IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 133 ( Passage 1 The coming back of the “Extinct” Grass in Britain, Passage 2 Intelligence and Giftedness, Passage 3 TV Addiction 2 ) we prefer you to work offline, download the test paper, and blank answer sheet.
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For Answers Academic IELTS Reading Test 133 Answers
Reading Passage 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on the IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 133 Reading Passage The coming back of the “Extinct” Grass in Britain below.
The coming back of the “Extinct” Grass in Britain
{A} It’s Britain’s dodo, called interrupted brome because of its gappy seed-head, this unprepossessing grass was found nowhere else in the world. Sharp-eyed Victorian botanists were the first to notice it, and by the 1920s the odd-looking grass had been found across much of southern England. Yet its decline was just as dramatic. By 1972 it had vanished from its last toehold-two hay fields at Pampisford, near Cambridge. Even the seeds stored at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden as an insurance policy were dead, having been mistakenly kept at room temperature. Botanists mourned: a unique living entity was gone forever.
{B} Yet reports of its demise proved premature. Interrupted brome has come back from the dead, and not through any fancy genetic engineering. Thanks to one green-fingered botanist, interrupted brome is alive and well and living as a pot plant. Britain’s dodo is about to become a phoenix, as conservationists set about relaunching its career in the wild.
{C} At first, Philip Smith was unaware that the scrawny pots of grass on his bench were all that remained of a uniquely British species. But when news of the “extinction” of Bromus interruptus finally reached him, he decided to astonish his colleagues. He seized his opportunity at a meeting of the Botanical Society of the British Isles in Manchester in 1979, where he was booked to talk about his research on the evolution of the brome grasses. It was sad, he said, that interrupted brome had become extinct, as there were so many interesting questions botanists could have investigated. Then he whipped out two enormous pots of it. The extinct grass was very much alive.
{D} It turned out that Smith had collected seeds from the brome’s last refuge at Pampisford in 1963, shortly before the species disappeared from the wild altogether. Ever since then, Smith had grown the grass on, year after year. So in the end the hapless grass survived not through some high-powered conservation scheme or fancy genetic manipulation, but simply because one man was interested in it. As Smith points out, interrupted brome isn’t particularly attractive and has no commercial value. But to a plant taxonomist, that’s not what makes a plant interesting.
{E} The brome’s future, at least in cultivation, now seems assured. Seeds from Smith’s plants have been securely stored in the state-of-the-art Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place in Sussex. And living plants thrive at the botanic gardens at Kew, Edinburgh and Cambridge. This year, “bulking up” is under way to make sure there are plenty of plants in all the gardens, and sackfuls of seeds are being stockpiled at strategic sites throughout the country.
{F} The brome’s relaunch into the British countryside is next on the agenda. English Nature has included interrupted brome in its Species Recovery Programme, and it is on track to be reintroduced into the agricultural landscape if friendly farmers can be found. Alas, the grass is neither pretty nor useful–in fact, it is undeniably a weed, and a weed of a crop that nobody grows these days, at that. The brome was probably never common enough to irritate farmers, but no one would value it today for its productivity or its nutritious qualities. As grass, it leaves agriculturalists cold.
{G} So where did it come from? Smith’s research into the taxonomy of the brome grasses suggests that interruptus almost certainly mutated from another weedy grass, soft brome, hordeaceus. So close is the relationship that interrupted brome was originally deemed to be a mere variety of soft brome by the great Victorian taxonomist Professor Hackel. But in 1895, George Claridge Druce, a 45-year-old Oxford pharmacist with a shop on the High Street, decided that it deserved species status, and convinced the botanical world. Druce was by then well on his way to fame as an Oxford don, mayor of the city, and a fellow of the Royal Society. A poor boy from Northamptonshire and a self-educated man, Druce became the leading field botanist of his generation. When Druce described a species, botanists took note.
{H} The brome’s parentage may be clear, but the timing of its birth is more obscure. According to agricultural historian Joan Thirsk, sainfoin and its friends made their first modest appearance in Britain in the early 1600s. Seeds brought in from the Continent were sown in pastures to feed horses and other livestock. But in those early days, only a few enthusiasts–mostly gentlemen keen to pamper their best horses–took to the new crops.
{I} Although the credit for the “discovery” of interrupted brome goes to a Miss A. M. Barnard, who collected the first specimens at Odsey, Bedfordshire, in 1849. The grass had probably lurked undetected in the English countryside for at least a hundred years. Smith thinks the botanical dodo probably evolved in the late 17th or early 18th century, once sainfoin became established.
