Training Courses for National Team 2021- 2022, Tran Van Trung, MA – HaTinh High School for Gifted

Students

READING COMPREHENSION TEST NO 13

(Time: 60 minutes)
NAME: ……………………………………….
SCORE: ………. /50
IELTS READING TEST NO 13
A
When you get tired of typical sight-seeing, when you have had enough of monuments, statues, and
cathedrals, then think outside the gap. Read the four paragraphs below about the innovative types of
tourism emerging around the globe and discover ways to spice up your itinerary.
B
One could eat your way through your travels if one wished. A comparatively new kind of tourism is
gaining popularity across the world. In this, food and beverages are the main factors that motivate a
person to travel to a particular destination. Combining food, drink and culture, this type of travel provides
for an authentic experience, the food and restaurants reflecting the local and unique flavors of a particular
region or country. Studies conducted into this travel phenomenon have shown that food plays,
consciously or unconsciously, an important part in the vacations of a good number of travelers. Those
trying this are looking for a more participatory style of holiday experience. Analysts have noticed a shift
from ‘passive observation’ to ‘interaction and involvement’ in tourists, whereby the visitor comes into
close contact with locals and their way of life rather than remaining a mere spectator.
C
This is a novel approach to tourism in which visitors do not visit the ordinary tourist attractions in
traditional fashion. Rather, they let their whims be their guides! Destinations are chosen not on their
standard touristic merit but on the basis of an idea or concept often involving elements of humor,
serendipity, and chance. One example is known as Monopoly-travel. Participants armed with the local
version of a Monopoly game board explore a city at the whim of a dice roll, shuttling between elegant
shopping areas and the local water plant – with the occasional visit to jail.
Another example is Counter-travel, which requires you to take snapshots with your back turned to
landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben. Joël Henry, the French founder of Latourex, has developed
dozens of ideas since coming up with the concept in 1990. The traveler must increase his or her
receptiveness, in this way, no trip is ever planned or predictable. Henry’s most unusual invention is
known as “Erotravel”, where a couple heads to the same town but travels there separately. The challenge
is to find one another abroad. He and his wife have engaged in the pursuit in five cities and have managed
to meet up every time.
D
This involves any crop-based or animal based operation or activity that brings visitors to a farm or ranch.
It has recently become widespread in America, and participants can choose from a wide range of
activities that include picking fruits and vegetables, riding horses, tasting honey, learning about wine and
cheese making, or shopping in farm gift shops for local and regional products or handicrafts. For rural
economies struggling to stay afloat in this age of industrial farming, it has become an important and
marketable opportunity for improving the incomes and potential economic viability of small farms and
rural communities. In western North Carolina, the organization ‘HandMade in America’ is using this
method to develop their local economy and craft trades, and to educate visitors about farming practices.
On their website, it is described as a niche market. As people are becoming more interested in the
ecological importance of local food production, related projects reinforce the need to support local
growers and allow visitors to experience the relationship between food and our natural environment.
E
This is the trend of traveling to destinations that are first seen in movies, for instance, touring London in a
high-speed boat like James Bond or visiting the stately homes that are seen in Jane Austin films. The term
was first coined in the US press in the New York Post by journalist Gretchen Kelly, who wrote a 2007
article entitled “The sexiest film locations from 2007 to visit now.”
Currently, summer blockbuster movies are being used as themed marketing tools by companies like
Expedia and Fandango, who are promoting trips to where the Steven Spielberg film, Indiana Jones and
the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was made. Corporations as well as convention and tourism boards are
exploiting the trend, creating their own location based travel maps, like the Elizabeth: The Golden Age
movie map published by VisitBritain, Britain’s official travel and tourism guide. Other travel itineraries
have been created by tourism boards for movies including The Da Vinci Code (France), In Bruges
(Belgium), and P.S. I Love You (Ireland). Although a new concept, it’s fast becoming a major factor in
the choices travelers make in an increasingly tight economic climate. If a traveler has seen a site in a
major motion picture, its media exposure makes it a compelling choice for a family vacation or
honeymoon.
Questions 28-31: Reading Passage has five sections, A–E. Choose the correct heading for sections B–
E from the list of headings below. Write the correct number, i–viii, in gapes 28–31.
List of Headings
i Experimental Tourism
ii Cuisine Tourism
iii Adventure Tourism
iv Fashion Tourism
v Photographic Travels
vi Set-jetting.
vii Agritourism.
viii Introduction
ix Capital Cities
Example: Section A viii
28. Section B
29. Section C
30 Section D
31. Section E
Questions 32–35: Look at the following statements (Questions 32–35). Read passage 3 and complete
the sentences using one word only from the text. Write the answers for questions 32-35.
