IELTS Recent Mock Tests

Volume 3
Reading Practice Test 2

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READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage
1 below.

The Forgotten Forest

Found only in the Deep South of America, longleaf pine woodlands have dwindled to about 3
percent of their former range, but new efforts are under way to restore them.

THE BEAUTY AND THE BIODIVERSITY of the longleaf pine forest are well-kept secrets, even
in its native South. Yet it is among the richest ecosystems in North America, rivaling tallgrass
prairies and the ancient forests of the Paci c Northwest in the number of species it shelters.
And like those two other disappearing wildlife habitats, longleaf is also critically endangered.

In longleaf pine forests, trees grow widely scattered, creating an open, parklike environment,
more like a savanna than a forest. The trees are not so dense as to block the sun. This
openness creates a forest oor that is among the most diverse in the world, where plants such
as many- owered grass pinks, trumpet pitcher plants, Venus ytraps, lavender ladies and
pineland bog-buttons grow. As many as 50 different species of wild owers, shrubs, grasses
and ferns have been cataloged in just a single square meter.

Once, nearly 92 million acres of longleaf forest ourished from Virginia to Texas, the only place
in the world where it is found. By the turn of the 2lst century, however, virtually all of it had
been logged, paved or farmed into oblivion. Only about 3 percent of the original range still
supports longleaf forest, and only about 10,000 acres of that is uncut old-growth—the rest is
forest that has regrown after cutting. An estimated 100,000 of those acres are still vanishing
every year. However, a quiet movement to reverse this trend is rippling across the region.
Governments, private organisations (including NWF) and individual conservationists are
looking for ways to protect and preserve the remaining longleaf and to plant new forests for
future generations.

Figuring out how to bring back the piney woods also will allow biologists to help the plants and
animals that depend on this habitat. Nearly two-thirds of the declining, threatened or

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endangered species in the southeastern United States are associated with longleaf. The
outright destruction of longleaf is only part of their story, says Mark Danaher, the biologist for
South Carolina's Francis Marion National Forest. He says the demise of these animals and
plants also is tied to a lack of re, which once swept through the southern forests on a regular
basis. "Fire is absolutely critical for this ecosystem and for the species that depend on it," says
Danaher.

Name just about any species that occurs in longleaf and you can nd a connection to re.
Bachman's sparrow is a secretive bird with a beautiful song that echoes across the longleaf
atwoods. It tucks its nest on the ground beneath clumps of wiregrass and little bluestem in
the open under-story. But once re has been absent for several years, and a tangle of shrubs
starts to grow, the sparrows disappear. Gopher tortoises, the only native land tortoises east of
the Mississippi, are also abundant in longleaf. A keystone species for these forests, its burrows
provide homes and safety to more than 300 species of vertebrates and invertebrates ranging
from eastern diamond-back rattlesnakes to gopher frogs. If re is suppressed, however, the
tortoises are choked out. "If we lose re," says Bob Mitchell, an ecologist at the Jones Center,
"we lose wildlife."

Without re, we also lose longleaf. Fire knocks back the oaks and other hardwoods that can
grow up to overwhelm longleaf forests. "They are re forests," Mitchell says. "They evolved in
the lightning capital of the eastern United States." And it wasn't only lightning strikes that set
the forest aflame. "Native Americans also lit fires to keep the forest open," Mitchell says. "So did
the early pioneers. They helped create the longleaf pine forests that we know today."

Fire also changes how nutrients ow throughout longleaf ecosystems, in ways we are just
beginning to understand. For example, researchers have discovered that frequent res provide
extra calcium, which is critical for egg production, to endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers.
Frances James, a retired avian ecologist from Florida State University, has studied these small
black-and-white birds for more than two decades in Florida's sprawling Apalachicola National
Forest. When she realised female woodpeckers laid larger clutches in the rst breeding season
after their territories were burned, she and her colleagues went searching for answers. "We
learned calcium is stashed away in woody shrubs when the forest is not burned," James says.
"But when there is a re, a pulse of calcium moves down into the soil and up into the longleaf."
Eventually, this calcium makes its way up the food chain to a tree-dwelling species of ant,
which is the red-cockaded's favorite food. The result: more calcium for the birds, which leads to
more eggs, more young and more woodpeckers.

