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: Multi-tasking and the Brain
A. Do you read while listening to music? Do you like to watch TV while finishing your homework? People who have these kinds of habits are called multi-taskers. Multitaskers are able to complete two tasks at the same time by dividing their focus. However, Thomas Lehman, a researcher in Psychology, believes people never really do multiple things simultaneously. Maybe a person is reading while listening to music, but in reality, the brain can only focus on one task. Reading the words in a book will cause you to ignore some of the words of the music. When people think they are accomplishing two different tasks efficiently, what they are really doing is dividing their focus. While listening to music, people become less able to focus on their surroundings. For example, we all have experience of times when we talk with friends and they are not responding properly. Maybe they are listening to someone else talk, or maybe they are reading a text on their smart phone and don't hear what you are saying. Lehman called this phenomenon “email voice”.
B. The world has been changed by computers and its spin offs like smart-phones or cellphones. Now that most individuals have a personal device, like a smart-phone or a laptop, they are frequently reading, watching or listening to virtual information. This raises the occurrence of multitasking in our day to day life. Now when you work, you work with your typewriter, your cellphone, and some colleagues who may drop by at any time to speak with you. In professional meetings, when one normally focuses and listens to one another, people are more likely to have a cell phone in their lap, reading or communicating silently with more people than ever, even inventions such as the cordless phone have increased multitasking. In the old days, a traditional wall phone would ring, and then the housewife would have to stop her activities to answer it. When it rang, the housewife will sit down with her legs up, and chat, with no laundry or sweeping or answering the door. In the modern era, our technology is convenient enough to not interrupt our daily tasks.
C. Earl Miller, an expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied the prefrontal cortex, which controls the brain while a person is multitasking. According to his studies, the size of this cortex varies between species, He found that for humans, the size of this part constitutes one third of the brain, while it is only 4 to 5 percent in dogs, and about 15% in monkeys. Given that this cortex is larger on a human, it allows a human to be more flexible and accurate in his or her multitasking. However, Miller wanted to look further into whether the cortex was truly processing information about two different tasks simultaneously. He designed an experiment where he presents visual stimulants to his subjects in a way that mimics multi-tasking. Miller then attached sensors to the patients' heads to pick up the electric patterns of the brain. This sensor would show if the brain particles, called neurons, were truly processing two different tasks. What he found is that the brain neurons only lit up in singular areas one at a time, and never simultaneously.
D. Davis Meyer, a professor of University of Michigan, studied the young adults in a similar experiment. He instructed them to simultaneously do math problems and classify simple words into different categories. For this experiment, Meyer found that when you think you are doing several jobs at the same time, you are actually switching between jobs. Even though the people tried to do the tasks at the same time, and both tasks were eventually accomplished, overall, the task took more time than if the person focused on a single task one at a time.
E. People sacrifice efficiency when multitasking, Gloria Mark set office workers as his subjects. He found that they were constantly multitasking. He observed that nearly every 11 minutes people at work were disrupted. He found that doing different jobs at the same time may actually save time. However, despite the fact that they are faster, it does not mean they are more efficient. And we are equally likely to self-interrupt as be interrupted by outside sources. He found that in office nearly every 12 minutes an employee would stop and with no reason at all, check a website on their computer, call someone or write an email. If they concentrated for more than 20 minutes, they would feel distressed. He suggested that the average person may suffer from a short concentration span. This short attention span might be natural, but others suggest that new technology may be the problem. With cellphones and computers at our sides at all times, people will never run out of distractions. The format of media, such as advertisements, music, news articles and TV shows are also shortening, so people are used to paying attention to information for a very short time.
F. So even though focusing on one single task is the most efficient way for our brains to work, it is not practical to use this method in real life. According to human nature, people feel more comfortable and efficient in environments with a variety of tasks, Edward Hallowell said that people are losing a lot of efficiency in the workplace due to multitasking, outside distractions and self-distractions. As it matters of fact, the changes made to the workplace do not have to be dramatic. No one is suggesting we ban e-mail or make employees focus on only one task. However, certain common workplace tasks, such as group meetings, would be more efficient if we banned cell-phones, a common distraction. A person can also apply these tips to prevent self-distraction. Instead of arriving to your office and checking all of your e-mails for new tasks, a common workplace ritual, a person could dedicate an hour to a single task first thing in the morning. Self-timing is a great way to reduce distraction and efficiently finish tasks one by one, instead of slowing ourselves down with multi-tasking.
