Reading 2026-02 Test 4 — IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test with Answers

基于考生回忆重建 — 非官方 IELTS 资料。音频和原文均为练习用途的重现版本。

Reading Passage 1 — Ants Could Teach Ants

A. The ants are tiny and usually nest between rocks in the south coast of England. Transformed into research subjects at the University of Bristol, they raced along a table top foraging for food – and then, remarkably, returned to guide others. Time and again, followers trailed behind leaders, darting this way and that along the route, presumably to memorise landmarks. Once a follower got its bearings, it tapped the leader with its antennae, prompting the lesson to literally proceed to the next step. The ants were only looking for food, but the researchers said the careful way the leaders led followers, thereby turning them into leaders in their own right, marked the Temnothorax albipennis ant as the very first example of a non-human animal exhibiting teaching behaviour.

B. “Tandem running is an example of teaching, to our knowledge the first in a non-human animal, that involves bidirectional feedback between teacher and pupil” remarks Nigel Franks, professor of animal behaviour and ecology, whose paper on the ant educators was published last week in the journal Nature.

C. No sooner was the paper published, of course, than another educator questioned it Marc Hauser, a psychologist and biologist and one of the scientists who came up with the definition of teaching, said it was unclear whether the ants had learned a new skill or merely acquired new information.

D. Later, Franks took a further study and found that there were even races between leaders. With the guidance of leaders, ants could find food faster. But the help comes at a cost for the leader, who normally would have reached the food about four times faster if not hampered by a follower. This means the hypothesis that the leaders deliberately slowed down in order to pass the skills on to the followers seems potentially valid. His ideas were advocated by the students who carried out the video project with him.

E. Opposing views still arose, however. Hauser noted that mere communication of information is commonplace in the animal world. Consider a species, for example, that uses alarm calls to warn fellow members about the presence Sounding the alarm can be costly, because the animal may draw the attention of the predator to itself. But it allows others flee to safety. “Would you call this teaching?” wrote Hauser. The caller incurs a cost. The naive animals gain a benefit and new knowledge that better enables them to learn about the predator’s location than if the caller had not called. This happens throughout the animal kingdom, but we don’t call it teaching, even though it is clearly transfer of information.”

F. Tim Caro, a zoologist, presented two cases of animal communication. He found that cheetah mothers that take their cubs along on hunts gradually allow their cubs to do more of the hunting-going, for example, from killing a gazelle and allowing young cubs to eat merely tripping the gazelle and letting the cubs finish it off. At one level, such behaviour might be called teaching – except the mother was not really teaching the cubs to hunt but merely facilitating various stages of learning. In another instance, birds watching other birds using a stick to locate food such as insects and so on, are observed to do the same thing themselves while finding food later.

G. Psychologists study animal behaviour in part to understand the evolutionary roots of human behaviour, Hauser said. The challenge in understanding whether other animals truly teach one another, he added, is that human teaching involves a “theory of mind” teachers are aware that students don’t know something. He questioned whether Franks leader ants really knew that the follower ants were ignorant. Could they simply have been following an instinctive rule to proceed when the followers tapped them on the legs or abdomen? And did leaders that led the way to food – only to find that it had been removed by the experimenter – incur the wrath of followers? That, Hauser said, would suggest that the follower ant actually knew the leader was more knowledgeable and not merely following an instinctive routine itself.

H. The controversy went on, and for a good reason. The occurrence of teaching in ants, if proven to be true, indicates that teaching can evolve in animals with tiny brains. It is probably the value of information in social animals that determines when teaching will evolve, rather than the constraints of brain size.

I. Bennett Galef Jr., a psychologist who studies animal behaviour and social learning at McMaster University in Canada, maintained that ants were unlikely to have a “theory of mind” meaning that leaders and followers may well have been following instinctive routines that were not based on an understanding of what was happening in another ant’s brain. He waned that scientists may be barking up the wrong tree when they look not only for examples of human like behaviour among other animals but human like thinking that underlies such behaviour. Animals may behave in ways similar to humans without a similar cognitive system, he said, so the behaviour is not necessarily a good guide into how humans came to think the way they do.

Questions 1-5: Matching statements with people

Look at the following statements (Questions 1-5) and the list of people in the box below. Match each statement with the correct person, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter, A, B, C or D, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once. List of people A Nigel Franks B Marc Hauser C Tim Caro D Bennet Galef Jr

1
Animals could use objects to locate food.
2
Ants show two-way, interactive teaching behaviours.
3
It is risky to say ants can teach other ants like human beings do,
4
Ant leadership makes finding food faster.
5
Communication between ants is not entirely teaching.

