IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 146

IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 146 ( Passage 1 Australia’s sporting success, Passage 2 What cookbooks really teach us, Passage 3 This Marvellous Invention ) we prefer you to work offline, download the test paper, and blank answer sheet.

For any query regarding the IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 146, you can mail us at [email protected], 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-146.pdf

For Answers Academic IELTS Reading Test 146 Answers

Reading Passage 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on the IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 146 Reading Passage Australia’s sporting success below.

Australia’s sporting success 

{A} They play hard, they play often, and they play to win. Australian sports teams win more than their fair share of titles, demolishing rivals with seeming ease. How do they do it? A big part of the secret is an extensive and expensive network of sporting academies underpinned by science and medicine. At the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), hundreds of youngsters and pros live and train under the eyes of coaches. Another body, the Australian Sports Commission (ASC), finances programmes of excellence in a total of 96 sports for thousands of sportsmen and women. Both provide intensive coaching, training facilities and nutritional advice. 

{B} Inside the academies, science takes centre stage. The AIS employs more than 100 sports scientists and doctors and collaborates with scores of others in universities and research centres. AIS scientists work across a number of sports, applying skills learned in one – such as building muscle strength in golfers – to others, such as swimming and squash. They are backed up by technicians who design instruments to collect data from athletes. They all focus on one aim: winning. ‘We can’t waste our time looking at ethereal scientific questions that don’t help the coach work with an athlete and improve performance,’ says Peter Pricker, chief of science at AIS. 

{C} A lot of their work comes down to measurement – everything from the exact angle of a swimmer’s dive to the second-by-second power output of a cyclist . This data is used to wring improvements out of athletes. The focus is on individuals, tweaking performances to squeeze an extra hundredth of a second here, an extra millimetre there. No gain is too slight to bother with. It’s the tiny, gradual improvements that add up to world-beating results. To demonstrate how the system works, Bruce Mason at AIS shows off the prototype of a 3D analysis tool for studying swimmers. A wire-frame model of a champion swimmer slices through the water, her arms moving in slow motion. Looking side-on, Mason measures the distance between strokes. From above, he analyses how her spine swivels. When fully developed, this system will enable him to build a biomechanical profile for coaches to use to help budding swimmers. Mason’s contribution to sport also includes the development of the SWAN (SWimming ANalysis) system now used in Australian national competitions. It collects images from digital cameras running at 50 frames a second and breaks down each part of a swimmer’s performance into factors that can be analysed individually – stroke length, stroke frequency, average duration of each stroke, velocity, start, lap and finish times, and so on. At the end of each race, SWAN spits out data on each swimmer. 

{D} Take a look,’ says Mason, pulling out a sheet of data. He points out the data on the swimmers in second and third place, which shows that the one who finished third actually swam faster. So why did he finish 35 hundredths of a second down? ‘His turn times were 44 hundredths of a second behind the other guy,’ says Mason. ‘If he can improve on his turns, he can do much better. ‘This is the kind of accuracy that AIS scientists’ research is bringing to a range of sports. With the Cooperative Research Centre for Micro Technology in Melbourne, they are developing unobtrusive sensors that will be embedded in an athlete’s clothes or running shoes to monitor heart rate, sweating, heat production or any other factor that might have an impact on an athlete’s ability to run. There’s more to it than simply measuring performance. Pricker gives the example of athletes who may be down with coughs and colds 11 or 12 times a year. After years of experimentation, AIS and the University of Newcastle in New South Wales developed a test that measures how much of the immune-system protein immunoglobulin A is present in athletes’ saliva . If lgA levels suddenly fall below a certain level, training is eased or dropped altogether. Soon, lgA levels start rising again, and the danger passes. Since the tests were introduced, AIS athletes in all sports have been remarkably successful at staying healthy. 

{E} Using data is a complex business. Well before a championship, sports scientists and coaches start to prepare the athlete by developing a ‘competition model’, based on what they expect winning times. ‘You design the model to make that time,’ says Mason. ‘A start of this much, each free-swimming period has to be this fast, with a certain stroke frequency and stroke length, with turns done in these times. ‘All the training is then geared towards making the athlete hit those targets, both overall and for each segment of the race. Techniques like these have transformed Australia into arguably the world’s most successful sporting nation. 

