Reading 2026-02 Test 29 — IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test with Answers

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Reading Passage 1: The History of Pencil

The beginning of the story of pencils started with a lightning. Graphite, the main material for producing pencil, was discovered in 1564 in Borrowdale in England when a lightning struck a local tree during a thunder. Local people found out that the black substance spotted at the root of the unlucky tree was different from burning ash of wood. It was soft, thus left marks everywhere. Chemistry was barely out of its infancy at the time, so people mistook it for lead, equally black but much heavier. It was soon put to use by locals in marking their sheep for ownership and calculation.

Britain turns out to be major country where mines of graphite can be detected and developed. Even so, the first pencil was invented elsewhere. As graphite is soft, it requires some form of encasement. In Italy, graphite sticks were initially wrapped in string or sheepskin for stability, becoming perhaps the very first pencil in the world. Then around 1560, an Italian couple made what are likely the first blueprints for the modern, wood-encased carpentry pencil. Their version was a flat, oval, more compact type of pencil. Their concept involved the hollowing out of a stick of juniper wood. Shortly thereafter in 1662, a superior technique was discovered by German people: two wooden halves were carved, a graphite stick inserted, and the halves then glued together - essentially the same method in use to this day. The news of the usefulness of these early pencils spread far and wide, attracting the attention of artists all over the known world.

Although graphite core in pencils is still referred to as lead, modern pencils do not contain lead as the “lead” of the pencil is actually a mix of finely ground graphite and clay powders. This mixture is important because the amount of clay content added to the graphite depends on the intended pencil hardness, and the amount of time spent on grinding the mixture determines the quality of the lead. The more clay you put in, the higher hardness the core has. Many pencils across the world, and almost all in Europe, are graded on the European system. This system of naming used B for black and H for hard; a pencil’s grade was described by a sequence or successive Hs or Bs such as BB and BBB for successively softer leads, and HH and HHH for successively harder ones. Then the standard writing pencil is graded HB.

In England, pencils continue to be made from whole sawn graphite. But with the mass production of pencils, they are getting drastically more popular in many countries with each passing decade. As demands rise, appetite for graphite soars. According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), world production of natural graphite in 2012 was 1,100,000 tonnes, of which the following major exporters are: China, India, Brazil, North Korea and Canada. However, much in contrast with its intellectual application in producing pencils, graphite was also widely used in the military. During the reign of Elizabeth I, Borrowdale graphite was used as a refractory material to line moulds for cannonballs, resulting in rounder, smoother balls that could be fired farther, contributing to the strength of the English navy. This particular deposit of graphite was extremely pure and soft, and could easily be broken into sticks. Because of its military importance, this unique mine and its production were strictly controlled by the Crown.

That the United States did not use pencils in the outer space till they spent $1000 to make a pencil to use in zero gravity conditions is in fact a fiction. It is widely known that astronauts in Russia used grease pencils, which don’t have breakage problem. But it is also a fact that their counterparts in the United States used pencils in the outer space before real zero gravity pencil was invented. They preferred mechanical pencils, which produced fine line, much clearer than the smudgy lines left by the grease pencils that Russians favored. But the lead tips of these mechanical pencils broke often. That bit of graphite floating around the space capsule could get into someone’s eye, or even find its way into machinery or electronics, causing an electrical short or other problems. But despite the fact that the Americans did invent zero gravity pencils later, they stuck to mechanical pencils for many years.

Against the backcloth of a digitalized world, the prospect of pencils seems bleak. In reality, it does not. The application of pencils has by now become so widespread that they can be seen everywhere, such as classrooms, meeting rooms and art rooms, etc. A spectrum of users are likely to continue to use it into the future: students to do math works, artists to draw on sketch pads, waiters or waitresses to mark on order boards, make-up professionals to apply to faces, and architects to produce blue prints. The possibilities seem limitless.

1
Graphite was found under a ______ in Borrowdale, it was dirty to use because it was ______.
2
Ancient people used graphite to sign ______.
3
People found graphite ______ in Britain.
4
The first pencil was graphite wrapped in ______ or animal skin.
5
Since graphite was too smooth, ______ was added to make it harder.
6
Russian astronauts preferred ______ pencils to write in the outer space.
7
Italy is probably the first country of the whole world to make pencils.
- TRUE. TRUE
- FALSE. FALSE
- NOT GIVEN. NOT GIVEN
8
Germany used various kinds of wood to make pencils.
9
Graphite makes a pencil harder and sharper.
10
In Britain, pencils are not produced any more.
11
American astronauts did not use pencil in outer space.
12
Pencils are unlikely to be used in the future.

Reading Passage 2: We have Star performers!

