Practice test Reading

READING
READING PASSAGE I

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

Dino discoveries
When news breaks of the discovery of a new species of dinosaur, you
would be forgiven for thinking that the scientists who set out in search of
the fossils are the ones who made the find. The reality tells a different story,
as Cavan Scott explains.
The BBC series Planet Dinosaur used state-of-the-art computer graphics
to bring to life the most impressive of those dinosaurs whose remains
have been discovered in the past decade. One of these is Gigantoraptor
erlianensis. Discovered in 2005, it stands more than three metres high
at the hip and is the biggest bird-like dinosaur ever unearthed. Yet its
discoverer. Xu Xing of Beijing's Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology
and Paleoanthropology, was not even looking for it at the time. He was
recording a documentary in the Gobi Desert. Inner Mongolia.
The production team were filming me and a geologist digging out what we
thought were sauropod bones,' says Xu. 'when I realised the fossils were
something else entirely.' Gigantoraptor. as it later became known, turned
out to be an oviraptorid, a therapod with a bird-like beak. Its size was staggering. The largest oviraptorid previously
discovered had been comparable in size to an emu; the majority were about as big as a turkey. Here was a creature that
was probably about eight metres long, if the bone analysis was anything to go by.
Sometimes it is sheer opportunism that plays a part in the discovery of a new species. In 1999, the National Geographic
Society announced that the missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds had finally been found. Named
Archaeoraptor /ianoingensis, the fossil in question appeared to have the head and body of a bird. with the hind legs
and tail of a 124-million-year-old dromaeosaur - a family of small theropods that include the bird-like Velociraptor made
famous by Jurassic Park films.
There was a good reason why the fossil looked half-bird, half-dinosaur. CT scans almost immediately proved the
specimen was bogus and had been created by an industrious Chinese farmer who had glued two separate fossils together
to create a profitable hoax.
But while the palaeontologists behind the announcement were wiping egg off their faces. others. including Xu were
taking note. The head and body of the fake comp~site be~onged to Yanornis martini. a primitive fish-eating bird from
around 120 million years ago. The dromaeosaur tail_ and hm? legs, however. were covered in what looked like fine
rota-feathers. That fossil turned out to be something special. In 2000, Xu named it Microraptor and revealed that it had
p bably lived in the treetops. Although it couldn't fly, its curved claws provided the first real evidence that dinosaurs
pro X d h. d.
Id have climbed trees. Three years later, u an is team iscovered a closely related Microraptor species which
~~~nged everything. ,Microraptor had two salie~t features,' Xu explains, 'long feathers were attached not just to its
forearms but to its legs and claws. Then we noticed th~t these long feathers had asymmetrical vanes. a feature often
associated with flight capability. This meant that we might have found a flying dinosaur.'

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Reading

some extraordinary fossils have remain d h"dd .

I
century. t he pa Iaeontology communityeh d . en in a collecfion and almost forgotten
. For the majority of the 20th
believed, t hat co Id -bl ooded dinosaurs co aId ignored. .
the froze t d f
n un ra o north Alaska. There was no way, scientists
F
expert Tony ion·11 o, they eventually rear u d survive in such bl k f . "d ..
h . . ea , rig, cond1t1o ns. But according to Alaskan dinosaur
. . . ise t ey were missing a trick.
'The first discovery of dinosaurs in Ala k
'Unfortunately, Robert was killed in s akwl_ads actually made by a geologist called
Robert Liscomb in 1961,' says Fiorillo.
the next two decades,' In the mid- a roe s
s I e the follow·
mg year, so
h. .
1s discoveri
1980 es languished in a warehouse for
fossils during a spring clean The b · managers at th e warehouse stumbled upon the box containing Liscomb's
belonging to Edmontosaurus . ones were sent to the U ·t d St G I .
d k b"I ni e ates ea og1cal Survey, where they were 1dent1fie. .
· a uc - 1led hadrosaur Tod · d as
for remains locked away in the permafrost. ·
I .
ay, pa aeonto1og1sts roam this frozen treasure trove searchin •
g
The rewards are worth the effort Whil t d · .
d. d th t th f h Al · e s u ymg teeth belonging to the relatively intelligent Troodon therapod, Fiorillo
0
iscovere e _ee . _ t e askan Troodon were double the size of those of its southern counterp
morphology of md1v1dual teeth resembl d th t f 7i art. 'Even though the
e a o roodon. the size · · · ·
warmer climates.' Fiorillo says that the re was significantly larger than the Troodon found in
. 1· · h 7i • · ·
ason 1es in t e roodon s large eyes. which allowed 1t to hunt at dawn and at
°
dusk - times when th er dinosaurs would have struggled to see. In the polar condition
s of Cretaceous Alaska. where the
Sun would all but disappear for months on end, this proved a useful talent. Troodon
adapted for life in the extraordinary
light regimes of the polar world. With this advantage, it took over as Alaska's dominan
t therapod ,' explains Fiorillo.
