blessed with such natural advantages, Eurasia was bound to take off economically.

{G} John Gallup and Jeffrey Sachs, two US economists, have also pointed out striking correlations between the geographical location of countries and their wealth. They note that tropical countries between 23.45 degrees north and south of the equator are nearly all poor. In an article for the Harvard International Review, they concluded that “development surely seems to favor the temperate-zone economies, especially those in the northern hemisphere, and those that have managed to avoid both socialism and the ravages of war”. But Masters cautions against geographical determinism, the idea that tropical countries are beyond hope: “Human health and agriculture can be made better through scientific and technological research,” he says, “so we shouldn’t be writing off these countries. Take Singapore: without air conditioning, it wouldn’t be rich.” 

Questions 14-20

The reading passage has seven paragraphs, 

A-G Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-G from the list below. Write the correct number, i-xi, in boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings 

(i) The positive correlation between climate and country 

(ii) The wealth influenced by other factors besides climate 

(iii) The inspiration from reading a book 

(iv) Other researcher results still do not rule out exceptional cases 

(V) Eurasia has different attributes from Africa 

(vi) Low temperature may benefit people and crop 

(vii) The traditional view reflects the importance of institutions. 

(viii) The best result to use aid which makes a difference 

(ix) The spread of crop in European and other courtiers 

(x) confusions and exceptional cases such as Singapore

(14) Paragraph A

(15) Paragraph B

(16) Paragraph C

(17) Paragraph D

(18) Paragraph E

(19) Paragraph F

(20) Paragraph G

Questions 21-26

Summary Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using no more than two words from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 21-26 on your answer sheet.

Dr. William Master read a book saying that a(an) 21 ………….. which struck an American city of Philadelphia hundreds of years ago, had been terminated by a cold frost. And academics found that there is a positive contribution of a certain period of cold days to economic success as in the small country of 22…………, Yet besides excellent surroundings and climate, one country needs to improve both their economy and 23……… to achieve long prosperity. Thanks to resembling weather conditions across latitude, the whole continent of 24 ………… enjoy faster spread of its uniformity in many economic factors. Also crops such as 25………… are bound to spread faster than those countries aligned from South America to the North. William Master finally pointed out though geographical factors are important tropical countries such as 26……… still become rich due to scientific advancement. 

Reading Passage 3 Academic IELTS Reading Test 88

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are based on the Academic IELTS Reading Test 88 Reading Passage 3 below.

Memory Decoding

Try this memory test: Study each face and compose a vivid image for the person’s first and last name. Rose Leo, for example, could be a rosebud and a lion. Fill in the blanks on the next page. The Examinations School at Oxford University is an austere building of oak-paneled rooms, large Gothic windows, and looming portraits of eminent dukes and earls. It is where generations of Oxford students have tested their memory on final exams, and it is where, last August, 34 contestants gathered at the World Memory Championships to be examined in an entirely different manner: 

{A} In timed trials, contestants were challenged to look at and then recite a two-page poem, memorize rows of 40-digit numbers, recall the names of 110 people after looking at their photographs, and perform seven other feats of extraordinary retention. Some tests took just a few minutes; others lasted hours. In the 14 years since the World Memory Championships was founded, no one has memorized the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards in less than 30 seconds. That nice round number has become the four-minute mile of competitive memory, a benchmark that the world’s best “mental athletes,” as some of them like to be called, is closing in on. Most contestants claim to have just average memories, and scientific testing confirms that they’re not just being modest. Their feats are based on tricks that capitalize on how the human brain encodes information. Anyone can learn them.

{B} Psychologists Elizabeth Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the monograph Superior Memory, recently teamed up with Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London to study eight people, including Karsten, who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championships. They wondered if the contestants’ brains were different in some way. The researchers put the competitors and a group of control subjects into an MRI machine and asked them to perform several different memory tests while their brains were being scanned. When it came to memorizing sequences of three-digit numbers, the difference between the memory contestants and the control subjects was, as expected, immense. However, when they were shown photographs of magnified snowflakes, images that the competitors had never tried to memorize before, the champions did no better than the control group. When the researchers analyzed the brain scans, they found that the memory champs were activating some brain regions that were different from those the control subjects were using. These regions, which included the right posterior hippocampus, are known to be involved in visual memory and spatial navigation.

{C} It might seem odd that the memory contestants would use visual imagery and spatial navigation to remember numbers, but the activity makes sense when their techniques are revealed. Cooke, a 23-year-old cognitive-science graduate student with a shoulder-length mop of curly hair, is a grandmaster of brain storage. He can memorize the order of 10 decks of playing cards in less than an hour or one deck of cards in less than a minute. He is closing in on the 30-second deck. In the Lamb and Flag, Cooke pulled out a deck of cards and shuffled it. He held up three cards—the 7 of spades, the queen of clubs, and the 10 of spades. He pointed at a fireplace and said, “Destiny’s Child is whacking Franz Schubert with handbags.” The next three cards were the king of hearts, the king of spades, and the jack of clubs.

