Reading 2026-07 Test 12 — IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test with Answers

基于考生回忆投稿及材料收集整理 — 非官方 IELTS 资料。

Reading Passage 1: What is the secret of a long life?

This year, the number of retired pensioners in the UK exceeded the number of under 18 years old for the first time in history. That's remarkable in its own right, but the real 'population explosion' has been among the oldest of the old — the centenarians. In fact, this imbalance is the fastest growing demographic in much of the developed world. In the UK, the number of centenarians has increased by 60 per cent since the early 20th century. And their ranks are set to swell even further, thanks to the ageing baby-boomer generation: by 2030 there will be about a million worldwide.

These trends raise social, ethical and economic dilemmas. Are medical advances artificially prolonging life, with little regard for the quality of that life? If growing numbers of elderly people become dependent on state or familial support, society faces skyrocketing costs and commitments. Yet researchers who study the oldest old have made a surprising discovery that presents a less pessimistic view of the future than many anticipate.

It is becoming clear that people who break through the 90-plus barrier represent a physical elite. Far from gaining a longer burden of disability, their extra years tend to be healthy ones. And supercentenarians, people aged 110 or over, are even better examples of ageing well. The average supercentenarian had freely gone about their daily life up until the age of 105 or so, some five to ten years longer even than centenarians.

One of the most comprehensive studies comes from Denmark. In 1998 Kare Christensen, at the University of Southern Denmark, contacted every single one of 3600 people born in 1905 who was still alive. Assessing their health over the subsequent decade, he found that the proportion of people who managed to remain independent throughout was constantly around one-third of the total. Each individual risked becoming more infirm, but the unhealthiest ones passed away at earlier ages, leaving the strongest behind. In 2005, only 166 of the people in Christensen's sample were still alive, but one-third of those were still entirely self-sufficient. Christensen's optimistic findings are echoed in studies all over the world. In the UK, Carol Brayne at the University of Cambridge studied 958 people aged over 90, and found that only one-quarter of them were living in accommodation specifically catering for the needs of older people. Research in China reveals that centenarians and nonagenarians spend fewer days ill and in bed than younger elderly groups. Of course, people can live independently without being entirely healthy, and it is true that most centenarians suffer from some kind of ailment. These range from osteoarthritis to simple loneliness.

Not all the oldest old survive by delaying illness or disability, though. Many soldier through it. Jessica Evert of Ohio State University examined the medical histories of over 400 centenarians. She found that those who achieve extreme longevity tend to fall into three categories. About 40 per cent were 'delayers', who avoided chronic diseases until after the age of 80. Another 40 per cent were 'survivors', who suffered from chronic diseases before the age of 80 but lived longer to tell the tale. The final 20 per cent were 'escapers', who reached their century with no sign of the most common chronic diseases. Intriguingly, one-third of male centenarians were in this category, compared with only 15 per cent of women. In fact, the two sexes fare very differently when it comes to longevity. There are far more female centenarians, but the reasons for this are unclear. Certainly, women tend to lead healthier lifestyles and experience fewer serious accidents. They also go to their doctor more. Men are more prone to risky behaviour and chronic illness, so it must be genetics which allows some men to reach extreme old age. Evidence of this comes from longevity hotspots.

The Japanese island of Okinawa is the front runner. At 58 centenarians per 100,000 people, it has the world's highest proportion in this age group, with Sardinia and Iceland not too far behind. All three are relatively isolated island communities, which leads to less genetic variation amongst inhabitants. In these places, the result has been a predisposition towards a longer life. Of course, members of such communities usually share a particular environment, too, but this alone cannot explain longevity. Gerontologists have emphasised the importance of regular exercise, so anyone aiming to reach a century should not underestimate this. They have also found that the influence on lifespan of social factors such as wealth fades as we age. By comparing 10,000 pairs of Scandinavian twins, Christensen found that genes are key, but that they only start exerting a strong influence on our lifespan after the age of 60. Before then, those who are both identical and nonidentical have largely independent chances of reaching a given age.

Longevity genes have also been found in abundance in other organisms, including over 70 in particular worms. Unfortunately, it's a different story in humans. While many genes have been suggested to affect lifespan, very few have been consistently verified in multiple populations.

1
The greatest growth in the centenarian population across the world is in the UK.
2
Fewer families today are looking after their elderly members.
3
People who live beyond 90 years old are likely to be in good health.
4
Centenarians tend to be in better physical health than supercentenarians.
5
None of the oldest survivors in Christensen's study could take care of themselves.
6
Research findings from Cambridge and China conflicted with Christensen's findings in Denmark.
7
Centenarians may suffer from stronger feelings of isolation than people a generation younger.
8
What name has Jessica Evert given to the category of centenarians who become 100 without suffering serious disease?
9
What factor is most likely to contribute to longevity in men?
10
Which place has the largest proportion of centenarians in the world?
11
According to gerontologists, what should people avoid neglecting if they wish to reach old age?
12
What social influence on longevity decreases as people get older?
13
In which species, apart from humans, have longevity genes been reliably identified?

