IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 164 ( Passage 1 Working in the movies, Passage 2 AIRPORTS ON WATER, Passage 3 The Grapes of Winter ) we prefer you to work offline, download the test paper, and blank answer sheet.
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For Answers Academic IELTS Reading Test 164 Answers
Reading Passage 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on the IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 164 Reading Passage Working in the movies below.
Working in the movies
{A}. When people ask French translator Virginie Verdier what she does for a living, it must be tempting to say enigmatically: ‘Oh me? I’m in the movies’. It’s strictly true, but her starring role is behind the scenes. As translating goes, it doesn’t get more entertaining or glamorous than subtitling films. If you’re very lucky, you get to work on the new blockbuster films before they’re in the cinema, and if you’re just plain lucky, you get to work on the blockbuster movies that are going to be on video or DVD.
{B}. The process starts when you get the original script and a tape. ‘We would start by translating and adapting the film script. The next step is what we call ‘timing’, which means synchronizing the subtitles to the dialogue and pictures.’ This task requires discipline. You play the film, listen to the voice and the subtitles are up on your screen ready to be timed. You insert your subtitle when you hear the corresponding dialogue and delete it when the dialogue finishes. The videotape carries a time code that runs in hours, minutes, seconds and frames. Think of it as a clock. The subtitling unit has an insert key to capture the time code where you want the subtitle to appear. When you press the delete key, it captures the time code where you want the subtitle to disappear. So each subtitle would be an exacting part of the translation profession. Melanie Leyshon talks to Virginie Verdier of London translation company VSI about the glamour and the grind. Virginie is quick to point out that this is as exacting as any translating job. You work hard. It’s not all entertainment as you are translating. You need all the skills of a good translator and those of a top-notch editor. You have to be precise and, of course, much more concise than in traditional translation work.
{C}. You have an ‘in’ point and an ‘out’ point which represents the exact time when the subtitle comes in and goes out. This process is then followed by a manual review, subtitle by the subtitle, and time-codes are adjusted to improve synchronization and respect shot changes. This process involves playing the film frame by frame as it is essential the subtitles respect the visual rhythm of the film.’ Different subtitlers use different techniques. ‘I would go through the film and do the whole translation and then go right back from the beginning and start the timing process. But you could do it in different stages, translate let’s say 20 minutes of the film, then time this section and translate the next 20 minutes, and so on. It’s just a different method.’ For multi-lingual projects, the timing is done first to create what is called a ‘spotting list’, a subtitle template, which is in effect a list of English subtitles pre-timed and edited for translation purposes. This is then translated and the timing is adapted to the target language with the help of the translator for quality control.
{D}. ‘Like any translation work, you can’t hurry to do the subtitling,’ says Virginie. ‘If subtitles are translated and timed in a rush, the quality will be affected and it will show.’ Mistakes usually occur when the translator does not master the source language and misunderstands the original dialogue. ‘Our work also involves checking and reworking subtitles when the translation is not up to standard. However, the reason for redoing subtitles is not just because of poor quality translation. We may need to adapt subtitles to a new version of the film: the time code may be different. The film may have been edited or the subtitles may have been created for the cinema rather than video. If subtitles were done for cinema on 35mm, we would need to reformat the timing for video, as subtitles could be out of sync or too fast. If the translation is good, we would obviously respect the work of the original translator.’
{E}. On a more practical level, there are general subtitling rules to follow, says Virginie. ‘Subtitles should appear at the bottom of the screen and usually in the centre.’ She says that different countries use different standards and rules. In Scandinavian countries and Holland, for example, subtitles are traditionally left-justified. Characters usually appear in white with a thin black border for easy reading against a white or light background. We can also use different colours for each speaker when subtitling for the hearing impaired. Subtitles should have a maximum of two lines and the maximum number of characters on each line should be between 32 and 39. Our company standard is 37 (different companies and countries have different standards).’
{F}. Translators often have a favourite genre, whether it’s war films, musicals, comedies (one of the most difficult because of the subtleties and nuances of comedy in different countries), drama, or corporate programs. Each requires a certain tone and style. ‘VSI employs American subtitlers, which is incredibly useful as many of the films we subtitle are American,’ says Virginie. ‘For an English person, it would not be so easy to understand the meaning behind typically American expressions, and vice-versa.’
Questions 1-5
Complete the flowchart below.
Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-5 cm in your answer sheet.
The Subtitling Process
Stage 1: Translate and adapt the script
Stage 2: (1)……………….……….-matching the subtitles to what was said. Involves recording time codes by using the (2)………………………….and………………………keys.