Finding itself at the top of the food chain, the dinosaur evolved to giant proportio
ns.
It is true that some of the most staggering of recent developments have come from
palaeontologists being in the right
place at the right time, but this is no reflection on their knowledge or expertise .
After all. not everyone knows when
they've stumbled upon something remarkable. When Argentine sheep farmer Guillermo
Heredia uncovered what he
believed was a petrified tree trunk on his Patagonian farm in 1988, he had no way
of realising that he'd found a 1.5-metre-
long tibia of the largest sauropod ever known to walk the Earth. Argentinosaurus
was 24 metres long and weighed 75
tonnes. The titanosaur was brought to the attention of the scientific community
in 1993 by Rodolfo Coria and Jose
Bonaparte of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Buenos Aires. Coria points
out that most breakthroughs are
not made by scientists, but by ordinary folk. 'But the real scientific discovery is not
the finding; it's what we learn from
that finding.' While any one of us can unearth a fossil. it takes dedicated scientists
to see beyond the rock.

Questions 1-6
Do the following statem ents agree with the information in Reading
Passage 1?
Write
TRUE if the stateme nt agrees with the informat~on
FALSE if the stateme nt contradicts the information
• F. mation on this
NOT GIVEN •
if there is no m,or
k f ssil evidence of the existence of Gigantoraptor erliane nsis. F
Xu x· th Gobi Desert to chec 0
mg went to e . G
2 Th d 1 ographic Society in 1999 was based on false evidence. T
e announ cemen t ma e by the Nat10na . e d" overed in China.
3 . . artini was first 1sc Not
Like Gigantoraptor, Yanorm s m L" rnb changed the attitude of palaeontologists toward s NG
4 . d by Robert 1sco
The bones origina lly d1scove re
north Alaska . ns 'wound ing tooth'. No
5 e Troodon rnea
According to Fiorillo, the nam . fl d was a dinosau r fossil. T
G Guillermo Heredi a had suspec ted that his n
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Practice test Readirig

Questions 7-13

Complete the labels on the diagrams below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS and/or A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

Gigantoraptor

3 meters .long
over 7 .................
SEAL
3ERD-LEGE
8 ................ ..

Microraptor

CLANS
CURVED ,

9 .................. - indicated
=

habitat in treetops

LONG
1O.................. on feathers -
suggested a flying dinosaur

Alaskan Troodon

large eyes - provided better

vision at sunrise and 11 ................
Dusk ..

teeth - twice as big

as those of relatives in
WARKED
body size - increased 12 .................. ·
regions
enormously as a result
of position in the
FOOD CHAIN .
13 .................
Reading
READING PASSAGE 2

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

Art to the aid of technology

What caricatures can teach us about
facial recognition, by Ben Austen
A Our brains are incredibly agile machines, and
it is hard to think of anything they do more
efficiently than recognize faces. Just hours after
birth, the eyes of newborns are drawn to facelike
patterns. An adult brain knows it is seeing a face
within 100 milliseconds, and it takes just over
a second to realize that two different pictures
of a face, even if they are lit or rotated in very
different ways, belong to the same person.

B Perhaps the most vivid illustration of our gift for recognition is the magic of caricature-the fact that
the sparest cartoon of a familiar face, even a single line dashed off in two seconds, can be identified by
our brains in an instant. It is often said that a good caricature looks more like a person than the person
themselves. As it happens, this notion, counterintuitive though it may sound, is actually supported by
research. In the field of vision science, there is even a term for this seeming paradox-the caricature
effect-a phrase that hints at how our brains misperceive faces as much as perceive them.

C Human faces are all built pretty much the same: two eyes above a nose that's above a mouth, the
features varying from person to person generally by mere millimetres. So what our brains look for,
according to vision scientists, are the outlying features-those characteristics that deviate most from the
ideal face we carry around in our heads, the running average of every "visage" we have ever seen. We
code each new face we encounter not in absolute terms but in the several ways it differs markedly from
the mean. In other words, we accentuate what is most important for recognition and largely ignore what
is not. Our perception fixates on the upturned nose, the sunken eyes or the fleshy cheeks, making them
loom larger. To better identify and remember people, we turn them into caricatures.