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A reference to a domestic situation that does not require multitasking
- 2
A possible explanation of why we always do multitask together
- 3
A practical solution to multitask in work environment
- 4
Relating multitasking to the size of prefrontal cortex
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Longer time spent doing two tasks at the same time than one at a time
- 6
When faced multiple visual stimulants, one can only concentrate on one of them.
- A. Thomas Lehman
- B. Earl Miller
- C. David Meyer
- D. Gloria Mark
- E. Edward Hallowell
- 7
Doing two things together may be faster but not better.
- A. Thomas Lehman
- B. Earl Miller
- C. David Meyer
- D. Gloria Mark
- E. Edward Hallowell
- 8
People never really do two things together even if you think you do.
- A. Thomas Lehman
- B. Earl Miller
- C. David Meyer
- D. Gloria Mark
- E. Edward Hallowell
- 9
The causes of multitask lie in the environment.
- A. Thomas Lehman
- B. Earl Miller
- C. David Meyer
- D. Gloria Mark
- E. Edward Hallowell
- 10
Even minor changes in the workplace will improve work efficiency.
- A. Thomas Lehman
- B. Earl Miller
- C. David Meyer
- D. Gloria Mark
- E. Edward Hallowell
- 11
A term used to refer to a situation when you are reading a text and cannot focus on your surroundings is _______.
- 12
The _______ part of the brain controls multitasking.
- 13
The practical solution of multitask in work is not to allow use of cellphone in _______.
Reading Passage 2: The importance of being playful
A While it has long been recognized that play affords benefits that last through adulthood, psychologists in the US are now becoming concerned that lack of play could actually be harming their country’s kids. In the past, few children grew up without ample free-play time. But youngsters’ leisure hours are now filled with structured activities such as music lessons and sports. Kids play soccer, Scrabble and saxophone – so why are experts worried that these activities are eating into free play? Most games are fun and sources of learning experiences – fostering group cohesion, for instance, says educational psychologist Anthony Pellegrini. But, Pellegrini explains, “games have predetermined rules – set up in advance and followed. Play, on the other hand, does not have rules, so affords more creative responses. Children initiate and create free play, and use their imagination to try out new activities and roles.”
B Perhaps most crucially, play helps us develop strong social skills. “You don’t become socially competent via teachers telling you how to behave,” Pellegrini says. “Kids learn those skills by interacting with peers, learning what is and isn’t acceptable. They want this thing to keep going, so they’re willing to ‘go the extra mile’ to accommodate their playmates’ desires. Keeping things friendly requires communication – arguably the most valuable social skill of all. Play among peers is the most important in this regard.” Studies show that children use more sophisticated language when playing with other children than when playing with adults. In pretend play, for instance, they have to communicate about something that’s not physically present, so they have to use complicated language to communicate what it is that they’re trying to say,” Pellegrini explains.
C If play helps children become socialized, then lack of play should impede social development – and research suggests that it does. A study of children in Michigan revealed that kids who enrolled in play-oriented preschools were more socially adjusted later in life – and less likely to commit a felony or be suspended from work – than kids who attended play-free preschools where they were constantly instructed by teachers.
D A 2003 study even suggests that play promotes emotional and social development in animals. Researchers allowed thirteen rats to play freely with companions for three and a half days, and kept fourteen others isolated for the same period. Examination revealed that the brains of the rats which had played contained much higher levels of BDNF – a protein that stimulates the growth of new neurons – than those of the animals that had not. “I think play is the major mechanism whereby higher regions of the brain get socialized,” says neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, who co-authored the study.
E Research also suggests that imaginative play is critical for children’s emotional health, as it enables them to work through anxiety. In a 1984 study, researchers assessed the anxiety levels of seventy-four children on their first day of preschool. They labeled each child as either “anxious” or “not anxious”, then randomly split the kids into groups. Half were escorted to rooms full of toys, where they played for 15 minutes; the other half listened to a teacher tell a story for 15 minutes. Afterward, their levels were assessed again. The anxiety levels of the anxious kids who had played had dropped by more than twice as much compared with the anxious kids who had listened to the story.
