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: Morse Code
Morse code is being replaced by a new satellite-based system for sending distress calls at sea. Its dots and dashes have had a good run for their money.
"Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence." Surprisingly this message, which flashed over the airwaves in the dots and dashes of Morse code on January 31st 1997, was not a desperate transmission by a radio operator on a sinking ship. Rather, it was a message signalling the end of the use of Morse code for distress calls in French waters. Since 1992 countries around the world have been decommissioning their Morse equipment with similar (if less poetic) sign-offs, as the world's shipping switches over to a new satellite-based arrangement, the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System. The final deadline for the switch-over to GMDSS is February 1st, a date that is widely seen as the end of an era.
The code has, however, had a good history. Appropriately for a technology commonly associated with radio operators on sinking ships, the idea of Morse code is said to have occurred to Samuel Morse while he was on board a ship crossing the Atlantic. At the time Morse was a painter and occasional inventor, but when another of the ship's passengers informed him of recent advances in electrical theory, Morse was suddenly taken with the idea of building an electric telegraph to send messages in codes. Other inventors had been trying to do just that for the best part of a century. Morse succeeded and is now remembered as "the father of the telegraph" partly thanks to his single-mindedness—it was 12 years, for example, before he secured money from Congress to build his first telegraph line—but also for technical reasons.
Compared with rival electric telegraph designs, such as the needle telegraph developed by William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in Britain, Morse's design was very simple: it required little more than a "key" (essentially, a spring-loaded switch) to send messages, a clicking "sounder" to receive them, and a wire to link the two. But although Morse's hardware was simple, there was a catch: in order to use his equipment, operators had to learn the special code of dots and dashes that still bears his name. Originally, Morse had not intended to use combinations of dots and dashes to represent individual letters. His first code, sketched in his notebook during that transatlantic voyage, used dots and dashes to represent the digits 0 to 9. Morse's idea was that messages would consist of strings of numbers corresponding to words and phrases in a special numbered dictionary. But Morse later abandoned this scheme and, with the help of an associate, Alfred Vail, devised the Morse alphabet, which could be used to spell out messages a letter at a time in dots and dashes.
At first, the need to learn this complicated-looking code made Morse's telegraph seem impossibly tricky compared with other, more user-friendly designs. Cooke's and Wheatstone's telegraph, for example, used five needles to pick out letters on a diamond-shaped grid. But although this meant that anyone could use it, it also required five wires between telegraph stations. Morse's telegraph needed only one. And some people, it soon transpired, had a natural facility for Morse code.
As electric telegraphy took off in the early 1850s, the Morse telegraph quickly became dominant. It was adopted as the European standard in 1851, allowing direct connections between the telegraph networks of different countries. (Britain chose not to participate, sticking with needle telegraphs for a few more years.) By this time Morse code had been revised to allow for accents and other foreign characters, resulting in a split between American and International Morse that continues to this day.
On international submarine cables, left and right swings of a light-beam reflected from a tiny rotating mirror were used to represent dots and dashes. Meanwhile a distinct telegraphic subculture was emerging, with its own customs and vocabulary, and a hierarchy based on the speed at which operators could send and receive Morse code. First-class operators, who could send and receive at speeds of up to 45 words a minute, handled press traffic, securing the best-paid jobs in big cities. At the bottom of the pile were slow, inexperienced rural operators, many of whom worked the wires as part-timers. As their Morse code improved, however, rural operators found that their new-found skill was a passport to better pay in a city job. Telegraphers soon swelled the ranks of the emerging middle classes. Telegraphy was also deemed suitable work for women. By 1870, a third of the operators in the Western Union office in New York, the largest telegraph office in America, were female.
In a dramatic ceremony in 1871, Morse himself said goodbye to the global community of telegraphers he had brought into being. After a lavish banquet and many adulatory speeches, Morse sat down behind an operator's table and, placing his finger on a key connected to every telegraph wire in America, tapped out his final farewell to a standing ovation. By the time of his death in 1872, the world was well and truly wired: more than 650,000 miles of telegraph line and 30,000 miles of submarine cable were throbbing with Morse code; and 20,000 towns and villages were connected to the global network. Just as the Internet is today often called an "information superhighway", the telegraph was described in its day as an "instantaneous highway of thought".
