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: How to find your way out of a food desert
Ordinary citizens have been using the internet to draw attention to the lack of healthy eating options in inner cities.
Over the last few months, a survey has been carried out of over 200 greengrocers and convenience stores in Crown Heights, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. As researchers from the Brooklyn Food Association enter the details, colorful dots appear on their online map, which display the specific location of each of the food stores in a handful of central Brooklyn neighborhoods. Clicking on a dot will show you the store’s name and whether it carries fresh fruit and vegetables, wholegrain bread, low-fat dairy and other healthy options.
The researchers plan eventually to survey the entire borough of Brooklyn. ‘We want to get to a more specific and detailed description of what that looks like,’ says Jeffrey Heehs, who leads the project. He hopes it will help residents find fresh food in urban areas where the stores sell mostly packaged snacks or fast food, areas otherwise known as food deserts. The aim of the project is also to assist government officials in assessing food availability, and in forming future policies about what kind of food should be sold and where.
In fact, the Brooklyn project represents the intersection of two growing trends: mapping fresh food markets in US cities, and private citizens creating online maps of local neighborhood features. According to Michael Goodchild, a geographer at the University of California at Santa Barbara, citizen map makers may make maps because there is no good government map, or to record problems such as burned-out traffic lights.
According to recent studies, people at higher risk of chronic disease and who receive minimal incomes for the work they do frequently live in neighborhoods located in food deserts. But how did these food deserts arise? Linda Alwitt and Thomas Donley, marketing researchers at DePaul University in Chicago, found that supermarkets often can’t afford the amount of land required for their stores in cities. City planning researcher Cliff Guy and colleagues at the University of Leeds in the UK found in 2004 that smaller urban groceries tend to close due to competition from suburban supermarkets.
As fresh food stores leave a neighborhood, residents find it harder to eat well and stay healthy. Food deserts are linked with lower local health outcomes, and they may be a driving force in the health disparities between lower-income and affluent people in the US. Until recently, the issue attracted little national attention, and received no ongoing funding for research.
Now, more US cities are becoming aware of their food landscapes. Last year, the United States Department of Agriculture launched a map of where food stores are located in all the US counties. Mari Gallagher, who runs a private consulting firm, says her researchers have mapped food stores and related them to health statistics for the cities of Detroit, Chicago, Cincinnati and Washington, DC. These maps help cities identify where food deserts are and, occasionally, have documented that people living in food deserts have higher rates of diet-related diseases.
The Brooklyn project differs in that it’s run by a local core of five volunteers who have worked on the project for the past year, rather than trained, academic researchers. To gather data, they simply go to individual stores with pre-printed surveys in hand, and once the storekeeper’s permission has been obtained, check off boxes on their list against the products for sale in the store. Their approach to data collection and research has been made possible by technologies such as mapping software and GPS-related smart phones, Google Maps and OpenStreetMap, an open-source online map with a history of involvement in social issues. Like Brooklyn Food Association volunteers, many citizen online map makers use maps to bring local problems to official attention, Goodchild says.
Heehs, the mapping project leader, says that after his group gathers more data, it will compare neighborhoods, come up with solutions to address local needs, and then present them to New York City officials. Their website hasn’t caught them much local or official attention yet, however. It was launched only recently, but its creators haven’t yet set up systems to see who’s looking at it.
Experts who visited the Brooklyn group’s site were optimistic but cautious. ‘This kind of detailed information could be very useful,’ says Michele Ver Ploeg, an economist for the Department of Agriculture. To make the map more helpful to both residents and policy makers, she would like to see price data for healthy products, too. Karen Ansel, a registered dietician and a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, found the site confusing to navigate. ‘That said, with this information in place the group has the tools to build a more user-friendly site that could be … very helpful to consumers,’ she says. ‘The group also should ensure their map is available to those who don’t have internet access at home,’ she adds. In fact, a significant proportion of Brooklyn residents don’t have internet access at home and 8 percent rely on dial-up service, instead of high-speed internet access, according to Gretchen Maneval, director of Brooklyn College’s Center for the Study of Brooklyn. ‘It’s still very much a work in progress,’ Heehs says of the online map. They’ll start advertising it online and by email to other community groups, such as urban food garden associations, next month. He also hopes warmer days in the spring will draw out fresh volunteers to spread awareness and to finish surveying, as they have about two-thirds of Brooklyn left to cover.