Putting together and enjoying culinary delights ensures the trip is more 32._____________
Moving quickly between more mundane public service facilities and malls that are more
33._____________
Film sets for hugely popular blockbuster movies are attracting couples to go there for their
34._____________
In the USA, visiting a strawberry picking field or listening to lectures on producing good wine is
becoming increasingly 35._____________
Questions 36-39: Label as true, false or not given (T / F / NG) Do the following statements agree with
the information given in passage 2? Write your answers in the gapes for questions 36-39 as:
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
36 Enjoying good foods is the most critical part of any good holiday for the majority of travelers.
37 Taking photos facing directly opposite from and facing away from a popular tourist site is a need for
Counter-travel.
38 People are gaining appreciation for the need to back those producing local grown vegetables and other
crops.
39 The term for promoting travel related to the film industry was first used in the British media.
Question 40: Read the text and choose the best match for the underlined phrase in the text, from the
three options, A-C.
For people who are bored of doing the usual activities such as looking at the common tourist attractions,
they need to reconsider things from a different perspective. This means to think is a way that is
____________.
A unique. B new. C creative.
GAP –FILL READING TEST NO 13
The Frozen Past
It’s taken over 200 years to find irrefutable evidences of Ice Ages, John Galvin reports
For hundreds of years, Europeans were aware of large lumps of rock, some as big as a house, lying
around in places where they didn't belong, far from the strata where such material originated. They
became known as ‘erratics' and until the late 18th century the accepted story was that they had been
dumped by a great flood.
37.
At a young age, he wanted to study natural history, but to please his parents and obtain financial support,
he qualified as a doctor (though he never practiced medicine) and also worked for a doctorate. He went
on to become an expert on fossilized fish and a professor at a college in Neuchatel. It was there that he
encountered the idea of an Ice Age.
38.
The upshot was that two years later, they went on a trip into the mountains to study the evidence at first
hand, Agassiz fully intended to dispel the ludicrous notion of what was called 'ice rafting', but came away
converted. Like many converts, he became more enthusiastic about the idea than the original enthusiasts.
Indeed, he proposed there had once been a great ice sheet engulfing Europe all the way from the North
Pole to the Mediterranean Sea.
39.
The talk produced a mixture of anger and disbelief. Even when Agassiz organized a field trip to show the
members scars and grooves cut into the rock by the action of boulders dragged along by glaciers, they
dismissed them as damage caused by the wheels of passing carriages. This only stirred him into more
proselytizing.
40.
Such language attracted attention, but in scientific terms a much more important event also occurred in
the same year when Agassiz presented his ideas to a meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, held in Glasgow in September. The great geologist Charles Lyell, who was a
big influence on Charles Darwin, was in the audience, and like many who heard the Ice Age theory for
the first time, was unconvinced. But as a good scientist, soon after the meeting, he headed into the
Highlands to look for evidence in the form of `terminal moraines' left behind by long-melted glaciers and
found them.
41.
The seeds of the modern theory of Ice Ages were sown in a book published just two years after the Ice
Age theory came in from the cold. The author was Joseph Adhemar, a mathematician who worked in
Paris, and his book was called Revolutions De La Mare. Although it was essentially a confused jumble of
ideas, it did contain one little jewel. This was the idea that climate is modulated by the slightly elliptical
nature of the Earth's orbit.
42.
Because the Earth travels more swiftly when it is nearer to the sun, it spends seven fewer days traversing
the (Northern Hemisphere) winter half of its orbit than it does traversing the summer half. In the south,
winters are longer than summers. Thus, he argued that over thousands of years this extra length of winter
had allowed the vast Antarctic ice sheet to grow. But he also knew that because of a wobble of the
spinning Earth, the pattern of the seasons slowly shifts around the orbit of the earth' as the millennia go
by. Some 11,000 years ago, Northern winter was seven days longer than summer. And 11,000 years
before that, the pattern was the same as it is today.
43.
 Enter James Croft who came from a poor family and was largely self-taught, reading voraciously about
science while supporting himself with a succession of dead-end jobs. When he was in Glasgow working
for a newspaper, he got his big break- a job as caretaker at the Andersonian College and Museum. The
college had a first-class scientific library, which he raided while his brother unofficially helped him out
with his job.

A Before the year was out, the Ice Age theory had been presented to the Geological Society in
London and established as fact. The geologists were convinced that the Earth (or at least Europe) had
once been covered by a great ice sheet, But this led to the questions of when and why the Ice Age had
occurred.
B In 1840, Agassiz presented the evidence in a book, Etude Sur Les G laciers, written in a way that
could not be ignored: 'Europe, previously covered with tropical vegetation and inhabited by herds of great
elephants, enormous hippopotami, and gigantic carnivores became suddenly buried under a vast expanse
of ice. Silence followed ... springs dried up, streams ceased to flow, and sunrays rising over that frozen
shore .... were met only by the whistling of northern winds and the rumbling of the crevasses as they
opened across the surface of that huge ocean of ice.'
