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Ielts Reading Test
Ielts Reading Test
READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.
American author Peter Miller explains, ‘I used to think that individual ants knew where they were
going, and what they were supposed to do when they got there. But Deborah Gordon, a biologist
at Stanford University, showed me that nothing an ant does makes any sense except in terms of
the whole colony. Which makes you wonder if, as individuals, we don’t serve a similar function
for the companies where we work or the communities where we live.’ Ants are not intelligent by
themselves. Yet as a colony, they make wise decisions. And as Gordon discovered during her
research, there’s no one ant making decisions or giving orders.
Take food collecting, for example. No ant decides, ‘There’s lots of food around today; lots of ants
should go out to collect it.’ Instead, some forager ants go out, and as soon as they find food, they
pick it up and come back to the nest. At the entrance, they brush past reserve foragers, sending a
‘go out’ signal. The faster the foragers come back, the more food there is and the faster other
foragers go out, until gradually the amount of food being brought back diminishes. An organic
calculation has been made to answer the question, ‘How many foragers does the colony need
today?’ And if something goes wrong a hungry lizard prowling around for an ant snack, for
instance then a rush of ants returning without food sends waiting reserves a ‘Don’t go out’ signal.
But could such decentralised control work in a human organisation? Miller visited a Texas gas
company that has successfully applied formulas based on ant colony behaviour to ‘optimise its
factories and route its trucks’. He explains, ‘If ant colonies had worked out a reliable way to
identify the best routes between their nest and food sources, the company managers figured, why
not take advantage of that knowledge?’ So they came up with a computer model, based on the
self-organising principles of an ant colony. Data is fed into the model about deliveries needing to
be made the next day, as well as things like weather conditions, and it produces a simulation
determining the best route for the delivery lorries to take.
Miller explains that he first really understood the impact that swarm behaviour could have on
humans when he read a study of honeybees by Tom Seeley, a biologist at Cornell University. The
honeybees choose as a group which new nest to move to. First, scouts fly off to investigate
multiple sites. When they return they do a ‘waggle dance’ for their spot, and other scouts will then
fly off and investigate it. Many bees go out, but none tries to compare all sites. Each reports back
on just one. The more they liked their nest, the more vigorous and lengthy their waggle dance and
the more bees will choose to visit it. Gradually the volume of bees builds up towards one site; it’s
a system that ensures that support for the best site snowballs and the decision is made in the most
democratic way.
Humans, too, can make clever decisions through diversity of knowledge and a little friendly
competition. 'The best example of shared decision making that I witnessed during my research
was a town meeting I attended in Vermont, where citizens met face-to-face to debate their annual
budget,’ explains Miller. ‘For group decision making to work well, you need a way to sort through
the various options they propose; and you need a mechanism to narrow down these options.’
Citizens in Vermont control their municipal affairs by putting forward proposals, or backing up
others’ suggestions, until a consensus is reached through a vote. As with the bees, the broad
sampling of options before a decision is made will usually result in a compromise acceptable to
all. The ‘wisdom of the crowd’ makes clever decisions for the good of the group and leaves
citizens feeling represented and respected.
The Internet is also an area where we are increasingly exhibiting swarm behaviour, without any
physical contact. Miller compares a wiki website, for example, to a termite mound. Indirect
collaboration is the key principle behind information sharing websites, just as it underlies the
complex constructions that termites build. Termites do not have an architect’s blueprint or a grand
construction scheme. They simply sense changes in their environment, as for example when the
mound’s wall has been damaged, altering the circulation of air. They go to the site of the change
and drop a grain of soil. When the next termite finds that grain, they drop theirs too. Slowly,
without any kind of direct decision making, a new wall is built. A termite mound, in this way, is
rather like a wiki website. Rather than meeting up and talking about what we want to post online,
we just add to what someone maybe a stranger on the other side of the world already wrote. This
indirect knowledge and skill sharing is now finding its way into the corridors of power.
Questions 1-6
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text?
In boxes 1-6 on your answer, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
1 Commuters are often compared favourably with worker ants. TRUE
2 Some ants within a colony have leadership roles. FALSE
3 Forager ants tell each other how far away the food source is. NOT GIVEN
4 Forager ants are able to react quickly to a dangerous situation. NOT GIVEN
5 Termite mounds can be damaged by the wind. TRUE
6 Termites repair their mounds without directly communicating with each other. TRUE
Questions 7-9
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F, below.
Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 7-9 on your answer sheet.
7 Managers working for a Texas gas company A, B,
8 Citizens in an annual Vermont meeting C, D, E
9 Some Internet users F,
A provide support for each other's ideas in order to reach the best outcome.
B use detailed comments to create large and complicated systems.
C use decision-making strategies based on insect communities to improve their service.
D communicate with each other to decide who the leader will be.
E contribute independently to the ideas of others they do not know.
F repair structures they have built without directly communicating with each other.
Questions 10-13
Complete the flow-chart below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet.
they perform what is known as a 11_ waggle dance _on their return
Questions 19-22
Look at the following statements (Questions 19-22) and the list of plants.
Match each statement with the correct plant, A, B, C, D or E.
Write the correct letter, A, B, C, D or E, in boxes 19-22 on your answer sheet.
19 It uses other creatures to help it digest insects. A
20 It produces a slippery substance to make insects fall inside it. D
21 It creates an empty space into which insects are sucked. B
22 It produces a sticky substance which traps insects on its surface. C
List of plants
A Venus flytrap
B bladderwort
C Drosera sundew
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
28 Paragraph B vi
29 Paragraph C v
31 Paragraph E ii
32 Paragraph F i
‘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
splutters, 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 post-modern 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 which 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 languages 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 çehirliliçtiremediklerimizdensiniz, 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 some one-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?
Questions 33-36
A difficult B complex C original
G fundamental
Questions 37-40
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 3?
YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
37 Human beings might have achieved their present position without language. NO
38 The Port-Royal grammarians did justice to the nature of language. YES
39 A complex idea can be explained more clearly in a sentence than in a single word. YES
40 The Sumerians were responsible for starting the recording of events. NOT GIVEN