Reading Passage 2: We Have Star Performers!

A. 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.

B. 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.

C. 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 important 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.

D. The result of mass star hirings as well as individual ones seem to conform 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.

E. 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.”

F. 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 Veira 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.

G. 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.

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

Reading Passage 3: The Science of Sleep

Sleep is not an optional activity and is more essential to our survival than food. By the time they die, most people will have spent more than 25 years asleep. As Paul Martin, author of Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams, puts it: “When you die, a bigger slice of your existence will have passed in this state than in raising children, playing games, listening to music, or any other activity that humanity values highly.” Why is it necessary to spend quite so long in this unconscious state? Unlike breathing or eating, the biological benefits of sleep are not immediately obvious.

It is a behaviour that can be found remarkably far back down the evolutionary ladder. In all creatures, sleep generally involves a cessation of physical activity and a reduction of sensory awareness for regular periods. Like us, other animals are kept awake by stimulants such as caffeine and sleep more as babies.

Sleep is therefore a mainstay of animal existence and has been honed by millions of years of evolution. Yet until 1952, scientists assumed it was a passive state in which brain activity ceased. But then an extraordinary discovery was made. Sleep-research pioneer Nathaniel Kleitman of the University of Chicago noticed it was marked by periods of rapid eye movement, now known as REM sleep, and that REM sleep was accompanied by a frenzy of brain activity akin to that seen during periods of consciousness.

We now know that brain activity is far from uniform while we sleep. Over a 60-minute period it goes through four distinct stages of non-REM (NREM) sleep and one episode of REM sleep. It has been discovered that most dreaming occurs during REM sleep, and that deep sleep occurs during the NREM stages. In fact, the two types of sleep are as different as sleeping is from wakefulness. Interestingly, while mammals, birds and more recent reptiles have both types of sleep, primitive reptiles experience only NREM sleep. This implies that REM sleep evolved more recently, possibly around the time of the reptilian ancestors of all mammals, 250 million years ago.

For centuries it was assumed that sleep served simply as a mechanism for allowing the body to recuperate. Recently, it has been shown that NREM sleep does indeed increase after vigorous exercise. However, people who lie in bed all day also enter NREM sleep, so it can’t only be due to this. Professor Meir Siegel of the University of California believes that NREM sleep provides an opportunity to repair the body cells damaged during wakefulness. As he explains, “The decrease both in metabolic rate and in brain temperature occurring during NREM sleep seems to provide an opportunity to repair this damage.”

However, Professor Jim Horne of the University of Loughborough disagrees: “There is little evidence that any organ apart from the brain goes through repair during sleep. All the evidence shows that these other organs recover just as well during restful wakefulness.”

The brain, Horne points out, never shuts down during wakefulness. Even if we are resting, it remains in a state of readiness. Scans have shown that it is only during NREM sleep that the brain gets any rest. Recognising that when NREM sleep evolved millions of years ago animals didn’t have highly developed brains, he concludes, “The functions of NREM sleep have probably changed with evolution, maybe beginning as an energy conserver and culminating, in humans, as a facilitator for the recovery of high-level brain function.”

While NREM most probably involves rest and recovery, REM sleep and dreaming are a much more contentious area of research. According to Dr Claudio, when we are deprived of REM sleep, memory consolidation is compromised: “We need it to reprocess what has happened during the previous period of wakefulness in order to store information that is useful.”

Certainly there are studies that suggest a strong link between REM sleep and memory. After being taught a new skill, people exhibit a rise in REM sleep. If they are deprived of REM sleep, they are less able to remember the skill. Experiments have shown that REM sleep must occur within 24 hours of an experience if it is to be remembered.

There are other views about the function of REM sleep. The pioneering sleep researcher Michel Jouvet believes that the intense activity seen in the brain during REM sleep is essential to neural development before birth. There is little to activate the developing brain during the long, dark months in the uterus, so Jouvet hypothesises that the brain generates its own stimuli in the form of REM sleep and dreams to aid its own development.

In short, the function of REM sleep and dreaming is still something of a mystery. The hope is that, as scanning techniques become more refined, the brain regions underlying the two types of sleep will be better understood. However, we’re not likely to get a straightforward answer. As Horne says, “Already over 100 neurochemicals and brain regions connected with sleep have been found, and more and more are being discovered. So clearly there’s no single sleep centre.” One thing is certain: we’ll never be without sleep. It’s highly improbable that any new drug could enable us to avoid it and remain healthy for any length of time.

