IELTS Reading Practice Test

IELTS Reading Practice Test

Harris was ambitious. After his undergraduate studies in India, he secured a place at a well-known university in the UK for Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. The only hurdle he had to overcome was the IELTS academic test in which he had to get a minimum of 7. So, he enrolled in an IELTS coaching centre nearby. But he knew that this was not enough if he was to be successful at the first attempt. So, he surfed the internet repeatedly attempting whatever IELTS practice tests he could find. What he found the most difficult to do was the academic reading test in which he had to read long passages and find the main ideas contained in each paragraph. Even though it was difficult, Harris persevered.

(Paragraph A)

It has long been well-known in zoos that all races of the Giraffes will interbreed quite freely and cannot be called species. All that this implies is that the races have not been separated for a sufficient time for changes to take place which would render them incompatible. Occasionally there are reports of wild hybrids, but although natural crossing may take place, I do not believe that the hybrids could be identified and that such reports are merely of the normal range of pattern shown by the Masai race. In the Nairobi National Park of Kenya, I have photographed Giraffes together showing many degrees of pattern ranging from an almost reticulate-type to the pure vine-leaf type. The reticulate-type always differ however from the true Reticulated Giraffe in that the lighter lines are not sparkling white and the brown areas are not the true liver-red colour. Some young animals will show these colours but not the reticulate pattern. No one has yet worked out how zoos have been crossing Giraffes for years. At the London Zoo results seem to show that if the male is Reticulate then the offspring, whichever the sex, inherits his pattern. If the male is, say, Masai, and the female Reticulate, then the offspring appears to be Reticulate but changes its pattern as it grows older.

(Paragraph B)

The question of where to draw the line between splitting and lumping is one that bedevils all taxonomists, but from the geographical distribution of the Giraffe I think that eight races will always hold good, namely, the northern, G.c. camelopardalis, the Reticulated, the Baringo, the West African, G.c. Peralta, the Masai, Thornicroft’s, the Angola and the Cape Giraffe. Thornicroft’s Giraffe was named after a specimen secured by the Commissioner of Petauke, Northern Rhodesia, H. Thornicroft, in 1910. It is related to the Masai race but seems to have neem isolated for a long time on the east bank of the Luangwa River.

(Paragraph C)

From about the middle of the last century, hand in hand with the expansion of evolutionary thought, the colours of animals have never failed to excite lively controversies in which the Giraffe has played a prominent part. Is there, then, any significance in the coloration and pattern of the Giraffe or is it merely incidental? This is a question to which we can only suggest an answer; but much of the confusion in the past arose from the too liberal use of the term ‘protective coloration’. This was extended in the extreme to the view that all animals were protectively coloured; otherwise, they would not have survived but would have been eliminated by natural selection.

(Paragraph D)

Early humans always reported how difficult it was to see the Giraffe when it was feeding in thorn bush, the head and neck looking, so they said, like the trunk of a withered tree with the white reticulum mimicking the white acacia branches. Over a century ago it was suggested that the colour followed a geographical pattern: in equatorial regions where the light is very bright and with strong shadows the spots and lines are sharply separated, as in the Reticulated form; whereas farther south the sunlight becomes softer and the shadows more diffuse so the sports on the Giraffe become softer and fade more gently into the lighter areas. Attractive as this theory may sound, the Cape Giraffe, with its dark and well-defined markings, does not conform to it.

(Paragraph E)

The Giraffe is often difficult to see as it stands quietly among the spreading acacias, but I do not think that this is due to its particular pattern. For one thing, the height of its body is frequently at the level at which the trees branch out and thus only the thin legs are in full view. My view is that the variation of the Giraffe’s pattern suggests that it is not significant and is most likely to be an obsolete ancestral feature. In many animals, such as the lion, the young wear the ancestral pattern, which changes as they become adult. In the Giraffe the pattern at birth is most like the Reticulate form and this does not tell as much. This fact has led to much confusion concerning the naming of races in zoos, for then a young animal arrives it often looks like a Reticulated Giraffe and is so named. It is not until it is about three years old, and is sexually mature, that the pattern begins to change rapidly to that of its particular race.

(Paragraph F)

Have you wondered about the Giraffe in ancient times? Giraffes had a place in primitive art. It is suggested that the primitive man had no inner urge to express beauty when he took to paining and engraving the walls of the rock shelters and caverns. He did not, it is said, do it to make them look pretty but to give himself mastery over the creatures that he hunted by creating their doubles. No one can be sure about this, but my own view is that the magical significance may have been over-emphasized, and that boredom, love of creation and mere territorial signs all played a part. As often as not he no doubt painted and engraved because he was proud of his ability to do so. Why otherwise portray wild animals fighting, a lioness and her cubs feeding, an elephant protecting its young from a carnivore? There is no hunting symbolism in such scenes.

(Paragraph G)

The Giraffe is found only in African rock art, where it does not figure prominently, although common enough. The dynamic attitudes show an intimate knowledge on the part of the artist. These animals were a part of this everyday life, and this explains why he was so much more successful at depicting animals than were the artists of medieval times. Artists of medieval Europe had to create their pictures from a mumbo-jumbo of hearsay and preconceived notions about animals which they had never seen and whose form they could only guess at, if indeed they believed that the animals ever existed.

(Paragraph H)

The vivid naturalism of the primitive artist on the other hand has never been surpassed to this day, although examples date back some 80,000 years in the famous caves of Lascaux and Altamire, in south-west France and northern Spain. Giraffes in the prehistoric art of northern Africa, however, are of much later date. Probably none of the representations yet found is older than 4,000 to 5,000 BC. Most of them are much less old. There is thus a tremendous interval between this and the earliest European art where the simple naturalistic style became extinct by about 10,000 BC. Perhaps the African dating will in some cases prove to be too conservative.

Match the following ideas with the paragraphs in which each one occurs.