IELTS Modular

Matching Features

A. About the task

Read the information about the task type.

The Matching Features task tests your ability to read a passage carefully and
understand the main ideas as well as detailed information and arguments. There are
two different types of Matching Features task. They look slightly different, but they
both test the same reading skills in the same way.

Type 1: On the question paper, you see a set of numbered statements. There is also
a box containing a set of options - these could be a list of people's names,
organisations or any other feature that is found in the passage. Your job is to read
the passage and match the information and ideas in the statements to the options.
Here are the basic rules for the Matching Features task (Type 1):
• The list of numbered statements is in random order.
• The statements do not use the same words and phrases as the passage, but they
do refer to the same information and ideas.
• The answer to each question is the letter that appears next to the feature in the
box.
• You should use all the letters.
• The letters may be used more than once.
• You then decide which of the lettered features in the box each statement refers
to.

Type 2: On the question paper, you see a set of numbered features - these could be
a list of people's names, organisations or any other feature that is found in the
passage. There is also a box containing a number of options. This is also a list of
features, for example a list of theories mentioned in the passage. Your job is to
read the passage and match the features, for example, the person's name to the
theory they are connected with.
Here are the basic rules for the Matching features task (Type 2):
• The features in the numbered questions are in the same order as they first appear
in the text.
• The answer to each question is the letter that appears next to the option in the
box.
• You decide which of the lettered options in the box matches each feature in the
numbered list.
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B IELTS PRACTICE TASK

Railway Systems
Underground railways are an essential part of life in some of the world's largest
cities. There are, for example, 275 stations on the London underground and 450 on
New York's subway system. Although the Paris metro can only boast 275, it is said
that wherever you live in the city, you're never more than 500 metres from a
station. In all three cities, the railways move enormous numbers of people around
every day, while making little impact on the visual appearance of the cityscape.
Many of the world's most famous underground railways date back to the period
around the beginning of the twentieth century. The first metro trains in Paris ran in
1900, while New York’s subway dates from 1904. They came into existence as the
development of railway building technology coincided with an enormous influx of
people into the world's largest cities, part of a general urbanisation associated with
both population growth and industrial development. Underground railways
facilitated the expansion of cities without placing more strain on their already
overcrowded surface transportation systems - a forward-thinking conclusion reached
by city leaders in London, whose system was inaugurated some 40 years before
developments in Paris and New York. Today, there are more than 160 subway
systems around the world that have followed that model.
Tunnelling under a city, however, is easier said than done. In the early days, there
was a reliance on manual labour, and it was tough work. Around 8,000 people were
involved in the construction of the first lines in New York, while the original
tunnelling in London was marked by a high level of both injuries and fatalities. A
variety of techniques has since been developed for use in the excavation of tunnels,
and each system has its own particular needs and challenges. For example, in Paris,
soft mud rather than hard rock is the main headache for tunnelling engineers,
whose solution has been to freeze it using calcium chloride so that it can be
removed more easily.
In New York City, the subway system is currently in the middle of a massive
renovation project that involves boring a number of new tunnels, using what's
known as a tunnel-boring machine (TBM). This enormous piece of equipment cuts
through the earth beneath the city slowly but safely, and is especially important in
New York where the hard bedrock is not far below the surface. This method of
construction is very different to those in use when the first underground railways
were built.
New tunnels are currently being dug beneath London to reduce overcrowding on a
system that already carries in excess of seven million passengers a day. The
tunnelling has unearthed archaeological remains of great interest, a factor that held
up the construction project. Sometimes, however, archaeology can work in the
builders' favour, as in Paris where the metro was able to take advantage of deep
quarries which were first excavated by the Ancient Romans.
Whether it's solid rock in New York or ancient remains in Europe, tunnelling is never
without its challenges. But the benefits of underground railways certainly outweigh
the cost and challenge of building them.
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Questions 1-6
Look at the following statements (Questions 1-6) and the list of railway systems
below.
Match each statement with the correct railway system, A, B or C.
Write the correct letter, A, B or C, next to each question.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. Construction of tunnels in the city was delayed by unexpected discoveries.