The difference between companies is people. With capital and technology in plentiful supply, the critical resource for companies in the knowledge era will be human talent. Companies full of achievers will, by definition, outperform organizations of plodders. Ergo, compete ferociously for the best people. Poach and pamper stars; ruthlessly weed out second-raters. This in essence has been the recruitment strategy of the ambitious company of the past decade. The “talent mindset” was given definitive form in two reports by the consultancy McKinsey famously entitled The War for Talent. Although the intensity of the warfare subsequently subsided along with the air in the internet bubble, it has been warming up again as the economy tightens: labour shortages, for example, are the reason the government has laid out the welcome mat for immigrants from the new Europe.

Yet while the diagnosis - people are important - is evident to the point of platitude, the apparently logical prescription - hire the best - like so much in management is not only not obvious: it is in fact profoundly wrong. The first suspicions dawned with the crash to earth of the dotcom meteors, which showed that dumb is dumb whatever the IQ of those who perpetrate it. The point was illuminated in brilliant relief by Enron, whose leaders, as a New Yorker article called “The Talent Myth” entertainingly related, were so convinced of their own cleverness that they never twigged that collective intelligence is not the sum of a lot of individual intelligences. In fact in a profound sense the two are opposites. Enron believed in stars, noted author Malcolm Gladwell, because they didn’t believe in systems. But companies don’t just create: “they execute and compete and co-ordinate the efforts of many people, and the organizations that are most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star”. The truth is that you can’t win the talent wars by hiring stars - only lose it. New light on why this should be so is thrown by an analysis of star behaviour in this month’s Harvard Business Review. In a study of the careers of 1,000 star-stock analysts in the 1990s, the researchers found that when a company recruited a star performer, three things happened.

First, stardom doesn’t easily transfer from one organisation to another. In many cases, performance dropped sharply when high performers switched employers and in some instances never recovered. More of success than commonly supposed is due to the working environment - systems, processes, leadership, accumulated embedded learning that are absent in and can’t be transported to the new firm. Moreover, precisely because of their past stellar performance, stars were unwilling to learn new tricks and antagonised those (on whom they now unwittingly depended) who could teach them. So they moved, upping their salary as they did - 36 per cent moved on within three years, fast even for Wall Street. Second, group performance suffered as result of tensions and resentment by rivals within the team. One respondent likened hiring a star to an organ transplant. The new organ can damage others by hogging the blood supply, other organs can start aching or threaten to stop working or the body can reject the transplant altogether, he said. “You should think about it very carefully before you do a transplant to a healthy body.” Third, investors punished the offender by selling its stock. This is ironic, since the motive for importing stars was often a suffering share price in the first place. Shareholders evidently believe that the company is overpaying, the hire is cashing in on a glorious past rather than preparing for a glowing present, and a spending spree is in the offing.

The result of mass star hirings as well as individual ones seem to confirm such doubts. Look at County NatWest and Barclays de Zoete Wedd, both of which hired teams of stars with loud fanfare to do great things in investment banking in the 1990s. Both failed dismally. Everyone accepts the cliche that people make the organisation - but much more does the organisation make the people. When researchers studied the performance of fund managers in the 1990s, they discovered that just 30 per cent of variation in fund performance was due to the individual, compared to 70 per cent to the company-specific setting.

That will be no surprise to those familiar with systems thinking. W. Edwards Deming used to say that there was no point in beating up on people when 90 per cent of performance variation was down to the system within which they worked. Consistent improvement, he said, is a matter not of raising the level of individual intelligence, but of the learning of the organisation as a whole. The star system is glamorous - for the new. But it rarely benefits the company that thinks it is working it. And the knock-on consequences indirectly affect everyone else too. As one internet response to Gladwell’s New Yorker article put it: after Enron, “the rest of corporate America is stuck with overpaid, arrogant, underachieving, and relatively useless talent.”

Football is another illustration of the stars vs systems strategic choice. As with investment banks and stockbrokers, it seems obvious that success should ultimately be down to money. Great players are scarce and expensive. So the club that can afford more of them than anyone else will win. But the performance of Arsenal and Manchester United on one hand and Chelsea and Real Madrid on the other proves that it’s not as easy as that. While Chelsea and Real Madrid have the funds to be compulsive star collectors - as with Juan Sebastan Veron - they are less successful than Arsenal and United which, like Liverpool before them, have put much more emphasis on developing a setting within which stars-in-the-making can flourish. Significantly, Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira and Robert Pires are much bigger stars than when Arsenal bought them, their value (in all sense) enhanced by the Arsenal system. At Chelsea, by contrast, the only context is the stars themselves - managers with different outlooks come and go every couple of seasons. There is no settled system for the stars to blend into. The Chelsea context has not only no added value, it has subtracted it. The side is less than the sum of its exorbitantly expensive parts. Even Real Madrid’s galacticos, the most extravagantly gifted on the planet, are being outperformed by less talented but better-integrated Spanish sides. In football, too, stars are trumped by systems.