D Ten years ago, we all imagined that as soon as surveillance cameras had been equipped with the
appropriate software, the face of a crime suspect would stand out in a crowd. Like a thumbprint, its
unique features and configuration would offer a biometric key that could be immediately checked against
any database of suspects. But now a decade has passed, and face-recognition systems still perform
miserably in real-world conditions. Just recently, a couple who accidentally swapped passports at an
airport in England sailed through electronic gates that were supposed to match their faces to file photos.

All this leads to an interesting question. What if, to secure our airports and national landmarks, we need
to learn more about caricature? After all, it's the skill of the caricaturist-the uncanny ability to quickly
distil faces down to their most salient features-that our computers most desperately need to acquire.
Clearly, better cameras and faster computers simply aren't going to be enough.

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F At the University of Central Lancashire in England, Charlie Frowd, a senior lecturer in psychology, has
used insights from caricature to develop a better police-composite generator. His system, called
EvoFIT,
produces animated caricatures, with each successive frame showing facial features that are
more
exaggerated than the last. Frowd's research supports the idea that we all store memories as
caricatures,
but with our own personal degree of amplification. So, as an animated composite depicts faces
at varying
stages of caricature, viewers respond to the stage that is most recognizable to them. In tests,
Frowd's
technique has increased positive identifications from as low as 3 percent to upwards of 30 percent.
-

G To achieve similar results in computer face recognition, scientists would need to model the artist's genius
even more closely-a feat that might seem impossible if you listen to some of the artists describe
their
nearly mystical acquisition of skills. Jason Seiler recounts how he trained his mind for years, beginning
in
middle school, until he gained what he regards as nothing less than a second sight. 'A lot of people
think
that caricature is about picking out someone's worst feature and exaggerating it as far as you
can,' Seiler
says. 'That's wrong. Caricature is basically finding the truth. And then you push the truth.' Capturing
a
likeness, it seems, has less to do with the depiction of individual features than with their placemen
t in
relationship to one another. 'It's how the human brain recognizes a face. When the ratios between
the
features are correct, you see that face instantly.'

H Pawan Sinha, director of MIT's Sinha Laboratory for Vision Research, and one of the nation's most
innovative computer-vision researchers, contends that these simple, exaggerated drawings can
be
objectivel y and systematically studied and that such work will lead to breakthroughs in our understand
ing
of both human and machine-based vision. His lab at MIT is preparing to computati onally analyze
hundreds of caricatures this year, from dozens of different artists, with the hope of tapping their
intuitive
knowledge of what is and isn't crucial for recognition. He has named this endeavor the Hirschfeld
Project,
after the famous New York Times caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.

Quite simply, by analyzing sketches, Sinha hopes to pinpoint the recurring exaggerations in the
caricature s that most strongly correlate to particular ways that the original faces deviate from
the norm.
The results, he believes, will ultimately produce a rank-ordered list of the 20 or so facial attributes
that
are most important for recognition: 'It's a recipe for how to encode the face,' he says. In preliminar
y
tests, the lab has already isolated important areas-for example, the ratio of the height of the
forehead to
the distance between the top of the nose and - the mouth.

J On a given face, four of 20 such Hirschfeld attributes, as Sinha plans to call them, will be several standard
deviations greater than the mean; on another face, a different handful of attributes might exceed
the
norm. But in all cases, it's the exaggerated areas of the face that hold the key. As matters stand
today,
an automate d system must compare its target faces against the millions of continuall y altering
- faces
it encounters. But so far, the software doesn't know what to look for amid this onslaught of variables.
Armed with the Hirschfeld attributes, Sinha hopes that computers can be trained to focus on
the features
most salient for recognition, tuning out the others. 'Then,' -
Sinha says, 'the sky is the limit'.

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Reading

·ons 14-19
Qtlestl
. g passage 2 has ten paragraphs A-J
~ead1n ' ·
Wbicb paragraph contains the following information?

wu may use any letter more than once.

14 whY we have mental images of faces that are essentially caricatures F C
th th
15 rnention of e leng of time it can take to become a good caricaturist O
16 an example of how unreliable current security systems can be
D
th e fact th at we can match even a hastily drawn caricature to
17 reference to the person it represents z
th
18 a summary of how e use of multiple caricatures has improved recognition rates in a particular field F
19 a comparison between facial recognition and another well-established form of identification J

Questions 20-23

Look at the following statements and the list of people, A-C, below.

Match each statement with the correct person.

