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: Computer Games: The Early Days of the Video Game Business
It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. In the age of computers, that statement takes on new meanings. A video game cannot ever really be defeated because, no matter how high the score, it is always the human who tires first or makes the fatal error. But millions of people continue to play, because microelectronic technology has enabled game designers to conveniently and inexpensively transform plain screens into playfields of extraordinary capability. At the same time, a multi-billion dollar industry has grown from very humble beginnings in just a few decades.
The technological roots of video games can be traced back to 1962, when an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) graduate student demonstrated Space war, a science-fiction fantasy game played on a mainframe computer and a large screen. That game immediately attracted a wide cult following among computer buffs. The next important step came in 1968, when a console was developed that could be used to play games on ordinary televisions. But it was not until the early 1970s that a young University of Utah engineer brought the concept to the point that the adaptation of Space war from a large computer into a coin-operated format, for use in video game arcades, was becoming economically feasible. Bushnell and his associates began working on such a machine in a converted bedroom workshop, but were unsuccessful. What they ultimately developed instead was a simple tennis-like game that they named Pong. Pong took the industry by storm and quickly became the first coin-operated video game hit. And soon thereafter, commercial Pong-style home video games also appeared. Yet despite early enthusiasm, consumer interest in this area proved less sustained than had been anticipated, and as prices started to drop and losses mounted, most of the early manufacturers withdrew from the field. Profits proved to be just as elusive at Bushnell’s company, Atari, where a rapidly growing market presence in coin-operated machines and home video required greater injections of capital and more professional management than the company was able to provide. In 1976, the founders of Atari sold their share of the company for a sum that was only equivalent to their sales in that year.
At that point, coin-operated video games seemed just another passing fad. But the introduction of Space Invaders, an arcade model produced by the Japanese manufacturer Taito, proved otherwise. With its vibrant graphics, it was so different from the previous black-and-white games that Space Invaders immediately captured public interest. There soon followed a rush of popular video games that employed the same or better hardware and even more imaginative software. Of these, Pac-Man (1980) was especially significant, because now females began to take an interest.
By this time, the same software improvements and technological advances (faster microprocessors and larger memories) that permitted designers to produce spectacular audio and visual effects for coin-operated machines were also being applied to home video units. It was thus only a short while before the programmable consoles that had been unpopular for lack of software suddenly began to sell in large numbers: consumers had discovered that they could finally play a reasonable version of their favorite arcade games in the comfort of their own home. The impact on Atari was astounding. Unprofitable for the first three years, Atari had, by the end of 1979, become a success. By either self-designing or licensing the most popular arcade concepts for cartridge format for use at home, the company had captured some 80 percent of the worldwide market for home video games.
All of this, however, was too good to last. By late 1982, the public’s fascination with arcade games had begun to slow down, and fewer potential best-sellers were becoming available for conversion to cartridges that could be used on an Atari machine. At the same time, the market was flooded with illegal software of all types. It was thus not until the late 1980s that the unstructured nature of the industry, at least on the software side, had stabilized and become restructured in a manner similar, in many respects, to the book publishing business.
Until 1986, when Japan-based Nintendo introduced a more technologically sophisticated and user-friendly game console, the hardware side was also in disarray. But with tight control of software development and marketing, Nintendo was able to revive and then capture up to 80 percent of a once-again booming market in which no significant competition appeared until the early 1990s. By that point, the annual operating profits of Nintendo had already grown to over $1 billion – an amount exceeding the 1991 profits of all the major Hollywood film studios combined. In 1999, sales of game hardware and software, led by Playstation, were equal in size (around $57 billion) to US domestic box office revenue.
With change the only constant, the game industry has moved on to become what it is today. However, no matter what the technology or the format, the essence of a successful game will always be the same: it is simple to understand and to play on an elementary level, but it is compulsive and maddeningly difficult – in fact, forever impossible to master fully.
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Advances in technology led to cheaper ______ and the possibility of coin-operated video games.
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The first successful coin-operated video game was ______.
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______ was bought from its original owners.
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Space Invaders was successful because of its colourful ______.
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Pac-Man was the first game to attract ______.
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By the end of the decade ______ had become the biggest selling home entertainment product.
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Space war was unpopular at first.
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Bushnell and his team failed to create a coin-operated version of Space war.
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From the beginning the home video game market has been commercially successful.
