IELTS General Reading Practice Test 30 COMMUNITY BUSINESS CARDS, HIGHLIGHTS OF PERU, Get vaccinated, GUARD AGAINST BURNOUT!, CAMPUS LIBRARY INFORMATION, FOOD AND DRINK IN CHINA with answers click on the following links for Question PDF and Answers
IELTSFever General Reading Practice Test 31 PDF
Answers General Reading Test 31
SECTION 1:
IELTS General Reading Practice Test 31 Questions 1-14
Read the advertisements below and answer questions 1-4.
COMMUNITY BUSINESS CARDS
| A HAIRDRESSING Ginger’s Unisex Hair Studio SPECIAL Wed & Thurs only Colour/Foils & Blow-wave and Receive a FREE Haircut Enquiries to 9489 8888 Shop 5 Smith Arcade 104 Old Northern Hwy, Northland |
B DRY CLEANERS For quality & friendly service • Wedding & evening dresses • Duvets & blankets • Curtains • Woollens/silks etc. • Alterations and mending Phone 9244 0000 Shop 1, Mundaring Shopping Centre 700 Great Eastern Highway, Mundaring |
| C GOOD MANNERS DOG TRAINING Dog daycare & training centre
• Small classes for all ages • Positive methods • Qualified trainer • Classes in Westland & hills Enquiries: 9244 4056 or 5419 924 133 Web: www.goodmanners.net.au |
D CLEANING
A-TOP CLEANING Carpet steam cleaning Window cleaning 28 yrs Owner operator Phone: 4419 924 575 |
| E BUILDING SERVICES
GCH CONSTRUCTION Greg, qualified tradesman Bricklaying & limestone Paving & concrete Building maintenance Renovations & new homes 6423 233 058 gchconstruction@bigpond.com |
F AIR CONDITIONING & GASMarkham Air & Appliances Pty Ltd
Split system installations Air-conditioning service & repairs Appliance service & repair (gas & electric) Phone: 4468 118 491 Eftpos available |
IELTS General Reading Practice Test 31 QUESTIONS 1-4
The business cards above are from a Local shop noticeboard. They offer local services. Look at the six business cards, A-F. For which card are the following statements true? Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet. Note: you may use any letter more than once.
{1} Which service provides daycare?
{2} Which service is provided at a local shopping centre?
{3} Which three services provide improvements to the home?
{4} Which service offers something free?
IELTS General Reading Practice Test 31 Questions 5-10.
HIGHLIGHTS OF PERU
SIGHTSEEING HIGHLIGHTS
IELTS General Reading Practice Test 31 QUESTIONS 5-10
Do the following statements agree with the information in the travel guide? In boxes 5-10 on your answer sheet, write:
- TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
- FALSE if the statements contradict the information
- NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this.
{5} The capital city of Peru, Lima, is the main highlight of the tour.
{6} Guests will travel by train to Machu Picchu.
{7} Guests will have the opportunity to meet a descendant of an old Peruvian family.
{8} Kike Pinto is a local expert musician who plays traditional Andean instruments.
{9} The farewell dinner will include a range of traditional Peruvian food.
{10} A souvenir group photo can be purchased at the end of the tour.
SEASONAL INFLUENZA VACCINATION PROGRAM
PART 1
Get vaccinated
Influenza, commonly known as the flu, is caused by a virus which spreads easily from person to person through infected droplets in the air and by hands infected with the virus.
The virus infects your nose, throat and, sometimes, your lungs. In most people, it causes mild to moderate symptoms for about a week, but some people can develop severe illness and complications which may need to be treated in hospital and can even result in death.
Flu complications include pneumonia and bronchitis. Flu can also make some underlying medical conditions worse.
Flu is a vaccine-preventable disease. Because the flu virus is constantly changing, it is necessary to get vaccinated every year. The flu vaccine protects against the three strains of the virus which are most likely to occur over the winter. Vaccination is recommended in autumn to give time for immunity to develop before the flu season starts. You cannot get flu from the vaccine.
PART 2
To prevent complications from flu it is recommended that people in the eligible groups outlined in this brochure get vaccinated each year.
65 years and over
People aged 65 years and over have the highest risk of complications associated with seasonal flu. Vaccination decreased hospitalisation and mortality rates by up to 50 per cent.
Indigenous people
Respiratory diseases are major causes of preventable sickness and death in Indigenous people. All Indigenous people are now eligible for the free flu vaccine from 15 years of age.