Stage 3: (3)……………………. – in order to make the (4)…………..……Better Multilingual project
Stage 4: Produce something known as a (5)……………………………….and translate that
Questions 6-9
Do the following statements agree with the information given in IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 164 Reading Passage 1? In boxes 6-9 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 |
(6). For translators, all subtitling work on films is desirable.
(7). Subtitling work involves a requirement that does not apply to other translation work.
(8). Some subtitling techniques work better than others.
(9). Few people are completely successful at subtitling comedies.
Questions 10-13
Complete the sentences below with words from IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 164 Reading Passage 1.
Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 10—13 on your answer sheet.
(10). Poor subtitling can be a result of the subtitler not being excellent at…………………..…
(11). To create subtitles for a video version of a film, it may be necessary to…………………
(12). Subtitles usually have a…………………………… around them.
(13). Speakers can be distinguished from each other for the benefit of…………………
Reading Passage 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on the IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 164 Reading Passage AIRPORTS ON WATER below.
AIRPORTS ON WATER
{A}. River deltas are difficult places for map makers. The river builds them up, the sea wears them down; their outlines are always changing. The changes in China’s Pearl River delta, however, are more dramatic than these natural fluctuations. An island six kilometers long and with a total area of 1248 hectares is being created there. And the civil engineers are as interested in performance as in speed and size. This is a bit of the delta that they want to endure. The new island of Chek Lap Kok, the site of Hong Kong’s new airport, is 83% complete. The giant dumper trucks rumbling across it will have finished their job by the middle of this year and the airport itself will be built at a similarly breakneck pace.
{B} As Chek Lap Kok rises, however, another new Asian island is sinking back into the sea. This is a 520-hectare island built in Osaka Bay, Japan, that serves as the platform for the new Kansai airport. Chek Lap Kok was built in a different way, and thus hopes to avoid the same sinking fate. The usual way to reclaim land is to pile sand rock onto the seabed. When the seabed oozes with mud, this is rather like placing a textbook on a wet sponge: the weight squeezes the water out, causing both water and sponge to settle lower. The settlement is rarely even: different parts sink at different rates. So buildings, pipes, roads, and so on tend to buckle and crack. You can engineer around these problems, or you can engineer them out. Kansai took the first approach; Chek Lap Kok took the second.
{C} The differences are both political and geological. Kansai was supposed to be built just one kilometer offshore, where the seabed is quite solid. Fishermen protested, and the site was shifted a further five kilometers. That put it in deeper water (around 20 meters) and above a seabed that consisted of 20 meters of soft alluvial silt and mud deposits. Worse, below it was a not-very-firm glacial deposit hundreds of meters thick. The Kansai builders recognized that settlement was inevitable. The sand was driven into the seabed to strengthen it before the landfill was piled on top, in an attempt to slow the process; but this has not been as effective as had been hoped. To cope with the settlement, Kansai’s giant terminal is supported on 900 pillars. Each of them can be individually jacked up, allowing wedges to be added underneath. That is meant to keep the building level. But it could be a tricky task.
{D} Conditions are different at Chek Lap Kok. There was some land there, to begin with, the original little island of Chek Lap Kok and a smaller outcrop called Lam Chau. Between them, these two outcrops of hard, weathered granite make up a quarter of the new island’s surface area. Unfortunately, between the islands, there was a layer of soft mud, 27 meters thick in places. According to Frans Uiterwijk, a Dutchman who is the project’s reclamation director, it would have been possible to leave this mud below the reclaimed land and to deal with the resulting settlement by the Kansai method. But the consortium that won the contract for the island opted for a more aggressive approach. It assembled the world’s largest fleet of dredgers, which sucked up l50m cubic meters of clay and mud and dumped it in deeper waters. At the same time, sand was dredged from the waters and piled on top of the layer of stiff clay that the massive dredging had laid bare.
{E} Nor was the sand the only thing used. The original granite island which had hills up to 120 meters high was drilled and blasted into boulders no bigger than two meters in diameter. This provided 70m cubic meters of granite to add to the island’s foundations. Because the heap of boulders does not fill the space perfectly, this represents the equivalent of 105m cubic meters of landfill. Most of the rock will become the foundations for the airport’s runways and its taxiways. The sand dredged from the waters will also be used to provide a two-meter capping layer over the granite platform. This makes it easier for utilities to dig trenches –granite is unyielding stuff. Most of the terminal buildings will be placed above the site of the existing island. Only a limited amount of pile-driving is needed to support building foundations above softer areas
{F} The completed island will be six to seven meters above sea level. In all, 350m cubic meters of material will have been moved. And much of it, like the overloads, has to be moved several times before reaching its final resting place. For example, there has to be a motorway capable of carrying 150-tonne dump trucks; and there has to be a raised area for the 15,000 construction workers. These are temporary; they will be removed when the airport is finished. The airport, though, is here to stay. To protect it, the new coastline is being bolstered with a formidable twelve kilometers of sea defenses. The brunt of a typhoon will be deflected by the neighboring island of Lantau; the sea walls should guard against the rest. Gentler but more persistent bad weather – the downpours of the summer monsoon – is also being taken into account. A mat-like material called geotextile is being laid across the island to separate the rock and sand layers. That will stop sand particles from being washed into the rock voids, and so causing further settlement. This island is being built never to be sunk.