C Agassiz picked up the notion from a friend, a geologist called Jean de Charpentier, who gave a talk
on the topic in Lucerne at a meeting of the Swiss Society of Natural Sciences. He reported how heaps of
rocky debris, known as moraines, are left behind by glaciers, and speculated that the Swiss glaciers had
been part of a huge single ice sheet. Agassiz thought the idea was ridiculous and told his friend so.
D And there it was - an explanation of not one but many Ice Ages. The only snag is that it was
wrong. The actual amount of heat 'lost' during the prolonged winter is nowhere near enough to make the
great ice sheets grow. But it did set people thinking about the influence of planetary motion on climate.
E As geologists developed techniques for dating the scars left behind by ice, and other evidence for
Ice Ages in the form of past changes in flora and fauna, his idea could be tested because it is possible to
calculate when the orbital parameters made for cold winters. By the end of the century, they showed he
was wrong in a way that should have grabbed attention.
F By the time the next annual meeting of the Society came around, Agassiz was its president despite
being only thirty years old. The audience settled into their seats expecting a dull presidential address on
fossil fishes, and were astonished when he delivered an impassioned lecture on the Ice Age in which that
very term was introduced.
G At present, closest approach to the Sun occurs in early January, while the most distant occurs in
July. So, Northern Hemisphere summers are a tiny bit cooler than they would otherwise be, and Northern
Hemisphere winters are a tiny bit warmer. But the cycle of the seasons is explained by the tilt of the
Earth, which brings short, cold winter days and long, hot summer days, completely overwhelming this
small orbital effect. This knowledge was applied to longer-term effects.
H The first alternative explanation came from Bernhard Kuhn, a Swiss who suggested that these
boulders had been carried to their new locations by ice. It was natural that this idea should originate in
Switzerland, where the power of glaciers is clearly visible. The Scottish pioneer of geology, James
Hutton, reached the same conclusion after a visit to the Jura Mountains. But the idea languished until it
was vigorously promoted by another Swiss, Louis Agassiz.
MULTIPLE- MATCHING TEST NO 13
Part 1:
THE BOOK IS DEAD - LONG LIVE THE BOOK
(A) A lot of ink has been spilled on the supposed demise of the printed word. EBooks are outselling
paper books. Newspapers are dying. To quote one expert: 'The days of the codex as the primary carrier of
information are almost over.' This has inspired a lot of handwringing from publisher s, librarians,
archivists - and me, a writer and lifelong bibliophile who grew up surrounded by paper books. I've been
blogging since high school, I'm addicted to my smartphone and, in theory, I should be on board with the
digital revolution - but when people mourn the loss of paper books, I sympathize. Are printed books
really going the way of the dodo? And what would we lose if they did? Some commentators think the
rumors of the printed world's imminent demise have been rather overstated. Printed books will live on as
art objects and collector's items, they argue, rather in the way of vinyl records. People may start buying
all their beach novels and periodicals in eBook formats and curating their physical bookshelves more
carefully. It is not about the medium, they say, it is about people. As long as there are those who care
about books and don't know why, there will be books. It's that simple.
(B) Meanwhile artists are blending print with technology. Between Page and Screen by Amaranth
Borsuk and Brad Bouse is a paper book that can be read only on a computer. Instead of words, every page
has a geometric pattern. If you hold so a printed page up to a webcam, while visiting the book's related
website, your screen displays the text of the story streaming, spinning and leaping off the page. Printed
books may need to become more multifaceted incorporating video, music and interactivity. A group at the
MIT Media Lab already builds electronic pop-up books with glowing LEDs that brighten and dim as you
pull paper tabs. and authors have been pushing the boundaries with 'augmented reality' books for years.
The lines between print and digital books are blurring, and interesting things are happening at the
interface.
(C) Beyond the page, eBooks may someday transform how we read. We are used to being alone with
our thoughts inside a book but what if we could invite friends or favorite authors to join in? A web tool
called Social Book offers a way to make the experience of reading more collaborative. Readers highlight
and comment on text, and can see and respond to comments that others have left in the same book. 'When
you put text into a dynamic network, a book becomes a place where readers and sometimes authors can
congregate in the margin,' said Bob Stein, founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book. a think tank
in New York. Stein showed how a high-school class is using Social Book to read and discuss Don
Quixote, how an author could use it to connect with readers and how he and his collaborators have started
using it instead of email. Readers can 100 open their books to anyone they want, from close friends to
intellectual heroes. 'For us, Social Book is not a pizza topping. It's not an addon,' Stein says. 'It's the
foundational cornerstone of reading and writing going forth into the future.