Pregnancy
Pregnant women are at higher risk of severe complications associated with the virus. The flu vaccine is safe for pregnant women, including in the first trimester. Vaccinating against flu during pregnancy also provides protection for the baby during the first vulnerable months of life.
People medically at risk
People with some existing medical conditions are at increased risk of complication from flu and may now be eligible for free seasonal flu vaccine. These include anyone who is over six months of age and has a condition such as:
- heart disease
- chronic respiratory conditions
- chronic illness requiring medical follow-up or hospitalisation in the past year • diseases of the neuromuscular system
- impaired immunity, or
- aged six months to 10 years and on long-term aspirin therapy.
IELTS General Reading Practice Test 31 QUESTIONS 11-14
Answer the questions below. Choose no more than three words for each answer in the text. Write your answers in boxes 11-14 on your answer sheet.
{11} Influenza is a virus which is easily spread from person to person via infected droplets in the air and by _____________ with the virus.
{12} It is necessary to ______________ against influenza because the virus is constantly changing.
{13} The influenza virus can lead to medical complications such as ______________ or can make existing medical conditions worse.
{14} It is recommended that vaccination take place in autumn so that ______________ before the winter flu season starts.
Section 2: Questions 15-27
Read the text below and answer questions 15-21.
GUARD AGAINST BURNOUT!
Burnout doesn’t just affect people in the workforce-high school students who feel bored, overwhelmed and overworked can also be at risk.
A Finnish study looking at burnout in students found it was linked to high expectations of school demands, feeling cynical about school work and feeling inadequate as a student. But being prepared, studying well and having reasonable expectations about results could help avoid burnout.
Department of Education psychologist Penelope Radunovich said that there were ways to avoid burning out before the final exams.
The first was to set up a good study environment. While some students could study while talking to someone and with the TV blaring, others needed perfect silence.
Ms Radunovich said students needed to work out what worked for them. She said the most important thing for students to do was to make sure they understood the material.
‘Spend 30 minutes studying, learning and understanding, then take 10 minutes to question yourself,’ she said.
‘Say do I understand this? Could I tell my mother or a stranger or my friends what I have been doing? If there is nobody to explain it to, do it out loud and, if you don’t understand it, go over it again.
‘If you can explain what you’ve learnt, then you have understood.’
Parents can help prevent burnout by keeping an eye on their children and how much study they are doing. If a Year 12 student is becoming cynical about their work or they look like they are studying to the point of exhaustion, then she suggests chatting to them or offering to take them to the movies and away from the study environment.
‘I asked kids about burnout and they said some people do feel burnt out and, when they get to that point, they stop working and go do some exercise or have a snack, listen to some music or talk to their friends,’ she said.
‘The kids who do really well are the ones who do a lot of other things.’
IELTS General Reading Practice Test 31 QUESTIONS 15-21
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text? In boxes 15-21 on your answer sheet, write:
- TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
- FALSE if the statements contradict the information
- NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this.
{15} High school students can avoid study burnout by studying well, and by having reasonable, but not overly high, expectations of results.
{16} It doesn’t matter where a student decides to study, as the study environment has no effect on study burnout.
{17} Final-year high school students experience more burnout than any other group of students.
{18} One way to assess your learning is to try to explain what you have learnt to someone else.
{19} Successful exam students are usually those who give up other social and sports activities and focus on their studies.
{20} If a student is studying too much, it is advised that parents offer to take him/her out, away from the study environment.
{21} According to a study in Finland, students who stopped socialising with friends before exams had a higher rate of burnout.
CAMPUS LIBRARY INFORMATION
The passage above has seven paragraphs labelled I-VII. Which paragraphs contain the following information? Write the appropriate letter I-VII in boxes 22-27 on your answer sheet. You need only one letter for each answer, but each letter may be used in more than one answer.
Example: How I can join the library I
{22} What I can do if I have not finished a book by the time I need to return it.
{23} How long I can borrow items for.
{24} What I should do if this particular library does not have the book I need.
{25} What I can do if I need a book, but live too far away from the library.
{26} What I can do if another borrower has the book I want.
{27} What I can do if I would like extra help with some research, but there is nothing on the shelves.
Section 3,
IELTS General Reading Practice Test 31 Questions 28-40
Read the text below and answer questions 28-34.
FOOD AND DRINK IN CHINA
{A} Most Westerners will have tasted and enjoyed Chinese food in various forms in their own countries, and may even have learned the delicate art of eating with chopsticks. But they may be less prepared for what the writer Colin Thubron memorably describes as the ‘passionate relationship’ of the Chinese to food. Folk memories of famine are recent (the last were in the 1960s) and there are still areas where people’s diet is limited and poor.