2. The city authorities were pioneers in the development of these railway systems.
3. The city is taking advantage of available technology to update its system.
4. An impressive claim is made regarding the ease of access to the city's system.
5. This system has to deal with the problem of tunnelling in difficult soil conditions.
6. Safety of the workforce was an issue during the initial construction of this
system.

List of Railway Systems

A Paris Metro
B New York City Subway
C London Underground
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C Tips and tactics

Read the tips and tactics for matching features questions.

1. Before you read the passage, read the list of statements and features and think
about what you're going to read.
2. Read the passage quickly to get an idea of the information and ideas in each
paragraph.
3. Underline the names of the features where they occur.
4. Mark any sections that contain the ideas in the statements (Type 1). Write the
number of the question next to these sections.
5. You probably need to mark more than one section for each statement or option.
This is OK. You can read them again carefully later and choose which one is
correct.
6. Now go through the numbered questions one by one and read the sections you
have marked with the question number. Look for the underlined features in this
section.
7. Read the sections carefully to see if the ideas match precisely.
8. Remember that the statements in Type 1 use different words and phrases from
the passage. You are looking for the information and ideas.
9. When you are sure you have found the correct section, write the correct letter
on the answer sheet.
10. Quickly read the paragraph or section again to make sure you haven't missed
anything.
11. Remember to write only the correct letter on the answer sheet.
12. Always answer all the questions, even if you're not sure.
13. Remember in Type 2, you have two sets of features. You need to underline both
sets of features in the passage, and then match them, e.g. the numbered
achievements to the lettered names.
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Skills-building exercises - Matching features

Read the passage and answer the questions.

According to the writer, which form of communication

1. began the changes in writing habits he describes?
2. became commonplace remarkably quickly?
3. has been shown to help young children learn key skills?
4. is characterised by the omission of unnecessary language features?
5. is written in a style that makes it easier to remember the content?
6. allows original ideas to reach a wider audience?
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How Communications Technology Has Improved Writing Skills

Day by day, written communications are becoming more like speech, and writing that
reads like conversation is a very modern phenomenon. What's more, social media, blogs
and emails have hugely improved the way we write, and made it more relevant. I
remember the term at school when we were taught to write essays. Most of my
classmates just endured it. They'd never written down their extended thoughts before,
and were confident they'd never need do it again.
Email kicked off an unprecedented expansion in writing. We're now in the most literate
age in history. I remember in 2003 asking Tom White, a fellow journalist, 'What's a blog?'
By 2006, the analysis firm NM Incite had identified 36 million blogs worldwide, five
years later, there were 173 million. Use of online social media rises every month. In
fact, writing is overtaking speech as the most common form of interaction. Ofcom, the
UK’s communications regulator, says Britons now text absent friends and family more
often than they speak to them on the phone or in person.
Pessimists like to call this the death of civilisation: a vision of mute youths exchanging
semi-literate messages. John Humphrys, the BBC broadcaster, once dismissed texters as
'vandals' intent on destroying the language. He's wrong. As the linguist John McWhorter
points out, pedants have been lamenting the decline of language since at least 63 AD.
Clare Wood, development psychologist at Coventry University, says very little research
exists to back up claims such as Humphrys’. Her own study of primary school students
suggested that texting improved their reading ability. Texters, after all, are constantly
practising reading and spelling. Sure, children tend not to punctuate text messages. But
most of them grasp that this genre has different rules from, say, school exams. That's a
distinction we adults are slowly learning: I've only just begun dropping commas from
texts.
But texts, blogs, emails and Facebook posts are infecting other kinds of writing, and
mostly for the good. They are making journalism, books and business communications
more conversational. Social media offer a pretty good model for how to write. First, the
writers mostly keep it short. People on Twitter often omit redundant words which waste
space, and use vocabulary which is more succinct. Likewise, bloggers say 'but' instead of
'however', and the writing is usually unpolished, barely edited - but that's its great
strength.
A recent study by Laura Mickes and others published in the journal Memory & Cognition,
found that people were much better at remembering casual writing like Facebook posts
than lines from books or journalism. One possible reason: 'The relatively unfiltered and
spontaneous production of one person's mind is just the sort of thing that is readily
stored in another's mind.' That's probably why Twitter and Facebook are so successful.
The unfiltered productions of people's minds are often banal, but they don't have to be.
Nobel prize-winning scientists tweet too. You can express quite thought-provoking new
concepts in everyday language, and conversational prose actually improves your chances
of being heard and understood. True, other styles are valid too. The novelist Jane
Austen wrote beautiful formal prose. But for an average writer with no particular gift,
the conversational model works better. The other tip for getting a point across is to tell
a human story, as I always want to tell conference speakers who speak in diagrams.
Of course, bad writing still exists. But mostly, social media have done wonders for
writing. Back in 1944, the essayist George Orwell lamented the divide between wordy,
stilted, written English and much livelier speech. 'Spoken English is full of slang,' he
wrote. 'It is abbreviated wherever possible.' His ideal was writing that sounded like
speech. It seems that, thanks to modern communications technology, we're getting
there at last.
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7. Look at the list of people A-E. Read the passage and underline the names.