(D) The tools might be new, but the goal of Social Book is hardly radical. Books have found ways to
be nodes of human connection ever since their inception. That's why reading a dog-eared volume
painstakingly annotated with thoughts and impressions is unfailingly delightful – akin to making a new
like-minded acquaintance. The MIT Rare i20 Books collection has kept a copy of John Stuart Mill's 1848
book Principles of Political Economy, not for its content but for the lines and lines of tiny comments a
passionate but unknown user scrawled in the margins. Maybe eBooks are taking us where print was
trying to go all along.
1. An example of superseded technology that still has a certain appeal?
2. An analogy used to emphasize how seriously an idea is taken?
3. An anxiety she shares with other like-minded people?
4. A development that questions our assumptions about what reading actually entails?
5. The willingness of writers to experiment with new ideas?
6. The idea that books have always been part of an ongoing interactive process?
7. A seeming contradiction in her own attitudes?
8. A belief that the fundamental nature of reading will change?
9. Finding pleasure in another readers' reactions to a book?
10. A view that a prediction is somewhat exaggerated?

Part 2:
Paintings which inspire
Art experts give their opinions
A Luisa Sutton
A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, by Edouard Manet
Manet was inviting some kind of response in the way in which he presented women in his work and he
succeeded in bridging the gap between classical traditions and painting modern life. Above all, I have
tremendous respect for the fact that he was a breakthrough artist: a champion of realist modernism who
was censured for breaking the mould. Through the medium of painting, Manet constantly reassessed the
prevailing attitudes of the world he was living in. Today we are used to multiple perspective - seeing the
same image from different angles. This was not so in Manet's time, and in this painting we see him
crossing boundaries as he switches reality by employing a mirror to reflect his subjects.
B Paul Harris
Henry VII, 29 October 1505, by unknown artist
Visually, this is a stunning portrait; Henry moves towards the viewer from the parapet wearing the red
robes of Lancaster, his hands on the ledge. It is immediately exciting and emotive. Henry VII was on the
lookout for a new bride and this was painted to be sent to the court of Maan, much as we would send a
photo today. So the provenance is clear. Portraits of other English monarchs, Richard III in particular, are,
in comparison, stiff and remote. Henry VII's portrait speaks in a very particular way. His eyes look at one.
He is Renaissance Man but, at the same time one sees a shrewd, wise and wily man who, throughout his
reign, managed to amass the fortune of the Tudor dynasty.
C Tom Newa
James V and I, 1618, by Paul Van Somer
I used to work for an art handling company in New York, and I came to realize how wonderful paintings
are as entities. Old paintings last for so long because of the materials used - the oil is so robust, it expands
or contracts depending on the heat. They can be rolled up and taken around the world, they'll never die.
This portrait, in particular, made a huge impression on me. Works of art often lose their power as soon as
they're placed in a museum. This painting is where it belongs - in a palace. Subject to who you speak to,
James is either a buffoon or a tactical genius, but in this work he looks so stately. The painting was
clearly commissioned to convey regality - and it worked on me, 400 years later.
D Paula Smith
Mr and Mr Andrews, by Gainsborough
I chose this painting as it has personal relevance for me. I grew up in my grandmother's house in London.
She was an excellent copyist of Gainsborough. We had copies of all of his paintings, except for this one,
which my grandmother didn't approve of. I've always found it incredibly beautiful though. The two
figures in this wonderful painting have very enigmatic expressions. What are they up to? What are they
thinking? And then what are we to make of the landscape? It's an agricultural scene, in the middle of the
day, but there are no agricultural workers anywhere to be seen. Where on earth is everybody? What a
strange atmosphere the place has, a long ago era that will never be recaptured.
E Lynn D'Anton
An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, 1618, by Velazquez
What is most striking about this painting is surely its veracity. One gets the feeling that one is looking
into a room in which there are no obstacles to understanding. Nothing comes between the subject and the
observer. The artist here is the perfect observer. When I saw it a few years ago in the National Gallery of
Scotland, set alongside many other works from Velazquez's youth, there was no doubt in my mind that it
was a masterpiece. I think that it is easy for many people to empathize with this painting in one way or
another.
In which section are the following mentioned?
the inscrutable nature of the subjects 1_________
the artist's ability to give an insight into temperament 2_________
the integrity of the image portrayed 3_________
the view that the artist was an innovator 4_________
delight in a painting's ability to endure 5_________
the background to a painting being well documented 6_________
the view that a painting's impact depends on its surroundings 7_________
a painting which gives an image of a lost world 8_________
admiration for an artist who dared to challenge conventional ideas 9_________
conflicting opinions about the subject of a painting 10_________

The end