About this set: compiled and lightly cleaned up from real test material that test-takers recalled. IELTS draws from a global question pool, so this material circulates worldwide. To give you a complete, sittable test, material reported around the same period is assembled together — so a set may combine content from several exam dates, not one single sitting. Any audio is a recreation for practice. Organized for study convenience. Based on test-taker recalls — not official IELTS material.
Reading Passage 1: Andrew Carnegie, an industrialist and philanthropist
Andrew Carnegie was among the wealthiest and most famous industrialists of his day. Through Carnegie Corporation of New York, he established the innovative philanthropic foundation. He was born in 1835, in Dunfermline, Scotland. His family lived by weaving. The town fell on hard times when industrialism made home-based weaving obsolete, leaving workers such as Carnegie's father, Will, hard pressed to support their families. Carnegie's family moved to Pennsylvania. His father worked in a cotton factory. In 1848, Carnegie worked in the same place. He educated himself through books, theatres and music.
Thomas A. Scott, superintendent of the western division of the Pennsylvania Railroad and Andrew Carnegie's boss, initiated the future millionaire's first investment. At that time, Carnegie worked as a secretary to him. Carnegie began to invest in car company. By 1865, Carnegie had amassed business interests in iron works.
In the 1870s, Carnegie was involved in steel production. He invented in steel business. In 1873, he built his first steel plant. he reinvested his profits and also sometimes borrowed money from banks. He cut the price of steel down. He built the Carnegie Steel Corporation into the largest steel manufacturing company in the world.
In the 1880s, Carnegie bought out Henry Clay Frick's company, which owned coal fields as well as a large steel mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Frick and Carnegie became partners. Carnegie began to spend half of every year at an estate in Scotland, in charge of different projects. Frick stayed in Pittsburgh, running the day-to-day operations of the company. Carnegie spent a lot time on travelling. He thought America is better than unequal European countries. Education is important in America. Andrew Carnegie's philanthropic career began around 1870. He founded universities and many educational institutes, donated money to education facilities, set up Funds in various fields.
Carnegie began to face a number of problems by the 1890s. With the development of technology, work efficiency improved, fewer workers are needed. Frick decided to lower the minimum wage of workers. Labor union was formed, and Carnegie believed the workers had the right to join the union. The union which represented workers at the Homestead Mill went on strike in 1892. Eventually, an armed militia had to take over the plant. Eight workers died finally.
Carnegie was informed by transatlantic cable of the events in Homestead. But he made no statement and did not get involved. He was later criticized for his silence. As the 1890s continued, Carnegie faced competition in business, and he found himself being squeezed by tactics similar to those he had employed years earlier. He refused to have conversations with his competitors.
Carnegie had already been giving money to create museums, such as the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh. But his philanthropy accelerated after selling Carnegie Steel. Carnegie supported numerous causes, including scientific research, educational institutions, museums, and world peace. He is best known for funding more than 2,500 libraries throughout the English-speaking world.
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found employment in the same workplace as his 1 .........
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educated himself through books, theatrical performances and 2 .........
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became 3 ......... to Thomas A Scott at Pennsylvania Railroad
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realised that changing engineering needs would require a greater demand for 4 .........
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managed a rail manufacturing business by reducing 5 .........
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restructuring; reinvesting profit and sometimes borrowing money from 6 .........
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Carnegie's responsibilities: arranging future 7 ......... and innovations for factories
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While Carnegie focused on future projects and travelled for much of the year, Frick was responsible for the day-to-day management of the company.
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Carnegie thought there were more work opportunities in America than in European countries.
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Carnegie decreased the number of workers.
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He prevented workers from joining the labor union.
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Carnegie blamed Frick for the strike.
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The libraries that Carnegie founded were limited to people in America.
Reading Passage 2: Herbal Medicines
A
There is an age-old practice of harvesting plants and herbs in their natural environment for use as medicines. And today there is huge potential for New Zealand to develop a herb industry based on the excellent growing conditions and expertise there, according to Phil Rasmussen, a pharmacist and medical herbalist. Take arnica, for example, a popular pharmaceutical herb used to treat bruises and joint problems. Traditionally collected by Romany communities in Europe, it is now in high demand worldwide as interest develops in the capabilities of the small alpine plant. A 2008 report for the Plant and Food Research organisation concluded that New Zealand has a good opportunity to cultivate arnica flowers and roots for the international markets. However, the initiative was stopped in its tracks when the government abruptly halted funding for the research programme. It was an unjustified move, according to agronomist Malcolm Douglas, based on a number of inaccurate views about weed invasion.
B
The history of herbal medicines in New Zealand has long featured disagreements of this sort. For the early Maori people – the original inhabitants of New Zealand – the forest was well stocked with edible plants that were an obvious source of nutrition, but that were taken for the relief of pain as well. While the earliest European doctors in New Zealand relied on imported dried herbs, many were keen to include native plants in their practices: in his book published in 1891, herbalist James Neil described manuka and koromiko as among New Zealand’s most valuable herbs. Despite its popularity among some, however, herbalism continued to have its detractors. In 1907 Neil, president of the then very young New Zealand Association of Medical Herbalists (NZAMH), petitioned parliament for legal status for herbalists, but he was unsuccessful. The Evening Post newspaper perhaps summed up the opposing position by claiming that herbalism ‘is obsolete’.
