Reading 2026-08 Test 5 — 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: Ensuring Our Future Food Supply

A Climate change and new diseases threaten the limited varieties of seeds we depend on for food. Luckily, we still have many of the seeds used in the past—but we must take steps to save them.

B Six miles outside the town of Decorah, Iowa in the USA, an 890-acre stretch of rolling fields and woods called Heritage Farm is letting its crops go to seed. Everything about Heritage Farm is in stark contrast to the surrounding acres of intensively farmed fields of corn and soybean that are typical of modern agriculture. Heritage Farm is devoted to collecting rather than growing seeds. It is home to the Seed Savers Exchange, one of the largest non government-owned seed banks in the United States.

C In 1975 Diane Ott Whealy was given the seedlings of two plant varieties that her great grandfather had brought to America from Bavaria in 1870: Grandpa Ott’s morning glory and his German Pink tomato. Wanting to preserve similar traditional varieties, known as heirloom plants, Diane and her husband, Kent, decided to establish a place where the seeds of the past could be kept and traded. The exchange now has more than 13,000 members, and the many thousands of heirloom varieties they have donated are kept in its walk-in coolers, freezers, and root cellars the seeds of many thousands of heirloom varieties and, as you walk around an old red barn that is covered in Grandpa Ott’s beautiful morning glory blossoms, you come across the different vegetables, herbs, and flowers they have planted there.

D "Each year our members list their seeds in this," Diane Ott Whealy says, handing over a copy of the Seed Savers Exchange 2010 Yearbook. It is as thick as a big-city telephone directory, with page after page of exotic beans, garlic, potatoes, peppers, apples, pears, and plums—each with its own name and personal history. For example, there’s an Estonian Yellow Cherry tomato, which was brought to the seed bank by “an elderly Russian lady” who lived in Tallinn, and a Persian Star garlic from “a bazaar in Samarkand.” There’s also a bean donated by archaeologists searching for pygmy elephant fossils in New Mexico.

E Heirloom vegetables have become fashionable in the United States and Europe over the past decade, prized by a food movement that emphasizes eating locally and preserving the flavor and uniqueness of heirloom varieties. Found mostly in farmers' markets and boutique groceries, heirloom varieties have been squeezed out of supermarkets in favor of modern single-variety fruits and vegetables bred to ship well and have a uniform appearance, not to enhance flavor. But the movement to preserve heirloom varieties goes way beyond the current interest in North America and Europe in tasty, locally grown food. It’s also a campaign to protect the world’s future food supply. Most people in the well-fed world give little thought to where their food comes from or how it’s grown. They wander through well-stocked supermarkets without realizing that there may be problem ahead. We’ve been hearing for some time about the loss of flora and fauna in our rainforests. Very little, by contrast, is being said or done about the parallel decline in the diversity of the foods we eat.

F Food variety extinction is happening all over the world—and it's happening fast. In the United States an estimated 90 percent of historic fruit and vegetable varieties are no longer grown. Of the 7,000 different apple varieties that were grown in the 1800s, fewer than a hundred remain. In the Philippines thousands of varieties of rice once thrived; now only about a hundred are grown there. In China 90 percent of the wheat varieties cultivated just a hundred years ago have disappeared. Experts estimate that in total we have lost more than 50 percent of the world's food varieties over the past century.

G Why is this a problem? Because if disease or future climate change affects one of the handful of plants we've come to depend on to feed our growing planet, we might desperately need one of those varieties we've let become extinct. The loss of the world's cereal diversity is a particular cause for concern. A fungus called Ug99, which was first identified in Uganda in 1999, is spreading across the world's wheat crops. From Uganda it moved to Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Yemen. By 2007 it had jumped the Persian Gulf into Iran. Scientists predict that the fungus will soon make its way into India and Pakistan, then spread to Russia and China, and eventually the USA.

H Roughly 90 percent of the world's wheat has no defense against this particular fungus. If it reached the USA, an estimated one billion dollars' worth of crops would be at risk. Scientists believe that in Asia and Africa alone, the portion currently in danger could leave one billion people without their primary food source. A famine with significant humanitarian consequences could follow, according to Rick Ward of Cornell University.

I The population of the world is expected to reach nine billion by 2045. Some experts say we’ll need to double our food production to keep up with this growth. Given the added challenge of climate change and disease, it is becoming ever more urgent to find ways to increase food yield. The world has become increasingly dependent upon a technology-driven, one-size-fits-all approach to food supply. Yet the best hope for securing our food's future may depend on our ability to preserve the locally cultivated foods of the past.