Questions 6-9: Animal behaviours mentioned

Choose FOUR letters, A-H. Write your answers in boxes 6-9 on your answer sheet.

A touch each other with antenna

B alert others when there is danger

C escape from predators

D protect the young

E hunt food for the young

F fight with each other

G use tools like twigs

H feed on a variety of foods

6
Which FOUR of the following behaviours of animals are mentioned in the passage?
- A. touch each other with antenna
- B. alert others when there is danger
- C. escape from predators
- D. protect the young
- E. hunt food for the young
- F. fight with each other
- G. use tools like twigs
- H. feed on a variety of foods

Questions 10-13: TRUE/FALSE/NOT GIVEN

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet, write TRUE if the statement is true, FALSE if the statement is false, NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage.

10
Ants, tandem running involves only one-way communication.
11
Franks’s theory got many supporters immediately after publicity.
12
Ants’ teaching behaviour is the same as that of human.
13
Cheetah share hunting gains to younger ones

Reading Passage 2 — Growing more for less

A For farmers, working out the optimal amount of seed, fertiliser, pesticide and water to scatter on a field can be a matter of luck, despite several harvests. Regular laboratory analyses of soil and plant samples from various sections of a field can help — but such expertise is costly, and often unavailable. However, a new and cheaper method of doing this analysis is now on offer. Precise prescriptions for growing crops can be obtained quickly, and less expensively, by calculating the amount of electromagnetic radiation reflected from agricultural land. The data is collected by orbiting satellites.

B Examining the wavelength of radiation that is reflected can reveal, with surprising precision, the properties of the soil, the quality of crop being grown, and the levels in those crops of chlorophyll, various minerals, moisture and other indicators of their quality. If recent and forecast weather data is added, detailed maps can be produced indicating exactly how, where and when crops should be grown. The service usually costs less than US $15 per hectare for a handful of readings a year, and can increase yields by as much as 10%.

C Such precision farming using satellite-based intelligence is a relatively new technique. Even so, it is catching on quickly. Five years ago, for example, a French cereal-growers' co-operative called Sevepi purchased a satellite and makes it available to its members in the form of maps of their fields, divided into three or four colour-coded zones per hectare. For each zone, the exact and best fertiliser formula is recommended. On top of this, if the amount of rain in the field has already grown quite high early in the season, and heavy showers are expected, an appropriate dose of growth regulator is recommended for each zone (as fragile stems break more easily in downpours). Then, farm vehicles equipped with global-positioning system locators automatically mix and apply the prescribed dose to each area.

D France is the pioneer in this sort of surveillance. More farmland is analysed by satellite there than in any other country, according to Infoterra (a subsidiary of EADS Astrium), the firm that is France’s largest provider of such information, supplying data to companies such as Sevepi. Moreover, Henri Douche, head of Infoterra's agriculture sales in Toulouse, reckons the amount of monitored farmland will increase as weather patterns change and farmers can no longer rely on the past as a guide to the future. When confounded by the yield variations that these new weather patterns will bring, even farmers who are afraid of new technology will sign up, he says.

E Inexpensive data on the productivity of land is advantageous to governments too. Areas where fertilisers and pesticides are being applied excessively can be pinpointed, enabling a reduction in environmental and land-use damage. Says Guy Lafond, an agronomist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, a government agency, says the satellite data it purchases is proving useful for the study of fields with declining productivity in the province of Saskatchewan. Over-application of nitrate fertilisers (which are also a source of greenhouse gases) appears partly responsible. And according to RapidEye, a German satellite operator, some companies are also studying satellite data with a view to selling insurance policies to governments of famine-prone countries that might be threatened by crop failure.

F In March, RapidEye began selling data that helps forecast harvests. "Too often, farmers limit productivity by managing fields wrongly," says Fredrick Jung-Rothenhäuser, head of product development at the firm's headquarters in Brandenburg an der Havel. "Our satellites are the first commercial satellites to include the Red-Edge band of the light spectrum, which is sensitive to changes in chlorophyll content. More research will be necessary to realise the full benefits of the Red-Edge band. However, this band can assist in monitoring vegetation health, improving species separation and also help in measuring protein and nitrogen content in biomass." The company's data, which comes from both Europe and the Americas, breaks field productivity down into patches just five metres square.

