Reading 2026-07 Test 9 — IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test with Answers

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Reading Passage 1: New Zealand’s early crafts and traditions

The first groups of people to discover New Zealand came from Polynesia. Exactly when these explorers arrived has often been a matter of debate, but today the general understanding is that it was during the 13th century that their canoes eventually landed on New Zealand's shores. In some ways the new country must have seemed like an ideal place to settle: the land was fertile, and thick forests provided firewood, shelter and building materials. Still, life would have been challenging for the different Polynesian tribes, who had to adapt to a new environment. The tribes only began to refer to themselves as Maori, meaning 'ordinary people', when Europeans in search of new opportunities began arriving in the 18th century. To the Maori, of course, the European settlers and sailors were not 'ordinary', but very strange.

It was not only a knowledge of canoe-building and navigation that the Polynesians brought to New Zealand. They were also skilled craftsmen. There is archaeological evidence that the tools they produced were of high quality and would have enabled tribes to plant and harvest crops. Craftsmen were also occupied with making weapons such as knives and axes, which were used for both construction and fighting. Interestingly, some crafts that had once been popular in Polynesian islands were no longer done in New Zealand, although researchers are unsure why. Pottery is an example of this, despite the fact that the clay needed to make pots and bowls could easily be found in the new country.

The Maori word whakairo can be translated as 'decorative work' — this can refer to bone, wood and greenstone carving. Although Maori carvers were influenced by their Polynesian heritage, they developed their own style, including the curved patterns and spirals inspired by New Zealand plants. The same term can also apply to weaving; the crafting of, for example, woven baskets and mats all required knowledge and skill. Carving greenstone, or pounamu as it is called in Maori, was a long process, requiring great patience. Further, because of this mineral's rarity, any greenstone object, such as a piece of jewellery or cutting blade, was a prized possession. For that reason, it was the few people of high status rather than low-ranking members of a tribe who would possess such objects.

As New Zealand had no native mammals except for bats, dolphins and whales, Maori largely had to depend on plants to provide material for their clothing, including their cloaks. Weavers experimented with the inner bark of the houhere, the lacebark tree, but found it unsuitable. But the dried-out leaves and fibres of the flax plant provided a solution. Once a cloak had been woven from flax, it could be decorated. Borders might be dyed black or red, for example. In the case of superior ones made for chiefs or the more important members of a tribe, feathers from kiwi, pigeons or other native birds might be attached. All flax cloaks were rectangular in shape, so had no sleeves, and neither was a hood a feature of this garment. Short cloaks were fastened around a person's neck, and came only to the waist.

Pins made of bone, wood or greenstone allowed longer cloaks to be secured at the shoulder; these were a type that were often used for ceremonial occasions. Of course, the construction of the cloaks was influenced by the plant material available to Maori weavers. This meant that cloaks were loose-fitting, and while they protected wearers from New Zealand's strong sunshine, they were not useful during the winter months. A cloak made from fur or wool could provide insulation from the cold, but not so a cloak made of flax.

The warriors of a tribe required a different kind of cloak to help protect them. To create these special cloaks, the tough fibres of the mountain cabbage tree were used instead. It is not clear to researchers what the entire process involved, but they believe the fibres were left to soak in water over a period of time in order to soften them and make them easier to weave together. Later, once the whole cloak had been constructed, it would be dyed black. To do this, Maori weavers covered it in a special kind of mud they had collected from riverbeds. This was rich in iron due to New Zealand's volcanic landscape. The particular advantage of these cloaks was that the tough cabbage tree fibres they were woven from could reduce the impact of spear tips during a fight with enemy tribes. It is fortunate that some cloaks from the 1800s still survive and can provide us with further insight into the materials and construction techniques that Maori craftsmen used.

1
It is now widely thought that humans reached New Zealand in the 13th century.
2
The first Europeans to come to New Zealand were keen to trade with Maori.
3
Members of Maori tribes were responsible for either tool- or weapon-making.
4
A craft that the Maori once practiced in New Zealand was making pottery.
5
Weaving baskets and mats was seen as a form of decorative.
6
It used to be common for everyone in a Maori tribe to wear greenstone jewellery.
7
Maori made flax cloaks by – weaving leaves and fibres – sometimes adding ________ to the better cloaks.
8
Flax cloaks were – rectangular in shape – designed without a ________.
9
Flax cloaks were – tied at either the wearer’s neck or their ________.
10
Flax cloaks offered no ________ during winter.
11
Weavers had to ________ to make cabbage tree fibres less stiff.
12
Mud containing ________ was used to make the cloaks look black.
13
________ could not easily go through the cloaks tough fibres.