Today, re is used as a vital management tool for preserving both longleaf and its wildlife. Most
of these res are prescribed burns, deliberately set with a drip torch. Although the public often
opposes any type of re—and the smoke that goes with it—these frequent, low-intensity burns
reduce the risk of catastrophic con agrations. "Forests are going to burn," says Amadou Diop,
NWF's southern forests restoration manager. "It's just a question of when. With prescribed

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burns, we can pick the time and the place."

Diop is spearheading a new NWF effort to restore longleaf. "It's a species we need to go back
to," he says. Educating landowners about the advantages of growing longleaf is part of the
program, he adds, which will soon be under way in nine southern states. "Right now, most
longleaf is on public land," says Jerry McCollum, president of the Georgia Wildlife Federation.
"Private land is where we need to work," he adds, pointing out that more than 90 percent of
the acreage within the historic range of longleaf falls under this category.

Interest among private landowners is growing throughout the South, but restoring longleaf is
not an easy task. The herbaceous layer—the understory of wiregrasses and other plants - also
needs to be re-created. In areas where the land has not been chewed up by farming, but
converted to loblolly or slash pine plantations, the seed bank of the longleaf forest usually
remains viable beneath the soil. In time, this original vegetation can be coaxed back. Where
agriculture has destroyed the seeds, however, wiregrass must be replanted. Right now, the
expense is pro-hibitive, but researchers are searching for low-cost solutions.

Bringing back longleaf is not for the short-sighted, however. Few of us will be alive when the
pines being planted today become mature forests in 70 to 80 years. But that is not stopping
longleaf enthusiasts. "Today, it's getting hard to nd longleaf seedlings to buy," one of the
private landowners says. "Everyone wants them. Longleaf is in a resurgence."

Questions 1-5
Complete the notes below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

Forest fire ensures that:

• Birds can locate their 1 in the ground.

• The burrows of a species of 2 provide homes to many other animals.

• Hardwoods such as 3 can grow and outnumber long-leaf trees.

Apart from fires lit by lightning:

• Fires are created by 4 and settlers.

• Fires deliberately lit are called 5

Questions 6-9
Complete the flow-chart below.

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Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers
in boxes 6-9 on your answer sheet.

How to increase the number of cockaded woodpeckers

Calcium stored in 6

Shrubs are burned

Calcium released into 7 and travels up to the leaves

a kind of 8 eats the leaves

Red-cockaded woodpeckers eat those ants

The number of 9 increases

More cockaded woodpeckers

Questions 10-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage
1?

In boxes 10-13 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

10
The sparse distribution of longleaf pine trees leads to the
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most diversity of species.

11
It is easier to restore forests converted to farms than forests
converted to plantations.

12
The cost to restore forest is increasing recently.

13
Few can live to see the replanted forest reach its maturity.

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READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage
2 below.

Storytelling, From Prehistoric Craves To Modern

Cinemas
A It was told, we suppose, to people crouched around a re: a tale of adventure, most likely—
relating some close encounter with death: a remarkable hunt, an escape from mortal danger; a
vision, or something else out of the ordinary. Whatever its thread, the weaving of this story was
done with a prime purpose. The listeners must be kept listening. They must not fall asleep. So,
as the story went on, its audience should be sustained by one question above all: What
happens next?

B The first fireside stories in human history can never be known. They were kept in the heads of
those who told them. This method of storage is not necessarily inef cient. From documented
oral traditions in Australia, the Balkans and other parts of the world we know that specialised
storytellers and poets can recite from memory literally thousands of lines, in verse or prose,
verbatim - word for word. But while memory is rightly considered an art in itself, it is clear that
a primary purpose of making symbols is to have a system of reminders or mnemonic cues -
signs that assist us to recall certain information in the mind's eye.

