Site icon IELTS Fever

Academic Reading Test 81 With Answers

Academic Reading Test 81 With Answers Passage 1 food advertising on children, Passage 2 Pollution! in the Bay, Passage 3 Morse Code

IELTSFever Academic Reading Test 81 With Answers Passage 1 food advertising on children, Passage 2 Pollution! in the Bay, Passage 3 Morse Code we prefer you to work offline, download the test paper and blank answer sheet.

For any query you can mail us at help@ieltsfever.com or you can mention your query in the comments section. Or send your questions on our IELTSfever Facebook page. Best of luck with your exam

Question PDF IELTSFever-academic-reading-test-81.pdf

For Answers Academic IELTS Reading Test 81 Answers

Reading Passage 1 Academic Reading Test 81 With Answers

Food Advertising on Children

The Food Standards Agency commissioned this review to examine the current research evidence on:

{A} Children’s food promotion is dominated by television advertising, and the great majority of this promotes the so-called “Big Four” of pre-sugary breakfast cereals, soft drinks, confectionery, and savory snacks. In the last ten years advertising for fast food outlets have rapidly increased. There is some evidence that the dominance of television has recently begun to wane. The importance of strong, global branding reinforces a need for multi-faceted communications combining television with merchandising, ‘tie-ins’ and point of sale activity. The advertised diet contrasts sharply with that recommended by public health advisors, and themes of fun and fantasy or taste, rather than health and nutrition, are used to promote it to children. Meanwhile, the recommended diet gets little promotional support.

{B} There is plenty of evidence that children notice and enjoy food promotion. However, establishing whether this actually influences them is a complex problem. The review tackled it by looking at studies that had examined possible effects on what children know about food, their food preferences, their actual food behavior (both buying and eating), and their health outcomes (e.g., obesity or cholesterol levels). The majority of studies examined food advertising, but a few examined other forms of food promotion. In terms of nutritional knowledge, food advertising seems to have little influence on children’s general perceptions of what constitutes a healthy diet, but, in certain contexts, it does have an effect on more specific types of nutritional knowledge. For example, seeing soft drink and cereal adverts reduced primary-aged children’s ability to correctly determine whether certain products contained real fruit. The review also found evidence that food promotion influences children’s food preferences and their purchase behavior. A study of primary school children, for instance, found that exposure to advertising influenced which foods they claimed to like; and another showed that labeling and signage on a vending machine had an effect on what was bought by secondary school pupils. Several studies have also shown that food advertising can influence what children eat. One, for example, showed that advertising influenced a primary class’s choice of daily snack at playtime.

{C} The next step of trying to establish whether or not a link exists between food promotion and diet or obesity is extremely difficult as it requires research to be done in real-world settings. A number of studies have attempted this by using the amount of television viewing as a proxy for exposure to television advertising. They have established a clear link between television viewing and diet, obesity, and cholesterol levels. However, it is impossible to say whether this effect is caused by the advertising, the sedentary nature of television viewing, or snacking that might take place whilst viewing. One study resolved this problem by taking a detailed diary of children’s viewing habits. This showed that the more food adverts they saw, the more snacks and calories they consumed.

{E} Thus, the literature does suggest food promotion is influencing children’s diet in a number of ways. This does not amount to proof; as noted above, incontrovertible proof simply isn’t attainable with this kind of research. Nor do all studies point to this conclusion; several have not found an effect. In addition, very few studies have attempted to measure how strong these effects are relative to other factors influencing children’s food choices. Nonetheless, many studies have found clear effects, and they have used sophisticated methodologies that make it possible to determine that i) these effects are not just due to chance; ii) they are independent of other factors that may influence diets, such as parents’ eating habits or attitudes; and iii) they occur at a brand and category level.

{F} Furthermore, two factors suggest that these findings actually downplay the effect that food promotion has on children. First, the literature focuses principally on television advertising; the cumulative effect of this combined with other forms of promotion and marketing is likely to be significantly greater. Second, the studies have looked at direct effects on individual children and understate indirect influences. For example, promotion for fast food outlets may influence the child and encourage parents to take them for meals and reinforce the idea that this is normal and desirable behavior.

{G} This does not amount to proof of an effect, but in our view, does provide sufficient evidence to conclude that an effect exists. The debate should now shift to what action is needed and specifically to how the power of commercial marketing can be used to bring about improvements in young people’s eating.

Questions 1-7

Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A-G. 

Choose the most suitable heading for paragraphs A-G from the list of headings below. Write the appropriate number, i-x, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i  General points of agreements and disagreements of researchers 

ii  How much children really know about food 

iii  Need to take action 

iv  Advertising effects of the “Big Four.” 