{F} Of course, there’s nothing to stop other countries copying – and many have tried. Some years ago, the AIS unveiled coolant-lined jackets for endurance athletes. At the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996, these sliced as much as two per cent off cyclists’ and rowers’ times. Now everyone uses them. The same has happened to the ‘altitude tent’, developed by AIS to replicate the effect of altitude training at sea level. But Australia’s success story is about more than easily copied technological fixes, and up to now, no nation has replicated its all­ encompassing system. 

IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 146 Questions 1-7 

Reading Passage 1 has six paragraphs, A-F. 

Which paragraph contains the following information? 

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet. 

NB You may use any letter more than once. 

(1) a reference to the exchange of expertise between different sports 

(2) an explanation of how visual imaging is employed in investigations 

(3) a reason for narrowing the scope of research activity 

(4) how some AIS ideas have been reproduced 

(5) how obstacles to optimum achievement can be investigated 

(6) an overview of the funded support of athletes 

(7) how performance requirements are calculated before an event 

IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 146 Questions 8-11 

Classify the following techniques according to whether the writer states they 

(A) are currently exclusively used by Australians 

(B) will be used in the future by Australians 

(C) are currently used by both Australians and their rivals 

Write the correct letter, A, B or C. in boxes 8-11 on your answer sheet. 

(8) cameras 

(9) sensors 

(10) protein tests 

(11) altitude tents 

Questions 12 and 13 

Answer the questions below. 

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

Write your answers in boxes 12 and 13 on your answer sheet. 

(12) What is produced to help an athlete plan their performance in an event? 

(13) By how much did some cyclists’ performance improve at the 1996 Olympic Games? 

Reading Passage 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on the IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 146 Reading Passage What cookbooks really teach us below.

What cookbooks really teach us  

{A}. Shelves bend under the weight of cookery books. Even a medium-sized bookshop contains many more recipes than one person could hope to take in a lifetime. Although the recipes in one book are often similar to those in another, their presentation varies wildly, from an array of vegetarian cookbooks to instructions on cooking the food that historical figures might have eaten. The reason for this abundance is chat cookbooks promise to bring about a kind of domestic transformation for the user. The daily routine can be put on one side and they liberate the user, if only temporarily. To follow their instructions is to turn a task which has to be performed every day into an engaging, romantic process. Cookbooks also provide an opportunity to delve into distant cultures without having to turn up at an airport to get there. 

{B}. The first Western cookbook appeared just over 1,600 years ago. De re coquinaria (it means ‘concerning cookery’) is attributed to Roman gourmet named Apicius. It is probably a compilation of Roman and Greek recipes, some or all of them drawn from manuscripts that were later lost. The editor was sloppy, allowing several duplicated recipes to sneak in. Yet Apicius’s book set the tone of cookery advice in Europe for more than a thousand years. As a cookbook, it is unsatisfactory with very basic instructions. Joseph Vehling, a chef who translated Apicius in the 1930s, suggested the author had been obscure on purpose, so his secrets leaked out. 

{C}. But a more likely reason is that Apicius’s recipes were written by and for professional cooks, who could follow their shorthand. This situation continued for hundreds of years. There was no order in cookbooks: a cake recipe might be followed by a mutton one. But then, they were not written for careful study. Before the 19* For centuries few educated people cooked for themselves. The wealthiest employed literate chefs; others presumably read recipes to their servants. Such cooks would have been capable of creating dishes from the vaguest of instructions. 

{D}. The invention of printing might have been expected to lead to greater clarity but at first, the reverse was true. As words acquired commercial value, plagiarism exploded. Recipes were distorted through reproduction. A recipe for boiled capon in Vk Good Huswifes Jewell, printed in 1596, advised the cook to add three or four dates. By 1653. When the recipe was given by a different author in A Book of Fruits & Flowers, the cook was told to see the dish aside for three or four days. 

{E}. The dominant theme in 16th and 17th-century cookbooks was ordered. Books combined recipes and household advice, on the assumption that a well-made dish, a well-ordered larder and well-disciplined children were equally important. Cookbooks thus became a symbol of dependability in chaotic times. They hardly seem to have been affected by the English civil war or the revolutions in America and France. 

{F}. In the 1850s, Isabella Becton published the Book of Household /Management. Like earlier cookery writers she plagiarized freely, lifting not just recipes but philosophical observations from other books. If Becton’s recipes were not wholly new. though, the way in which she presented them certainly was. She explains when the chief ingredients are most likely to be in season, how long the dish will take to prepare and even how much it is likely to cost. Bee ton’s recipes were well suited to her times. Two centuries earlier, an understanding of rural ways had been so widespread that one writer could advise cooks to heat water until it was a little hotter than milk that comes from a cow. By the 1850s Britain was industrializing. The growing urban middle class needed details, and Becton provided them in the hill. 