List of People List of Achievements

A Aristotle 1 saw the brain as a type of cooling system
B Cajal 2 drew the first visual representation of the brain
C Golgi 3 realised all parts of the brain were interconnected
D Lichtman 4 identified the role of individual brain cells
E Willis 5 developed computer models of brain cells

8. Look at the list of achievements 1-5. Read the passage carefully and match
each person with his achievement

The Science of the Brain

Scientists are learning so much about the brain now that it's easy to forget that for
much of history we had no idea at all how it worked or even what it was. In the
ancient world, physicians believed that the brain was made of mucus. The Greek
philosopher Aristotle looked on it as a refrigerator, taking the heat out of a fiery
heart. From his time through to the 17th century, anatomists declared with great
authority that our perceptions, emotions, reasoning and actions were all the result
of what they called animal spirits - in other words mysterious, unknowable vapours
that swirled through cavities in our head and travelled through our bodies.
The scientific revolution in the 17th century began to change that. The British
physician Thomas Willis recognised that the tissue of the brain was where our
mental world existed. To understand how it worked, he studied the brains of sheep,
dogs and other animals, producing an accurate map of the organ, something which
hadn't previously been attempted.
It would take another century for researchers to grasp that the brain is an electric
organ and that voltage spikes travel through it and out into the body's nervous
system. Still, even in the 19th century scientists knew little about the paths those
spikes followed. The Italian physician Camillo Golgi argued that the brain was a web
- with all of its parts linked together. Building on Golgi’s research, the Spanish
scientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal tested new ways of staining individual neurons to
trace their tangled connections. Cajal recognised what Golgi did not: that each
neuron was a distinct cell, separate from every other one, and that signals,
triggered by a mix of chemicals, are transmitted to neighbouring neurons.
Jeff Lichtman, a neuroscientist, is the current Ramon y Cajal Professor of Arts and
Sciences at Harvard, carrying Cajal's project into the 21st century. Instead of
making pen-and-ink drawings of neurons by hand, he and his colleagues are creating
extremely detailed three-dimensional images of neurons on screen, revealing their
every detail. By looking at the fine structure of individual nerve cells, they may
finally get answers to some of the most basic questions about the nature of the
brain.
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IELTS PRACTICE TASK

Read the passage and answer the questions.