Reading Passage 2: The Success of Cellulose

Not too long ago many investors made the bet that renewable fuels from biomass would be the next big thing in energy. Converting corn, sugarcane, and soybeans into ethanol or diesel-type fuels lessens our nation’s dependence on oil imports while cutting carbon dioxide emissions. But already the nascent industry faces challenges. Escalating demand is hiking food prices while farmers clear rainforest habitats to grow fuel crops. And several recent studies say that certain biofuel-production processes either fail to yield net energy gains or release more carbon dioxide than they use.

A successor tier of start-up ventures aims to avoid those problems. Rather than focusing on the starches, sugars, and fats of food crops, many of the prototype bioethanol processes work with lignocellulose, the “woody” tissue that strengthens the cell walls of plants, says University of Massachusetts Amherst chemical engineer George W. Huber. Although cellulose breaks down less easily than sugars and starches and thus requires a complex series of enzyme-driven chemical reactions, its use opens the industry to nonfood plant feedstocks such as agricultural wastes, wood chips, and switchgrass. But no company has yet demonstrated a cost-competitive industrial process for making cellulosic biofuels.

So scientists and engineers are working on dozens of possible biofuel-processing routes, reports Charles Wyman, a chemical engineer at the University of California, Riverside, who is a founder of Mascoma Corporation in Cambridge, Mass., a leading developer of cellulosic ethanol processing. “There’s no miracle process out there,” he remarks. And fine-tuning a process involves considerable money and time. “The oil companies say that it takes 10 years to fully commercialize an industrial processing route,” warns Huber, who has contributed some thermochemical techniques to another biomass start-up, Virent Energy Systems in Madison, Wis.

One promising biofuel procedure that avoids the complex enzymatic chemistry to break down cellulose is now being explored by Coskata in Warrenville, Ill., a firm launched in 2006 by high-profile investors and entrepreneurs (General Motors recently took a minority stake in it as well). In the Coskata operation, a conventional gasification system will use heat to turn various feedstocks into a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen called syngas, says Richard Tobey, vice president of Engineering and R&D. The ability to handle multiple plant feedstocks would boost the flexibility of the overall process because each region in the country has access to certain feedstocks but not others.

Instead of using thermochemical methods to convert the syngas to fuel—a process that can be significantly more costly because of the added expense of pressurizing gases, according to Tobey—the Coskata group chose a biochemical route. The group focused on five promising strains of ethanol-excreting bacteria that Ralph Tanner, a microbiologist at the University of Oklahoma, had discovered years before in the oxygen-free sediments of a swamp. These anaerobic bugs make ethanol by voraciously consuming syngas.

The “heart and soul of the Coskata process,” as Tobey puts it, is the bioreactor in which the bacteria live. “Rather than searching for food in the fermentation mash in a large tank, our bacteria wait for the gas to be delivered to them,” he explains. The firm relies on plastic tubes, the filter-fabric straws as thin as human hair. The syngas flows through the straws, and water is pumped across their exteriors. The gases diffuse across the selective membrane to the bacteria embedded in the outer surface of the tubes, which permits no water inside. “We get an efficient mass transfer with the tubes, which is not easy,” Tobey says. “Our data suggest that in an optimal setting we could get 90 percent of the energy value of the gases into our fuel.” After the bugs eat the gases, they release ethanol into the surrounding water. Standard distillation or filtration techniques could extract the alcohol from the water.

Coskata researchers estimate that their commercialized process could deliver ethanol at under $1 per gallon—less than half of today’s $2-per-gallon wholesale price, Tobey claims. Outside evaluators of Argonne National Laboratory measured the input-output “energy balance” of the Coskata process and found that, optimally, it can produce 7.7 times as much energy in the end product as it takes to make it.

The company plans to construct a 40,000-gallon-a-year pilot plant near the GM test track in Milford, Mich., by the end of this year and hopes to build a full-scale, 100-million-gallon-a-year plant by 2011. Coskata may have some company by then; Bioengineering Resources in Fayetteville, Ark., is already developing what seems to be a similar three-step pathway in which syngas is consumed by bacteria isolated by James Gaddy, a retired chemical engineer at the University of Arkansas. Considering the advances in these and other methods, plant cellulose could provide the greener ethanol everyone wants.