Questions 14–18
Classify the following statements as applying to
(A) Chek Lap Kok airport only
(B) Kansai airport only
(C) Both airports
Write the appropriate letters A–C in boxes 1–5 on your answer sheet
Example Answer
built on a man-made island C
(14) having an area of over 1000 hectares
(15) built-in a river delta
(16) built-in the open sea
(17) built by reclaiming land
(18) built using conventional methods of reclamation
Questions 19–22
Complete the labels on Diagram B below.
Choose your answers from the box below the diagram and write them in boxes 19–22 on your answer sheet.
NB There are more words/phrases than spaces, so you will not use them all.
DIAGRAM A
Cross-section of the original area around Chek Lap Kok before work began
DIAGRAM B
Cross-section of the same area at the time the article was written
| granite | mud | Runways and taxiways | stiff clay |
| sand | water | terminal building site |
Questions 23–26
Complete the summary below.
Choose your answers from the box below the summary and write them in boxes 10–13 on your answer sheet.
NB There are more words than spaces, so you will not use them all.
When the new Chek Lap Kok airport was completed, the raised area and the ………. (Example) ………. will be removed. motorway
The island will be partially protected from storms by ………(23)……… and also by ………(24)………. The further settlement caused by ………(25)……… will be prevented by the use of ………(26)……….
| construction workers | dump-trucks | geotextile | rainfall |
| rock and sand | rock voids | motorway | sea walls |
| Lantau Island | coastline | typhoons |
Reading Passage 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on the IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 164 Reading Passage The Grapes of Winter below.
The Grapes of Winter
If an artist must suffer to create great art, so does the winemaker when it comes to producing ice wine.
{A}. Ice wine, or Eiswein as the Germans call it, is the product of frozen grapes. A small portion of the vineyard has left unpicked during the fall harvest. Those grapes are left on the vine until the mercury drops to at least -7°C. At this temperature, the sugar-rich juice begins to freeze. If the grapes have been picked in their frozen state and pressed while they are as hard as marbles, the small amount of juice recovered is intensely sweet and high in acidity. The amber dessert wine made from this juice is ambrosia fit for Dionysus himself – very sweet, it combines savours of peach and apricot.
{B}. The discovery of ice wine, like most epicurean breakthroughs, was accidental. In 1794, wine producers in the German duchy of Franconia made a virtue of necessity by pressing juice from frozen grapes. They have been amazed by an abnormally high concentration of sugars and acids which, until then, had been achieved only by drying the grapes on straw mats before pressing or by the effects of Botrytis cinerea, a disease known as ‘root rot’. Botrytis cinerea afflicts grapes in autumn, usually in regions where there are early morning fog and humid, sunny afternoons. A mushroom-like fungus attaches itself to the berries, punctures their skins, and allows the juice to evaporate. To many, the result is sheer ambrosia. The world’s great dessert wines, such as Sauternes, Riesling, and Tokay Aszu Essencia, are made from grapes afflicted by this benign disease.
{C}. It was not until the mid-19th century in the Rheingau region of northwestern Germany that winegrowers made conscious efforts to produce ice wine on a regular basis. But they found they could not make it every year since the subzero cold spell must last several days to ensure that the berries remain frozen solid during picking and the pressing process, which alone can take up to three days or longer. Grapes are 80 percent water; when this water has frozen and driven off under pressure and shards of ice, the resulting juice is wonderfully sweet. If the ice melts during a sudden thaw, the sugar in each berry is diluted.
{D}. Not all grapes are suitable for ice wine. Only the thick-skinned, late-maturing varieties such as Riesling and Vidal can resist such predators as grey rot, powdery mildew, unseasonable warmth, wind, rain, and the variety of fauna cravings a sweet meal. Leaving grapes on the vine once they have ripened is an enormous gamble. If birds and animals do not get them, mildew and rot or a sudden storm might. So growers reserve only a small portion of their Vidal or Riesling grapes for ice wine, a couple of hectares of views at most.