- 1
The online map provides users with a store's name, ______ and details of its produce.
- 2
One goal of the mapping project is to help develop new ______ on food.
- 3
Citizen maps are sometimes made when ______ maps are unsatisfactory.
- 4
New research suggests that people living in food deserts often have low ______.
- 5
Some supermarkets are unable to buy enough ______ inside cities for their stores.
- 6
Small grocery stores in cities often cannot cope with supermarket ______.
- 7
A group of professional researchers are in charge of the Brooklyn project.
- 8
The Brooklyn project team carries out their assessment of stores without the owner's knowledge.
- 9
The Brooklyn project has experienced technical difficulties setting up the website.
- 10
The city government has taken a considerable interest in the Brooklyn project website.
- 11
Michele Ver Ploeg believes the Brooklyn project website should contain additional information.
- 12
The rate of internet use in Brooklyn is unlikely to increase in the near future.
- 13
Jeffrey Heehs would like more people to assist with the Brooklyn project research.
Reading Passage 2: The Myth of the Eight-hour Sleep
A
We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night—but it could be good for you. Indications from both science and history suggest that the eight-hour sleep may not be a natural or inborn pattern for humans. In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted research which implies just that. Wehr kept a group of people in a darkened room for 14 hours a day for a month. It took some time for their sleep to regulate, but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. First, they slept for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep. Though sleep scientists were impressed by the implications of the study, the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists amongst the general public.
B
In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech University in the US published a paper drawn from 16 years of research, revealing historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct periods of time each night. Ekirch’s research found more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern—in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from the ancient Greeks to tribes in Nigeria. Much like Wehr’s findings, these references describe a first sleep which began not long following sunset. Then there was a waking period of one or two hours and after that a second sleep. During the waking period, people could be quite active. They sometimes got up and moved around the house, although most people stayed in bed, and perhaps read or wrote if they had enough money for candles. In many historic accounts, Ekirch found that people used the time that they were awake between periods of sleep to think about and attempt to analyse their dreams.
In his book, Evening’s Empire, historian Craig Koslofsky suggests an explanation for this divided sleep pattern in Europe. ‘Associations with night before the 17th century were not good,’ he writes. He goes on to explain that the streets of the cities and towns at night were often populated by thieves or worse. The streets at night consequently scared many people. Even the wealthy, who could afford to light their way, had better things to spend their nights on.
C
Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th century. The pattern began to alter first among the upper classes in northern Europe and, over the course of the next 200 years, began changing amongst the rest of Western society. By the 1920s, the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness. Ekirch attributes the initial shift to improvements in street and home lighting.
As the night became a time for all kinds of activity, the length of time people slept declined. In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets, using wax candles in glass lamps. It was followed by another French city, Lille, in the same year and by Amsterdam in Holland two years later, where a much more efficient oil-powered lamp was developed. London didn’t light its streets until 1684, but by the end of the 17th century, more than 50 of Europe’s major towns and cities were lit at night. Coffee houses emerged as a fashionable phenomenon and many were open virtually around the clock. Going out at night became commonplace, and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time. ‘People were becoming increasingly time-conscious and sensitive to efficiency, certainly before the 19th century,’ says Ekirch. ‘But the Industrial Revolution intensified that attitude considerably.’ Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical journal from 1829 which urged parents to force their children out of the pattern of first and second sleep.
D
Today, most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body’s natural preference for divided sleep, as well as in difficulties caused by extended exposure to artificial light in the modern world. This could be the cause of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep. The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th century, at the same time as accounts of interrupted sleep disappear.
E
Sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs says that the idea that we must sleep for an extended period of time could be damaging if it makes people who wake up in the night anxious, as this anxiety can itself discourage sleep and is likely to affect waking life too. Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeps, when people simply rested and relaxed, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally. Russell Foster, a professor of circadian (body clock) neuroscience at Oxford University in the UK, shares this point of view. ‘Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training, and there are very few centres where sleep is studied,’ Foster says. He feels this needs to change.