C In some Polynesian communities, a notched memory stick may help to guide a storyteller
through successive stages of recitation. But in other parts of the world, the activity of
storytelling historically resulted in the development or even the invention of writing systems.
One theory about the arrival of literacy in ancient Greece, for example, argues that the epic
tales about the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus traditionally attributed to Homer
were just so enchanting to hear that they had to be preserved. So the Greeks, c. 750-700BC.
borrowed an alphabet from their neighbors in the eastern Mediterranean, the Phoenicians.

D The custom of recording stories on parchment and other materials can be traced in many
manifestations around the world, from the priestly papyrus archive of ancient Egypt to the

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birch-bark scrolls on which the North American Ojibway Indians set down their creation myth.
It is a well-tried and universal practice: so much so that to this day storytime is probably most
often associated with words on paper. The formal practice of narrating a story aloud would
seem-so we assume-to have given way to newspapers, novels and comic strips. This, however,
is not the case. Statistically it is doubtful that the majority of humans currently rely upon the
written word to get access to stories. So what is the alternative source?

E Each year, over 7 billion people will go to watch the latest offering from Hollywood.
Bollywood and beyond. The supreme storyteller of today is cinema. The movies, as distinct
from still photography, seem to be an essentially modern phenomenon. This is an illusion, for
there are, as we shall see, certain ways in which the medium of lm is indebted to very old
precedents of arranging 'sequences' of images. But any account of visual storytelling must
begin with the recognition that all storytelling beats with a deeply atavistic pulse: that is, a
'good story' relies upon formal patterns of plot and characterisation that have been embedded
in the practice of storytelling over many generations.

F Thousands of scripts arrive every week at the of ces of the major lm studios. But aspiring
screenwriters really need look no further for essential advice than the fourth-century BC Greek
Philosopher Aristotle. He left some incomplete lecture notes on the art of telling stories in
various literary and dramatic modes, a slim volume known as the Poetics. Though he can never
have envisaged the popcorn-fuelled actuality of a multiplex cinema, Aristotle is almost
prescient about the key elements required to get the crowds ocking to such a cultural hub. He
analyzed the process with cool rationalism. When a story enchants us, we lose the sense of
where we arc; we are drawn into the story so thoroughly that we forget it is a story being told.
This is. in Aristotle's phrase, 'the suspension of disbelief.

G We know the feeling. If ever we have stayed in our seats, stunned with grief, as the credits
roll by, or for days after seeing that vivid evocation of horror have been nervous about taking a
shower at home, then wo have suspended disbelief. We have been caught, or captivated, in the
storyteller's wet). Did it all really happen? We really thought so for a while. Aristotle must have
witnessed often enough this suspension of disbelief. Ho taught at Athens, the city where
theater developed as a primary form of civic ritual and recreation. Two theatrical types of
storytelling, tragedy and comedy, caused Athenian audiences to lose themselves in sadness
and laughter respectively. Tragedy, for Aristotle, was particularly potent in its capacity to enlist
and then purge the emotions of those watching the story unfold on the stage, so he tried to
identify those factors in the storyteller's art that brought about such engagement. He had, as
an obvious sample for analysis, not only the fth-century BC masterpieces of Classical Greek
tragedy written by Aeschylus. Sophocles and Euripides. Beyond them stood Homer. whose
stories oven then had canonical status: The lliad and The Odyssey were already considered
literary landmarks-stories by which all other stories should he measured. So what was the
secret of Homer's narrative art?

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H It was not hard to nd. Homer created credible heroes. His heroes belonged to the past, they
were mighty and magni cent, yet they were not, in the end, fantasy gures. He made his
heroes sulk, bicker, cheat and cry. They were, in short, characters-protagonists of a story that
an audience would care about, would want to follow, would want to know what happens next.
As Aristotle saw, the hero who shows a human side some aw or weak-ness to which mortals
are prone is intrinsically dramatic.