G The advantages that satellite technology provides in terms of precision farming do not have to be restricted to rich countries. In Africa, where many areas have become badly depleted of nutrients, better fertiliser management would help reverse this situation. As a consequence, the charitable trust World Agroforestry Centre, in the city of Nairobi, in Kenya, has begun to build up a collection of radiation patterns derived from around 100,000 samples of African soils. The aim of this work is to help by understanding the potential of these soils to be more agriculturally productive. Once passed on to the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture, based in Colombia, South America, it is intended that the information be used to build a database called the 'Digital Soil Map'. When complete, this will provide farmers with free forecasts, developed with regularly updated satellite imagery, across farmland in the poorest countries in Africa. This is information which will almost certainly assist in improving crop yields. For a hunger-ravaged continent, that is good news indeed.

Questions 14–20: Paragraph matching

Reading Passage has seven paragraphs, A–G. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A–G, in boxes 14–20 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once.

14
An example of how farmers in one country are now using satellite data to determine fertiliser use.
15
A reference to climate change and its effects.
16
A reference to the effect on the soil of using too much fertiliser.
17
An example of information that will be shared between different countries.
18
Mention of the country which is the leader in agricultural technology.
19
A description of an innovation in satellite imaging which requires further study.
20
Evidence of the cost-effectiveness of using satellite technology in agriculture.

Questions 21 and 22: Companies using satellite information

Choose TWO letters, A–E. Write the correct letters in boxes 21 and 22 on your answer sheet.

A. Sevepi

B. Infoterra

C. Agriculture and AgriFood Canada

D. RapidEye

E. World Agroforestry Centre

21
Which TWO companies obtain information directly from satellites?
- A. Sevepi
- B. Infoterra
- C. Agriculture and AgriFood Canada
- D. RapidEye
- E. World Agroforestry Centre

Questions 23–26: Sentence completion

Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 23–26 on your answer sheet.

23. Initially, orbiting satellites are used to measure _________ coming from farmland.

24. Fredrick Jung-Rothenhäuser says that additional irregular weather will raise the _________ of satellite technology.

25. As a result of satellite technology, it may become possible to insure against the threat of _________ in some countries.

26. In Africa, much of the soil suffers from the loss of _________.

Reading Passage 3 — Titan of technology

A. Moore is the scientific brain behind Intel, the world’s biggest maker of computer chips. Both funny and self-deprecating, he’s a shrewd businessman too but admits to being an ‘accidental entrepreneur’, happier in the backroom trading ideas with techies than out selling the product or chatting up the stockholders. When he applied for a job at Dow Chemical after gaining his PhD, the company psychologist ruled that I was okay technically, but that I’d never manage anything’. This year, Intel is set to turn over $28 billion.

B. When Moore co-founded Intel (short for Integrated Electronics) to develop integrated circuits thirty-five years ago, he provided the motive force in R&D (Research & Development) while his more extrovert partner Robert Noyce became the public face of the company. Intel’s ethos was distinctively Californian: laid- back, democratic, polo shirt and chinos. Moore worked in a cubicle like everyone else, never had a designated parking space and flew Economy. None of this implied lack of ambition. Moore and Noyce shared a vision, recognising that success depended just as much on intellectual pieces as on Intel’s ability to deliver a product. Noyce himself received the first patent for an integrated circuit in 1961, while both partners were learning the business of electronics at Fairchild Semiconductor.

C. Fairchild’s success put money in Moore and Noyce’s pockets, but they were starved of R&D money. They resigned, frustrated, to found Intel in 1968. ‘It was one of those rare periods when money was available,’ says Moore. They put in $250,000 each and drummed up another $2.5m of venture capital ‘on the strength of a one-page business plan that said essentially nothing’. Ownership was divided 50:50 between founders and backers. Three years later, Intel’s first microprocessor was released: the 4004, carrying 2,250 transistors. Progress after that was rapid. By the time the competition realised what was happening, Intel had amassed a seven-year R&D lead that it was never to relinquish.

D. By the year 2000, Intel’s Pentium-4 chip was carrying 42 million transistors. ‘Now,’ says Moore, ‘we put a quarter of a billion transistors on a chip and are looking forward to a billion in the near future.’ The performance gains have been phenomenal. The 4004 ran at 108 kilohertz (108,000 hertz), the Pentium*4 at three gigahertz (3 billion hertz). It’s calculated that if automobile speed had increased similarly over the same period, you could now drive from New York to San Francisco in six seconds. Moore’s prescience in forecasting this revolution is legendary. In 1965, while still head of the R&D laboratory at Fairchild, he wrote a piece for Electronics magazine observing ‘that over the first few years we had essentially doubled the complexity of integrated circuits every year. I blindly extrapolated for the next ten years and said we’d go from about 60 to about 60,000 transistors on a chip. It proved a much more spot-on prediction than I could ever have imagined, up until then, integrated circuits had been expensive and had had principally military applications. But I could see that the economics were going to switch dramatically. This was going to become the cheapest way to make electronics.’