{D} How did he do it? Cooke has already memorized a specific person, verb, and object that he associates with each card in the deck. For example, for the 7 of spades, the person (or, in this case, persons) is always the singing group Destiny’s Child, the action is surviving a storm, and the image is a dinghy. The queen of clubs is always his friend Henrietta, the action is thwacking with a handbag, and the image is of wardrobes filled with designer clothes. When Cooke commits a deck to memory, he does it three cards at a time. Every three-card group forms a single image of a person doing something to an object. The first card in the triplet becomes the person, the second the verb, the third the object. He then places those images along a specific familiar route, such as the one he took through the Lamb and Flag. In competitions, he uses an imaginary route that he has designed to be as smooth and downhill as possible. When it comes time to recall, Cooke takes a mental walk along his route and translates the images into cards. That’s why the MRIs of the memory contestants showed activation in the brain areas associated with visual imagery and spatial navigation.

{E} The more resonant the images are, the more difficult they are to forget. But even meaningful information is hard to remember when there’s a lot of it. That’s why competitive memorizers place their images along an imaginary route. That technique, known as the loci method, reportedly originated in 477 B.C. with the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos. Simonides was the sole survivor of a roof collapse that killed all the other guests at a royal banquet. The bodies were mangled beyond recognition, but Simonides was able to reconstruct the guest list by closing his eyes and recalling each individual around the dinner table. What he had discovered was that our brains are exceptionally good at remembering images and spatial information. Evolutionary psychologists have offered an explanation: Presumably, our ancestors found it important to recall where they found their last meal or the way back to the cave. After Simonides’ discovery, the loci method became popular across ancient Greece as a trick for memorizing speeches and texts. Aristotle wrote about it, and later a number of treatises on the art of memory were published in Rome. Before printed books, the art of memory was considered a staple of classical education, on a par with grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

{F} The most famous of the naturals was the Russian journalist S. V. Shereshevskii, who could recall long lists of numbers memorized decades earlier, as well as poems, strings of nonsense syllables, and just about anything else he was asked to remember. “The capacity of his memory had no distinct limits,” wrote Alexander Luria, the Russian psychologist who studied Shereshevskii from the 1920s to the 1950s. Shereshevski also had synesthesia, a rare condition in which the senses become intertwined. For example, every number may be associated with a color or every word with a taste. Synesthetic reactions evoke a response in more areas of the brain, making memory easier.

{G} K. Anders Ericsson, a Swedish-born psychologist at Florida State University, thinks anyone can acquire Shereshevski’s skills. He cites an experiment with S. F, an undergraduate who was paid to take a standard test of memory called the digit span for one hour a day, two or three days a week. When he started, he could hold, like most people, only about seven digits in his head at any given time (conveniently, the length of a phone number). Over two years, S. F. completed 250 hours of testing. By then, he had stretched his digit span from 7 to more than 80. The study of S. F. led Ericsson to believe that innately superior memory doesn’t exist at all When he reviewed original case studies of naturals, he found that exceptional memorizers were using techniques-sometimes without realizing it, and lots of practice. Often, exceptional memory was only for a single type of material, like digits. “If we look at some of these memory tasks, they’re the kind of thing most people don’t even waste one-hour practicing, but if they wasted 50 hours, they’d be exceptional at it,” Ericsson says. It would be remarkable, he adds, to find a “person who is exceptional across a number of tasks. I don’t think that there’s any compelling evidence that there are such people.”

Questions 27-30 Academic IELTS Reading Test 88

The reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-G. 

Which paragraph contains the following information? 

Write the correct letter A-G, in boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet.

(27) The reason why competence of super memory is significant in academic settings 

(28) Mention of a contest for extraordinary memory held in consecutive years  

(29) An demonstrative example of an extraordinary person who did an unusual recalling game 

(30) A belief that extraordinary memory can be gained through enough practice 

(31) A depiction of the rare ability which assists the extraordinary memory reactions

Questions 32-36 Academic IELTS Reading Test 88

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using no more than three words from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 32-36 on your answer sheet. 

Using visual imagery and spatial navigation to remember numbers are investigated and explained. A man called Ed Cooke in a pub, spoke a string of odd words when he held 7 of the spades (the first one of any cards group) was remembered as he encoded it to a …….32…….. and the card deck to memory are set to be one time of an order of …….33……..; When it came time to recall, Cooke took a ……..34…….. along his way and interpreted the imaginary scene into cards. This superior memory skill can be traced back to Ancient Greece, the strategy was called …….35…….. which had been a major subject in ancient ……36……..

Questions 37-38

Choose TWO correct letters, A-E

Write your answers in boxes 37-38 on your answer sheet.

According to the World Memory Championships, what activities need good memory?

(A) order for a large group of each digit

(B) recall people’s face

(C) resemble a long Greek poem

(D) match name with pictures and features

(E) recall what people ate and did yesterday

Questions 39-40

Choose TWO correct letter, A-E

Write your answers in boxes 39-40 on your answer sheet.

What is the result of Psychologists Elizabeth Valentine and John Wilding’s MRI Scan experiment find out?

(A) the champions ‘brains are different in some way from common people

(B) the difference in the brain of champions’ scan image to control subjects are shown when memorizing sequences of three-digit numbers

(C) champions did much worse when they are asked to remember photographs

(D) the memory-champs activated more brain regions than control subjects

(E) there is some part in the brain coping with visual and spatial memory

For Answers Academic IELTS Reading Test 88 Answers

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