1
Heritage Farm is different from most other nearby farms.
2
Most nongovernment-owned seed banks are bigger than Seed Savers Exchange.
3
Diane Ott Whealy's grandfather taught her a lot about seed varieties.
4
The seeds people give to the Seed Savers Exchange are stored outdoors.
5
Diane and her husband choose which heirloom seeds to grow on Heritage Farm.
6
The seeds are listed in alphabetical order in The Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook.
7
The Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook describes how each seed was obtained.
8
Supermarkets sell fruit and vegetables that transport well and want fruit and vegetables to be standard in their _______.
9
While people know about plants disappearing from _______ very few know about the decline in fruit and vegetable varieties.
10
Less than 100 of the types of _______ once available in the USA are still grown.
11
Over _______ of food varieties around the world have disappeared in the last 100 years.
12
Rick Ward believes the threat to food supplies in Asia and Africa might lead to a _______.
13
Twice the amount of food may be needed because of an increase in _______.

Reading Passage 2: Lean Production Innovation – In Manufacturing Systems

A After the First World War, car makers Henry Ford and Arthur Sloan of General Motors moved world manufacturing from centuries of craft production into the age of mass production. Largely as a result of this, the United States soon dominated the world economy. After the Second World War, and approximately a hundred years after Japan opened up to the modern world, Eiji Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno pioneered the concept of lean production at the Toyota car company. And now, although superimposing the method on existing mass production systems causes pain and upheaval, manufacturers around the world are trying to embrace this innovative system.

B Perhaps the best way to describe lean production is to compare it with the two other major manufacturing systems: craft production and mass production. The craft producer uses highly skilled workers and simple but flexible tools to make exactly what the customer asks for – one item at a time. A present-day example of this method is the customised production of a few exotic sports cars. The concept of craft production remains very popular, but the problem with it is obvious. Goods produced by the craft method – as cars once exclusively were – cost too much for most of us to afford. So at the beginning of the twentieth century, mass production was developed as an alternative method. The mass producer uses narrowly skilled professionals to design products which are then made by unskilled or semi-skilled workers, using expensive, single-purpose machines. These churn out standardised products in very high volumes. Because the machinery costs so much, and is so intolerant of disruption, the mass producer keeps standard designs in production for as long as possible. The result is that the customer gets lower costs, but at the expense of variety, and by means of work methods which most employees find boring and dispiriting. By contrast, the lean production system combines the advantages of craft and mass production, while avoiding the high cost of the former and the rigidity of the latter. Towards this end, companies appoint teams of multi-skilled workers to all levels of the organisation, and use highly flexible and increasingly automated machines to produce goods in enormous volume and variety.

C Lean production is so called because, compared with mass production, it uses less of everything – half the human effort in the factory, half the manufacturing space, half the investment in tools, and half the engineering hours to develop the new product. It also results in far fewer defects.

D Perhaps the most striking contrast between mass and lean production systems lies in their production standards. Mass producers set a limited goal for themselves: ‘good enough’, which translates into an acceptable number of defects, a maximum acceptable number of inventories, and a narrow range of standardised products. Lean producers, on the other hand, are unwilling to compromise standards in any of these areas.

E Although cost reduction is the primary objective of the lean production system, it must meet three other intermediate objectives in order to achieve this: quantity control, quality assurance and respect for humanity. Firstly, the system must be able to adapt to daily and monthly fluctuations in demand. Secondly, each separate process must supply only good units to the subsequent process. Thirdly, in as far as the system uses human resources to attain its cost objectives, respect for human needs must be cultivated. It should be emphasised that none of these three objectives can be achieved separately.

F The continuous flow of lean manufacturing production relies on two practical mechanisms: just-in-time and autonomation. Just-in-time means, for example, that in the process of assembling the parts to build a car, components from the preceding process should arrive at the next part of the line at exactly the right time and in the correct quantities. If just-in-time is fully realised throughout the company, then superfluous inventories are completely eliminated from the factory, making stores or warehouses unnecessary. However, relying solely on a central planning approach to control schedules for all stages of the production process simultaneously is very difficult in the case of cars, which consist of thousands of parts. So the lean system looks at the production flow in reverse; in other words, employees go to the preceding process to withdraw the necessary quantity of units at the appropriate time. The preceding process must produce only sufficient quantities of units to replace those that have been withdrawn, and in turn withdraws the requisite number of components from the process that precedes it.