C
In fact, traditional Maori medicine faced a more determined challenge. In 1908 the government passed a controversial law that had the effect of restricting traditional herbal practice, or pushing it underground. Then for a brief period in the mid-20th century, herbal medicine was largely ignored, shunned by the majority of the medical profession, and absent from medical school curricula. But a centuries-old tradition was not going to disappear so easily, and in the 1980s the NZAMH was revived, and it became possible to complete a course in herbal medicine at several polytechnics around the country. However, the problem remained of how to connect the culture of plant-based medicine with conventional scientific thinking in order to promote herbal use within the general population. For many years, the limited evidence there was that herbal medicines worked was undermined by lack of interest among general practitioners and within the scientific community.
D
Today, the ideas of herbalists in the 1980s – eat a varied diet, include lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, recognise stress – are completely accepted by the medical establishment and widely practised in society as a whole. Natural health products are big sellers in pharmacies, and global pharmaceutical companies are buying up natural supplement brands or developing their own. What’s more, according to Rasmussen, robust clinical trials show that herbal medicine is generally safe – safer than most drugs. ‘It doesn’t do everything,’ he says, ‘but there’s a lot it does do, particularly in terms of preventative health care.’ One significant issue for today’s export-oriented herbal medicine producers is the question of how to guarantee standards for consumers in different countries. In other words, there is the need for some form of globally recognised system of documentation. Rasmussen’s range of extracts are produced under the Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) scheme, which is respected around the world. So too is the range produced by Sandra Clair, who says that such assurance is expensive but necessary if you want to export herbal remedies to the rest of the world. Moves to launch a joint Australia–New Zealand agency to regulate herbal remedies under a single, streamlined licensing process have recently been revived, after being abandoned in 2007 through lack of support in parliament.
E
There are those in the industry who support further regulation still. According to Rasmussen, some herbs should require a prescription from a suitably qualified medical herbalist or doctor. For example, consumers shouldn’t be able to go to their local supermarket and buy St John’s Wort, according to Rasmussen, because it can interact in harmful ways with at least ten pharmaceutical drugs. Isla Burgess, who is part of the International Research Group for the Conservation of Medicinal Plants, agrees that tighter regulation is necessary, but for a different reason. ‘More than 400,000 tonnes of medicinal and aromatic plants are traded in the world each year,’ says Burgess. ‘The great majority of these are harvested from the wild, so they each have an impact on their local ecosystem.’ She gives the example of elm trees in the USA, ringbarked and stripped for the growing market for a product called ‘slippery elm’: this endangered tree should be protected. But others argue that more regulation would be prohibitively expensive for all but the largest manufacturers – a change, cautions Clair, that would probably put some local companies out of business. So, for the time being at least, it seems that the topic of herbal medicines will continue to provoke debate.
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a reference to the interest shown by large corporations in herbal remedies
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examples of the uses of one particular herbal medicine
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a warning that small companies cannot afford stricter controls of the herbal medicine industry
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a statement by one expert about the effectiveness and limitations of herbal medicines
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Originally, the Maori people consumed plants to help deal with 18 ________, and also as food.
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When Europeans settled in the country, a 19 ________ by James Neil showed that some of them also recognised the medicinal value of native plants.
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The following year, the use of herbal medicines was made more difficult because of a new 20 ________.
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Then in the 1980s a number of institutions started offering a 21 ________ in the subject.
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There ought to be restrictions on where you can buy some herbal medicines.
- A. Phil Rasmussen
- B. Malcolm Douglas
- C. Sandra Clair
- D. Isla Burgess
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The authorities stopped supporting one project without a good reason.
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The herbal medicine industry has an effect on the environment where some plant-based medicines are found.
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New Zealand has the human resources and natural environment to grow herbs commercially.
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It is essential for herbal medicines to have international certification, despite the cost.
Reading Passage 3: Unlocking the Mystery of Dreams
Dreams have captivated thinkers since ancient times, but their mystery is now closer than ever to resolution, thanks to new technology that allows scientists to watch the sleeping brain at work.
A Thousands of years ago, dreams were seen as messages from the gods, and in many cultures, they are still considered prophetic, foretelling things to come. In ancient Greece, sick people slept at the temples of Asclepius, the god of medicine, in order to receive healing dreams. Modern dream science really begins at the end of the 19th century with Sigmund Freud, who theorized that dreams were the expression of unconscious desires often from childhood. He believed that exploring these hidden emotions through analysis could help cure mental illness. After Freud, the most important event in dream science was the discovery in the early 1950s of a phase of sleep characterized by intense brain activity and rapid eye movement (REM).