V  Connection of advertising and children’s weight problems 

vi  Evidence that advertising affects what children buy to eat 

vii  How parents influence children’s eating habits

Viii  Advertising’s focus on unhealthy options

ix Children often buy what they want

x  Underestimating the effects advertising has on children

(1) Paragraph A

(2) paragraph B

(3) Paragraph C

(4) Paragraph D

(5) Paragraph E 

(6) Paragraph F

(7) Paragraph G

Questions 8-13

Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the writer
NO if the statement does not agree with the writer
NOT GIVEN if there is no information about this in the passage

(8) There is little difference between a healthy diet recommended by advisors and a diet prompted in food advertisements.

(9) TV advertising has successfully taught children nutritional knowledge about vitamins and others.

(10) It is hard to decide which aspect accompanied by TV viewing has caused weight problems or other detrimental effects on children.

(11) The preference of food for children is affected by their age and gender.

(12) The investigation primarily for food promotion on TV advertising tend to be partial and incomplete

(13) Wealthy parents tend to buy more “sensible food” for their children.

Reading Passage 2 Academic Reading Test 81 With Answers

Pollution! in the Bay

{A} POURING water into the sea sounds harmless enough. But in Florida Bay, a large and shallow section of the Gulf of Mexico that lies between the southern end of the Everglades and the Florida Keys, it is proving highly controversial. That is because researchers are divided over whether it will help or hinder the plants and animals that live in the bay.

{B} What is at risk is the future of the bay’s extensive beds of seagrasses. These grow on the bay’s muddy floor and act as nurseries for the larvae of shrimps, lobsters, and fish—many of the important sport and commercial-fishing species. Also in danger is an impressive range of coral reefs that run the length of the Florida Keys and form the third-largest barrier reef in the world. Since the 1980s, coral cover has dropped by 40%, and a third of the coral species have gone. This has had a damaging effect on the animals that depend on the reef, such as crabs, turtles, and nearly 600 species of fish.

{C} What is causing such ecological change is a matter of much debate. And the answer is of no small consequence. This is because the American government is planning to devote $8 billion over the next 30 years to revitalizing the Everglades. Seasonal freshwater flows into the Everglades are to be restored in order to improve the region’s health. But they will then run off into the bay.

{D} Joseph Zieman, a marine ecologist at the University of Virginia, thinks this is a good idea. He believes that a lack of fresh water in the bay is its main problem. The blame, he says, lies with a century of drainage in the Everglades aimed at turning the marshes into farmland and areas for development. This has caused the flow of fresh water into Florida Bay to dwindle, making the water in the bay, overall, more saline. This, he argues, kills the seagrasses, and as this rot, nutrients are released that feed the microscopic plants and animals that live in the water. This, he says, is why the bay’s once crystal-clear waters often resemble a pea soup. And in a vicious circle, these turbid blooms block out sunlight, causing more seagrasses to die and yet more turbidity.

{E} Brian Lapointe, a marine scientist at the Harbour Branch Oceanographic Institution at Fort Pierce in Florida, disagrees. He thinks seagrasses can tolerate much higher levels of salinity than the bay actually displays. Furthermore, he notes that when freshwater flows through the Everglades were increased experimentally in the 1990s; it led to massive plankton blooms. Freshwater running off from well-fertilized farmlands, he says, caused a fivefold rise in nitrogen levels in the bay. This was like pouring fuel on a fire. The result was mass mortality of seagrasses because of increased turbidity from the plankton. Dr. Lapointe adds that because corals thrive only in waters where nutrient levels are low, restoring freshwater rich in nitrogen will do more damage to the reef.

{F} It is a plausible theory. The water flowing off crops that are grown on the 750,000 acres of heavily fertilized farmland on the northern edge of the Everglades is rich in nitrogen, half of which ends up in the bay. But Bill Kruczynski of America’s Environmental Protection Agency is convinced that nitrogen from farmlands is not the chief problem. Some coral reefs well away from any nitrogen pollution are dying, and, curiously, a few are thriving. Dr. Kruczynski thinks that increased nutrients arriving from local sewage discharges from the thousands of cesspits along the Florida Keys are part of the problem.

{G} Such claims and counterclaims make the impact of the restoration plan difficult to predict. If increased salinity is the main problem, the bay’s ecology will benefit from the Everglades restoration project. If, however, nitrogen is the problem, increasing the flow of freshwater could make matters much worse.