But by the 1890s the Morse telegraph's heyday as a cutting-edge technology was coming to an end, with the invention of the telephone and the rise of automatic telegraphs, precursors of the teleprinter, neither of which required specialist skills to operate. Morse code, however, was about to be given a new lease of life thanks to another new technology: wireless. Following the invention of radiotelegraphy by Guglielmo Marconi in 1896, its potential for use at sea quickly became apparent. For the first time, ships could communicate with each other, and with the shore, whatever the weather and even when out of visual range. In 1897 Marconi successfully sent Morse code messages between a shore station and an Italian warship 19km (12 miles) away. By 1910, Morse radio equipment was commonplace on ships.
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Paragraph A
- i. The advantage of Morse's invention
- ii. A suitable job for women
- iii. Morse's invention was developed
- iv. Sea rescue after the invention of radiotelegraphy
- v. The emergence of many job opportunities
- vi. Standard and variations
- vii. Application of Morse code in a new technology
- viii. The discovery of electricity
- ix. International expansion of Morse Code
- x. The beginning of an end
- xi. The move of using code to convey information
- 2
Paragraph B
- 3
Paragraph C
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Paragraph D
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Paragraph E
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Paragraph F
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Paragraph G
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Paragraph H
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Morse had already been famous as an inventor before his invention of Morse code.
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Morse waited a long time before receiving support from the Congress.
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Morse code is difficult to learn compared with other designs.
- 12
Companies and firms prefer to employ telegraphy operators from rural areas.
- 13
Morse died from overwork.
Reading Passage 2: Bio-mimetic Design
What has fins like a whale, skin like a lizard, and eyes like a moth? The future of engineering. Andrew Parker, an evolutionary biologist, knelt in the baking red sand of the Australian outback just south of Alice Springs and eased the right hind leg of a thorny devil into a dish of water.
“Its back is completely drenched!” Sure enough, after 30 seconds, water from the dish had picked up the lizard’s leg and was glistening all over its prickly hide. In a few seconds more the water reached its mouth, and the lizard began to smack its jaws with evident satisfaction. It was, in essence, drinking through its foot. Given more time, the thorny devil can perform this same conjuring trick on a patch of damp sand – a vital competitive advantage in the desert. Parker had come here to discover precisely how it does this, not from purely biological interest, but with a concrete purpose in mind: to make a thorny-devil-inspired device that will help people collect lifesaving water in the desert. “The water’s spreading out incredibly fast!” he said, as drops from his eyedropper fell onto the lizard’s back and vanished, like magic. “Its skin is far more hydrophobic than I thought. There may well be hidden capillaries, channeling the water into the mouth.”
Parker’s work is only a small part of an increasingly vigorous, global biomimetics movement. Engineers in Bath, England, and West Chester, Pennsylvania, are pondering the bumps on the leading edges of humpback whale flukes to learn how to make airplane wings for more agile flight. In Berlin, Germany, the fingerlike primary feathers of raptors are inspiring engineers to develop wings that change shape aloft to reduce drag and increase fuel efficiency. Architects in Zimbabwe are studying how termites regulate temperature, humidity, and airflow in their mounds in order to build more comfortable buildings, while Japanese medical researchers are reducing the pain of an injection by using hypodermic needles edged with tiny serrations, like those on a mosquito’s proboscis, minimizing nerve stimulation.
Ronald Fearing, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, has taken on one of the biggest challenges of all: to create a miniature robotic fly that is swift, small, and maneuverable enough for use in surveillance or search-and-rescue operations. Fearing made his own, one of which he held up with tweezers for me to see, a gossamer wand some 11 millimeters long and not much thicker than a cat’s whisker. Fearing has been forced to manufacture many of the other minute components of his fly in the same way, using a micromachining laser and a rapid prototyping system that allows him to design his minuscule parts in a computer, automatically cut and cure them overnight, and assemble them by hand the next day under a microscope.