B Adult humans spend about a quarter of their sleep time in REM, much of it dreaming. People awakened in the midst of REM sleep reported vivid dreams, which led researchers to conclude that most dreaming took place during REM. Using a machine called the electroencephalograph (EEG), researchers were able to see that brain activity during REM resembled that of the brain when the body is awake. The mystery of REM sleep is that even though it may not be essential, it is universal – at least in mammals and even birds. Some researchers think REM may have evolved for physiological reasons. “One thing that’s unique about mammals and birds is that they regulate body temperature,” says neuroscientist Jerry Siegel, director of UCLA’s Center for Sleep Research. “There’s no good evidence that any cold-blooded animal has REM sleep.” REM sleep heats up the brain and non-REM cools it off, Siegel says, and that could mean that the changing sleep cycles allow the brain to repair itself. “It seems likely that REM sleep is filling a basic physiological function and that dreams are a kind of a side effect, or by-product of this.”
C There is great disagreement about the psychological function of dreams and researchers have come up with some differing theories. On one side are scientists like Harvard’s Allan Hobson, who believes that dreams are essentially random. In the 1970s, Hobson and his colleague Robert McCarley proposed what they called the “activation-synthesis hypothesis,” which describes how dreams are formed by nerve signals sent out during REM sleep from a small area at the base of the brain called the pons. These signals, the researchers said, activate the images that we call dreams. That raised questions about dream research. If dreams are insignificant night-time images created by the brain, what is the point of studying them?
D But more recently, new theories have made some scientists take dreams more seriously. In 1997, Mark Solms of the University of Cape Town in South Africa found that there was more than one mechanism in the brain for activating dreams. Since then, Solms has argued that medical diagnostic equipment like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) that helps researchers watch dreaming brains might actually lend new support to Freud’s ideas because the parts of the brain that are most active during dreaming control emotion. Further research has supported Solms’s findings. Scientists using PET and fMRI technology to watch the dreaming brain have found that one of the most active areas during REM is the limbic system, which controls our emotions.
E Much less active during REM sleep is the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with logical thinking. That could explain why dreams in REM sleep often lack a coherent story line. Some researchers have also found that people dream in non-REM sleep as well, although those dreams generally are less vivid. Another active part of the brain in REM sleep is the anterior cingulate cortex, which detects differences or inconsistencies. Eric Nofzinger, director of the Sleep Neuroimaging Program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, thinks that could be why people often solve tricky problems in their dreams.
F Deirdre Barrett, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, would agree. In her book “The Committee of Sleep,” she describes how painters like Jasper Johns and Salvador Dali found inspiration in their dreams. In her own research on problem solving through dreams, Barrett has found that even ordinary people can solve simple problems in their lives (like how to fit old furniture into a new apartment) if they focus on the dilemma before they fall asleep. There is also evidence that dreaming helps certain kinds of learning. Some researchers have found that dreaming about physical tasks, like a gymnast’s floor routine, enhances performance.
G Whatever the function of dreams at night, they clearly can play a role in therapy during the day. The University of Maryland’s Clara Hill, who has studied the use of dreams in therapy, says that dreams are a “back door” into a patient’s thinking. “Dreams reveal stuff about you that you didn’t know was there,” she says. The therapists she trains to work with patients’ dreams use dream imagery to uncover hidden emotions and feelings. Rosalind Cartwright from the university medical center in Chicago has been studying depression in divorced men and women, and she is finding that “good dreamers,” people who have vivid dreams with strong story lines, are less likely to remain depressed. She thinks that dreaming helps diffuse powerful emotions. “Dreaming is a mental-health activity,” she says.
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a reference to the significance of dreams on artists' work
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a concern about the usefulness of dream research
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the types of living creatures that have REM sleep
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research results linking dreams to psychological well-being
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an account of how modern research tools have strengthened Freud's theory
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In ancient times, people thought that dreams
- A. sent messages to the gods.
- B. helped resolve conflict.
- C. were a sign of physical illness.
- D. predicted future events.
- 33
According to the passage, which of the following happens during REM sleep?
- A. People rarely dream.
- B. People's dreams become confused.
- C. The temperature of the brain increases.
- D. The brain behaves differently than when you are awake.
- 34
What explanation is suggested in paragraph E for lack of a clear narrative in dreams?
- A. Some dreams occur in non-REM sleep.
- B. Some dreams are generated in different areas of the brain.
- C. The part of the brain in control of reasoning is less involved.
- D. The part of the brain responsible for feelings is more involved.
- 35
According to the passage, which area of the brain helps people find solutions to difficult situations through their dreams?
- A. the anterior cingulate cortex
- B. the pons
- C. the limbic system
- D. the prefrontal cortex
- 36
Technology shows there is a link between dreams and the areas of the brain that deal with feelings.
- A. Jerry Siegel
- B. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley
- C. Mark Solms
- D. Eric Nofzinger
- E. Deirdre Barrett
- F. Clara Hill
- G. Rosalind Cartwright
- 37
Dreams are meaningless pictures created by the brain.
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Dreaming is a method of calming strong feelings.
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Our dreams can show us unexpected things about ourselves.
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Dreams may be a result of maintaining an essential body function.
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