INTERNAL TEST-VER1

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Semester/Academic year 2020 - 2021

FINAL EXAM
(READING) Date 07/2021

Course title INTERNAL IELTS TEST

UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY - VNUHCM Course ID

OFFICE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDY PROGRAMS
Duration 60 mins. Question sheet code VER1

Notes: - Be allowed to use pencils for giving answers

- Submit the question sheet together with the answer sheet
(The above part must be hidden when copying for exam)

READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes in Questions 1 – 13, which are based on Reading Passage 1.

GILES GILBERT SCOTT ARCHITECT (1880 – 1960)

A bastion of the architectural establishment in early 20 th century Britain, Giles Gilbert Scott (1880 –
1960) fused tradition with modernity by applying historic styles to industrial structures in his designs
from the Battersea and Bankside power stations in London, to Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, and to the
K2 telephone kiosk.
At the top of the splendid Portland stone tomb of the 19 th century architect John Soane and his wife and
son, in St Pancras Old Church Gardens, north London, is a dome in a surprisingly familiar shape.
Designed by Soane in 1815 as a monument to his beloved wife, the tomb is one of his most romantic
designs, ornate in form and decorated by stone carvings of snakes and pipeapples. It is familiar not
because of its association with Soane’s family tomb, but because of its influence on the design of the red
K2 telephone kiosks, which were once a common sight throughout Britain.
The architect who designed the K2, Gile Gilbert Scott, admired Soane’s work and had recently become a
trustee of the Sir John Soane Museum in London when invited in 1924 to enter a competition to design a
public telephone kiosk. The shape of his design was inspired by the central domed structure of Soane’s
tomb. By rooting his design in Britain’s architectural heritage, Scott transformed the telephone kiosk
from what was then seen as an intimidating symbol of modernity into something that seemed reassuringly
familiar. When the wooden models of the competing designs were exhibited outside the National Gallery,
Giles Gilbert Scott’s was chosen as the winner.
Scott continued to package modernity in British traditionalism throughout his career. In his inaugural
address as president of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1933, when Britain was finally
succumbing to modernism and the architectural profession was spilt by batting ‘trads v. rads’, he

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advocated a ‘middle line’ of both embracing technological progress and the human qualities of
architecture. The ‘middle line’ was illustrated by scott’s best known London buildings, the power stations
at Battersea (1929 – 1935) and Bankside (1947 – 1960), where he disguised their industrial purpose
behind Gothic facades. Battersea, in particular, became a popular London landmark. Yet in an age when
progressive such as Le Corbusier and Jean Prouvé romanticised technology, Scott’s attempts to
popularise industrial buildings by obfuscating their function seemed, at best, conservative.
It is not surprising that Giles Gilbert Scott appeared unable to escape Britain’s architectural tradition as
he was born into it. His grandfather George Gilbet Scott (1811 – 1878) was the eminent High Victorian
Gothic architect of the Albert Memorial, the Foreign Office and the Midland Railways Terminus Hotl at
At Pancras station. His uncle Joh Oldrid Scott was also an architect, as was his father, the second George
Gilbet Scott, who was nicknamed Scott Jnr. A gifted yet tragic figure, Scott Jnr showed youthful promise
by designing a series of churches in London and Yorkshire that bridged Victorian gothic and the arts and
crafts movement, only to succumb to alcoholism and, eventually, to be committed to a mental asylum.
In 1923, Giles Gilbert Scott was commissioned to design Memorial Court, a hall of residence at Clare
College, Cambridge (begun in 1923), which he completed in a Georgian-inspired style. The following
year he won the telephone kiosk competition. Traditional though his kiosk was in style, functionally it
was very advanced. An ingenious ventilation system was installed using perforations in the dome, and the
glass was divided into small panels for speedy replacement in case of breakages. Scott’s original proposal
was for a mild steel structure, but the Post Office insisted on changing it to cast iron. It also insisted on
painting the kiosks bright red for maximum visibility in emergencies rather than Scott’s suggested shade
of duck egg blue. Following protests in rural areas, where people complained that the bright red kiosks
looked overbearing in the open countryside, the Post Office agreed to repaint them in green.
Despite the rural complaints, the K2 kiosk was a popular success, and Scott was invited by the Post
Office to modify his design in 1930 fort the concrete K3, intended principally for country use. He was
recalled again to design the K6 in 1953 to commemorate King George V’s silver jubilee. This became the
most widely used version of the kiosk with thousands being installed.
As well as these landmark commission, Scott designed dozens of churches throughout his career, as well
as more modest public projects such as monuments and extensions to existing buildings. One of his most
conspicuous commissions was a consultant, rather than an architect, to Battersea Power Station in south
London. Charged with making the enormouos electricity generating station more appealing, Scott
suggested brick as the main material for the central structure and turned the four chimneys – one on each
corner – into reassuringly familiar neo-classical columns. The result is surprisingly engaging for such a
vast structure, but with the showiness of the Art Deco cinemas then being constructed across Britain.
His most significant post-war commission came in 1947 when Scott was invited to design a second
London power station at Bankside beside the Thames in Southwark. More austere in style than Battersea,
Bankside did not match its popularity until its conversion in 2000 by the Swiss architects Herzog and DE

