About this set: compiled and lightly cleaned up from real reading passages that test-takers recalled. IELTS draws from a global question pool, so these passages circulate worldwide. To give you a complete, sittable test, passages reported around the same period are assembled together — so a set may combine passages from several exam dates, not one single sitting. Organized for study convenience. Based on test-taker recalls — not official IELTS material.
Reading Passage 1: Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was born in 1888, into a prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. She became one of New Zealand's best-known writers, using the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. The daughter of a banker, and born into a middle-class family, she was also a first cousin of Countess Elizabeth von Arnim, a distinguished novelist in her time. Mansfield had two older sisters and a younger brother. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, went on to become the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand. In 1893, the Mansfield family moved to Karori, a suburb of Wellington, where Mansfield would spend the happiest years of her childhood; she later used her memories of this time as an inspiration for her Prelude story.
Her first published stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls' High School magazine in 1898 and 1899. In 1902, she developed strong feelings for a musician who played the cello, Arnold Trowell, although her feelings were not, for the most part, returned. Mansfield herself was an accomplished cellist, having received lessons from Trowell's father. Mansfield wrote in her journals of feeling isolated to some extent in New Zealand, and, in general terms, of her interest in the Maori people (New Zealand's native people), who were often portrayed in a sympathetic light in her later stories, such as How Pearl Button was Kidnapped.
She moved to London in 1903, where she attended Queen's College, along with her two sisters. Mansfield recommenced playing the cello, an occupation that she believed, during her time at Queen's, she would take up professionally. She also began contributing to the college newspaper, with such a dedication to it that she eventually became its editor. She was particularly interested in the works of the French writers of this period and on the 19th-century British writer, Oscar Wilde, and she was appreciated amongst fellow students at Queen's for her lively and charismatic approach to life and work. She met fellow writer Ida Baker, a South African, at the college, and the pair became lifelong friends. Mansfield did not actively support the suffragette movement in the UK. Women in New Zealand had gained the right to vote in 1893.
Mansfield first began journeying into the other parts of Europe in the period 1903-1906, mainly to Belgium and Germany. After finishing her schooling in England, she returned to her New Zealand home in 1906, only then beginning to write short stories in a serious way. She had several works published in Australia in a magazine called Native Comparison, which was her first paid writing work, and by this time she had her mind set on becoming a professional writer. It was also the first occasion on which she used the pseudonym "K. Mansfield".
Mansfield rapidly grew discontented with the provincial New Zealand lifestyle, and with her family. Two years later she headed again to London. Her father sent her an annual subsidy of £100 for the rest of her life. In later years, she would express both admiration and disdain for New Zealand in her journals.
In 1911, Mansfield met John Middleton Murry, the Oxford scholar and editor of the literary magazine Rhythm. They were later to marry in 1918. Mansfield became a co-editor of Rhythm, which was subsequently called The Blue Review, in which more of her works were published. She and Murry lived in various houses in England and briefly in Paris. The Blue Review failed to gain enough readers and was no longer published. Their attempt to set up as writers in Paris was cut short by Murry's bankruptcy, which resulted from the failure of this and other journals. Life back in England meant frequently changed addresses and very limited funds.
Between 1915 and 1918, Mansfield moved between England and Bandol, France. She and Murry developed close contact with other well-known writers of the time such as D.H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley. By October 1918 Mansfield had become seriously ill; she had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and was advised to enter a sanatorium. She could no longer spend time with writers in London. In the autumn of 1918 she was so ill that she decided to go to Ospedale in Italy. It was the publication of Bliss and Other Stories in 1920 that was to solidify Mansfield's reputation as a writer.
Mansfield also spent time in Menton, France, as the tenant of her father's cousin at "The Villa Isola Bella". There she wrote what she pronounced to be "...the only story that satisfies me to any extent".
Mansfield produced a great deal of work in the final years of her life, and much of her prose and poetry remained unpublished at her death in 1923. After her death, her husband, Murry, took on the task of editing and publishing her works. His efforts resulted in two additional volumes of short stories, The Doves' Nest and Something Childish, published in 1923 and 1924 respectively, the publication of her Poems as well as a collection of critical writings (Novels and Novelists) and a number of editions of Mansfield's previously unpublished letters and journals.
- 1
The name Katherine Mansfield, that appears on the writer's book, was exactly the same as her origin name.