Refrigeration is more widespread now, but the Chinese almost never eat ‘ready meals’; food is freshly cooked for each meal, and fish, meat and poultry are often killed only a short time before they are cooked. Shopping in the markets or shops is done with immense gusto and everything is prodded, shaken, sniffed and thoroughly checked before being purchased.
It is debatable whether, in purely Western terms, the Chinese eat a ‘healthy’ diet. They eat many vegetables, things are cooked fast so that the goodness is not destroyed, and people eat small quantities fairly frequently-‘grazing’, rather than eating huge meals at one sitting, which is one reason why they tend to be much slimmer than people in the increasingly obese West. On the other hand they use a large amount of the very salty MSG (monosodium glutamate, or taste powder) in their cooking, as well as sugar; and in some regions of China there is a high incidence of certain types of cancer, due to the overuse of pickling, the only way some vegetables can be preserved through the winter.
At any rate, Western visitor will experience a fantastic range of different foods, some wonderful ( dumplings, tofu, sweet and sour soup, Mongolian hotpot, and hundreds more treats), and some less to Western tastes, such as ‘hundred-year old eggs’ or donkey stew. If the Westerner is overwhelmed by a desire for a more familiar food, these days help is at hand. In the bigger cities, though more rarely in the rural areas, there are plenty of fast-food outlets selling hamburgers and pizzas; there are some Italian, Indian, Japanese, Korean and Mexican restaurants, and also newly opened supermarkets (mostly French) that sell the foods of which, in the past, homesick Westerners could only dream-for example, bread, cheese, milk, coffee and real chocolate.
{B} Chinese local dishes are said to have four, eight and ten culinary schools, depending on which authority is consulted. Canton, Shandong, Sichuan and Yangzhou make up four of them: if you count Hunan, Fujian, Anhui and Zhejiang, you have eight culinary schools; add in Beijing and Shanghai, and that makes ten. You should also try the Middle Eastern-type cooking of the Muslim minorities, such as the Hui and Uighur people, whose roadside stalls produce wonderful (and very cheap) lamb kebabs wrapped in naan bread with salad and hot spicy sauce. Here are a few pointers about some of the schools of cookery.
{C} Cantonese cuisine adopts the good points of all other culinary schools, and its selection of ingredients is extensive. River food and seafood are widely used, as well as birds, rats, snakes and insects. There is a saying that ‘The Cantonese will eat anything with wings, except a plane, and anything with four legs, except a table.’ Cantonese cuisine pays attention to the use of fresh ingredients and has unique cooking methods. Representative dishes are ‘three kinds of snake stewed’, cat meat, snake soup, casserole mountain turtle and crispy skin suckling pig.
Shandong cuisine is dominated by seafood, reflecting its nature as a peninsula surrounded by the sea. Typical dishes include stewed sea cucumber with scallion, ·
stewed snakehead eggs, sea slugs with crab ovum, Dezhou grilled chicken and walnut kernel in a cream soup.
Sichuan cuisine is renowned for its searingly hot, peppery flavour. The variety of tastes is summed up in the phrase ‘a hundred dishes with a hundred flavours’.
Famous dishes include shredded pork with fish flavour, stewed beancurd with minced pork in pepper sauce, and dry-roast rock carp.
Those who are not used to extremely hot food should proceed with care. The Sichuanese use a special black pepper that leaves the lips numb-a bit frightening the
first time it happens, but not unpleasant when one grows accustomed to it.
Huaiyang cuisine integrates the cream of dishes in Yangzhou, Zhenjiang, Huaian and other places south of the Yangtze River, stressing freshness and tenderness, careful preparation, cutting skill, bright colour, beautiful arrangements and light flavouring. Famous dishes include beggar’s chicken, fried mandarin fish with sweet and sour sauce, sliced chicken with egg white, salted duck, steamed crab meat and minced pork balls cooked in a casserole.
{D} Vegetable dishes have been popular since the Song dynasty (960-1279) and they were greatly developed in the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911). They were divided into three schools: Monastery Vegetable Dishes, Court Vegetable Dishes and Folk Vegetable Dishes.
The main features of vegetable dishes are their unique style and their health benefits. Main materials include green leaf vegetables, fruit, edible mushrooms, and bean-curd products with vegetable oil as a condiment, all of which are delicious in taste, rich in nutrition, easy to digest, and believed to be helpful in preventing cancer.