E. The prediction that a chip’s transistor-count – and thus its performance – would keep doubling every year soon proved so accurate that Carver Mead, a friend from Caltech, dubbed it ‘Moore’s Law’. The name has stuck. ‘Moore’s Law’ has become the yardstick by which the exponential growth of the computer industry has been measured ever since. When, in 1975, Moore looked around him again and saw transistor-counts slowing, he predicted that in future chip-performance would double only every two years. But that proved pessimistic. Actual growth since then has split the difference between his two predictions, with performance doubling every 18 months.

F. And there’s a corollary, says Moore. ‘If the cost of a given amount of computer power drops 50 per cent every 18 months, each time that happens the market explodes with new applications that hadn’t been economical before.’ He sees the microprocessor as ‘almost infinitely elastic’. As prices fall, new applications keep emerging: smart light bulbs, flashing trainers or greetings cards that sing ‘Happy Birthday’. Where will it all stop? Well, it’s true, he says, ‘that in a few more generations [of chips], the fact that materials are made of atoms starts to be a real problem. Essentially, you can’t make things any smaller.’ But in practice, the day of reckoning is endlessly postponed as engineers find endlessly more ingenious ways of loading more transistors on a chip. ‘I suspect I shared the feelings of everybody else that when we got to the dimensions of a micron [about 1986], we wouldn’t be able to continue because we were touching the wavelength of light. But as we got closer, the barriers just melted away,’

G. When conventional chips finally reach their limits, nanotechnology beckons. Researchers are already working on sci-fi sounding alternatives such as molecular computers, built atom by atom, that theoretically could process hundreds of thousands times more information than today’s processors. Quantum computers using the state of electrons as the basis for calculation could operate still faster. On any measure, there looks to be plenty of life left in Moore’s Law yet.

Questions 27-29: Multiple choice

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

27
What do we learn about Gordon Moore’s personality in the first two paragraphs?
- A. It has changed noticeably as his career has developed.
- B. It was once considered unsuitable for the particular type of business he was in.
- C. It made him more suited to producing things than selling them.
- D. It is less complicated than it may at first appear.
28
What do we learn about Intel when it was first established?
- A. It was unlike any other company in its field at the time.
- B. It combined a relaxed atmosphere with serious intent.
- C. It attracted attention because of the unconventional way in which it was run.
- D. It placed more emphasis on ingenuity than on any other aspect.
29
What is stated about the setting up of Intel in the third paragraph?
- A. It was primarily motivated by the existence of funds that made it possible.
- B. It involved keeping certain sensitive information secret.
- C. It resulted from the founders’ desire to launch a particular product.
- D. It was caused by the founders’ dissatisfaction with their employer’s priorities.

Questions 30-34: TRUE/FALSE/NOT GIVEN

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 30-34 on your answer sheet write TRUE if the statement agrees with the information, FALSE if the statement contradicts the information, NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

30
Competitors soon came close to catching up with Intel’s progress.
31
Intel’s Pentium 4 chip was more successful than Moore had anticipated.
32
Moore’s prediction in 1975 was based on too little evidence.
33
Flashing trainers are an example of Moore’s theory about the relationship between cost and applications.
34
Moore has always been confident that problems concerning the size of components will be overcome.

Questions 35-40: Summary completion

Complete the summary below using words from the box. Write your answers in boxes 35-40 on your answer sheet.

MOORE’S LAW

Gordon Moore’s ability to foresee developments is well-known. In 1965, he referred to the increase in the 35……. of integrated circuits and guessed that the number of transistors would go on rising for a decade. The 36……. of his prediction surprised him. Previously, the 37……. and main 38……. of integrated circuits had been the major 39……. with regard to their development. But Moore observed that the 40……. of integrated circuits was going to improve dramatically. His resulting forecasts concerning chips led to the creation of the term ‘Moore’s Law’.

design use opinion invention

cost-effectiveness failure sophistication proposition

production influence understanding cost

accuracy demand theory inter-dependence

familiarity reception appearance reference

35
In 1965, he referred to the increase in the ________ of integrated circuits
36
The ________ of his prediction surprised him.
37
Previously, the ________ and main ________ of integrated circuits had been the major ________ with regard to their development.
38
Previously, the cost and main ________ of integrated circuits had been the major influence with regard to their development.
39
Previously, the cost and main use of integrated circuits had been the major ________ with regard to their development.
40
But Moore observed that the ________ of integrated circuits was going to improve dramatically.