So if not by hiring stars, how do you compete in the war for talent? You grow your own. This worked for investment analysts, where some companies were not only better at creating stars but also at retaining them. Because they had a much more sophisticated view of the interdependent relationship between star and system, they kept them longer without resorting to the exorbitant salaries that were so destructive to rivals.

13
14. One example from non-commerce/business settings that better system wins bigger stars
14
15. One failed company that believes stars rather than system
15
16. One suggestion that author made to acquire employees to win the competition
16
17. nowadays
17
18. McKinsey who wrote The War for Talent had not expected the huge influence made by this book
- TRUE. TRUE
- FALSE. FALSE
- NOT GIVEN. NOT GIVEN
18
19. Economic condition becomes one of the factors which decide whether or not a country would prefer to hire foreign employees
19
20. The collapse of Enron is caused totally by a unfortunate incident instead of company’s management mistake
20
21. Football clubs that focus on making stars in the setting are better than those simply collecting stars
21
22. An investigation carried out on 1000 ______ participants of a survey by Harvard Business Review found a company hiring a ______ has negative effects.
22
23. An investigation carried out on 1000 analysts/star-stock analysts participants of a survey by Harvard Business Review found a company hiring a ______ has negative effects.
23
24. For instance, they behave considerably worse in a new team than in the ______ that they used to be.
24
25. They move faster than Wall Street and increase their ______.
25
26. Secondly, they faced rejections or refusal from those ______ within the team.

Reading Passage 3: Good Parenting

Raising a baby may, at first, appear to be a highly personal, intimate affair between child and caregiver. In fact, there are often very public battles over every facet of child care, however: Breastfeeding or bottle-feeding? Breastfeeding in public? Toilet training — when and how? Nothing escapes judgment or scrutiny. Restlessness and crying at bedtime are no different, and three different schools of thought have emerged around how parents should respond to this problem. These have been called extinction, attachment parenting, and graduated extinction.

Attachment parenting, a term coined by pediatrician William Sears, suggests that children form powerful emotional bonds with caregivers during early childhood that have implications for their development through life. The basis for this theory was generated within the field of developmental psychology during the 1950s when researcher John Bowlby proposed that maternal deprivation during infancy could decrease a person's ability to form healthy adult relationships years later. Attachment parenting seeks to avoid this tendency by placing great importance on childhood bonding through the caregiver's holding and cuddling of her baby when he is upset. Attachment parenting also suggests that babies’ ability to communicate their requirements is limited to crying and that parents need to learn to understand different types of crying signals. No crying is considered superfluous — even if the baby merely wants to be comforted rather than fall asleep — caregivers are encouraged to affirm these desires.

The extinction method proposes that, so long as a baby has had adequate calorie intake during the day, he or she can reasonably be expected to maintain nocturnal somnolence. The core postulates of this approach were laid down by Emmett Holt but they have been extrapolated upon by authors such as Warwick Reilly and further adapted recently by Melinda Collins to form the extinction method of today. Caregivers are encouraged to develop a gentle evening routine that involves feeding 45 minutes before bed, bathing, dressing and laying the baby in his sleeping sack, walking out and closing the door, and remaining out of the child's presence until dawn even if he cries for extended periods of time. It is expected that sooner or later children will realize that crying is ineffective and that they must learn to comfort themselves into slumber.

Graduated extinction is a modulated version of the extinction method. It postulates that a process of learning needs to be undertaken in order for children to sleep through the night. Richard Ferber, the doctor who popularized this method in the 1980s, emphasized the progressive withdrawal of the caregiver's company with the child in bed as a way to solve infant sleep problems. At first, for example, the caregiver is encouraged to hold and caress the baby until he or she is asleep. Once this routine is established, the caregiver should lie down next to the baby but touch it less and less until the baby can sleep without contact. Eventually, the caregiver can sit on a chair nearby, and finally, it is hoped that he or she can retreat from the room altogether. The key to this approach is that the caregiver must never capitulate to a child's demands for comfort if he starts to become restless or vocal as the method unfolds over time.

Doing so is said to let the baby know that he does not need to learn to sleep through the night without comfort or interaction, and also to lessen the chances that the caregiver will complete the program, knowing that a ‘quick fix' is available. Ferber has since altered his stance to acknowledge the acceptability of co-sleeping and suggests that there is no single method or golden rule for overcoming sleep difficulties.