{E}. To ensure the right temperature is maintained, in Germany the pickers must be out well before dawn to harvest the grapes. A vineyard left for ice wine is a sorry sight. The mesh-covered vines are denuded of leaves and the grapes are brown and shriveled, dangling like tiny bats from the frozen canes. The stems of the grape clusters are dry and brittle. A strong wind or an ice storm could easily knock the fruit to the ground. A twist of the wrist is all that is needed to pick them, but when the wind howls through the vineyard, driving the snow- before it and the wind chill factor can make a temperature of -10° seem like -40°, harvesting ice wine grapes becomes a decidedly uncomfortable business. Pickers fortified with tea and brandy, brave the elements for two hours at a time before rushing back to the winery to warm up.
{F}. Once the tractor delivers the precious boxes of grapes to the winery, the real hard work begins. Since the berries must remain frozen, the pressing is done either outdoors or inside the winery with the doors left open. The presses have to be worked slowly otherwise the bunches will turn to a solid block of ice yielding nothing. Some producers throw rice husks into the press to pierce the skins of the grapes and create channels for the juice to flow- through the mass of ice. Sometimes it takes two or three hours before the first drop of juice appears.
{G}. A kilogram of unfrozen grapes normally produces sufficient juice to ferment into one bottle of wine. Depending on the degree of dehydration caused by wind and winter sunshine, the juice from a kilogram of ice wine grapes produces one-fifth of that amount or less. The longer the grapes hang on the vine, the less juice there is. So grapes harvested during a cold snap in December will yield more ice wine than if they are picked in February. The oily juice, once extracted from the marble-hard berries, is allowed to settle for three or four days. It is then cleared of dust and debris by ‘racking’ from one tank to another. A special yeast is added to activate fermentation in the stainless steel tanks since the colorless liquid is too cold to ferment on its own. Because of the high sugar content, fermentation can take several months. But when the wine is finally bottled, it has the capacity to age for a decade or more.
{H}. While Germany may be recognized as the home of ice wine, its winemakers cannot produce it every year. Canadian winemakers can and are slowly becoming known for this expensive rarity as the home-grown product garners medals at international wine competitions. Klaus Reif of the Reif Winery at Niagara-on-the-Lake has produced ice wine in both countries. While studying oenology, the science of winemaking, he worked at a government winery in Neustadt in the West German state of Rheinland-Pfalz. In 1983 he made his first Canadian ice wine from Riesling grapes. Four years later he made ice wine from Vidal grapes grown in his uncle’s vineyard at Niagara-on-the-Lake. “The juice comes out like honey here,” says Reif, “but in Germany, it has the consistency of ordinary wine”.
Question 27-33
IELTSFever Academic IELTS Reading Test 164 Passage 1 has seven paragraphs A-H
From the list of headings below, choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
Write the appropriate numbers i-x in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet
List of Headings
(i). International comparisons
(ii). Unique grapes withstand various attacks
(iii). Production of initial juice
(iv). Warm temperatures reduce sweetness
(v). Cold temperatures bring a sweet taste
(vi). From grape to wine
(vii. More grapes produce less wine
(viii). Temperature is vital to production
(ix). Infection brings benefits
(x). Obstacles to picking
(xi). The juice flows quickly
| Example | Answer |
| Paragraph A | v |
| (27) | Paragraph B |
| (28) | Paragraph C |
| (29) | Paragraph D |
| (30) | Paragraph E |
| (31) | Paragraph F |
| (32) | Paragraph G |
| (33) | Paragraph H |
Question 34 -36
Choose the correct letter. A, B, C, or D
Write your answers in boxes 8-10 on your answer sheet.
Question 34. Growers set aside only a small area for ice wine grapes because
(A). not all grapes are suitable.
(B). nature attacks them in various ways.
(C). not many grapes have needed.
(D). the area set aside makes the vineyard look extremely untidy.
Question 35. Rice husks are used because they
(A). stop the grapes from becoming ice blocks.
(B). help the berries to remain frozen.
(C). create holes in the grapes.
(D). help producers create different tastes.
Question 36. According to Klaus Reif, Canadian ice wine
(A). flows more slowly than German wine.
(B). tastes a lot like German ice wine.
(C). is better than German ice wine.
(D). is sweeter than German ice wine.
Question 37-40
Complete each of the following statements (questions 37-40) with the best ending A-G from the box below.
Write the appropriate letters A-G in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.
(37). Franconia ice winemakers
(38). Famous dessert winemakers
(39). Ice wine grape pickers in Germany
(40). Canadian ice winemakers
| (A) | use diseased grapes to produce their wine. |
| (B) | enjoy working in cool climates. |
| (C) | can produce ice wine every year. |
| (D) | were surprised by the high sugar content in frozen grapes. |
| (E) | made a conscious effort to produce ice wine. |
| (F) | drink tea and brandy during their work. |
For Answers Academic IELTS Reading Test 164 Answers
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