{H} If this second hypothesis proved correct, the cure is to remove nitrogen from farmland or sewage discharges, or perhaps both. Neither will be easy. Man-made wetlands, at present, being built to reduce phosphate runoff into the bay—also from fertilizers—would need an algal culture (a sort of contained algal bloom) added to them to deal with discharges from farmlands. That would be costly. So too would be the replacement of cesspits with proper sewerage—one estimate puts the cost at $650m. Either way, it is clear that when, on December 1st, 3,000 square miles of sea around the reef are designated as a “protective zone” by the deputy secretary of commerce, Sam Bodman, this will do nothing to protect the reef from pollution.

{I} Some argue, though, that there is a more fundamental flaw in the plans for the bay: the very idea of returning it to a utopian ideal before man wrought his damage. Nobody knows what Florida Bay was like before the 1950s when engineers cut the largest canals in the Everglades and took most of the water away. Dr. Kruczynski suspects it was more like an estuary. Many people wish to re-create the bay that many people wish to re-create could have been nothing more than a changing phase in the bay’s history.

{J} These arguments do not merely threaten to create ecological problems but economic ones as well. The economy of the Florida Keys depends on tourism—the local tourist industry has an annual turnover of $2.5 billion. People come for fishing-boat trips, for manatee watching, or for scuba diving and snorkeling to view the exotically colored corals. If the plan to restore the Everglades makes problems in the bay and the reef worse, it could prove a very expensive mistake.

Questions 14-17 

The reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-J. 

Which paragraph contains the following information? 

Write the correct letter A-J in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet.

(14) See grass turned to be more resistant to the saline water level in the Bay.

(15) Significance of finding a specific reason in controversy

(16) Expensive proposals raised to solve the nitrogen dilemma

(17) A statistic of ecological changes in both the coral area and species

Questions 18-21

Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-C) with opinions or deeds below. Write the appropriate letters A-C in boxes 5-8 on your answer sheet.

(A) Bill Kruczynski 

(B) Brian Lapointe 

(C) Joseph Zieman

(18) Drainage system in the everglades actually results in high salty water in the bay.

(19) Restoring water high in nitrogen level will make more ecological side effect

(20) High nitrogen levels may be caused by the nearby farmland.

(21) Releasing sewage rather than nutrients from agricultural areas increases the level of Nitrogen. 

Questions 22-23 

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 22 and 23 on your answer sheet.

The water flowing off plants that can be grown over the 750,000 acres of heavily fertilized farmland over the northern border of the Everglades is more full of nitrogen, 1 / 2 of that ultimately ends up in the bay. However, Bill Kruczynski of America’s Environmental Protection Agency is convinced nitrogen in farmlands really isn’t the principal issue. Many ……(22)….. well from some other nitrogen contamination are perishing, and also, curiously, some are thriving. Doctor Kruczynski believes that raised nourishment coming from local sewer discharges from the 1000s of ……(23)……across the Florida Keys are a portion of the issue.

Questions 24-28

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 24-28 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement is True
FALSE if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN If the information is not given in the passage

(24) Everyone agrees that “pouring water into the sea is harmless enough,” even in the Florida Bay area.

(25) Nitrogen was poured in from different types of crops as water flowed through.

(26) Everglade restoration projects can be effective regardless of the cause of the pollution.

(27) Humans have changed Florida Bay, where the old image before the 1950s is unrecalled.

(28) Tourism contributes fundamentally to the economy of the Florida Bay area.

 Reading Passage 3 Academic Reading Test 81 With Answers

Morse Code

{A} Morse code is being replaced by a new satellite-based system for sending distress calls at sea. Since 1992 countries around the world have been decommissioning their Morse equipment with similar (if less poetic) sign-offs, as the world’s shipping switches over to a new satellite-based arrangement, the Global Maritime Distress, and Safety System. The final deadline for the switch-over to GMDSS is February 1st, a date that is widely seen as the end of an era. For although dots and dashes will not die out altogether — they will, for example, continue to be used by amateur radio operators, spies, and some members of the armed forces — the switch to GMDSS marks the end of the last significant international use of Morse.

{B} The code has, however, had a good history. Appropriately for a technology commonly associated with radio operators on sinking ships, the idea of Morse code is said to have occurred to Samuel Morse while he was on board a ship crossing the Atlantic. At the time, Morse was a painter and occasional inventor, but when another of the ship’s passengers informed him of recent advances in electrical theory, Morse was suddenly taken with the idea of building an electric telegraph. Other inventors had been trying to do just that for the best part of a century. Morse succeeded and is now remembered as the father of the telegraph partly thanks to his single-mindedness — it was 12 years, for example, before he secured money from Congress to build his first telegraph line — but also for technical reasons.