- 14
Section A
- i. Historical reasons why interrupted sleep became uncommon
- ii. Brain structures involved in sleep patterns
- iii. Potential health issues related to sleep
- iv. Famous cases in literature of sleep problems
- v. An analysis of old documents to discover sleep patterns
- vi. Biological and environmental factors preventing people from falling asleep again
- vii. Scientific evidence that divided sleep is a natural phenomenon
- 15
Section B
- 16
Section C
- 17
Section D
- 18
Section E
- 19
In certain historical periods, the threat of criminal danger led to segmented sleep.
- A. Thomas Wehr
- B. Roger Ekirch
- C. Craig Koslofsky
- D. Gregg Jacobs
- E. Russell Foster
- 20
Physicians should learn more about treating people with sleeping difficulties.
- 21
Historically, when people experienced interrupted sleep, they used the waking periods at night for different activities.
- 22
Technological changes in Europe made people more likely to sleep through the night.
- 23
The belief that humans should have a long continuous sleep can be psychologically harmful.
- 24
People habitually went to bed early, soon after ______, slept for a while, then woke up for a few hours of activity.
- 25
During the waking hours people would perhaps consider the meaning of their ______.
- 26
In 16th-century Europe, people tended to stay at home at night because they feared ______ on largely unlit city streets.
Reading Passage 3: Malaria Combat in Italy
A Everybody now knows that malaria is carried by mosquitoes. But in the 19th century, most experts believed that the disease was produced by "miasma" or "poisoning of the air". Others made a link between swamps, water and malaria, but did not make the further leap towards insects. The consequences of these theories were that little was done to combat the disease before the end of the century. Things became so bad that 11m Italians (from a total population of 25m) were "permanently at risk". In malarial zones the life expectancy of land workers was a terrifying 22.5 years. Those who escaped death were weakened or suffered from splenomegaly - a "painful enlargement of the spleen" and "a lifeless stare". The economic impact of the disease was immense. Epidemics were blamed on southern Italians, given the widespread belief that malaria was hereditary. In the 1880s, such theories began to collapse as the dreaded mosquito was identified as the real culprit.
B Italian scientists, drawing on the pioneering work of French doctor Alphonse Laveran, were able to predict the cycles of fever but it was in Rome that further key discoveries were made. Giovanni Battista Grassi, a naturalist, found that a particular type of mosquito was the carrier of malaria. By experimenting on healthy volunteers (mosquitoes were released into rooms where they drank the blood of the human guinea pigs), Grassi was able to make the direct link between the insects (all females of a certain kind) and the disease. Soon, doctors and scientists made another startling discovery: the mosquitoes themselves were also infected and not mere carriers. Every year, during the mosquito season, malarial blood was moved around the population by the insects. Definitive proof of these new theories was obtained after an extraordinary series of experiments in Italy, where healthy people were introduced into malarial zones but kept free of mosquito bites — and remained well. The new Italian state had the necessary information to tackle the disease.
C A complicated approach was adopted, which made use of quinine - a drug obtained from tree bark which had long been used to combat fever, but was now seen as a crucial part of the war on malaria. Italy introduced a quinine law and a quinine tax in 1904, and the drug was administered to large numbers of rural workers. Despite its often terrible side-effects (the headaches produced were known as the "quinine-buzz") the drug was successful in limiting the spread of the disease, and in breaking cycles of infection. In addition, Italy set up rural health centres and invested heavily in education programmes. Malaria, as Snowden shows, was not just a medical problem, but a social and regional issue, and could only be defeated through multi-layered strategies. Politics was itself transformed by the anti-malarial campaigns. It was originally decided to give quinine to all those in certain regions — even healthy people; peasants were often suspicious of medicine being forced upon them. Doctors were sometimes met with hostility and refusal, and many were dubbed "poisoners".