Reading the game

Thirty-five years ago, a hundred tennis-playing children were tested for general
athleticism. One girl was rated by the psychologist leading the analysis as 'the
perfect tennis talent'. She outperformed her contemporaries at every tennis drill, as
well as general motor skills. Her lung capacity suggested that she could have
become a European champion at 1,500 metres. The girl's name? Steffi Graf, who
went on to win 22 Grand Slams.
I was reminded of Graf's innate sporting talent during a recent conversation with the
geneticist and former Economist journalist Matt Ridley. We were discussing the
common argument that greatness, even genius, is the result of 10,000 hours of
dedicated practice, This has been the sales pitch of several widely read books, the
subtitles of which include 'The genius in all of us' and 'Greatness isn’t born, it’s
grown'.
If nurture is so dominant and nature such an irrelevance, then an unavoidable
question follows: how many people, of all those born in 1758, had the potential, if
they were given the right opportunities, to be as good as Mozart? Or in this case,
how many women, of all those born in 1989, had the potential to become as good at
tennis as Graf? According to the logic that a genius lurks in all of us, the answer
must lie somewhere between 'most' and 'many'.
Ridley's answers were a bit different: four Mozarts and about 30 Grafs. There was
mischief, of course, in attaching numbers to such hypothetical questions, but his
answer rang true.
The surprise here is that the Idea of talent finds itself on the ropes, beaten and
bruised by those who believe in nurture alone, Acknowledging a role for genes, any
role, can feel almost immoral, When I was quizzed by a newspaper about the
genetic arguments in my book Luck, the interviewer sounded surprised - even
though he agreed - that I dared to take on the gene-denial industry. His reticence
was understandable. The anti-genes lobby often suggests that it is a short hop from
recognising the existence of genetic talent to believing in eugenics. Personally, I'm
pretty confident we can distinguish between the two.
The role of innate talent in elite sport, just as it has been written out of the causal
narrative, is actually in the ascendant out on the pitch, Consider the example of
modern tennis, In the late 1970s and 1980s, tennis was still catching up with the
implications of professionalism, John McEnroe enjoyed going for a burger much
more than going to the gym, It fell to the underrated Ivan Lendl, a less talented all-
round player than his elite rivals, to dedicate his whole life to the pursuit of self-
improvement. To protect his joints, Lendl pioneered aerobic training on bikes rather
than road running. He even installed an exact replica of the court at Flushing
Meadows, home of the US Open, in his own back garden in Connecticut. Less gifted
than McEnroe, Lendl relied on being fitter and more prepared, He used nurture, if
you like, to make up for a shortfall in nature. And it worked. Lendl overhauled his
rivals and spent 270 weeks as the world number one.
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One up for nurture. But what if all the top players hire nutritionists, masseurs and
specialist coaches? That is what happened within 20 years. The upshot was that for
302 weeks between 2004 and 2009, the world number one was Roger Federer,
widely rated the most talented player ever to pick up a racket. This view hardly
needs anecdotal support, but if you're sceptical, perhaps you can take his greatest
rival's word for it: 'His DNA,' Rafael Nadal says, 'seems perfectly adapted to tennis.'
During the amateur era and the early decades of professionalism, tennis players
came in all shapes, sizes and training regimes. So it was possible to gain a
significant edge through sheer hard work. But when a sport becomes fully
professional and global, and nurture equilibrates, nature once again has the upper
hand.
The Grand Slam tournaments are the four most important international tennis events, including
Wimbledon and the US Open.

Questions 1-6
Look at the following statements (Questions 1-6) and the list of tennis players
below.
Match each statement with the correct player, A, B, C, D or E.
Write the correct letter, A, B, C, D or E, next to each question.
NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. This player's level of achievement was successfully predicted.

2. This player's innate ability was not matched by a commitment to training.
3. This player was responsible for innovations in training procedures.
4. This player's level of success would seem to support the idea that talent can be
developed through training.
5. This player has acknowledged the superior talent of a rival.
6. This player's achievements support Epstein's view regarding the innate nature of
talent.

List of Tennis Players

A Roger Federer
B Steffi Graf
C Ivan Lendl
D John McEnroe
E Rafael Nadal