20 A single caricature can be recognised straight away if the parts of the face are appropriately positioned. 3
21 An evaluation of the work of different caricaturists will provide new information about how we see faces. C
22 People misunderstand what is involved in the design of a caricature. z
23 When given a choice, people will have different views regarding which caricature best represents a
particular person's face.
A
List of People
A Charlie Frowd
B Jason Seiler
-C Pawan Sinha
G AREAS
Questions 24-26
24:
EXAERATEl
Complete the summary below. SYSTEM
25 : AUTOMATED
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
26 : SAILENT
Sinha's Project

Sl. n h as
, . mt
aim . h e proJe
. ct 1·s to come up with a specific number of what he terms ... .. .. 2.4...... that are
ke Y t o 1.dent1.fi cation
. purp oses · He hopes these can be used to enable an ....... 2.5 ... ... to identify faces
mo re qmc
. kly an d more ac curately· In order to do this, his team must examine the most frequently
·····•2.6..... features in a large number of cartoon faces.

IELTS practice test e

Practice test

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

Mind readers
It may one day be possible to eavesdrop on another
person's inner voice. Duncan Graham-Row e explains
As you begin to read this article and your eyes follow the
words across the page, you may be aware of a voice in your
head silently muttering along. The very same thing happens
when we write: a private, internal narrative shapes the words
before we commit them to text.
What if it were possible to tap into this inner voice? Thinking
of words does, after all, create characteristic electrical signals
in our brains, and decoding them could make it possible to piece together someone's thoughts. Such an
ability would have phenomenal prospects, not least for people unable to communicate as a result of brain
damage. But it would also carry profoundly worrisome implications for the future of privacy.
The first scribbled records of electrical activity in the human brain were made in 1924 by a German doctor
called Hans Berger using his new invention - the electroencepha logram (EEG). This uses electrodes placed
on the skull to read the output of the brain's billions of nerve cells or neurons. By the mid- I990s, the ability
to translate the brain's activity into readable signals had advanced so far that people could move computer
cursors using only the electrical fields created by their thoughts.
The electrical impulses such innovations tap into are produced in a part of the brain called the motor
cortex, which is responsible for muscle movement. To move a cursor on a screen, you do not think 'move
left' in natural language. Instead, you imagine a specific motion like hitting a ball with a tennis racket.
Training the machine to realise which electrical signals correspond to your imagined movements, however,
is time consuming and difficult. And while this method works well for directing objects on a screen, its
drawbacks become apparent when you try using it to communicate. At best, you can use the cursor to
select letters displayed on an on-screen keyboard. Even a practised mind would be lucky to write 15 words
per minute with that approach. Speaking, we can manage 150.
Matching the speed at which we can think and talk would lead to devices that could instantly translate the
electrical signals of someone's inner voice into sound produced by a speech synthesiser. To do this, it is
necessary to focus only on the signals coming from the brain areas that govern speech. However, real mind
reading requires some way to intercept those signals before they hit the motor cortex.
The translation of thoughts to language in the brain is an incredibly complex and largely mysterious process,
but this much is known: before they end up in the motor cortex, thoughts destined to become spoken
words pass through two 'staging areas' associated with the perception and expression of speech.
The first is called Wernicke's area, which deals with semantics - in this case, ideas based in meaning, which
can include images, smells or emotional memories. Damage to Wernicke's area can result in the loss of
semantic associations: words can't make sense when they are decoupled from their meaning. Suffer a stroke
in that region, for example, and you will have trouble understanding not just what others are telling you, but
what you yourself are thinking.
The second is called Broca's area, agreed to be the brain's speech-process ing centre. Here, semantics are
translated into phonetics and, ultimately, word components. From here, the assembled sentences take a
quick trip to the motor cortex, which activates the muscles that will turn the desired words into speech.

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Reading

Injure Broca's area, and though y .

. ou might know wh .
When you hsten to your inner v . at you want to say, you Just can't send those impulses .
. k ' o1ce, two things a h .
Wernic es area as you construct it• B , re appenmg. You 'hear' yourself producing language in
m roca s area Th k .
rrAJ The work of Bradley Greger in · e ey to mind reading seems to lie in these two areas.