Questions 14-18
Reading Passage 2 has eight paragraphs, A-H.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

14
A misunderstanding of how people today get stories

15
The categorisation of stories

16
The fundamental aim of storytelling

17
A description of reciting stories without any assistance

18
How to make story characters attractive

Questions 19-22
Classify the following information as referring to

A adopted the writing system from another country

B used organic materials to record stories

C used tools to help to tell stories

Write the correct letter, A, B or C in boxes 19-22 on your answer sheet.

19
Egyptians

20
Ojibway

21
Polynesians

22
Greek

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Questions 23-26
Complete the sentences below with ONE WORD ONLY from the passage.

Write your answers in boxes 23-26 on your answer sheet.

Aristotle wrote a book on the art of storytelling called the 23 .

Aristotle believed the most powerful type of story to move listeners is 24 .

Aristotle viewed Homer’s works as 25 .

Aristotle believed attractive heroes should have some 26 .

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READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage
3 on the following pages.

Living Dunes
When you think of a sand dune, you probably picture a barren pile of lifeless sand. But sand
dunes are actually dynamic natural structures. They grow, shift and travel. They crawl with
living things. Some sand dunes even sing.

A Although no more than a pile of wind-blown sand, dunes can roll over trees and buildings,
march relentlessly across highways, devour vehicles on its path, and threaten crops and
factories in Africa, the Middle East, and China. In some places, killer dunes even roll in and
swallow up towns. Entire villages have disappeared under the sand. In a few instances the
government built new villages for those displaced only to find that new villages themselves
were buried several years later. Preventing sand dunes from overwhelming cities and
agricultural areas has become a priority for the United Nations Environment Program.

B Some of the most significant experimental measurements on sand movement were

performed by Ralph Bagnold, a British engineer who worked in Egypt prior to World War II.
Bagnold investigated the physics of particles moving through the atmosphere and deposited by
wind. He recognised two basic dune types, the crescentic dune, which he called “barchan,” and
the linear dune, which he called longitudinal or “sief ’ (Arabic for “sword”). The crescentic
barchan dune is the most common type of sand dune. As its name suggests, this dune is
shaped like a crescent moon with points at each end, and it is usually wider than it is long.
Some types of barchan dunes move faster over desert surfaces than any other type of dune.
The linear dune is straighter than the crescentic dune with ridges as its prominent feature.
Unlike crescentic dunes, linear dunes are longer than they are wide—in fact, some are more
than 100 miles (about 160 kilometers) long. Dunes can also be comprised of smaller dunes of
different types, called complex dunes.

C Despite the complicated dynamics of dune formation, Bagnold noted that a sand dune

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generally needs the following three things to form: a large amount of loose sand in an area with
little vegetation—usually on the coast or in a dried-up river, lake or sea bed; a wind or breeze to
move the grains of sand; and an obstacle, which could be as small as a rock or as big as a tree,
that causes the sand to lose momentum and settle. Where these three variables merge, a sand
dune forms.

D As the wind picks up the sand, the sand travels, but generally only about an inch or two
above the ground, until an obstacle causes it to stop. The heaviest grains settle against the
obstacle, and a small ridge or bump forms. The lighter grains deposit themselves on the other
side of the obstacle. Wind continues to move sand up to the top of the pile until the pile is so
steep that it collapses under its own weight. The collapsing sand comes to rest when it reaches
just the right steepness to keep the dune stable. The repeating cycle of sand inching up the
windward side to the dune crest, then slipping down the dune’s slip face allows the dune to
inch forward, migrating in the direction the wind blows.