{J} Like many once-common arable weeds, such as the corncockle, interrupted brome seeds cannot survive long in the soil. Each spring, the brome relied on farmers to resow its seeds; in the days before weed killers and sophisticated seed sieves, an ample supply would have contaminated stocks of crop seed. But fragile seeds are not the brome’s only problem: this species is also reluctant to release its seeds as they ripen. Show it a ploughed field today and this grass will struggle to survive, says Smith. It will be difficult to establish in today’s “improved” agricultural landscape, inhabited by notoriously vigorous competitors.
Questions 1-7 IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 133
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1 In boxes 1-7 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 |
(1) The name for interrupted brome is very special as its head shaped like a sharp eye
(2) Interrupted brome is thought to become extinct because there were no live seeds even in a labs condition.
(3) Philip Smith comes from the University of Cambridge.
(4) Reborn of the interrupted brome is attributed more to scientific meaning than seemingly aesthetic or commercial ones
(5) English nature will operate to recover interrupted brome on the success of survival in Kew.
(6) Interrupted Brome grow poorly in some competing modern agricultural environment with other plants
(7) Media publicity plays a significant role to make interrupted brome continue to exist.
Questions 8-13
Use the information in the IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 133 passage to match the people (listed A-F) with opinions or deeds below. Write the appropriate letters A-F in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet.
NB you may use any letter more than once
(A) George Claridge Druce
(B) Nathaniel Fiennes
(C) Professor Hackel
(D) A. M. Barnard
(E) Philip Smith
(F) Joan Thirsk
Choose the people who
(8) reestablished the British unique plants
(9) identified the interrupted brome as just to its parent brome
(10) gave an independent taxonomy place to interrupted brome
(11) discovered and picked the first sample of interrupted brome
(12) recorded the first ‘show up’ of sainfoin plants in Britain
(13) collected the last seeds just before its extinction
Reading Passage 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on the IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 133 Reading Passage Intelligence and Giftedness below.
Intelligence and Giftedness
{A} In 1904 the French minister of education, facing limited resources for schooling, sought a way to separate the unable from the merely lazy. Alfred Binet got the job of devising selection principles and his brilliant solution put a stamp on the study of intelligence and was the forerunner of intelligence tests still used today, he developed a thirty-problem test in 1905, which tapped several abilities related to intellect, such as judgment and reasoning, the test determined a given child’s mental age’ the test previously established a norm for children of a given physical age. (for example, five-year-olds on average get ten items correct), therefore, a child with a mental age of five should score 10, which would mean that he or she was functioning pretty much as others of that age. the child’s mental age was then compared to his physical age.
{B} A large disparity in the wrong direction (e.g., a child of nine with a mental age of four) might suggest inability rather than laziness and mean he or she was earmarked for special schooling, Binet, however, denied that the test was measuring intelligence, its purpose was simply diagnostic, for selection only. This message was however lost, and caused many problems and misunderstandings later.
{C} Although Binet’s test was popular, it was a bit inconvenient to deal with a variety of physical and mental ages. So in 1912 Wilhelm Stern suggested simplifying this by reducing the two to a single number, he divided the mental age by the physical age, and multiplied the result by 100. An average child, irrespective of age, would score 100. a number much lower than 100 would suggest the need for help, and one much higher would suggest a child well ahead of his peer.
{D} This measurement is what is now termed the IQ (for intelligence quotient) score and it has evolved to be used to show how a person, adult or child, performed in relation to others. (the term IQ was coined by Lewis m. Terman, professor of psychology and education of Stanford University, in 1916. He had constructed an enormously influential revision of Binet’s test, called the Stanford-Binet test, versions of which are still given extensively.)
{E} The field studying intelligence and developing tests eventually coalesced into a subfield of psychology called psychometrics (psycho for ‘mind’ and metrics for ‘measurements’). The practical side of psychometrics (the development and use of tests) became widespread quite early, by 1917, when Einstein published his grand theory of relativity, mass-scale testing was already in use. Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare (which led to the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915) provoked the United States to finally enter the First World War in the same year. The military had to build up an army very quickly; it had two million inductees to sort out. Who would become officers and who enlisted men? Psychometricians developed two intelligence tests that helped sort all these people out, at least to some extent, this was the first major use of testing to decide who lived and who died, as officers were a lot safer on the battlefield, the tests themselves were given under horrendously bad conditions, and the examiners seemed to lack commonsense, a lot of recruits simply had no idea what to do and in several sessions most inductees scored zero! The examiners also came up with the quite astounding conclusion from the testing that the average American adult’s intelligence was equal to that of a thirteen-year-old!
