Reading 2026-05 Test 17 — 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: Ambergris

In the ancient world, the waxy grey substance we now refer to as ambergris was highly prized for its medicinal properties, and was widely used as a spice, which was believed to be an aphrodisiac when added to food or wine. Ambergris itself is pleasantly aromatic, especially when warmed, and it was also highly valued as a fixing agent in the making of perfume, since it enabled a scent to retain its fragrance for much longer than might otherwise have been possible. Most ambergris was found in the form of lumps floating on the surface of the sea, or washed up on the shores of tropical and temperate oceans. At one time, ambergris was worth its weight in gold, but there was much confusion about its origins.

Ambergris was known to the Arabs as ‘ambar’ and was originally called amber in the West in the Middle Ages. This eventually led to further confusion in the popular mind between ambergris and true amber, the mineral known to mineralogists as succinite, which is actually fossilised tree resin, and generally yellow in colour. Both substances were rare and costly, and both were associated with the sea, largely because for Europeans the most common source of amber was the shores of the Baltic. In Chapter 92 of Moby Dick, the American writer Herman Melville pours scorn on those who believed the two substances to be the same: ‘Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far-inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odourless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant that it is largely used in perfumery.’

Moby Dick was published in 1851, by which time the mystery of the origins of ambergris had been resolved by the scientific community. In 1783, the botanist Joseph Banks, who had accompanied Captain James Cook on his voyages of discovery in the Pacific, presented a paper to the Royal Society of London by the German physician Dr Franz Xavier Schwediawer in which it was conclusively proved that ambergris came from sperm whales. In this, he was confirming an observation made in the 13th century by the great Venetian traveller Marco Polo who, while on the island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean, had witnessed a sperm whale vomiting up ambergris. But whereas Marco Polo imagined that the whale had swallowed the lump in the depths of the sea, Schwediawer showed that the origin of the material was inside the whale itself.

The sperm whale is the largest of the odontocetes, or toothed whales. Males can grow up to 20 metres in length. Melville described the sperm whale as ‘the king of whales’, and his novel Moby Dick is based on the pursuit of one such creature. Sperm whales are renowned for their ability to dive to great depths, possibly as far as 3,000 metres below the surface, and for remaining underwater for periods of two hours or more in pursuit of their favourite prey, the giant squid.

It is from the problems the whales have in digesting the beaks of such creatures that ambergris has its origins. The beak is sharp and irritates the whale’s lower intestine, which responds by producing a black, foul-smelling liquid. It is not clear to scientists whether this secretion should be considered a normal response by the whale’s digestive system or a pathological one, but from time to time large quantities of the liquid are vomited up by the whale. Once outside the whale’s body and exposed to air, the substance hardens, acquiring the waxy, greyish and pleasantly aromatic characteristics of ambergris. Often the beaks of squid are still found embedded in lumps of ambergris, some of which can weigh several hundred kilograms. Melville took some delight in contrasting the origins of ambergris with the high value placed upon it by refined society: ‘Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale!’

Sperm whales were ruthlessly pursued by commercial whalers in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1963-64 alone, almost 30,000 individuals were killed, and only the imposition of a ban on the hunting of sperm whales in 1984 saved the species from extinction. Ambergris was by far the most valuable product to be extracted during the processing of the whales’ carcasses, and over 90 per cent of the annual worldwide total was acquired in this way, as a by-product of commercial whaling. However, even before the ban on hunting sperm whales was imposed, the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act had prohibited trade in ambergris. Just as petroleum and plastic products were replacing other natural products of whaling, so ambergris was supplanted in the making of perfume by other materials, some natural and some synthetic in origin. Nevertheless, it is possible that, as sperm-whale populations recover to their former numbers in the wild, so the sight of lumps of ambergris washed ashore along the tide-line will once again become a familiar one to beach-combers the world over.

1
very expensive
- A. ambergris only
- B. amber only
- C. both ambergris and amber
- D. neither ambergris nor amber
2
a food flavouring
3
used as currency
4
sweet-smelling
5
referred to by Herman Melville
6
can be seen through
7
Ambergris is formed in whales because of problems digesting the ________ of giant squid.
8
Black liquid is produced and is ________ from time to time.
9
The liquid ________ on contact with the air.
10
In the 20th century, most of the world’s ambergris came from processing dead whales.
- TRUE. TRUE
- FALSE. FALSE
- NOT GIVEN. NOT GIVEN
11
The value of ambergris has increased recently.
12
Ambergris remains an important ingredient in perfume.
13
New uses have recently been found for ambergris.

