Practice Test 1 – IELTS - Ms.

Ngọc

Listening: 35 mins + Reading: 25 mins + Writing: 25 mins = 85 mins

Listening: 35 mins
You will listen to the recordings TWICE. Please DOUBLE CLICK the file below.

SECTION 1 QUESTION 1-10

Question 1-5. Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.

Transport from Airport to Milton

Example                                               answer

Distance:                                             147 miles

Options:

Car hire

Don’t want to drive

1 ……………………………….

Expensive

Greyhound bus

$15 single, $27.50 return

Direct to the 2 …………………………

Long 3 …………………………….

Airport shuttle

4 ……………………….. service

Every 2 hours

$35 single, $65 return

Need to 5 ……………………..

 Questions 6-10. Write ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer.

AIRPORT SHUTTLE BOOKING FORM

To: Milton

Date:   6 …………………..                   No. of passengers:          one

Practice Test 1 – IELTS - Ms. Ngọc

Bus Time:   7 ………………….. pm           Type of ticket:               single

Name:        Janet 8 ………………

Flight No:  9 …………………………           From:    London Heathrow

Address in Milton: Vacation Motel 24, Kitchener Street

Fare:                        $35

Credit Card No:     (Visa) 10 ………………………

SECTION 2: Questions 11—20

Questions 11—16: Choose the correct letter, A, B or C.
SPONSORED WALKING HOLIDAY
11. On the holiday, you will be walking for
A. 6 days.
B. 8 days.
C. 10 days.
12. What proportion of the sponsorship money goes to charity?

A B C
13. Each walker's sponsorship money goes to one
A. student.
B. teacher.
C. school.
14. When you start the trek you must be
A. interested in getting fit.
B. already quite fit.
C. already very fit.
Practice Test 1 – IELTS - Ms. Ngọc

15. As you walk you will carry

A. all of your belongings
B. some of your belongings.
C. none of your belongings.
16. The Semira Region has a long tradition of
A. making carpets.
B. weaving blankets.
C. carving wood.
Questions 17-20. Complete the form below. Write ONE WORD ONLY for each answer.
ITINERARY
Day 1: arrive in Kishba
Day 2: rest day
Day 3: spend all day in a 17. ……………………
Day 4: visit a school
Day 5: rest day
Day 6: see a 18. ………………… with old carvings
Day 7: rest day
Day 8: swim in a 19. …………………
Day 9: visit a 20. …………………
Day 10: depart from Kishba
Practice Test 1 – IELTS - Ms. Ngọc

Reading: 25 mins
Ant Intelligence
When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring
immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members
of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence.
Among these, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the
idea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by those
involved in these investigations. Ants store food, repel attackers and use chemical signals
to contact one another in case of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared
to the human use of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising
images and jingles, political slogans and martial music) to arouse and propagate moods
and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote Ants are so much like human beings as
to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies to war,
use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour,
exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
However, in ants there is no cultural transmission — everything must be encoded in the
genes — whereas in humans the opposite is true. Only basic instincts are carried in the
genes of a newborn baby, other skills being learned from others in the community as the
child grows up. It may seem that this cultural continuity gives us a huge advantage over
ants. They have never mastered fire nor progressed. Their fungus farming and aphid
herding crafts are sophisticated when compared to the agricultural skills of humans five
thousand-years ago but have been totally overtaken by modern human agribusiness.
Or have they? The farming methods of ants are at least sustainable. They do not ruin
environments or use enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, recent evidence suggests
that the crop farming of ants may be more sophisticated and adaptable than was thought.
Ants were farmers fifty million years before humans were. Ants can't digest the cellulose
in leaves — but some fungi can. The ants therefore cultivate these fungi in their nests,
bringing them leaves to feed on, and then use them as a source of food. Farmer ants
secrete antibiotics to control other fungi that might act as 'weeds', and spread waste to
fertilise the crop.
It was once thought that the fungus that ants cultivate was a single type that they had
propagated, essentially unchanged from the distant past. Not so. Ulrich Mueller of
Maryland and his colleagues genetically screened 862 different types of fungi taken from
ants' nests. These turned out to be highly diverse: it seems that ants are continually
domesticating new species. Even more impressively, DNA analysis of the fungi suggests
that the ants improve or modify the fungi by regularly swapping and sharing strains with
neigh boring ant colonies.
Whereas prehistoric man had no exposure to urban lifestyles — the forcing house, of
intelligence — the evidence suggests that ants have lived in urban settings for close on a
hundred million years, developing and maintaining underground cities of specialised
Practice Test 1 – IELTS - Ms. Ngọc