{F} Intelligence testing enforced political and social prejudice, their results were used to argue that Jews ought to be kept out of the United States because they were so intelligently inferior that they would pollute the racial mix, and blacks ought not to be allowed to breed at all. And so abuse and test bias controversies continued to plaque psychometrics.
{G} Measurement is fundamental to science and technology, science often advances in leaps and bounds when measurement devices improve, psychometrics has long tried to develop ways to gauge psychological qualities such as intelligence and more specific abilities, anxiety, extroversion, emotional stability, compatibility, with a marriage partner, and so on. Their scores are often given enormous weight, a single IQ measurement can take on a life of its own if teachers and parents see it as definitive, it became a major issue in the 70s when court cases were launched to stop anyone from making important decisions based on IQ test scores, the main criticism was and still is that current tests don’t really measure intelligence, whether intelligence can be measured at all is still controversial, some say it cannot others say that IQ tests are psychology’s greatest accomplishments
Questions 14-18 IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 133
The reading Passage has eleven paragraphs A-I. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter A-I, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.
(14) IQ is just one single factor of human characteristics.
(15) Discussion of the methodology behind Professor Stern’s test.
(16) Inadequacy of IQ test from Binet.
(17) The definition of IQ was created by a professor.
Questions 18-21
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in boxes 18-21 on your answer sheet.
Question 18 Professor Binet devise the test to_____________
(A) find those who do not perform satisfied
(B) choose the best one
(C) measure the intelligence
(D) establish the standard of intelligence
Question 19 The test is designed according to ________________
(A) math
(B) age
(C) reading skill
(D) gender
Question 20 U.S. Army used Intelligence tests to select__________
(A) Officers
(B) Normal Soldiers
(C) Examiners
(D) Submarine drivers.
Question 21 the purpose of the text is to ____________
(A) Give credit to the contribution of Binet in IQ test
(B) prove someone’s theory is feasible.
(C) discuss the validity and limitation of test
(D) outline the history of the test
Questions 22-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 133 Reading Passage 2?
In boxes 22-26 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 |
(22) Part the intention in designing the test by professor Binet has been misunderstood.
(23) Age as a factor is completely overlooked in the simplified tests by Wilhelm Stern
(24) Einstein was a counter-example of IQ test conclusions.
(25) IQ test may probably lead to racial discrimination as a negative effect.
(26) The author regards measuring intelligent test as a goal hardly meaningful
Reading Passage 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on the IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 133 Reading Passage TV Addiction 2 below.
TV Addiction 2
{A} Excessive cravings do not necessarily involve physical substances. Gambling can become compulsive; sex can become obsessive. One activity, however, stands out for its prominence and ubiquity–the world’s most popular pastime, television. Most people admit to having a love-hate relationship with it. They complain about the “boob tube” and “couch potatoes,” then they settle into their sofas and grab the remote control. Parents commonly fret about their children’s viewing (if not their own). Even researchers who study TV for a living marvel at the medium’s hold on them personally. Percy Tannenbaum of the University of California at Berkeley has written: “Among life’s more embarrassing moments have been countless occasions when I am engaged in conversation in a room while a TV set is on, and I cannot for the life of me stop from periodically glancing over to the screen. This occurs not only during dull conversations but during reasonably interesting ones just as well.”
{B} Scientists have been studying the effects of television for decades, generally focusing on whether watching violence on TV correlates with being violent in real life. Less attention has been paid to the basic allure of the small screen–the medium, as opposed to the message.
{C} The term “TV addiction” is imprecise and laden with value judgments, but it captures the essence of a very real phenomenon. Psychologists and psychiatrists formally define substance dependence as a disorder characterized by criteria that include spending a great deal of time using the substance; using it more often than one intends; thinking about reducing use or making repeated unsuccessful efforts to reduce use; giving up important social, family or occupational activities to use it; and reporting withdrawal symptoms when one stops using it.