- 2
Mansfield won a prize for a story she wrote for the High School Reporter.
- 3
How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped portrayed Maori people in a favorable way.
- 4
When Mansfield was at Queen's college, she planned to be a professional writer.
- 5
Mansfield was unpopular with the other students at Queen's college.
- 6
In London, Mansfield showed little interest in politics.
- 7
Katherine Mansfield's adult years: moved from England back to New Zealand.
- 8
First paid writing work was in a publication based in _______.
- 9
Her _______ and the New Zealand way of life made her feel dissatisfied.
- 10
_______ prevented Mansfield and Murry from staying together in Paris.
- 11
Spent time with distinguished _______.
- 12
Her _______ was consolidated when Bliss and Other Stories was published.
- 13
Mansfield's _______ published more of her works after her death.
Reading Passage 2: Who wrote Shakespeare's plays?
Even today, almost 400 years after his death, the works of the famous English dramatist William Shakespeare have lost none of their appeal, nor have questions about the source of his genius. For is it really credible that an ordinary actor from the small town of Stratford-upon-Avon should metamorphose into so extraordinary a dramatist? For some, the answer is obvious: Shakespeare was a genius whose gift is no more suspicious than that of the physicist Albert Einstein, the German salesman's son who devised the theory of relativity. But others have insisted that a mere school leaver simply could not have penned such sophisticated works. They believe that Shakespeare was a pseudonym for someone with far more impressive qualifications who wrote the plays that still play to packed theatres today. But after long and largely fruitless debate, researchers are now turning to scientific methods to resolve the controversies surrounding Shakespeare. Ways of identifying the literary ‘fingerprint’ of writers are currently being developed using computers. This analysis of features of literary style is known as 'stylometry' and with it researchers can recognise the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries with impressive reliability.
The idea of using these basic scientific techniques to probe questions of authorship dates back to 1851, when the Victorian mathematician Augustus de Morgan suggested that different authors might be identified through the frequency with which they used words of different lengths. His idea attracted the attention of Thomas Mendenhall, an American physicist who decided to use word length to investigate one of the oldest controversies about the works of Shakespeare: were they actually written by someone else?
As long ago as 1785, the Elizabethan writer and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon was identified as a possible contender for having written Shakespeare's works. Bacon's possible motivation for not wanting to be known as the author of such masterpieces is far from clear, but Mendenhall believed his methods might at least reveal telltale signs of Bacon's hand in the plays. However, his results, published in 1901, revealed Bacon's writing style to be quite unlike that of Shakespeare. But Mendenhall's methods also revealed some key concerns. Recognising the need to include large samples of writing from both authors, Mendenhall lumped all their works together, despite the fact that literary style can vary enormously between plays, poetry and philosophy, for example. His focus on word length as the sole ‘fingerprint’ of writing style was also questionable - for how could he be sure that some other characteristics would not give different results? But Mendenhall’s biggest fault was perhaps simply that he was too far ahead of his time - he was attempting a task that cried out for the kind of computers not even conceivable over 100 years ago. More recently with their development scholars have been able to look for subtle peculiarities among the complete works of authors, which, in Shakespeare's case, amount to over 800,000 words.
One of the key controversies now being probed is Shakespeare's relationship with other dramatists. Was he a lone genius or was his work the result of collaboration? Traditional methods of investigating such questions have relied on traits like the use of metaphor, but these may be shared by different authors simply on cultural grounds. In contrast, modern stylometry focuses on far more fundamental characteristics which are less likely to be shared by others. The text-crunching power of computers allows researchers to pinpoint phrases, words or even individual letters by their frequency in the work of different authors. Pattern recognition techniques are then used to develop a ‘fingerprint’ for each author.
Stylometry has come up with little to encourage the continual number of experts who insist Shakespeare was simply too uneducated to create works of enduring brilliance. In 1996, literary scholar Ward Elliott and mathematician Robert Valenza of Claremont McKenna College, California, published the results of a stylometric comparison of the works of Shakespeare with those of over 30 of the proposed 'real' authors. Elliott and Valenza applied a battery of 51 tests to computerised texts and found that none of the claimants had a stylometric ‘fingerprint’ similar to that of Shakespeare. “I think these claims were driven initially by a sense that Shakespeare is too ‘important’ to be an ordinary person,” says Professor Kate McCluskey, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham.