23
27 All of the body is able to recover during one type of sleep.
- A. Paul Martin
- B. Nathaniel Kleitman
- C. Jerome M. Siegel
- D. Jim Horne
- E. Claudio Stampi
- F. Michel Jouvet
24
28 The brain benefits from one type of sleep during an early stage of life.
25
29 Humans spend more time asleep than engaged in any other activity.
26
30 It is likely that the purpose of one type of sleep has altered over time.
27
31 Brain activity during one type of sleep is similar to that when people are awake.
28
32 One type of sleep enables an individual to learn from past experience.
29
33 People: biological advantages of sleep not clear – this makes it different from either ________ or ________.
30
34 Animals: sleep longer when they are ________.
31
35 Research: scientists once believed that ________ stopped during sleep – now know it takes place but not in a uniform way.
32
36 Types of sleep – REM and NREM: now possible to prove that amount of NREM sleep rises with ________.
33
37 Types of sleep – REM and NREM: the metabolic rate and the ________ of the brain fall during NREM sleep.
34
38 The Future: mysteries of REM sleep may become clearer as the ________ improve.
35
39 The Future: unlikely that a ________ will ever replace the need for sleep.
36
40 The writer’s main aim in this passage is to
- A. compare animal and human brain activity during sleep.
- B. suggest why some people need more sleep than others.
- C. account for the fact that some dreams are easily forgotten.
- D. describe the differences between two types of sleep.

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1. NOT GIVEN
NOT GIVEN is correct because there is no information in the passage about the greatest growth in the centenarian population being in the UK.
2. NOT GIVEN
NOT GIVEN is correct because the passage does not mention whether fewer families today are looking after their elderly members.
3. TRUE
TRUE is correct because the passage says people who live beyond 90 years old are likely to be in good health, showing that many are healthy at that age.
4. FALSE
FALSE is correct because the passage states that centenarians are not in better physical health than supercentenarians; in fact, supercentenarians are described as healthier.
5. FALSE
FALSE is correct because the passage says some of the oldest survivors in Christensen's study could still take care of themselves, so not all were unable to do so.
6. FALSE
FALSE is correct because the passage says research findings from Cambridge and China supported, not conflicted with, Christensen's findings in Denmark.
7. NOT GIVEN
NOT GIVEN is correct because the passage does not provide information about whether centenarians suffer from stronger feelings of isolation than people a generation younger.
8. escapers
'escapers' is correct because Jessica Evert called centenarians who reach 100 without serious disease 'escapers' in the passage.
9. genetics
'genetics' is correct because the passage says genetics is the factor most likely to contribute to longevity in men.
10. Okinawa
'Okinawa' is correct because the passage states that Okinawa has the largest proportion of centenarians in the world.
11. exercise
'exercise' is correct because gerontologists in the passage advise people not to neglect exercise if they wish to reach old age.
12. wealth
'wealth' is correct because the passage says the influence of wealth on longevity decreases as people get older.
13. worms
'worms' is correct because the passage says longevity genes have been reliably identified in worms apart from humans.
14. F
F is correct because option F gives an example from a non-business setting showing that a better system, not just individual stars, leads to bigger success.
15. B
B is correct because option B describes a failed company that believed in hiring stars rather than building a good system.
16. G
G is correct because the author suggests in option G that companies should focus on acquiring employees who fit their system to win in competition.
17. C
C is correct because option C uses a metaphor comparing hiring stars to human medical anatomy to show the problems this can cause.
18. NOT GIVEN
NOT GIVEN is correct because there is no information about whether McKinsey expected the influence of The War for Talent.
19. TRUE
TRUE is correct because the passage says economic conditions are a factor in whether a country prefers to hire foreign employees.
20. FALSE
FALSE is correct because the passage explains that Enron's collapse was due to management mistakes, not just an unfortunate incident.
21. TRUE
TRUE is correct because the passage says football clubs that focus on making stars are better than those that just collect stars.
22. analysts / star performer / working environment / salary / rivals
The correct words are 'analysts / star performer / working environment / salary / rivals' because the passage describes a survey of analysts, the effects of hiring a star performer, their worse behavior in a new working environment, their higher salary, and rejection from rivals.
23. C
C (Jerome M. Siegel) is correct because he claims that all of the body is able to recover during one type of sleep.
24. F
F (Michel Jouvet) is correct because he says the brain benefits from one type of sleep during early life.
25. A
A (Paul Martin) is correct because he states that humans spend more time asleep than doing any other activity.
26. D
D (Jim Horne) is correct because he suggests that the purpose of one type of sleep has changed over time.
27. B
B (Nathaniel Kleitman) is correct because he found that brain activity during one type of sleep is similar to when people are awake.
28. E
E (Claudio Stampi) is correct because he says one type of sleep helps people learn from past experience.
29. breathing
'breathing' is correct because the passage says the biological advantages of sleep are not clear, unlike breathing or eating.
30. babies
'babies' is correct because the passage says animals sleep longer when they are babies.
31. brain activity
'brain activity' is correct because the passage says scientists once believed brain activity stopped during sleep, but now know it continues.
32. exercise
'exercise' is correct because the passage says it is now possible to prove that the amount of NREM sleep rises with exercise.
33. temperature
'temperature' is correct because the passage says the metabolic rate and temperature of the brain fall during NREM sleep.
34. scanning techniques
'scanning techniques' is correct because the passage says mysteries of REM sleep may become clearer as scanning techniques improve.
35. drug
'drug' is correct because the passage says it is unlikely that a drug will ever replace the need for sleep.
36. D
D is correct because the writer’s main aim is to describe the differences between two types of sleep, REM and NREM, as shown throughout the passage.

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