{G}. In France, cookbooks were fast becoming even more systematic. Compared with Britain, France had produced few books written for the ordinary householder by the end of the 19th century. The most celebrated French cookbooks were written by superstar chefs who had a clear sense of codifying a unified approach to sophisticated French cooking. The 5.000 recipes in Auguste Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire (The Culinary Guide), published in 1902, might as well have been written in stone, given the book’s preparation among French chefs, many of whom still consider it the definitive reference book. 

{H}. What Escoffier did for French cooking. Fannie Farmer did for American home cooking. She not only synthesized American cuisine; she elevated it to the status of science. ‘Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery,’ she breezily announced in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, before launching into a collection of recipes that sometimes resembles a book of chemistry experiments. She was occasionally over-fussy. She explained that currants should be picked between June 28th and July 3rd, but not when it is raining. But in the main, her book is reassuringly authoritative. Its recipes are short, with no unnecessary chat and no unnecessary spices. 

{I}. In 1950, Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David launched a revolution in cooking advice in Britain. In some ways, Mediterranean Food recalled even older cookbooks but the smells and noises that filled David’s books were not mere decoration for her recipes. They were the point of her books. When she began to write, many ingredients were not widely available or affordable. She understood this, acknowledging in a later edition of one of her books that ‘even if people could not very often make the dishes described here, it was stimulating to think about them.’ David’s books were not so much cooking manuals as guides to the kind of food people might well wish to eat. 

IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 146 Questions 14-16 

Complete the summary below. 

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

Write your answers in boxes 14-16 on your answer sheet. 

Why are there so many cookery books? 

There are a great number more cookery books published than is really necessary and it is their 14 ………………………. which makes them differ from each other. There are such large numbers because they offer people an escape from their 15…………………….. and some give the user the chance to inform themselves about other 16 ………………………… 

IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 146 Questions 17-21

Reading Passage 2 has nine paragraphs, A-I. 

Which paragraph contains the following information? 

Write the correct letter, A-l, in boxes 17-21 on your answer sheet. 

NB You may use any letter more than once. 

(17). cookery books providing a sense of stability during periods of unrest 

(18). details in recipes being altered as they were passed on 

(19). knowledge which was in danger of disappearing 

(20). the negative effect on cookery books of a new development 

(21). a period when there was no need for cookery books to be precise 

IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 146 Questions 22-26 

Look at the following statements (Questions 22-26) and list of books (A-E) below. 

Match each statement with the correct book A-E. 

Write the correct letter A-E. In boxes 22-26 on your answer sheet. 

(22). Its recipes were easy to follow despite the writer’s attention to detail. 

(23). Its writer may have deliberately avoided passing on details. 

(24). It appealed to ambitious ideas people have about cooking. 

(25). Its writer used ideas from other books but added additional related information. 

(26). It put into print ideas which are still respected today. 

List of cookery books 

(A). De re coquinaria 

(B). The Book of Household Management 

(C). Le Guide Culinaire 

(D). The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book 

(E). Mediterranean Food 

Reading Passage 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on the IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 146 Reading Passage Plant Scents below.

‘This Marvellous Invention’ 

{A} Of all mankind’s manifold creations, language must take pride of place. Other inventions -the wheel, agriculture, sliced bread – may have transformed our material existence, but the advent of language is what made us human. Compared to language, all other inventions pale in significance, since everything we have ever achieved depends on language and originates from it. Without language, we could never have embarked on our ascent to unparalleled power over all other animals, and even over nature itself. 

{B} But language is foremost not just because it came first. In its own right it is a tool of extraordinary sophistication, yet based on an idea of ingenious simplicity: ‘this marvellous invention of composing out of twenty-five or thirty sounds that infinite variety of expressions which, whilst having in themselves no likeness to what is in our mind, allow us to disclose to others its whole secret, and to make known to those who cannot penetrate it all that we imagine, and all the various stirrings of our soul’. This was how, in 1660, the renowned French grammarians of the Port-Royal abbey near Versailles distilled the essence of language, and no one since has celebrated more eloquently the magnitude of its achievement. Even so, there is just one flaw in all these hymns of praise, for the homage to languages unique accomplishment conceals a simple yet critical incongruity. Language is mankind’s greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never invented. This apparent paradox is at the core of our fascination with language, and it holds many of its secrets. 