Elliott and Valenza's research found something else too. Some of the earliest plays, notably Henry VI and the notoriously violent Titus Andronicus, seem to be a combination of Shakespeare and his brilliant contemporary the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who was born in the same year as Shakespeare. 'Traditional scholars accept that Marlowe influenced Shakespeare's early work,' says Dr Thomas Merriam, one of Britain's leading stylometry experts. He explains that, provisionally at least, stylometric studies suggest some of Marlowe's actual text exists within the early plays of Shakespeare.
Some scholars remain cautious about basing new views of Shakespeare’s career on stylometric analysis of centuries-old texts. “If they have been edited, amended or shortened, then the data from them is highly compromised,” says Dr Markus Dahl of London University. Even so, the results to date are in line with the growing view of Shakespeare as a hardworking professional who perfected his skills throughout his career.
- 14
uncertainty why an author would wish to remain anonymous
- 15
a reference to the continuing popularity of Shakespeare's work
- 16
the reasons why a particular researcher's approach proved unsatisfactory
- 17
mention of the time when the use of stylometry was first proposed
- 18
support for the opinion that Shakespeare became more skillful as he grew older
- 19
a similarity between Shakespeare and a scientist with exceptional ability
- 20
A key controversy is Shakespeare's relationships with other writers. It has always been uncertain whether he worked in _________ with others or not. To investigate this issue, literary experts traditionally looked at stylistic features such as the writer's choice of metaphor, although it was recognised that this choice may have been influenced by cultural factors. Current stylometric analysis has been made possible by the invention of _________. These can identify different features of writing such as the frequency with which particular letters, words or phrases are used by different writers. By using stylometric analysis of particular characteristics and pattern recognition systems, a so-called _________ of a writer can be identified.
- 21
People search for a more distinguished author because they cannot accept that a normal individual could write such brilliant plays.
- A. Thomas Mendenhall
- B. Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza
- C. Professor Kate McCluskey
- D. Dr Thomas Merriam
- E. Dr Markus Dahl
- 22
It should be possible to recognise writers by examining the number of letters in the words they use.
- A. Thomas Mendenhall
- B. Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza
- C. Professor Kate McCluskey
- D. Dr Thomas Merriam
- E. Dr Markus Dahl
- 23
The fact that Shakespeare's works are likely to have been altered over the years raises doubts about any stylometric analysis.
- A. Thomas Mendenhall
- B. Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza
- C. Professor Kate McCluskey
- D. Dr Thomas Merriam
- E. Dr Markus Dahl
- 24
Analysis proves that Shakespeare's style differs from those of writers who have been suggested as the authors of the plays.
- A. Thomas Mendenhall
- B. Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza
- C. Professor Kate McCluskey
- D. Dr Thomas Merriam
- E. Dr Markus Dahl
Reading Passage 3: Art-based training for engineers
The CONNECT Program in the Engineering School of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art has served as a laboratory for testing the effectiveness of art-based learning for technical graduates. Our underlying concept with CONNECT is that most communication breakdowns involving engineers happen because they know every aspect of their subject matter and assume that others do too. Engineers spend a great deal of time ensuring their work is accurate, and their solutions to engineering problems are workable, meet official requirements, are environmentally sound, and so on. They are persuaded by sound content. Others may not be.
Communicating with an audience is essentially a social skill with a behavioral basis. A fact that becomes all too apparent when one's audience has a divergent set of assumptions. Failing to understand your audience opens up an 'audience gap'. To give engineering graduates the skills to close this gap, CONNECT turned to the theatre. Performing artists specialize in the effective communication of any content — good, bad, or indifferent — through vocal, physical, and socially appropriate behaviors keyed to a particular audience. CONNECT applied stage movement analysis to interaction with clients, meetings with colleagues, and job interviews. It also made use of vocal and physical exercises and directing techniques, to equip technical personnel for the everyday communication challenges they face, as well as for formal talks.
Attending workshops based on the CONNECT model resulted in observably improved behaviors. Our data demonstrate that, while not every engineer is likely to become a great communicator, almost all are capable of becoming better communicators. In a survey of corporate recruiters, potential employees who had taken one or more CONNECT workshops were rated higher overall in areas such as confidence and maturity than those who had not participated in CONNECT. Those who had taken a range of workshops, including one in advanced non-verbal behavior, were rated even higher. These results were achieved after mixed early assessment results led us to significantly refine our methods.