14
A key component to gain success lies in the place where the organisms survive.
15
Engaged in separating fixed procedures to produce ethanol in the homologous biochemical way.
16
Assists to develop certain skills.
17
It needs arduous efforts to achieve highly efficient transfer.
18
There is no shortcut to expedite the production process.
19
A combination of chemistry and biology can considerably lower the cost needed for the production company.
20
A shift from conventionally targeted areas of the vegetation to get ethanol takes place.
21
It takes a considerably long way before a completely mature process is reached.
22
The Coskata group sees no bright future for the cost advantage available in the production of greener ethanol.
23
Some enterprises are trying to buy the shares of Coskata group.
24
Tobey has noticed that the Coskata process can achieve huge success because it utilizes ________ as the bioreactor on whose exterior surface the bacteria take the syngas going through the coated ________. To produce the ethanol into the water outside which researchers will later ________ by certain techniques. The figures show a pretty high percentage of energy can be transferred into fuel which is actually very difficult to achieve.

Reading Passage 3: The Value of Handwriting

A. ‘When I was in school in the 1970s,’ says Tammy Chou, ‘my end-of-term report included Handwriting as a subject alongside Mathematics and Physical Education, yet, by the time my brother started, a decade later, it had been subsumed into English. I learnt two scripts: printing and cursive, while Chris can only print.’ The 2013 Common Core, a curriculum used throughout most of the US, requires the tuition of legible writing (generally printing) only in the first two years of school; thereafter, teaching keyboard skills is a priority.

B. ‘I work in recruitment,’ continues Chou. ‘Sure, these days, applicants submit a digital CV and cover letter, but there’s still information interviewees need to fill out by hand, and I still judge them by the neatness of their writing when they do so. Plus there’s nothing more disheartening than receiving a birthday greeting or a condolence card with a scrawled message.’

C. Psychologists and neuroscientists may concur with Chou for different reasons. They believe children learn to read faster when they start to write by hand, and they generate new ideas and retain information better. Karin James conducted an experiment at Indiana University in the US in which children who had not learnt to read were shown a letter on a card and asked to reproduce it by tracing, by drawing it on another piece of paper, or by typing it on a keyboard. Then, their brains were scanned while viewing the original image again. Children who had produced the freehand letter showed increased neural activity in the left fusiform gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus, and the posterior parietal cortex – areas activated when adults read or write, whereas all other children displayed significantly weaker activation of the same areas. James speculates that in handwriting, there is variation in the production of any letter, so the brain has to learn each personal font – each variant of ‘F’, for example, that is still ‘F’. Recognition of variation may establish the eventual representation more permanently than recognising a uniform letter printed by computer.

Victoria Berninger at the University of Washington studied children in the first two grades of school to demonstrate that printing, cursive, and keyboarding are associated with separate brain patterns. Furthermore, children who wrote by hand did so much faster than the typists, who had not been taught to touch type. Not only did the typists produce fewer words but also the quality of their ideas was consistently lower. Scans from the older children’s brains exhibited enhanced neural activity when their handwriting was neater than average, and, importantly, the parts of their brains activated are those crucial to working memory. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer have shown in laboratories and live classrooms that tertiary students learn better when they take notes by hand rather than inputting via keyboard. As a result, some institutions ban laptops and tablets in lectures and prohibit smartphone photography of lecture notes. Mueller and Oppenheimer also believe handwriting aids contemplation as well as memory storage.

D. Some learners of English whose native script is not the Roman alphabet have difficulty in forming several English letters: the lower case ‘b’ and ‘d’, ‘p’ and ‘q’, ‘n’ and ‘u’, ‘m’ and ‘w’ may be confused. This condition affects a tiny minority of first-language learners and sufferers of brain damage. Called dysgraphia, it appears less frequently when writers use cursive instead of printing, which is why cursive has been posited as a cure for dyslexia.

E. Berninger is of the opinion that cursive, endangered in American schools, promotes self-control, which printing may not, and which typing – especially with the ‘delete’ function – unequivocally does not. In a world saturated with texting, where many have observed that people are losing the ability to filter their thoughts, a little more restraint would be a good thing. A rare-book and manuscript librarian, Valerie Hotchkiss, worries about the cost to our heritage as knowledge of cursive fades. Her library contains archives from the literary giants Mark Twain, Marcel Proust, HG Wells, and others. If the young generation does not learn cursive, its ability to decipher older documents may be compromised, and culture lost.

F. Paul Bloom, from Yale University, is less convinced about the long-term benefits of handwriting. In the 1950s – indeed in Tammy Chou’s idyllic 1970s – when children spent hours practising their copperplate, what were they doing with it? Mainly copying mindlessly. For Bloom, education, in the complex digital age, has moved on.