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Meuron into the Tate Modern museum. Yet formally and functionally it is the more sophisticated of the
two buildings, not least as Scott combined all of Bankside’s chimneys into a single central tower.

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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes in Questions 14 - 26, which are based on Reading Passage 2.

Mutual harm
A. In forests and fields all over the world, plants are engaged in a deadly chemical war to suppress other
plants and create conditions for their own success. But what if we could learn the secret of these
plants and use them for our own purposes? Would it be possible to use their strategies and weapons to
help us improve agriculture by preventing weeds from germinating and encouraging growth in crops?
This possibility is leading agricultural researchers to explore the effects plants have on other plants
with the aim of applying their findings to farming.
B. The phenomenon by which an organism produces one or more chemicals that influence the growth,
survival and reproduction of other organisms is called allelopathy. These chemicals are a subset of
chemicals produced by organisms called secondary metabolites. A plant’s primary metabolites are
associated with growth and development. Allelochemicals, however, are part of a plant’s defence
system and have a secondary function in the life of the organism. The term allelopathy comes from
the Greek: allelo and pathy meaning ‘mutual harm’. The term was first used by the Austrian scientist
Han Molisch in 1937, but people have been noting the negative effects that one plant can have on
another for a long time. In 300 BC, the Greek philosopher Theophrastus noticed that pigweed had a
negative effect on alfalfa plants. In China, around the first century AD, the author of Shennong Ben
Cao Jing described 267 plants that have the ability to kill pests.
C. Allelopathy can be observed in many aspects of plant ecology. It can affect where certain species of
plants grow, the fertility of competitor plants, the natural change of plant communities over time,
which plant species are able to dominate a particular area, and the diversity of plants in an area. Plants
can release allelopathic chemicals in several ways: their roots can release chemicals into the soil as
they rot. Initially, scientists were interested in the negative effects of allelopathic chemicals.
Observations of the phenomenon included poor growth of some forest trees, damage to crops,
changes in vegetation patterns, and interestingly, the occurrence of weed-free areas. It was also
realized that some species could have beneficial effects on agricultural crop plants and the possible
application of allelopathy became the subject of the research.
D. Today research is focused on the effects of weeds on crops, the effects of crops on weeds, and how
certain crops affect other crops. Agriculture scientists are exploring the use of allelochemicals to
regulate growth and to act as natural herbicides, thereby promoting sustainable agriculture by using
these natural chemicals as an alternative to man-made chemicals. For example, a small fast-growing
tree found in Central America, sometimes called the ‘miracle tree’, contains a poison that slows the
growth of other trees but does not affect its own seeds. Chemicals produced by this tree have been
shown to improve the production of rice. Similarly, box elder – another tree – stimulate the growth of
bluestem grass, which is a tall praise grass found in the mid-western United States. Many weeds may

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use allelopathy to become ecologically successful, a study in China found that 25 out of 33 highly
poisonous weeds had significant allelopathic properties.
E. There may be at least three applications of allelopathy to agriculture. Firstly, the allelopathic
properties of wild or cultivated plants many be bred into crop plants through genetic modification or
traditional breeding methods to improve the release of desired allelochemicals and thus improve crop
yield. Secondly, a plant with strong allelopathic properties could be used to control weeds by planting
it in rotation with an agricultural crop and then leaving it to rot and become part of the soil in order to
inhibit the growth of weeds. Finally, naturally occurring allelopathic chemicals could be used in
combination with man-made chemicals. Boosting the efficiency of man-made herbicides could lead to
a reduction in the amount of herbicides used in agriculture, which is better for the environment.
F. Despite the promising uses of allelopathic chemicals, agricultural scientists are still cautious. Firstly,
allelopathic chemicals may break down and disappear in the soil more easily than artificial chemicals.
Secondly, allelopathic chemicals may be harmful to plants other than weeds. Thirdly, allelopathic
chemicals could persist in the soil for a long time and may affect crops grown in the same field as the
allelopathic plants at a late date. Because the effects of allelopathic chemicals are not yet fully known,
agricultural scientists will need to continue to study the biological war between plants.