{C} Language often seems so skillfully drafted that one can hardly imagine it as anything other than the perfected handiwork of a master craftsman. How else could this instrument make so much out of barely three dozen measly morsels of sound? In themselves, these configurations of mouth – p,f,b,v,t,d,k,g,sh,a,e and so on – amount to nothing more than a few haphazard spits and sputters, random noises with no meaning, no ability to express, no power to explain. But run them through the cogs and wheels of the language machine, let it arrange them in some very special orders, and there is nothing that these meaningless streams of air cannot do: from sighing the interminable boredom of existence to unravelling the fundamental order of the universe. 

{D} The most extraordinary thing about language, however, is that one doesn’t have to be a genius to set its wheels in motion. The language machine allows just about everybody from pre-modern foragers in the subtropical savannah, to postmodern philosophers in the suburban sprawl – to tie these meaningless sounds together into an infinite variety of subtle senses, and all apparently without the slightest exertion. Yet it is precisely this deceptive ease that makes language a victim of its own success, since in everyday life its triumphs are usually taken for granted. The wheels of language run so smoothly that one rarely bothers to stop and think about all the resourcefulness and expertise that must have gone into making it tick. Language conceals art. 

{E} Often, it is only the estrangement of foreign tongues, with their many exotic and outlandish features, that brings home the wonder of language design. One of the showiest stunts that some languages can pull off is an ability to build up words of breath­ breaking length, and thus express in one word what English takes a whole sentence to say. The Turkish word c;ehirlilic;tiremediklerimizdensiniz, to take one example, means nothing less than ‘you are one of those whom we can’t turn into a town-dweller’. (In case you were wondering, this monstrosity really is one word, not merely many different words squashed together – most ol its components cannot even stand up on their own.) 

{F} And if that sounds like someone-off freak, then consider Sumerian, the language spoken on the banks of the Euphrates some 5,000 years ago by the people who invented writing and thus enabled the documentation of history . A Sumerian word like munintuma’a (‘when he had made it suitable for her’) might seem rather trim compared to the Turkish colossus above. What is so impressive about it, however, is not its lengthiness but rather the reverse – the thrifty compactness of its construction. The word is made up of different slots, each corresponding to a particular portion of meaning. This sleek design allows single sounds to convey useful information, and in fact even the absence of a sound has been enlisted to express something specific. If you were to ask which bit in the Sumerian word corresponds to the pronoun ‘it’ in the English translation ‘when he had made it suitable for her’, then the answer would have to be nothing. Mind you, a very particular kind of nothing: the nothing that stands in the empty slot in the middle. The technology is so fine-tuned then that even a non-sound, when carefully placed in a particular position, has been invested with a specific function. Who could possibly have come up with such a nifty contraption? 

IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 146 Questions 27-32 

Reading Passage 3 has six paragraphs, A-F. 

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-F from the list of headings below. 

Write the correct number, i-vii, in boxes 21-32 on your answer sheet. 

List of Headings 

(i) Differences between languages highlight their impressiveness 

(ii) The way in which a few sounds are organised to convey a huge range of meaning 

(iii) Why the sounds used in different languages are not identical 

(iv) Apparently incompatible characteristics of language 

(v) Even silence can be meaningful 

(vi) Why language is the most important invention of all 

(vii) The universal ability to use language 

(27) Paragraph A 

(28) Paragraph B 

(29) Paragraph C 

(30) Paragraph D 

(31) Paragraph E 

(32) Paragraph F 

IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 146 Questions 33-36 

Complete the summary using the list of words, A-G, below. 

Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 33-36 on your answer sheet. 

The importance of language 

The wheel is one invention that has had a major impact on 33 …………… aspects of life, but no impact has been as 34…………… as that of language. Language is very 35 ……………, yet composed of just a small number of sounds. Language appears to be 36 …………… to use. However, its sophistication is often overlooked. 

(A) difficult  (C) original  (E) material  (G) fundamental
(B) complex (D) admired (F) easy 

Questions 37-40 

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

In boxes 37-40 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

(37) Human beings might have achieved their present position without language. 

(38) The Port-Royal grammarians did justice to the nature of language. 

(39) A complex idea can be explained more clearly in a sentence than in a single word. 

(40) The Sumerians were responsible for starting the recording of events. 

For Answers Academic IELTS Reading Test 146 Answers

Pages Content

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top