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显示答案

1. C
Option C is correct because the passage mentions birds watching other birds use a stick to locate food, and then doing the same themselves (Section F). Option A is wrong because it is about ants, not animals in general.
2. A
Option A is correct because the passage describes how ants use 'bidirectional feedback between teacher and pupil' during tandem running (Section B), showing two-way, interactive teaching.
3. D
Option D is correct because the passage says it is risky to claim ants teach like humans, as animals may behave like humans without similar thinking (Section I).
4. A
Option A is correct because the passage says 'With the guidance of leaders, ants could find food faster' (Section D).
5. B
Option B is correct because the passage explains that communication of information, like alarm calls, is common but not always considered teaching (Section E).
6. A / B / E / G
The correct answers are A, B, E, and G. The passage mentions ants touching each other with antennae (A), animals alerting others to danger (B), cheetahs hunting for their young (E), and birds using tools like twigs (G).
10. FALSE
FALSE is correct because tandem running involves 'bidirectional feedback between teacher and pupil' (Section B), so it is not just one-way communication.
11. NOT GIVEN
NOT GIVEN is correct because the passage does not say whether Franks’s theory got many supporters immediately after publicity.
12. NOT GIVEN
NOT GIVEN is correct because the passage does not state that ants’ teaching behaviour is the same as humans.
13. TRUE
TRUE is correct because the passage says cheetah mothers allow cubs to do more of the hunting and let them finish off prey (Section F).
14. C
C is correct because the passage describes how a French co-operative, Sevepi, uses satellite data to recommend fertiliser formulas for different zones in their fields (Section C).
15. D
D is correct because the passage mentions that as weather patterns change, farmers can no longer rely on the past and will need more satellite monitoring (Section D).
16. E
E is correct because the passage says over-application of nitrate fertilisers is partly responsible for declining productivity in Saskatchewan (Section E).
17. G
G is correct because the passage describes how soil data from Africa will be shared with the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia to build a 'Digital Soil Map' (Section G).
18. D
D is correct because the passage states that France is the pioneer and has more farmland analysed by satellite than any other country (Section D).
19. F
F is correct because the passage says RapidEye’s new Red-Edge band in satellite imaging 'will require more research to realise the full benefits' (Section F).
20. B
B is correct because the passage says the satellite service costs less than $15 per hectare and can increase yields by as much as 10% (Section B), showing it is cost-effective.
21. B / D
B and D are correct because Infoterra and RapidEye are both described as companies that provide satellite data directly (Sections D and F).
23. electromagnetic radiation
'electromagnetic radiation' is correct because the passage says satellites measure the amount of electromagnetic radiation reflected from farmland (Section A).
24. importance
'importance' is correct because Jung-Rothenhäuser says that more irregular weather will increase the importance of satellite technology (Section D).
25. crop failure
'crop failure' is correct because the passage says satellite data may help insurance companies sell policies to governments threatened by crop failure (Section E).
26. nutrients
'nutrients' is correct because the passage says many areas in Africa have become badly depleted of nutrients (Section G).
27. C
C is correct because the passage says Moore was happier working with technology than selling products, making him more suited to producing things (Section A).
28. B
B is correct because the passage says Intel had a relaxed atmosphere but also serious intent, combining both (Section B).
29. D
D is correct because Moore and Noyce left Fairchild because they were frustrated by lack of R&D money, showing dissatisfaction with their employer’s priorities (Section C).
30. FALSE
FALSE is correct because the passage says Intel had a seven-year R&D lead that it was never to relinquish, so competitors did not catch up (Section C).
31. NOT GIVEN
NOT GIVEN is correct because the passage does not compare the Pentium 4 chip’s success to Moore’s expectations.
32. NOT GIVEN
NOT GIVEN is correct because the passage does not say Moore’s 1975 prediction was based on too little evidence.
33. TRUE
TRUE is correct because the passage lists flashing trainers as an example of new applications that appear as costs fall, supporting Moore’s theory (Section F).
34. FALSE
FALSE is correct because Moore says he and others thought they would not be able to continue at a certain point, showing he was not always confident (Section F).
35. sophistication
'sophistication' is correct because in 1965 Moore referred to the increase in the complexity (sophistication) of integrated circuits (Section D).
36. accuracy
'accuracy' is correct because Moore says his prediction was 'much more spot-on' than he imagined (Section D).
37. cost
'cost' is correct because the passage says integrated circuits had been expensive (Section D).
38. use
'use' is correct because the passage says the main use of integrated circuits had been military applications (Section D).
39. influence
'influence' is correct because the passage says cost and use had been the major influence on development (Section D).
40. cost-effectiveness
'cost-effectiveness' is correct because Moore observed that the economics (cost-effectiveness) of integrated circuits was going to improve (Section D).

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