{C} Compared with rival electric telegraph designs, Morse’s design was very simple: it required little more than a ‘key’ (essentially, a spring-loaded switch) to send messages, a clicking ‘sounder’ to receive them, and a wire to link the two. But although Morse’s hardware was simple, there was a catch: in order to use his equipment, operators had to learn the special code of dots and dashes. Originally, Morse had not intended to use combinations of dots and dashes to represent individual letters. His first code, sketched in his notebook during that transatlantic voyage, used dots and dashes to represent the digits 0 to 9. Morse’s idea was that messages would consist of strings of numbers corresponding to words and phrases in a special numbered dictionary. But Morse later abandoned this scheme and, with the help of an associate, Alfred Vail, devised the Morse alphabet, which could be used to spell out messages a letter at a time in dots and dashes. At first, the need to learn this complicated-looking code made Morse’s telegraph seem impossibly tricky compared with other, more user-friendly designs. For example, Cooke and Wheatstone’s telegraph used five needles to pick out letters on a diamond-shaped grid. But although this meant that anyone could use it, it also required five wires between telegraph stations. Morse’s telegraph needed only one.

{D} As electric telegraphy took off in the early 1850s, the Morse telegraph quickly became dominant. It was adopted as the European standard in 1851, allowing direct connections between the telegraph networks of different countries. (Britain chose not to revise to allow for accents and other foreign more years) . By this time, Morse code had been involved, sticking with needle telegraphs for a few characters, resulting in a split between American and International Morse that continues to this day.

{E}On international submarine cables, left and right swings of a light beam reflected from a tiny rotating mirror were used to represent dots and dashes. Meanwhile, a distinct telegraphic subculture was emerging, with its own customs and vocabulary and a hierarchy based on the speed at which operators could send and receive Morse code. First-class operators, who could send and receive at speeds of up to 45 words a minute, handled press traffic, securing the best-paid jobs in big cities. At the bottom of the pile were slow, inexperienced rural operators, many of whom worked the wires as part-timers. As their Morse code improved, however, rural operators found that their newfound skill was a passport to better pay in a city job. Telegraphers soon swelled the ranks of the emerging middle classes. Telegraphy was also deemed suitable work for women. By 1870, a third of the operators in the Western Union office in New York, the largest telegraph office in America, were female.

{F}In a dramatic ceremony in 1871, Morse himself said goodbye to the global community of telegraphers he had brought into being. By the time of his death in 1872, the world was well and truly wired: more than 650,000 miles of telegraph line and 30,000 miles of submarine cable were throbbing with Morse code, and 20,000 towns and villages were connected to the global network. Just as the Internet is today often called an ‘information superhighway,’ the telegraph was described in its day as an ‘instantaneous highway of thought.’

{G}But by the 1890s, the Morse telegraph’s heyday as a cutting-edge technology was coming to an end, with the invention of the telephone and the rise of automatic telegraphs, precursors of the teleprinter, neither of which required specialist skills to operate. Morse code, however, was about to be given a new lease of life thanks to another new technology: wireless. Following the invention of radiotelegraphy by Guglielmo Marconi in 1896, its potential for use at sea quickly became apparent. For the first time, ships could communicate with each other, and with the shore, whatever the weather and even when out of visual range. In 1897 Marconi successfully sent Morse code messages between a shore station and an Italian warship 19km (12 miles) away. The first sea rescue after a distress call sent by the radiotelegraph took place in 1899 when a lightship in the Dover Straits reported the grounding of the Elbe, a steamship.

Questions 29-35

Reading passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A-G Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-G from the list of headings below. Write the correct number, i-x, in boxes 29-35 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

I Standard and variation for the code

ii Substitution for Morse code

iii Emergence of many employment opportunities

iv The advantages of Morse’s invention

V Discovery of electricity 

Vi Sea application of Morse code expanded under new technology 

Vii The invention of Morse code

Viii The need for radio operators 

IX International reach of Morse code

(29) Paragraph A

(30) Paragraph B

(31) Paragraph C

(32) Paragraph D

(33) Paragraph E

(34) Paragraph F

(35) Paragraph G 

Questions 36-40

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

In boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet, write.

TRUE if the statement is True
FALSE if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN If the information is not given in the passage

(36) Morse had already been famous before the invention of code.

(37) Morse waited for a long time to receive support from Congress.

(38) Compared with other designs, the learning experience of Morse code is demanding

(39) Many big cities prefer to employ rural operators.

(40) Morse died from overwork.

For Answers Academic IELTS Reading Test 81 Answers

Pages Content

Exit mobile version