With the micro laser he cuts the fly’s wings out of a two-micron polyester sheet so delicate that it crumples if you breathe on it and must be reinforced with carbon-fiber spars. The wings on his current model flap at 275 times per second – faster than the insect’s own wings – and make the blowfly’s signature buzz. “Carbon fiber outperforms fly chitin,” he said, with a trace of self-satisfaction. He pointed out a protective plastic box on the lab bench, which contained the fly-bot itself, a delicate, origami-like framework of black carbon-fiber struts and hairlike wires that, not surprisingly, looks nothing like a real fly. A month later it achieved liftoff in a controlled flight on a boom. Fearing expects the fly-bot to hover in two or three years, and eventually to bank and dive with fly like virtuosity.
Stanford University roboticist Mark Cutkosky designed a gecko-inspired climber that he christened Stickybot. In reality, gecko feet aren’t sticky – they’re dry and smooth to the touch – and owe their remarkable adhesion to some two billion spatula-tipped filaments per square centimeter on their toe pads, each filament only a hundred nanometers thick. These filaments are so small, in fact, that they interact at the molecular level with the surface on which the gecko walks, tapping into the low-level van der Waals forces generated by molecules’ fleeting positive and negative charges, which pull any two adjacent objects together. To make the toe pads for Stickybot, Cutkosky and doctoral student Sangbae Kim, the robot’s lead designer, produced a urethane fabric with tiny bristles that end in 30-micrometer points. Though not as flexible or adherent as the gecko itself, they hold the 500-gram robot on a vertical surface.
Cutkosky endowed his robot with seven-segmented toes that drag and release just like the lizard’s, and a gecko-like stride that snugs it to the wall. He also crafted Stickybot’s legs and feet with a process he calls shape deposition manufacturing (SDM), which combines a range of metals, polymers, and fabrics to create the same smooth gradation from stiff to flexible that is present in the lizard’s limbs and absent in most man-made materials. SDM also allows him to embed actuators, sensors, and other specialized structures that make Stickybot climb better. Then he noticed in a paper on gecko anatomy that the lizard had branching tendons to distribute its weight evenly across the entire surface of its toes. Eureka. “When I saw that, I thought, wow, that’s great!” He subsequently embedded a branching polyester cloth “tendon” in his robot’s limbs to distribute its load in the same way.
Stickybot now walks up vertical surfaces of glass, plastic, and glazed ceramic tile, though it will be some time before it can keep up with a gecko. For the moment it can walk only on smooth surfaces, at a mere four centimeters per second, a fraction of the speed of its biological role model. The dry adhesive on Stickybot’s toes isn’t self-cleaning like the lizard’s either, so it rapidly clogs with dirt. “There are a lot of things about the gecko that we simply had to ignore,” Cutkosky says. Still, a number of real-world applications are in the offing. The Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funds the project, has it in mind for surveillance: an automaton that could slink up a building and perch there for hours or days, monitoring the terrain below. Cutkosky hypothesizes a range of civilian uses. “I’m trying to get robots to go places where they’ve never gone before,” he told me. “I would like to see Stickybot have a real-world function, whether it’s a toy or another application. Sure, it would be great if it eventually has a lifesaving or humanitarian role…”
For all the power of the biomimetics paradigm, and the brilliant people who practice it, bio-inspiration has led to surprisingly few mass-produced products and arguably only one household word – Velcro, which was invented in 1948 by Swiss chemist George de Mestral, by copying the way cockleburs clung to his dog’s coat. In addition to Cutkosky’s lab, five other high-powered research teams are currently trying to mimic gecko adhesion, and so far none has come close to matching the lizard’s strong, directional, self-cleaning grip. Likewise, scientists have yet to meaningfully re-create the abalone nanostructure that accounts for the strength of its shell, and several well-funded biotech companies have gone bankrupt trying to make artificial spider silk.
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Andrew Parker failed to make effective water device which can be used in desert.
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Skin of lizard is easy to get wet when it contacts water.
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Scientists apply inspiration from nature into many artificial engineering.