chambers and tunnels. When we survey Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles, we are
amazed at what has been accomplished by humans. Yet Hoelldobler and Wilson's
magnificent work for ant lovers, the Ants, describes a supercolony of the ant Formica
yessensis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. This 'megalopolis' was reported to be
composed of 360 million workers and a million queens living in 4,500 interconnected
nests across a territory of 2.7 square kilometers.
Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far
anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in
southern France and elsewhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in
something like their present form more than seventy million years ago. Beside this,
prehistoric man looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence,
albeit of a different kind?
Research conducted at Oxford, Sussex and Zurich Universities has shown that when;
desert ants return from a foraging trip, they navigate by integrating bearings and
distances, which they continuously update their heads. They combine the evidence of
visual landmarks with a mental library of local directions, all within a framework which
is consulted and updated. So ants can learn too.
And in a twelve-year programme of work, Ryabko and Reznikova have found evidence
that ants can transmit very complex messages. Scouts who had located food in a maze
returned to mobilise their foraging teams. They engaged in contact sessions, at the end of
which the scout was removed in order to observe what her team might do. Often the
foragers proceeded to the exact spot in the maze where the food had been Elaborate
precautions were taken to prevent the foraging team using odour clues. Discussion now
centers on whether the route through the maze is communicated as a 'left- right sequence
of turns or as a 'compass bearing and distance' message.
During the course of this exhaustive study, Reznikova has grown so attached to her
laboratory ants that she feels she knows them as individuals — even without the paint
spots used to mark them. It's no surprise that Edward Wilson, in his essay, 'In the
company of ants', advises readers who ask what to do with the ants in their kitchen to:
“Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives.”
Questions 1-6
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage l? In
boxes 1-6 on
your answer sheet, write:
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
Practice Test 1 – IELTS - Ms. Ngọc

1. Ants use the same channels of communication as humans do.

2. City life is one factor that encourages the development of intelligence.
3. Ants can build large cities more quickly than humans do.
4. Some ants can find their way by making calculations based on distance and position.
5. In one experiment, foraging teams were able to use their sense of smell to find food.
6. The essay. 'In the company of ants' explores ant communication.
Questions 7-13:
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-O, below. Write the correct letter,
A-O, in boxes 7-13 on your answer sheet.
Ants as farmers
Ants have sophisticated methods of farming, including herding livestock and growing
crops, which are in many ways similar to those used in human agriculture. The ants
cultivate a large number of different species of edible fungi which convert
(7)..................... into a form which they can digest. They use their own natural (8)........ as
weed-killers and also use unwanted materials as (9)..................... Genetic analysis shows
they constantly upgrade these fungi by developing new species and by (10)……………..
species with neighboring ant colonies. In fact, the farming methods of ants could be said
to be more advanced than human agribusiness, since they use (11)............ methods, they
do not affect the (12) …………and do not waste (13) ………..
A. aphids F. fertilizers K. natural
B. agricultural G. food L. other species
C. cellulose H. fungi M. secretions
D. exchanging I. growing N. sustainable
E. energy J. interbreeding O. environment

Writing: 25 mins
The diagrams below show the changes made to Queensland in 2002 and now. Summarize
the information by selecting and reporting the main features and make comparisons
where relevant.
Queensland: 2002 Queensland: Present
Practice Test 1 – IELTS - Ms. Ngọc