G Autonomation is the automatic checking for abnormalities in the production process. In order to realise just-in-time perfectly, only units which are in perfect condition must be allowed to flow to the next process, and this flow must be regular and uninterrupted. In other words, quality control must coexist with just-in-time procedures throughout the system. Autonomation involves building in a mechanism to prevent the multiplication of defects in machines or product lines. For example, in Toyota factories almost all the machines have been fitted with stopping devices, and the concept of autonomation has been extended to manual production lines. If something abnormal happens there, the worker pushes a button to stop the whole line, and lights, which are hung so high in the factory that they are visible to everyone, indicate the position of the problem.

14
Paragraph A
- i. Global resistance to lean manufacturing
- ii. The historical context
- iii. Procedures for controlling quality
- iv. The pros and cons of different production systems
- v. The impact on profits
- vi. Procedures for controlling supply
- vii. The origin of the term
- viii. A crucial difference in levels of quality
- ix. Working conditions
- x. Interdependent strategies for controlling expenditure
15
Paragraph B
16
Paragraph C
17
Paragraph D
18
Paragraph E
19
Paragraph F
20
Paragraph G
21
A small number of unusual cars are still produced by the ______ method.
22
Lean production requires staff who are ______.
23
Lean production employs fewer people, and uses less ______, equipment and time.
24
Storage facilities are not needed if a procedure known as ______ is implemented in the lean production method.
25
Autonomation is a procedure for spotting any ______ in the products on a production line.
26
At Toyota factories, ______ are suspended above manual production lines in order to show where production has to be halted.

Reading Passage 3: Let's all be friends

From healthcare to climate change, governments today face a range of problems in which they must persuade people to change their behaviour. But maybe instead of relying on their powers of persuasion, governments should consider using the science of social networks as a tool to do this. True, many claims for the power of these are based on the hype surrounding major social networking websites. But the basic idea is simple: people can join together in groups with particular patterns of social links, and these patterns then have important effects on the way they behave.

The shape of these networks has surprising effects. Take an unlikely example: stage musicals. Brian Uzzi is a sociologist at Northwestern University in Chicago. He is also a big fan of musicals. Musicals have been big business for decades, but investors have to guess which shows will be a hit. Bye Bye Birdie, a profitable 1960 production, ran for 607 nights. Bring Back Birdie, its 1981 sequel, closed after just four. Intrigued, Uzzi used network science to find out why.

He investigated 321 American musicals that were launched between 1945 and 1989, paying particular attention to whether the team of director, producers, choreographers and writers had worked together before. After crunching the statistics, he discovered something remarkable. Teams who had never worked together, perhaps unsurprisingly, fared poorly: their 'weak' networks meant a lack of creative vision, and lots of failures. And at the other extreme, teams that had worked together successfully also tended to produce flops. Sometimes, lacking outside creative input, the team just rehashed the same ideas that worked the last time; sometimes, lacking newcomers, they 'developed' their vision in unwise ways. Either way, lightning rarely struck twice. But, in between, Uzzi found a point of balance. Groups with exactly the right mix of new and old participants reliably produced hits. This variation in the 'density' of the ties allowed easy communication and fostered greater creativity; new ideas from the outsiders meshed with the experience of the insiders. It made no difference whether a musical was about cats or roller-skating, or who starred in it - what mattered was the nature of the network binding its team together.

These insights have some fascinating consequences for policymaking—particularly in the area of health. According to network science, teenagers are more likely to adopt unhealthy eating habits if their friends' friends consume junk food, even if they don't personally know those individuals. Conversely, they may be encouraged to eat more healthily if their immediate friends do. This opens up opportunities for governments to reduce spending. For example, suppose a health authority has £100 and wants to improve the diets of ten people. If it invests £10 in each individual separately, it might only influence one or two. However, by investing the entire sum in persuading one or two key individuals who are central to a social network, the authority could trigger a cascade effect, influencing the entire group for a fraction of the cost. The same principle could be applied to other areas, such as encouraging physical exercise or quitting smoking.

However, the influence of networks is not always positive. The same mechanisms that can spread healthy behaviours can also amplify harmful ones. Financial panic, political extremism, and the rapid proliferation of unhealthy fads can all be accelerated by tightly-knit social networks. This presents a significant challenge for policymakers: how to harness the power of social connectivity for good while mitigating its potential for harm. Understanding the precise structure of these networks—identifying the key influencers and the strength of the connections between people—is therefore critical. Without this map of human relationships, any intervention risks being inefficient or could even produce unintended negative consequences.