D Despite these problems, the strategy was hugely successful. Deaths from malaria fell by some 80% in the first decade of the 20th century and some areas escaped altogether from the scourge of the disease. War, from 1915-18, delayed the campaign. Funds were diverted to the battlefields and the fight against malaria became a military issue, laying the way for the fascist approach to the problem. Mussolini's policies in the 20s and 30s are subjected to a serious cross-examination by Snowden. He shows how much of the regime's claims to have "eradicated" malaria through massive land reclamation, forced population removals and authoritarian clean-ups were pure propaganda. Mass draining was instituted — often at a great cost as Mussolini waged war not on the disease itself, but on the mosquitoes that carried it. The cleansing of Italy was also ethnic, as "carefully selected" Italians were chosen to inhabit the gleaming new towns of the former marshlands around Rome. The "successes" under fascism were extremely vulnerable, based as they were on a top-down concept of eradication. As war swept through the drained lands in the 40s, the disease returned with a vengeance.
E In the most shocking part of the book, Snowden describes — passionately, but with the skill of a great historian — how the retreating Nazi armies in Italy in 1943-44 deliberately caused a massive malaria epidemic in Lazio. It was "the only known example of biological warfare in 20th century Europe". Shamefully, the Italian malaria expert Alberto Missiroli had a role to play in the disaster: he did not distribute quinine, despite being well aware of the epidemic to come. Snowden claims that Missiroli was already preparing a new strategy — with the support of the US Rockefeller Foundation — using a new pesticide, DDT. Missiroli allowed the epidemic to spread, in order to create the ideal conditions for a massive, and lucrative, human experiment. Fifty-five thousand cases of malaria were recorded in the province of Littoria alone in 1944. It is estimated that more than a third of those in the affected area contracted the disease. Thousands, nobody knows how many, died. With the war over, the US government and the Rockefeller Foundation were free to experiment. DDT was sprayed from the air and 3m Italians had their bodies covered with the chemical. The effects were dramatic, and nobody really cared about the toxic effects of the chemical.
F By 1962, malaria was more or less gone from the whole peninsula. The last cases were noted in a poor region of Sicily. One of the final victims to die of the disease in Italy was the popular cyclist, Fausto Coppi. He had contracted malaria in Africa in 1960, and the failure of doctors in the north of Italy to spot the disease was a sign of the times. A few decades earlier, they would have immediately noticed the tell-tale signs; it was later claimed that a small dose of quinine would have saved his life. As there are still more than 1m deaths every year from malaria worldwide, Snowden's book also has contemporary relevance. This is a disease that affects every level of the societies where it is rampant. It also provides us with "a message of hope for a world struggling with the great present-day medical emergency".
- 27
Before the link between malaria and ______ was established, there were many popular theories circulating among the public.
- 28
One of the popular theories points to ______, the unclean air.
- 29
The lack of proper treatment affected the country so badly that rural people in malaria infested places had extremely short ______.
- 30
The disease spread so quickly, especially in the south of Italy, thus giving rise to the idea that the disease was ______.
- 31
People believed in these theories until the mosquito was found to be the ______ in the 1880s.
- 32
The volunteers of the Italian experiments that provided assuring evidence were from all over Italy.
- 33
It's possible to come out of malarial zones alive.
- 34
The government successfully managed to give all people quinine medication.
- 35
A breakthrough in the theory of the cause of malaria
- 36
A story for today's readers
- 37
A description of an expert who didn't do anything to restrict the spread of disease
- 38
A setback in the battle against malaria due to government policies
- 39
A description of how malaria affects the human body
Answer sheet
Fill in as you go — checking is instant and local, and every miss lands in your mistake log with the lesson that fixes it.
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
- 24.
- 25.
- 26.
- 27.
- 28.
- 29.
- 30.
- 31.
- 32.
- 33.
- 34.
- 35.
- 36.
- 37.
- 38.
- 39.
Saved on this device — no account needed. Sign in on your progress page if you want it synced elsewhere.
Show answer key
Answer key
1. location
2. policies
3. government
4. incomes
5. land
6. competition
7. FALSE
8. FALSE
9. NOT GIVEN
10. FALSE
11. TRUE
12. NOT GIVEN
13. TRUE
14. vii
15. v
16. i
17. vi
18. iii
19. C
20. E
21. B
22. B
23. D
24. sunset
25. dreams
26. thieves
27. insects / mosquitoes
28. miasma
29. life expectancy
30. hereditary
31. culprit / real culprit
32. NOT GIVEN
33. TRUE
34. FALSE
35. B
36. F
37. E
38. D
39. A