E Depending on the speed and direction of the wind and the weight of the local sand, dunes
will develop into different shapes and sizes. Stronger winds tend to make taller dunes; gentler
winds tend to spread them out. If the direction of the wind generally is the same over the years,
dunes gradually shift in that direction. But a dune is “a curi-ously dynamic creature”, wrote
Farouk El-Baz in National Geographic. Once formed, a dune can grow, change shape, move
with the wind and even breed new dunes. Some of these offspring may be carried on the back
of the mother dune. Others are bom and race downwind, outpacing their parents.

F Sand dunes even can be heard ‘singing’ in more than 30 locations worldwide, and in each
place the sounds have their own characteristic frequency, or note. When the thirteenth century
explorer Marco Polo encountered the weird and wonderful noises made by desert sand dunes,
he attributed them to evil spirits. The sound is unearthly. The volume is also unnerving. Adding
to the tone’s otherworldliness is the inability of the human ear to localise the source of the
noise. Stéphane Douady of the French national research agency CNRS and his colleagues have
been delving deeper into dunes in Morocco, Chile, China and Oman, and believe they can now
explain the exact mechanism behind this acoustic phenomenon.

G The group hauled sand back to the laboratory and set it up in channels with automated
pushing plates. The sands still sang, proving that the dune itself was not needed to act as a
resonating body for the sound, as some researchers had theorised. To make the booming
sound, the grains have to be of a small range of sizes, all alike in shape: well-rounded. Douady’s
key discovery was that this synchronised frequency—which determines the tone of sound—is
the result of the grain size. The larger the grain, the lower the key. He has successfully
predicted the notes emitted by dunes in Morocco, Chile and the US simply by measuring the
size of the grains they contain. Douady also discovered that the singing grains had some kind
of varnish or a smooth coating of various minerals: silicon, iron and manganese, which probably
formed on the sand when the dunes once lay beneath an ancient ocean. But in the muted

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grains this coat had been worn away, which explains why only some dunes can sing. He
admits he is unsure exactly what role the coating plays in producing the noise. The mysterious
dunes, it seems, aren’t quite ready yet to give up all of their secrets.

Questions 27-33
Reading passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A-G.

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A-G from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, i-x, in boxes 27-33 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i Shaping and reforming

ii Causes of desertification

iii Need combination of specific conditions

iv Potential threat to industry and communication

v An old superstition demystified

vi Differences and similarities

vii A continuous cycling process

viii Habitat for rare species

ix Replicating the process in laboratory

x Commonest type of dune

27
Paragraph A

28
Paragraph B

29
Paragraph C

30
Paragraph D

31
Paragraph E

32
Paragraph F

33
Paragraph G

Questions 34-36

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Complete the sentences below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 34-36 on your answer sheet.

34 dune is said to have long ridges that can extend hundreds of miles.

According to Bagnold, an 35 is needed to stop the sand from

movingbefore a dune can form.

Stéphane Douady believes the singing of dunes is not a spiritual phenomenon, but
purely 36 .

Questions 37-40
Complete the summary below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

There are many different types of dunes, two of which are most commonly found in deserts
throughout the world, the linear dune and the 37 dune, some times also known
as the crescentic dune. It’s been long known that in some places dunes can even sing and the
answer lies in the sand itself. To produce singing sand in lab, all the sands must have similar
38 . And scientists have discovered that the size of the sand can affect the
39 of the sound. But the function of the varnish composed by a mixture of
40 still remains puzzling.

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 Solution:

Part 1: Question 1 - 13

1 nest 2 tortoises

3 oaks 4 Native Americans

5 prescribed burns 6 shrubs

7 soil 8 ant

9 eggs 10 TRUE

11 FALSE 12 NOT GIVEN

13 TRUE

Part 2: Question 14 - 26

14 D 15 G

16 A 17 B

18 H 19 B

20 B 21 C

22 A 23 Poetics

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 24 tragedy 25 landmarks(-stories)

26 flaw/weakness

Part 3: Question 27 - 40

27 iv 28 x

29 iii 30 vii

31 i 32 v

33 ix 34 linear

35 obstacle 36 acoustic

37 barchan 38 shape

39 tone 40 minerals

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