27
Brian Uzzi’s research into Broadway musicals revealed that the success of a production was not determined by its subject matter or cast, but by the ________ of its creative team.
28
He found that groups composed entirely of newcomers were often unsuccessful due to a lack of ________.
29
Conversely, teams that had a history of working together also frequently produced ________ because they tended to reuse old ideas.
30
The most successful teams had a ________ of experienced and new members.
31
This balance in network ________ promoted effective communication and creativity.
32
Governments are currently very effective at using social network science.
- YES. YES
- NO. NO
- NOT GIVEN. NOT GIVEN
33
Bring Back Birdie was financially successful.
34
Uzzi’s study analysed musicals from the first half of the 20th century.
35
The eating habits of a teenager can be affected by someone they have never met.
36
Investing money in central figures is guaranteed to be more cost-effective.
37
Can be used to improve public health initiatives, e.g., diet and ________.
38
Targeting key people in a network can create a ________ effect, influencing many others.
39
Networks can also spread ________ behaviours, like financial panic or extreme views.
40
To use networks effectively, policymakers must understand their ________.

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1. TRUE
Heritage Farm is described as different from most other nearby farms because it focuses on preserving rare and heirloom seeds, unlike typical farms that grow commercial crops.
2. FALSE
Seed Savers Exchange is described as the largest nongovernment-owned seed bank, so most others are smaller.
3. NOT GIVEN
There is no information about Diane Ott Whealy's grandfather teaching her about seed varieties.
4. FALSE
The seeds given to Seed Savers Exchange are stored in special storage facilities, not outdoors.
5. NOT GIVEN
The passage does not say whether Diane and her husband choose which heirloom seeds to grow.
6. NOT GIVEN
There is no information about the order in which seeds are listed in The Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook.
7. TRUE
The Yearbook describes how each seed was obtained, as it gives the story or origin of each seed.
8. appearance
Supermarkets want fruit and vegetables to be standard in their appearance, as they prefer produce that looks uniform.
9. rainforests
The passage says people know about plants disappearing from rainforests, but few know about the decline in fruit and vegetable varieties.
10. apples
Less than 100 of the types of apples once available in the USA are still grown, showing a loss of diversity.
11. 50 percent
Over 50 percent of food varieties around the world have disappeared in the last 100 years, showing a major decline.
12. famine
Rick Ward believes the threat to food supplies in Asia and Africa might lead to a famine, meaning a severe shortage of food.
13. population
Twice the amount of food may be needed because of an increase in population, as more people means more food is required.
14. ii
Paragraph A is about the historical context, explaining the background and development of production systems.
15. iv
Paragraph B discusses the pros and cons of different production systems, comparing their advantages and disadvantages.
16. vii
Paragraph C explains the origin of the term, describing where the term 'lean production' comes from.
17. viii
Paragraph D highlights a crucial difference in levels of quality between production methods.
18. x
Paragraph E discusses interdependent strategies for controlling expenditure, showing how different methods work together to save money.
19. vi
Paragraph F is about procedures for controlling supply, describing how supply is managed in production.
20. iii
Paragraph G explains procedures for controlling quality, focusing on how quality is checked and maintained.
21. craft production
A small number of unusual cars are still produced by the craft production method, which is used for special or custom vehicles.
22. multi-skilled
Lean production requires staff who are multi-skilled, meaning they can do different types of work.
23. manufacturing space
Lean production uses less manufacturing space, equipment, and time, making it more efficient.
24. just-in-time
Storage facilities are not needed if just-in-time is used, because materials arrive exactly when needed.
25. defects
Autonomation is a procedure for spotting any defects in products, helping to catch mistakes early.
26. lights
At Toyota factories, lights are suspended above manual production lines to show where production must be stopped if there is a problem.
27. network
Brian Uzzi found that the success of a musical was determined by the network of its creative team, not by the subject or cast.
28. vision
Groups made up entirely of newcomers often failed due to a lack of vision, meaning they did not have a clear direction.
29. flops
Teams with a history of working together often produced flops because they reused old ideas instead of being creative.
30. mix
The most successful teams had a mix of experienced and new members, combining fresh ideas with experience.
31. density
This balance in network density helped teams communicate well and be creative.
32. NO
The passage says governments are not currently very effective at using social network science, so the answer is NO.
33. NO
Bring Back Birdie was not financially successful, as the passage states it failed at the box office.
34. NO
Uzzi’s study did not analyse musicals from the first half of the 20th century, so the answer is NO.
35. YES
The passage says a teenager's eating habits can be influenced by someone they have never met, showing the power of networks.
36. NO
Investing money in central figures is not guaranteed to be more cost-effective, as the passage explains it does not always work.
37. exercise
Networks can be used to improve public health initiatives, such as diet and exercise.
38. cascade
Targeting key people in a network can create a cascade effect, where influence spreads to many others.
39. harmful
Networks can also spread harmful behaviours, like financial panic or extreme views.
40. structure
To use networks effectively, policymakers must understand their structure, meaning how the network is organized.

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