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Atari was successful for the first time in 1979.
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Video arcade game usage continued strongly in the 1980s.
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The time taken to produce a video game can be compared to producing a book.
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The qualities needed for a video game to become successful have been researched thoroughly.
Reading Passage 2: Father of Modern Management
A. Peter Drucker was one of the most important people to think about management in the last 100 years. He wrote about 40 books and thousands of articles, and he never stopped trying to show the world how important management is. "Management is a part of institutions. It is the part that turns a group of people into an organization and turns human effort into performance." Did he do well? It was amazing how far his influence went. Drucker's ideas can be found wherever people try to solve hard management problems. This includes big and small organizations, the public and private sectors, and, increasingly, the nonprofit sector.
B. Winston Churchill liked his first two books, The End of Economic Man (1939) and The Future of Industrial Man (1942), but academic critics didn't like how they covered so many different topics. Still, the second of these books got people's attention because it argued passionately that businesses had a social purpose as well as a financial one. The Concept of the Corporation, his third book, was an instant hit and has been in print ever since.
C. The two most interesting arguments in The Concept of the Corporation had very little to do with the decentralization trend. They were going to dominate his work. The first one had to do with "empowering" workers. Drucker thought that workers should be seen as resources rather than just as costs. He was a harsh critic of the assembly-line system of production, which was the most common at the time. This was partly because assembly lines moved at the speed of the slowest worker and partly because they didn't use the creativity of individual workers. The second point had to do with the rise of knowledge workers. Drucker said that the world is moving from an "economy of goods" to an "economy of knowledge" and from a society ruled by the industrial proletariat to one ruled by brain workers. He insisted that this had huge implications for both managers and politicians. Managers had to stop treating workers like parts of a big, cold machine and start treating them like brain workers. In turn, politicians had to realize that knowledge, and therefore education, was the most important resource for any advanced society. Yet Drucker also thought that this economy had effects on knowledge workers themselves. They had to accept that they were neither "bosses" nor "workers," but something in between—entrepreneurs who had to develop their most important resource, their brainpower, and who also had to take more control of their careers, including their pension plans.
D. But his job was also hard in some ways. Drucker came up with "management by objectives," one of the most successful ideas from the rational school of management. In 1954's The Practice of Management, one of his most important books, he talked about how important it was for managers and businesses to set clear long-term goals and then turn those long-term goals into more immediate goals. He said that companies should have an elite group of general managers who set these long-term goals, and then another group of more specialized managers. For his critics, this was a change from the way he used to talk about the human side of management. Drucker thought that everything fit together perfectly: if you put too much faith in empowerment, you risk anarchy, and if you put too much faith in command and control, you lose creativity. Managers should set long-term goals, but then let their employees figure out how to reach those goals. Drucker may have helped make management a global field, but he also pushed it outside of business. He was a thinker about management, not just business. He thought that management is "the organ that defines all modern institutions," not just companies.
E. Drucker's work is often criticized for three reasons. The first is that he focused on big companies instead of small ones. In many ways, The Concept of the Corporation was a tribute to big organizations. Drucker said, "We know now that in modern industrial production, especially modern mass production, the small unit is not only inefficient, it can't produce at all." The book helped start the "big organization boom" that dominated business thinking for the next 20 years. The second complaint is that Drucker's enthusiasm for management by objectives led the business down a dead end. They prefer that ideas, including ideas for long-term strategies, come from the bottom and middle of the organization, not from the top. Third, Drucker is criticized for being an outsider who is getting left behind as his field becomes more strict. There is no area of academic management theory that he made his own.
F. The first two arguments have some merit. Drucker never wrote anything else as good as The Concept of the Corporation about how entrepreneurs start businesses. Drucker's work on "management by objectives" doesn't fit well with his earlier and later writings on how important knowledge workers and self-directed teams are. But the third argument is short-sighted and unfair because it doesn't take into account Drucker's role as a pioneer in creating the modern profession of management. He made one of the first organized studies of a big company. He was the first person to suggest that ideas can help companies get going. The biggest problem with judging Drucker's impact is that so many of his ideas have become common knowledge. He is a victim of his success. His writings about the importance of knowledge workers and giving people power may sound a bit boring now. But they weren't boring when he first thought of them in the 1940s or when they were first used in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s. In addition, Drucker kept coming up with new ideas until he was in his 90s. His work on how to run non-profit organizations remained at the cutting edge.