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READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes in Questions 27- 40, which are based on Reading Passage 3.

ULTRACONSERVED WORDS

The idea that it is possible to trace the relationship between languages by comparing words with similar
sounds and meanings seems obvious today, but there was little research in this field until the 1780s. That
is when William Jones noted the similarity between Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, and proposed that they all
derived from a common ancestral language. This idea is the basis for historical linguistics and has been
used to trace the movements of people from place to place. For instance, by comparing Romany with
various Indian languages, it was possible to prove that India was the original homeland of the Roma
people living in Europe.

Traditionally, linguists have believed that it was impossible for words to exist in a recognisable form for
more than nine thousand years. Recently, however, evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel and colleagues
from the University of Reading in the UK claim to have traced a group of common words back to the
language used by hunter-gatherers some fifteen thousand years ago.

The team from Reading published a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
indicating that they had found a group of what they termed “ultraconserved” words that have survived
since the last Ice Age. The researchers studied some two-hundred cognates – words that have a similar
sound and a similar meaning in more than one language. For example, the English word mother has
cognates in numerous languages, including madre in Spanish, mutter in German, mater in Latin, matar in
Sanskrit, and mathair in Irish. The researchers examined commonly used words, because these are the
ones which are less likely to change over time.

Seven major language families were studied, which together comprise over seven hundred individual
modern languages: Altaic, which includes modern Turkish and Mongolian; Kuchi-Kamchatkan, which
includes the languages of north-eastern Siberia; Dravidian, which includes languages spoken in southern
India; Inuit-Yupik, which includes languages spoken in Alaska and other Arctic regions; Kartvelian,
which includes Georgian and other languages spoken in the Caucasus region; and Uralic, which includes
Finish and Hungarian. About half of the world’s current population speaks one of the languages in these
seven families, but the individual languages make for quite a diverse group; they do not sound alike, use
a range of different alphabets and their speakers are widely separated geographically.

When the researchers found cognates, they tried to translate these into “proto-words” which they believed
to be the common ancestral item of vocabulary. This required a knowledge of how sounds change when
words move from one language to another; for example, the p sound in Romance languages (pisces in
Latin and pesce in Italian) becomes an f in Germanic languages (fisch in German and fish in English).

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The team then looked at these proto-words in relation to the languages in the seven families, and were
gratified to find twenty-four that were shared by at least four of the language families, although
frustratingly only one (thou) that was found in all seven. According to Pagel, however, all this points to
the existence of a proto-Eurasiatic language, which was the ancestor of all the languages in these
families. “We’ve never heard this language, and it’s not written down anywhere,” he says, “But this
ancestral language was spoken and heard. People sitting around campfires used it to talk to each other.”

Some of the twenty-three ultraconserved words on the list are unsurprising: mother, you, me, this, what,
not, man, fire. Others are rather unexpected: bark, worm, to spit, ashes. Pagel found the inclusion of the
verb to give on the list heartwarming. “I was really delighted to see it there,” he says. “Our society is
characterized by a degree of cooperation and reciprocity that you simply don’t see in any other animal.
Verbs tend to change fairly quickly, but that one hasn’t”.

The study’s conclusions are not without critics. Linguist Sarah Thomason from the University of
Michigan in the USA is unconvinced and finds a number of flaws in it. She writes: “This is the latest of
many attempts to get around the unfortunate fact that systematic sound-meaning correspondences in
related languages decay so much over time that even if the words survive, they are unrecognizable as
cognates … This means that word sets that have similar meanings and also sound similar after fifteen
thousand years are unlikely to share those similar sounds as the result of inheritance from a common
ancestor.” William Croft, a linguist at the University of New Mexico in the USA, is more sympathetic
than many to the idea, and says that the use of methods from evolutionary biology makes the idea of
Eurasiatic superfamily more plausible. “It probably won’t convince most historical linguists to accept the
Eurasiatic hypothesis, but their resistance may soften somewhat.”

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