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Tiny and thin hair under gecko's feet allows it to stick to the surface of object.
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When gecko climbs downward, its feet release a certain kind of chemical to make them adhesive.
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Famous cases stimulate a large number of successful products of biomimetics in real life.
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Velcro is well-known for its bionics design.
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Ronald Fearing was required to fabricate tiny components for his robotic fly 21.................... by specialized techniques.
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The robotic fly's main structure outside is made of 22.................... and long and thin wires which make it unlike fly at all.
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Cutkosky applied an artificial material in Stickybot's 23.................... as a tendon to split pressure like lizard's does.
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Stickybot's feet doesn't have 24................ function which makes it only be able to walk on smooth surface.
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DARPA are planning to use stickybot for 25................
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Cutkosky assume that stickybot finally has potential in 26................ other human-related activities.
Reading Passage 3: Understanding Symbols
About 20 years ago I had one of those wonderful moments when research takes an unexpected but fruitful turn. I had been studying toddler memory and was beginning a new experiment with two-and-a-half and three-year-olds. For the project, I had built a model of a room that was in my laboratory. The real space contained basic furniture such as a couch and table. The miniature version was as similar as possible to its larger counterpart: the furniture was the same shape and material and was arranged in the same position. For the study a child watched as we hid a miniature toy—a plastic dog we called Little Snoopy—in the model. We then encouraged the child to find "Big Snoopy," a large version of the toy hiding in the same place in his big room.
The three-year-olds were very successful. After they observed the small toy being placed behind the miniature couch, they ran into the room and found the large toy behind the real couch. But the two-and-a-half-year-olds failed abysmally. They cheerfully ran into the room to retrieve the large toy, but most had no idea where to look, even though they remembered where the tiny toy was hidden in the miniature room and could readily find it there.
Their failure to use what they knew about the model to draw an inference about the real room indicated that they did not appreciate the relation between the model and the room. I realised my memory study was instead a study of symbolic understanding and that the children's failure might be telling us something about how and when children acquire the ability to understand that one object stands for another.
The first type of symbolic object that infants and young children master is the picture. No symbols seem simpler to adults, but infants initially find pictures perplexing. The problem stems from the duality inherent in all symbolic objects: they are real in themselves and also representations of something else. A few years ago I became intrigued by anecdotes suggesting that infants do not appreciate this duality—stories of a baby trying to pick up a depicted toy or fit a foot into a photograph of a shoe. We assumed such behaviour would be rare and therefore difficult to study.
Fortunately we were wrong. We began testing infants' understanding of pictures by putting a book of highly realistic colour photographs of individual objects in front of nine-month-olds. To our surprise, every child in the study reached out to feel or scratch the pictures. The confusion seems to be conceptual not perceptual. Infants can perfectly well perceive the difference between objects and pictures and given the choice they will choose the real thing. But they do not yet fully understand what pictures are and how they differ from real objects. However, when depicted objects bear little resemblance to the real thing—as in a black and white drawing—infants rarely explore them. By 18 months, babies have come to appreciate that a picture merely represents an object; instead of manipulating the paper, they point to pictures and name objects. Nevertheless, it takes several years for the nature of pictures to be completely understood.
Studies have shown that, until the age of four, many children think that turning a picture of a bowl of popcorn upside down will result in the depicted popcorn falling out of the bowl.
Pictures are not the only source of confusion for very young children. In a third experiment, we brought a group of toddlers (18-to 30-month-old children) into a room containing a child's slide, a chair, and a toddler-sized car. The children played with these for a while. Then we secretly replaced each object with an identical miniature version. Most children attempted to perform the same actions with the miniature items that they had with the larger ones. Some tried to sit on the chair, others attempted to climb into the car. Interestingly, most of the children showed little reaction to their failed attempts. We think this probably reflects the fact that toddlers' daily lives are full of unsuccessful attempts to do one thing or another.