Just as important to the improvements we saw after the first year was an adjustment to how we approached the students themselves. We needed to practice what we preached, and that meant understanding our own audience of young engineers. We needed to behave in ways that would get through to them. Too often in early workshops, our performer-facilitators assumed that a technical audience would respond to theatrical training material in the same positive way that performers did. However, we came to realize that technical audiences need to be approached differently if arts-based training is to achieve its full potential.
Adjusting our approach to achieve this was key to the improvement in results. Changing how we behaved toward our audience of young engineers required real sensitivity to what was happening in the workshops, and to how our facilitators related to the students. What we learned during this process can be distilled into 'rules' for maximizing the effectiveness of performing-arts-based training in a technical field.
The first 'rule' is to customize on a continual basis; adapting a performance for a particular audience is second nature to performing artists. What works on Friday night may not work at the Sunday matinee. Similarly, what is effective in training chemical engineers may not work for their civil engineering or electrical engineering colleagues. And what works for engineers in general will certainly not work for each individual engineer. We have recognized the value of individualized attention and our facilitators send each participant away with something specific to his or her needs.
A second 'rule' is to avoid being 'touchy feely' unless the purpose is clear. Although actors do not think twice about standing in a circle and 'passing a ball of energy' from person to person, or closing their eyes and imagining themselves at a 'favourite place', the majority of engineers do not respond in quite the same way. In fact, the CONNECT participants often felt that this part of the workshop was a 'waste of time'. And nothing — nothing— is more counterproductive when it comes to coaching technical trainees. However, when the value of such activities is clearly related to the stated purpose of the workshop — to improve performance— few people will get the point more quickly than an engineer.
These 'rules' are, of course, only a starting point. We have learned to apply them both rigorously and with flexibility. At the Engineering School of The Cooper Union, customization meant establishing a mini-conservatory. We have learned that you can't close someone else's audience gap without looking at things from their perspective. In another setting, playing to the technical audience might require a completely different sort of customization and a subtly different set of training behaviors. What CONNECT has shown is that knowing one's audience— and knowing it specifically rather than generally— is fundamental.
- 25
The concept behind the CONNECT program is that the ______ in communication experienced by engineers, are due to their tendency to concentrate on technical ______, rather than adapt their approach to meet the ______ of their audience. This is mainly because engineers are used to focusing on the accuracy of their work and ensuring that it complies with ______. Thus, the program aimed to provide technical graduates with the ______ they needed to bridge the resulting communication gap. Having developed an awareness of audience, the engineers would then be in a better position to give effective ______ and communicate more appropriately in everyday situations.
- A. presentations
- B. details
- C. efficiencies
- D. regulations
- E. interruptions
- F. expectations
- G. failures
- H. actions
- I. tools
- 26
The study carried out by CONNECT indicates that any technical graduate has the ability to become an expert communicator.
- 27
Employers said that they were particularly keen to hire technical graduates who had attended sessions in time management.
- 28
Assessment results from the early workshops led to changes being made to the delivery of the CONNECT program.
- 29
It became apparent that some of the CONNECT participants were too young to appreciate the purpose of the workshops.
- 30
What is the writer doing in the fifth paragraph?
- A. advising trainers on how they should incorporate the rules into workshops
- B. comparing how the young engineers reacted to the content of the workshops
- C. explaining the context in which the rules for effective training were arrived at
- D. describing how trainers assessed the performance of workshop participants
- 31
In the seventh paragraph, what does the writer say about activities such as 'passing a ball of energy'?
- A. The timing had to be adapted to make them suitable for the engineers.
- B. The point of them had to be explained to the engineers numerous times.
- C. The engineers were initially unconvinced of their value.
- D. The engineers misunderstood how they should be performed.
- 32
What does the writer attribute the success of the demonstrative approach to?
- A. It complemented the way the technical graduates usually worked.
- B. It was a highly innovative method of working.
- C. It combined well with the two other approaches.
- D. It met the participants' expectations about a workshop situation.
- 33
What is the writer's main point in the final paragraph?
- A. The differences between the facilitators and the trainees remained immense.
- B. The facilitators had to put into practice what they were attempting to teach.
- C. The program that has been developed is suitable for any technical audience.
- D. The facilitators on the program acknowledged they had learnt very little.