{D} All these criteria can apply to people who watch a lot of television. That does not mean that watching television, per se, is problematic. Television can teach and amuse; it can reach aesthetic heights; it can provide much needed distraction and escape. The difficulty arises when people strongly sense that they ought not to watch as much as they do and yet find themselves strangely unable to reduce their viewing. Some knowledge of how the medium exerts its pull may help heavy viewers gain better control over their lives.
{E} The amount of time people spend watching television is astonishing. On average, individuals in the industrialized world devote three hours a day to the pursuit–fully half of their leisure time, and more than on any single activity save work and sleep. At this rate, someone who lives to 75 would spend nine years in front of the tube. To some commentators, this devotion means simply that people enjoy TV and make a conscious decision to watch it. But if that is the whole story, why do so many people experience misgivings about how much they view? In Gallup polls in 1992 and 1999, two out of five adult respondents and seven out of 10 teenagers said they spent too much time watching TV. Other surveys have consistently shown that roughly 10 percent of adults call themselves TV addicts.
{F} What is it about TV that has such a hold on us? In part, the attraction seems to spring from our biological ‘orienting response.’ First described by Ivan Pavlov in 1927, the orienting response is our instinctive visual or auditory reaction to any sudden or novel stimulus. It is part of our evolutionary heritage, a built-in sensitivity to movement and potential predatory threats.
{G} In 1986 Byron Reeves of Stanford University, Esther Thorson of the University of Missouri and their colleagues began to study whether the simple formal features of television–cuts, edits, zooms, pans, sudden noises—activate the orienting response, thereby keeping attention on the screen. By watching how brain waves were affected by formal features, the researchers concluded that these stylistic tricks can indeed trigger involuntary responses and ‘derive their attentional value through the evolutionary significance of detecting movement…. It is the form, not the content, of television that is unique.’
{H} The orienting response may partly explain common viewer remarks such as: “If a television is on, I just can’t keep my eyes off it,” “I don’t want to watch as many ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to “recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay” when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.
{I} This idea that paper facilitates a highly specialized cognitive and social process is a far cry from the way we have historically thought about the stuff. Paper first began to proliferate in the workplace in the late nineteenth century as part of the move toward “systematic management.” To cope with the complexity of the industrial economy, managers were instituting company-wide policies and demanding monthly, weekly, or even daily updates from their subordinates. Thus was born the monthly sales report, and the office manual and the internal company newsletter. The typewriter took off in the eighteen-eighties, making it possible to create documents in a fraction of the time it had previously taken, and that was followed closely by the advent of carbon paper, which meant that a typist could create ten copies of that document simultaneously. Paper was important not to facilitate creative collaboration and thought but as an instrument of control.
Questions 27-30
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 133 Reading Passage?
In boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE FALSE NOT GIVEN
if the statement is true if the statement is false if the information is not given in the passage
(27) Even researcher find sometimes it is more interesting in watching TV than talking with others in personal experience
(28) Information mediums such as TV has always been the priority for scientific research.
(29) It is partially unscientific to use the term ‘TV addiction’.
(30) Children do not know why they exercise too little.
Questions 31-33
Choose THREE letters, A-F.
Write the correct letters in boxes 31-33 on your answer sheet.
Which THREE of the following are benefits of watching TV?
(A) artistic inspiration
(B) family reunion
(C) relieve stress
(D) learn knowledge and education
(E) work efficiency
(F) ease communicative conflict
Questions 34-37 IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 133
Look at the following researchers (Questions 34-37) and the list of statements below. Match each researcher with the correct statements.
Write the correct letter A-G in boxes 34-37 on your answer sheets.
(34) Percy Tannenbaum
(35) Ivan Pavlov
(36) Byron Reeves and Esther Thorson
(37) Annie Lang
| List of Statements
(A) It is the specific media formal characteristic that counts. (B) TV distraction shows human physical reaction to a new and prompted stimulus (C) Conveying information is the most important thing. (D) It is hard to ignore the effects of TV. (E) Whether people can remember deeper of the content relates with the format. (F) The heart rate remains stable when watching. (G) Clinically reliance on TV does not meet the criteria of an addiction. |
Questions 38-40
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage I, using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer
Write your answers in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.
| TV is becoming a worldwide 38……….. Some people love it and spend a great deal of time watching it. According to some surveys, a small group even claim themselves as 39………… One researcher believes that this attraction comes from our human instinct, described as 40………which is built-in part of our physiological evolution. |
For Answers Academic IELTS Reading Test 133 Answers
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