2010
l!:!.l motor cortex ·into t he brain's
langu broke new &round_ bY mar k'mg the first-ever excursion beyond the
. I .
the electnca signatures of whole aged centres · His t earn use d e Iectrodes placed inside the skull to detect
. approach requires a newwor
it is, t h1s si s, such as 'yes'• ' no,' 'hot,' 'co Id', •thirsty',
. . . as
1 'hungry', etc. Promising
million distinct words. And though tra to be learne~ for each new word. English contains a quarter of a
largely on the facial motor cort th st
ex. is was e fir instance of monitoring Wernicke's area, it still relied
Greger decided there might be another . .
the English language has about of way. Th~ bu~ldmg bl~c~s of language are called phonemes, and
40
English word contains some subset them - the kuh sound m school', fo~ e~ample, the 'sh' in 'shy'. Every
honemes, and you would have th
of ese components. Decode the brain signals that correspond to the
P a system to unlock any word at the moment someone thinks it.
In 2011, Eric Leuthardt and his coll G · .. ·
. eague erwm Schalk pos1t1oned electrodes over the language regions
of fou~ fully conscious people and were able to detect the phonemes 'oo', 'ah', 'eh' and 'ee'. What they
als~ d'.scov_e red was that spoken phonemes activated both the language areas and the motor cortex,
while imagined speech - that inner voice - boosted the activity of neurons in Wernicke's area. Leuthardt
had effectively read his subjects' minds. 'I would call it brain reading,' he says. To arrive at whole words,
Leuthardt's next step is to expand his library of sounds and to find out how the production of phonemes
translates across different languages.
For now, the research is primarily aimed at improving the lives of people with locked-in syndrome, but
the ability to explore the brain's language centres could revolutionise other fields. The consequences of
these findings could ripple out to more general audiences who might like to use extreme hands-free mobile
communication technologies that can be manipulated by inner voice alone. For linguists, it could provide
previously unobtainable insight into the neural origins and structures of language. Knowing what someone is
thinking without needing words at all would be functionally indistinguishable from telepathy.

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Practice test
ReQd•
1118

Questions 27-32

Do th e following statements agree with the claims of the writer in the Reading Passage?
Write
YES
if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
27 Our inner voice can
sometimes distract us when we are reading or writing. Na
28 The possibility of reading minds
has both positive and negative implications. YES
29 Li!tle progress was made in understanding electrical activity
in the brain between 1924 and the YES
m1d-1990s.
30 Machines can be readily trained to interpret electrical signals from the brain that correspond
to NO
movements on a keyboard.
3 1 Much has been written about the potential use of speech synthesisers with paralysed patients. Po
32 It has been proven that the perception and expression of speech occur in different parts of the NO
brain.

Questions 33-36

Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-G.

33 In Wernicke's area, our thoughts · F

34 It is only in Broca's area that ideas we wish to express C

35 The muscles that articulate our sentences

36 The words and sentences that we speak F
A receive impulses from the motor cortex.
-
B pass directly to the motor cortex.
C are processed into language.
D require a listener.
E consist of decoded phonemes.
F are largely non-verbal.
-
G match the sounds that they make.

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Listening

tions 37 -40
oueS
chDose the correct letter, A, B,
c or D.
44 mean?
s th e u nd erl ine d ph ras e 'br oke new gro und ' in lin e
37 What doe
ers
A bui lt on the wo rk of oth
exp ect ed res ult s
B pro du ced un usu al or un
jec t to be false
c pro ved ear lie r the ori es on the sub
t had not bee n done before
D ach iev ed som eth ing tha
alk 's work?
nt abo ut Le uth ard t and Sch
38 What wa s mo st sig nif ica words.
upi ng cer tai n pho nem es into
A Th ey suc cee ded in gro ognisable bra in activity.
ey lin ked the pro duc tio n of cer tai n pho nem es to rec
B Th er tha n English.
Th eir me tho ds wo rke d for spe ake rs of lan gua ges oth
C ir experiments.
Th eir sub jec ts we re aw ake dur ing the course of the
D
clude abo ut mi nd reading?
39 Wh at doe s the wr ite r con
A It cou ld bec om e a for
m of ent ert ain me nt.
n.
die s on lan gua ge acquisitio
B It ma y con trib ute to stu ng it.
aw aiti ng the possibility of doi
C Mo st peo ple are kee nly aus e of it.
D Mobile tec hno log ies
ma y become unreliable bec
e?
e of the wr iter of thi s passag
40 Wh at is the ma in pur pos res ear ch
giv e an acc oun t of the dev elopments in mi nd- rea din g
A to din g have cha nge d
to sho w ho w sci ent ists ' atti tud es towards mi nd rea
B en more fun din g
din g res ear ch should be giv
C to exp lai n wh y mi nd- rea nd rea din g
D to ful ly exp lor e the
arg um ent s for and aga ins t mi

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