This confusion has implications for educational practice. Teachers everywhere use blocks or other objects to represent numerical quantity. However, if young children do not understand the relation between an object and what it represents, this could be counterproductive. To demonstrate this, we taught six- and seven-year-olds a difficult subtraction problem using blocks. We taught an identical comparison group the same concept, but using pencil and paper. Both groups learned to solve the problems equally well, but the group using blocks took three times as long to do so. Dual representation also comes into play in many children's books. Modern children's books are often 3D, with features that encourage children to interact directly with the book itself, for example flaps that can be lifted to reveal pictures. Graduate student Cynthia Chong and I reasoned that these features might distract children from the information. Accordingly we used different types of book to teach letters to 30-month-old children. One was a simple old-fashioned alphabet book with each letter accompanied by an appropriate picture. The other was a 3D version. The children using the traditional book subsequently recognised more letters than those using the 3D book. Presumably, the children could concentrate more easily with the plain 2D book, whereas with the other one they were distracted by the 3D activities. Less may be more when it comes to educational books for young children.
- 27
In the first paragraph, what did the children in the experiment have to do?
- A. spot the differences between a real room and a smaller version
- B. make a copy of a life-sized room using small furniture
- C. hide a large toy in a tiny room
- D. locate a toy in a life-sized room
- 28
What was the result of the first experiment?
- A. Both two-and-a-half-and three-year-olds completed the task successfully.
- B. Three-year-olds could mentally relate the two rooms they had been shown.
- C. Two-and-a-half-year-olds could relate more closely to the toys as symbols.
- D. Two-and-a-half-year-olds had poorer memory than three-year-olds.
- 29
In the fourth paragraph, what does the writer say about children and pictures?
- A. Infants are unable to understand that pictures serve a double purpose.
- B. Young children may understand pictures more readily than adults.
- C. Infants can understand that a picture of food cannot be eaten.
- D. Adults should encourage children to look at pictures from an early age.
- 30
In the third experiment, what did the writer notice about the reactions of the toddlers?
- A. They often behaved in an unpredictable way.
- B. They were only comfortable performing very familiar tasks.
- C. They became frustrated when they could not achieve a task.
- D. They behaved the same whether they were successful or not.
- 31
What did the experiment involving a mathematical problem suggest about children's learning?
- A. Children are able to understand complex concepts at an early age.
- B. Children younger than seven cannot learn using pencil and paper alone.
- C. Using blocks can make it harder for children to learn new concepts.
- D. Teachers should try using blocks to teach mathematics to lower level students.
- 32
What does Deloache conclude about the results of her and Chong's experiment?
- A. Children's books should be more interactive.
- B. 2-D books should contain realistic images.
- C. Simpler books may be better learning tools.
- D. 3-D books help weaker students to progress.
- 33
The test involving 9-month-old babies attempted to find out ..........
- A. that a three-year-old may still expect an image to perform a real task.
- B. how quickly children can learn the alphabet.
- C. the best age for children to begin school.
- D. the effectiveness of symbolic objects as teaching tools.
- E. whether young children are puzzled by pictures.
- F. that young children expect tiny objects to function in the same way as life-sized ones.
- 34
The third experiment revealed ..........
- 35
The maths experiment was designed to assess ..........
- 36
The results of the first experiment revealed unexpected information.
- 37
Infants react the same way to both drawings and photographs.
- 38
Toddlers are used to failing in many of the tasks they try to perform.
- 39
The confusion of symbols and real objects has little significance for educational practice.
- 40
Children enjoy reading 3D books more than 2D books.
Answer sheet
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Show answer key
Answer key
1. x
2. xi
3. iii
4. i
5. vi
6. ii
7. ix
8. vii
9. FALSE
10. TRUE
11. TRUE
12. NOT GIVEN
13. NOT GIVEN
14. NOT GIVEN
15. FALSE
16. TRUE
17. FALSE
18. NOT GIVEN
19. FALSE
20. TRUE
21. the same way
22. carbon-fiber
23. limbs / legs and feet
24. self-cleaning
25. surveillance
26. lifesaving
27. D
28. B
29. C
30. D
31. C
32. C
33. E
34. F
35. D
36. YES
37. NO
38. YES
39. NO
40. NOT GIVEN