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Paragraph A
- i. The popularity and impact of Drucker's works
- ii. Finding fault with Drucker
- iii. The impact of economic globalisation
- iv. Government regulation of businesses
- v. Early publications of Drucker
- vi. Drucker's concept of balanced management
- vii. Drucker's rejection of big businesses
- viii. An appreciation of the pros and cons of Drucker's works
- ix. The changing role of the employee
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Paragraph B
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Paragraph C
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Paragraph D
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Paragraph E
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Paragraph F
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Drucker thought that in a period of social transition, managers and politicians would dominate the economy.
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Drucker believed that workers should not just put themselves just in employment relationships, but also take the initiative to develop their own intellectual resources.
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Drucker's works on management is out of date in modern days.
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Which TWO of the following are true of Drucker's views?
- A. Employees should be given more authority and carry out creative tasks.
- B. Young executives should be given chances to start from low-level jobs.
- C. More emphasis should be laid on fostering the development of the union.
- D. Managers should facilitate workers with tools of self-appraisal instead of controlling them from the outside force.
- E. Leaders should go beyond the scope of management details and strategically establish feasible goals.
- 24
Which TWO of the following are true of Drucker's views?
- 25
Which TWO of the following are mentioned in the passage as the criticisms of Drucker?
- A. His works focused too much on big organisations and ignored the small ones.
- B. His views were too broad and lacked precision and accuracy about the facts.
- C. He put the source of objectives more on corporate executives but not on average workers.
- D. He acted much like a maverick and did not set up his management group.
- E. He was overstating the case of knowledge workers when warning businesses to get prepared.
- 26
Which TWO of the following are mentioned in the passage as the criticisms of Drucker?
Reading Passage 3: Age-proofing our brains
A. While it may not be possible to completely age-proof our brains, a brave new world of anti-aging research shows that our gray matter may be far more flexible than we thought. So no one, no matter how old, has to lose their mind. The brain has often been called the three-pound universe. It’s our most powerful and mysterious organ, the seat of the self, laced with as many billions of neurons as the galaxy has stars. No wonder the mere notion of an aging, failing brain—and the prospect of memory loss, confusion, and the unraveling of our personality—is so terrifying. As Mark Williams, M.D., author of The American Geriatrics Society’s Complete Guide to Aging and Health, says, 'The fear of dementia is stronger than the fear of death itself.' Yet the degeneration of the brain is far from inevitable. 'Its design features are such that it should continue to function for a lifetime,' says Zaven Khachaturian, Ph.D., director of the Alzheimer’s Association’s Ronald and Nancy Reagan Research Institute. 'There’s no reason to expect it to deteriorate with age, even though many of us are living longer lives.' In fact, scientists’ view of the brain’s potential is rapidly changing, according to Stanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D. Thirty-five years ago we thought Alzheimer’s disease was a dramatic version of normal aging. Now we realize it’s a disease with a distinct pathology. In fact, some people simply don’t experience any mental decline, so we’ve begun to study them. Antonio Damasio, M.D., Ph.D., head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa and author of Descartes’ Error, concurs. 'Older people can continue to have extremely rich and healthy mental lives.'
B. The seniors were tested in 1988 and again in 1991. Four factors were found to be related to their mental fitness: levels of education and physical activity, lung function, and feelings of self-efficacy. 'Each of these elements alters the way our brain functions,' says Marilyn Albert, Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School, and colleagues from Yale, Duke, and Brandeis Universities and the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, who hypothesizes that regular exercise may actually stimulate blood flow to the brain and nerve growth, both of which create more densely branched neurons, rendering the neurons stronger and better able to resist disease. Moderate aerobic exercise, including long brisk walks and frequently climbing stairs, will accomplish this.
C. Education also seems to enhance brain function. People who have challenged themselves with at least a college education may actually stimulate the neurons in their brains. Moreover, native intelligence may protect our brains. It’s possible that smart people begin life with a greater number of neurons, and therefore have a greater reserve to fall back on if some begin to fail. 'If you have a lot of neurons and keep them busy, you may be able to tolerate more damage to your brain before it shows,' says Peter Davies, M.D., of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York. Early linguistic ability also seems to help our brains later in life. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at 93 elderly nuns and examined the autobiographies they had written 60 years earlier, just as they were joining a convent. The nuns whose essays were complex and dense with ideas remained sharp into their eighties and nineties.