26
27 The phrase ‘attachment parenting’ was invented by a ….............
27
28 The principles of attachment parenting are derived from the discipline of ….............
28
29 The key points of the ‘extinction’ school of thought originated from the work of ….............
29
30 Dr. Ferber initially thought the parent should not spend the night with the child but now thinks …............. is all right.
30
31. After a strict bedtime schedule, the child is unattended till morning.
- A. attachment parenting
- B. extinction
- C. graduated extinction
31
32. All crying is a vocalization of important needs.
32
33. Caregiver presence as the child drifts to sleep should decrease over time.
33
34. The emphasis is on the physical closeness between baby and caregiver at any time.
34
35. Well-fed babies should sleep through the night.
35
36 Attachment Parenting: very stressful as parents have to give in to …............. of the baby but not yet any …............. to show that it works
36
38 Extinction Method: a good night’s sleep is attained by family members because the baby is …............. and but can lead to …............. such as despair & unhappiness later in life
37
40 Graduated Extinction: a central position so …............. have been avoided

Phiếu trả lời

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Hiện đáp án

1. tree / soft
The answer is 'tree / soft' because the passage says graphite was found under a tree in Borrowdale and it was dirty to use because it was soft.
2. sheep
The answer is 'sheep' because the passage explains that ancient people used graphite to sign sheep.
3. mines
The answer is 'mines' because people found graphite in mines in Britain.
4. string
The answer is 'string' because the first pencil was graphite wrapped in string or animal skin.
5. clay
The answer is 'clay' because clay was added to graphite to make it harder, since graphite was too smooth.
6. grease
The answer is 'grease' because Russian astronauts preferred grease pencils to write in outer space.
7. TRUE
The answer is TRUE because the passage says Italy is probably the first country in the world to make pencils.
8. NOT GIVEN
The answer is NOT GIVEN because there is no information in the passage about Germany using various kinds of wood to make pencils.
9. FALSE
The answer is FALSE because the passage says graphite is too smooth and needs clay to make it harder, so graphite alone does not make a pencil harder and sharper.
10. FALSE
The answer is FALSE because the passage says pencils are still produced in Britain.
11. FALSE
The answer is FALSE because the passage says American astronauts did use pencils in outer space.
12. FALSE
The answer is FALSE because the passage says pencils are likely to be used in the future.
13. F
The answer is F because the passage gives an example from non-business settings, like football clubs, where a better system wins bigger stars.
14. B
The answer is B because the passage mentions a failed company that believed in stars rather than the system.
15. G
The answer is G because the author suggests acquiring employees to win the competition.
16. C
The answer is C because the passage talks about the situation nowadays.
17. NOT GIVEN
The answer is NOT GIVEN because there is no information about McKinsey's expectations of the influence of 'The War for Talent'.
18. TRUE
The answer is TRUE because the passage says economic conditions are a factor in whether a country prefers to hire foreign employees.
19. FALSE
The answer is FALSE because the passage says the collapse of Enron was not totally caused by an unfortunate incident, but also by management mistakes.
20. TRUE
The answer is TRUE because the passage says football clubs that focus on making stars are better than those that just collect stars.
21. analysts
The answer is 'analysts' because the survey by Harvard Business Review was carried out on 1000 analysts.
22. star
The answer is 'star' because the survey found that hiring a star has negative effects.
23. working environment
The answer is 'working environment' because the passage says they behave worse in a new team than in the working environment they used to be in.
24. salary
The answer is 'salary' because the passage says they move faster than Wall Street and increase their salary.
25. rivals
The answer is 'rivals' because they faced rejection or refusal from those rivals within the team.
26. paediatrician / pediatrician
The answer is 'paediatrician / pediatrician' because the phrase 'attachment parenting' was invented by a paediatrician.
27. developmental psychology
The answer is 'developmental psychology' because the principles of attachment parenting come from developmental psychology.
28. (emmett) holt
The answer is '(emmett) holt' because the key points of the 'extinction' school of thought came from Emmett Holt.
29. co-sleeping
The answer is 'co-sleeping' because Dr. Ferber now thinks co-sleeping is all right.
30. B
The answer is B (extinction) because after a strict bedtime schedule, the child is left unattended until morning, which is the extinction method.
31. A
The answer is A (attachment parenting) because this method believes all crying is a vocalization of important needs.
32. C
The answer is C (graduated extinction) because this method says caregiver presence should decrease over time as the child falls asleep.
33. A
The answer is A (attachment parenting) because this method emphasizes physical closeness between baby and caregiver at any time.
34. B
The answer is B (extinction) because this method believes well-fed babies should sleep through the night.
35. every demand / conclusive research
The answer is 'every demand / conclusive research' because attachment parenting is stressful as parents must give in to every demand of the baby, but there is not yet any conclusive research to show it works.
36. detached and apathetic / emotional problems
The answer is 'detached and apathetic / emotional problems' because the extinction method gives a good night's sleep as the baby is detached and apathetic, but it can lead to emotional problems like despair and unhappiness later.
37. vociferous attacks
The answer is 'vociferous attacks' because the graduated extinction method is a central position so vociferous attacks have been avoided.

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Reading Passage 1: The History of Pencil

Reading Passage 2: We have Star performers!

Reading Passage 3: Good Parenting

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