F Results of animal studies support these views. In 2008, neuroscientist Stephen Siviy put rats into a chamber and exposed them to a collar previously worn by a cat, making them visibly anxious. Later, the chamber was cleaned to remove the cat odor, and the rats were put back without the collar. They immediately became anxious again, probably because they associated the space with the cat. The researchers then introduced another rat – one that had never been exposed to the collar and was not afraid – and it began playing with one of the rats. “Shortly thereafter, the first rat relaxed and became calm,” says Siviy, “suggesting that play helped lessen its anxiety.”
G Play even appears to make kids smarter. In a classic study, researchers told a group of preschool children to play freely with some common objects such as paper towels, a screwdriver, a wooden board and paper clips. Another group was asked to imitate an experimenter using the objects in common ways. A third set was told to sit and draw whatever they wanted, without seeing the objects. After 10 minutes, the researchers asked the children to come up with ideas for how one of the objects could be used. The kids who had played with the objects named, on average, three times as many nonstandard, creative uses for the objects as those in either of the other two groups did, suggesting that play fosters imaginative thinking.
H A later animal study produced similar results. Experimenters isolated young rats during the development period when they would have most frequently played. The researchers taught these rats, and a group that had been allowed to play without constraints, to pull a rubber ball out of the way to get a food treat. A few days later they switched the setup so the rats would have to push the same ball to get the treat. Compared with the isolated rats, the ones which had played proved to be far more adept at solving problems. “Play is like a kaleidoscope,” says evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff, “in that it is random and creative. It encourages flexibility and creativity that may, in the future, be advantageous in unexpected situations or new environments. And in the absence of play, children miss vital learning experiences.”
- 14
14 reference to how play can develop children’s verbal skills
- 15
15 mention of a change in the amount of free play children engage in
- 16
16 an account of some research indicating that free play stimulates children’s creativity
- 17
17 evidence of the link between antisocial behaviour and a lack of free play
- 18
18 a comparison between free play and other forms of play
- 19
19 It encourages children to take other people’s wishes into account.
- A. Anthony Pellegrini
- B. Jaak Panksepp
- C. Stephen Siviy
- D. Marc Bekoff
- 20
20 It can serve to relieve stress.
- A. Anthony Pellegrini
- B. Jaak Panksepp
- C. Stephen Siviy
- D. Marc Bekoff
- 21
21 It prepares children for dealing with unpredictable situations.
- A. Anthony Pellegrini
- B. Jaak Panksepp
- C. Stephen Siviy
- D. Marc Bekoff
- 22
22 It is less useful for children when adults are involved.
- A. Anthony Pellegrini
- B. Jaak Panksepp
- C. Stephen Siviy
- D. Marc Bekoff
- 23
23 In studies researching links between play and social learning, experiments analysing protein levels in the ________ of rats noted significant differences between rats which had played and those which had not.
- 24
24 In another study, rats made distressed by an object smelling of a ________ experienced a noticeable reduction in their ________ levels after they had been allowed to play.
- 25
25 In another study, rats made distressed by an object smelling of a cat experienced a noticeable reduction in their ________ levels after they had been allowed to play.
- 26
26 A further experiment, in which rats had to move a ________ in order to reach a reward, indicated that rats deprived of play were less skilled at dealing with problems.
Reading Passage 3: 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 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 curiously 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 born 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 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.
- 27
27 Paragraph A .......................
- 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
- 28
28 Paragraph B .......................
- 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
- 29
29 Paragraph C .......................
- 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
- 30
30 Paragraph D .......................
- 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
- 31
31 Paragraph E .......................
- 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
- 32
32 Paragraph F .......................
- 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
- 33
33 Paragraph G .......................
- 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
- 34
34 ________ dune is said to have long ridges that can extend hundreds of miles.
- 35
35 According to Bagnold, an ________ is needed to stop the sand from moving before a dune can form.
- 36
36 Stéphane Douady believes the singing of dunes is not a spiritual phenomenon, but purely ________.
- 37
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, sometimes 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.