25
27. Section B
- i. Handwriting and a more active brain
- ii. The disgrace of dysgraphia
- iii. A school subject
- iv. Handwriting has had its day
- v. Handwriting raises academic performance
- vi. Handwriting reduces typing ability
- vii. The medium is the message?
- viii. Cursive may treat a reading disorder
- ix. The social and cultural advantages of handwriting
26
28. Section C
27
29. Section D
28
30. Section E
29
31. Section F
30
32. According to him/ her/ them, education is now very sophisticated, so handwriting is unimportant.
31
33. He/ She/ They found children who wrote by hand generated more ideas.
32
34. Universities have stopped students using electronic devices in class due to his/ her/ their research.
33
35. He/ She/ They may assess character by handwriting.
34
36. Some ______ and neuroscientists ______ this decision as there seems to be a(n) ______ between early reading and handwriting. Children with the best handwriting produce the most neural activity and the most interesting schoolwork. ______ of cursive consider it more useful than printing. However, not all academics believe in the necessity of handwriting. In the digital world, perhaps keyboarding is ______.
- A. correlation
- B. dispute
- C. essentially
- D. evidence
- E. inevitable
- F. proponents
- G. psychologists
- H. teachers

Phiếu trả lời

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Hiện đáp án

1. TRUE
The passage says humans reached New Zealand in the 13th century, so this matches the statement.
2. NOT GIVEN
There is no information in the passage about whether the first Europeans wanted to trade with Maori, so the answer is NOT GIVEN.
3. NOT GIVEN
The passage does not say if Maori tribe members were only responsible for tool- or weapon-making, so the answer is NOT GIVEN.
4. FALSE
The passage says Maori did not make pottery, so the answer is FALSE.
5. TRUE
The passage mentions that weaving baskets and mats was seen as a decorative craft, so the answer is TRUE.
6. FALSE
The passage says only chiefs and important people wore greenstone jewellery, not everyone, so the answer is FALSE.
7. feathers
The passage says feathers were sometimes added to the better cloaks, so the answer is 'feathers'.
8. hood
The passage says cloaks were designed without a hood, so the answer is 'hood'.
9. shoulder
The passage says cloaks were tied at the neck or shoulder, so the answer is 'shoulder'.
10. insulation
The passage says cloaks offered no insulation during winter, so the answer is 'insulation'.
11. water
The passage says weavers had to water cabbage tree fibres to make them less stiff, so the answer is 'water'.
12. iron
The passage says mud containing iron was used to make the cloaks look black, so the answer is 'iron'.
13. spear tips
The passage says spear tips could not easily go through the cloaks' tough fibres, so the answer is 'spear tips'.
14. C
Option C is correct because it says success depends on the place where organisms survive, matching the statement.
15. B
Option B is correct because it talks about separating procedures to make ethanol in a biochemical way, matching the statement.
16. C
Option C is correct because it mentions developing certain skills, which matches the statement.
17. A
Option A is correct because it says it takes hard work to achieve efficient transfer, matching the statement.
18. D
Option D is correct because it says there is no shortcut to speed up the process, matching the statement.
19. C
Option C is correct because it says combining chemistry and biology lowers production costs, matching the statement.
20. TRUE
The passage says there is a shift from traditional areas of vegetation to get ethanol, so the answer is TRUE.
21. TRUE
The passage says it takes a long time before the process is fully mature, so the answer is TRUE.
22. FALSE
The passage says Coskata sees a bright future for cost advantages in greener ethanol, so the answer is FALSE.
23. NOT GIVEN
There is no information about enterprises trying to buy Coskata's shares, so the answer is NOT GIVEN.
24. plastic tubes the filter-fabric straws / the selective membrane / extract
The passage says Coskata uses plastic tubes as bioreactors, with bacteria on the filter-fabric straws (selective membrane), and researchers extract ethanol from the water outside.
25. vii
Section B is about how the medium (handwriting or typing) affects the message, so option vii is correct.
26. i
Section C is about handwriting and a more active brain, so option i is correct.
27. viii
Section D discusses how cursive may help with a reading disorder, so option viii is correct.
28. ix
Section E talks about the social and cultural advantages of handwriting, so option ix is correct.
29. iv
Section F says handwriting has had its day, meaning it is no longer important, so option iv is correct.
30. D
Person D says education is now sophisticated, so handwriting is unimportant, matching the statement.
31. B
Person B found that children who wrote by hand generated more ideas, matching the statement.
32. C
Person C's research led universities to stop students using electronic devices in class, matching the statement.
33. A
Person A may assess character by handwriting, matching the statement.
34. G / B / A / F / E
The correct words are: psychologists (G) dispute (B) correlation (A) proponents (F) inevitable (E), matching the context of the sentence.

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Reading Passage 1: New Zealand’s early crafts and traditions

Reading Passage 2: The Success of Cellulose

Reading Passage 3: The Value of Handwriting

Phiếu trả lời

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