{E} The Chinese drink large quantities of tea (mostly ‘green tea’, as opposed to the ‘black’ tea that is more commonly drunk in the West) and they add no milk or sugar. Tea is drunk constantly at meetings and at work, less so in restaurants and at formal meals, though it is always available if asked for. It is usually served in mugs with lids to keep it warm. Teabags and tea strainers are not used, and drinking tea without swallowing a mouthful of tea leaves requires concentration: try using the lid as a strainer when sipping.
Tea is divided into green, black, perfumed, white and Wulong tea. The most valuable green teas are Longjing and Biluochun; black tea, Qihong and Y unfeng; scented tea, Jasmine; white tea, Y inzhenbaihao, Gongmei and Shoumei; Wulong tea, Dahongpao and Tieguanyin. The Chinese will frequently give beautifully
decorated tea caddies of special teas as a present.
Other drinks you may be offered are yellow rice wine, served hot in little porcelain cups. It tastes rather like sherry. More lethal is maotai, the Chinese answer to vodka; there are also many light Chinese beers, as well as a growing range of Chinese wines-Great Wall wine is perhaps the best known and has improved considerably since the producers set up a joint venture with a French wine-grower. Soft drinks such as mineral water and Coca-Cola are available everywhere, and fruit juices made from the exotic tropical fruits grown in the south of China are delicious.
{F} One interesting development in the 1990s has been the re-emergence of teahouses, traditionally the haunts of the intellectuals and literati, who would idle away hours in stimulating conversation or in composing poems. In workaholic, post-liberation China, such establishments were considered a decadent remnant of the feudal society. But with the emergence of the five-day working week, and with more emphasis on quality leisure time, the traditional teahouse is once again blossoming in major cities. Teahouses have one thing in common: tranquillity-a precious commodity in China. The quiet atmosphere is broken only by leisurely music played on the zheng, a twenty-one- or twenty-five-stringed plucked instrument, in some ways similar to the zither. Conversation tends to be carried out in hushed tones. Teahouses are located at quiet places in beautiful surroundings, often near lakes; most cities have several now. The teahouse has its own slot on TV, too-the British television company Granada has coproduced with Chinese TV a 230-part TV soap called Joy Luck Street, based around the comings and goings in a teahouse; it was inspired by the long-running British TV soap Coronation Street, whose central location is a good old English pub.
{G} Among men in China, much less so among women, smoking is widespread, and at formal meals, cigarettes are almost always offered along with tea. Most Chinese people do not seem to be at all worried about the links between smoking and health problems. It is very hard to escape from other people’s cigarettes in restaurants. Young Chinese men set on having a good night out can even be seen holding a lit cigarette in one hand and a pair of chopsticks in the other managing to smoke and eat at the same time.
IELTS General Reading Practice Test 31 QUESTIONS 28-34
The text ‘Food and Drink in China· has seven sections labelled A-G. Which section contains the following information? Write the correct letter A-Gin boxes 28-34 on your answer sheet. Note: you may use any letter more than once.
{28} Regional cuisines of China
{29} The importance of food in Chinese culture
{30} Cigarette-smoking in Chinese culture
{31} Overview of four regional culinary ·schools’
{32} Popular Chinese drinks
{33} The importance of vegetable dishes in Chinese cooking
{34} The importance of teahouses in Chinese culture
IELTS General Reading Practice Test 31 QUESTIONS 35-40
Complete the summary below. Choose no more than three words from the text for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 35-40 on your answer sheet.
The Chinese are known to have what is often called a ‘passionate relationship’ with food, and the buying and cooking of it is done with enthusiasm.
Although aspects of Chinese cuisine are very healthy, such as the use of many different {35} _____________ and the habit of eating small amounts of food often, the adding of MSG to cooking, too much-added sugar, and the {36} _____________ can be linked to high levels of some cancers in China.
In addition to the availability of some Western foods in China nowadays, there are several regional cuisines to choose from. Cantonese cuisine is known to use many ingredients; Shandong cuisine uses a lot of {37}_____________, Sichuan cuisine is known to be hot and spicy, and Huiyang food combines the flavours and colours of the best dishes from places {38} _____________ the Yangzte River.
The Chinese drink teas, wines, spirits and beers, with one Chinese wine company more recently developing wine with a wine-grower from {39}__________. Chinese teahouses are usually situated near cities in {40} ______________ and are places for quiet conversation. Cigarette smoking is a popular pastime, particularly with men.
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