D. Finally, personality seems to play an important role in protecting our mental prowess. A sense of self-efficacy may protect our brain, buffeting it from the harmful effects of stress. According to Albert, there’s evidence that elevated levels of stress hormones may harm brain cells and cause the hippocampus—a small seahorse-shaped organ that’s a crucial moderator of memory—to atrophy. A sense that we can effectively chart our own course in the world may retard the release of stress hormones and protect us as we age. 'It’s not a matter of whether you experience stress or not,' Albert concludes, 'it’s your attitude toward it.' Reducing stress by meditating on a regular basis may buffer the brain as well. It also increases the activity of the brain’s pineal gland, the source of the antioxidant hormone melatonin, which regulates sleep and may retard the aging process. Studies at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and the University of Western Ontario found that people who meditated regularly had higher levels of melatonin than those who took 5-milligram supplements. Another study, conducted jointly by Maharishi International University, Harvard University, and the University of Maryland, found that seniors who meditated for three months experienced dramatic improvements in their psychological well-being, compared to their non-meditative peers.
E. Animal studies confirm that both mental and physical activity boost brain fitness. At the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology in Urbana, Illinois, psychologist William Greenough, Ph.D., let some rats play with a profusion of toys. These rodents developed about 25 percent more connections between their neurons than did rats that didn’t get any mentally stimulating recreation. In addition, rats that exercised on a treadmill developed more capillaries in specific parts of their brains than did their sedentary counterparts. This increased the blood flow to their brains. 'Clearly the message is to do as many different things as possible,' Greenough says.
F. It’s not just scientists who are catching anti-aging fever. Walk into any health food store, and you’ll find nutritional formulas—with names like Brainstorm and Smart ALEC—that claim to sharpen mental ability. The book Smart Drugs & Nutrients, by Ward Dean, M.D., and John Morgenthaler, was self-published in 1990 and has sold over 120,000 copies worldwide. It has also spawned an underground network of people tweaking their own brain chemistry with nutrients and drugs—the latter sometimes obtained from Europe and Mexico. Sales of ginkgo, an extract from the leaves of the 200-million-year-old ginkgo tree, which has been shown in published studies to increase oxygen in the brain and ameliorate symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease—are up by 22 percent in the last six months alone, according to Paddy Spence, president of SPINS, a San Francisco-based market research firm. Indeed, products that increase and preserve mental performance are a small but emerging segment of the supplements industry, says Linda Gilbert, president of HealthFocus, a company that researches consumer health trends. While neuroscientists like Khachaturian liken the use of these products to the superstition of tossing salt over your shoulder, the public is nevertheless gobbling up nutrients that promise cognitive enhancement.
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Which of the FOUR situations or conditions assist the brain's function?
- A. Preventive treatment against Alzheimer's disease
- B. Doing active aerobic exercise and frequently climbing stairs
- C. High levels of education
- D. Early verbal or language competence training
- E. Having more supplements such as ginkgo tree
- F. Participate in more physical activity involving stimulating tasks
- G. Personality and feelings of self-fulfillment
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Which of the FOUR situations or conditions assist the brain's function?
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Which of the FOUR situations or conditions assist the brain's function?
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Which of the FOUR situations or conditions assist the brain's function?
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Alzheimer's was probably a kind of disease rather than a normal aging process
- A. Zaven Khachaturian
- B. William Greenough
- C. Marilyn Albert
- D. Robert Sapolsky
- E. Linda Gilbert
- F. Peter Davies
- G. Paddy Spence
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Keeping neurons busy, people may be able to endure more harm to your brain
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Regular exercises boost blood flow to the brain and increase antidisease disability
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Significant increase of sales of ginkgo has been shown
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More links between their neurons are found among stimulated animals
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Effectiveness of the use of brain supplement products can be of little scientific proof
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Heightened levels of stress may damage brain cells and cause part of brain to deteriorate
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Products that upgrade and preserve mental competence are still a newly developing industry
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According to the passage, what is the most appropriate title for this passage?
- A. Making our minds last a lifetime
- B. Amazing pills of the ginkgo
- C. How to stay healthy in your old hood
- D. More able a brain and neurons
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