Reading Passage 2: The Constant Evolution of the Humble Tomato

Heirloom tomatoes—varieties that have been passed down through several generations of a family because they are thought to have a particularly good flavor—are really no more 'natural' than the varieties available in grocery stores. New studies promise to restore their lost, healthy genes.

Famous for their taste, color, and organic appearance, heirloom tomatoes are favorites of gardeners and advocates of locally grown foods. The tomato enthusiast might conclude that, given the immense varieties, heirlooms must have a more diverse and superior set of genes than the tomatoes available in grocery stores, those ordinary hybrid varieties such as cherry and plum. However, their seeming diversity is only skin-deep: heirlooms are actually feeble and inbred—the defective product of breeding experiments that began hundreds of years ago, and exploded thanks to enthusiastic backyard gardeners. "The irony of all this," says Steven Tanksley, a geneticist at Cornell University, "is all that diversity of heirlooms can be accounted for by a handful of genes. There're probably no more than 10 mutant genes that create the diversity of heirlooms you see." But rather than simply proving that the myth about the heirloom's diversity is wrong, Tanksley's deconstruction of the tomato genome, along with work by others, is showing how a small berry-like fruit from the Andes became one of the world's top crops.

The cultivated tomato is a member of the nightshade family that includes New World crops such as the potato, which spread around the globe after Christopher Columbus brought them back to Spain in the 15th century. But whereas scientists have uncovered a wealth of archaeological evidence on early farming practices in the New World, the record is blank when it comes to the tomato. The modern tomato seems to have its origins in the Andes in South America and may have been domesticated in Vera Cruz, Mexico. Primitive varieties still grow throughout the Americas. All told, botanists call as many as 13 species 'tomatoes' and consider an additional four to be closely related.

One might assume that one of these known wild species became today's cultivated crop, but that's not the case: the Mother Tomato has never been found. The closest relative is the currant tomato, which, based on genetic comparisons, split from today's tomato some 1.4 million years ago. So researchers like Tanksley have to work backward, crossing tomato varieties and species in order to understand how various genes influence shape and size. Once isolated, Tanksley later inserts those genes into other tomato varieties to make his case with a dramatic transformation.

Tanksley concludes from his analyses that in their effort to make bigger, tastier, and faster-growing fruit, our ancestors ultimately exploited just 30 mutations out of the tomato's 35,000 genes. Most of these genes have only small effects on tomato size and shape, but recently Tanksley and his colleagues reported that they found a gene that increases fruit size by 50 percent. It was probably the most important event in domestication. The first written record of tomatoes—from Spain in the 1500s—confirms that this mutation, which enlarges tomatoes by producing compartments known as locules, existed back in the same yellow tomatoes that gave Italians the word pomodoro, or golden apple. Besides size, tomato farmers also selected for shape. To discover those genes, Esther van der Knaap, a Tanksley alumnus now at The Ohio State University, took a gene from one heirloom tomato and inserted it into a wild relative. She observed that, as a result, the tiny fruits became shaped like pears.

The selection of these traits has, however, affected the heirloom's hardiness. They often suffer from infections that cause the fruit to crack, split, and otherwise rot quickly. Wild plants must continuously evolve to fend off such infections, points out Roger Chetelat of the Tomato Genetics Resource Center at the University of California. But in their quest for size, shape, and flavor, humans have inadvertently eliminated defensive genes. As a result, most possess only a single disease-resistant gene. Chetelat elaborates that heirlooms' taste may have less to do with their genes than with the productivity of the plant and the growing environment. Any plant that produces only two fruits, as heirlooms sometimes do, is highly likely to produce juicier, sweeter, and more flavorful fruit than varieties that produce 100, as commercial types do. In addition, heirlooms are sold ripened on the vine, a certain way to get tastier results than allowing them to mature on the shelf. This means breeders feel confident that getting germ-beating genes back into heirlooms won't harm the desirable aspects of the fruit. Modern breeding has resuscitated grocery store tomatoes with an influx of wild genes; in the past 50 years, as many as 40 disease-resistant genes have been bred back into commercial crops.

In 1996, a tomato breeder and former Tanksley student named Doug Heath began a favorite project. After 12 years of traditional breeding with the help of molecular markers, he created a new multi-colored tomato less prone to cracking and also endowed with 12 disease-resistant genes. The original heirloom plant, Heath explains, had defective flowers, which is one reason why it produced only two fruits compared with the 30 he gets from his new variety. He claims he is also able to maintain a comparable flavor and sugar profile even on productive plants. The heirloom's defects are, after all, just an accident of a narrow breeding strategy left over from the very beginning of genetic modification.

14
An explanation of research aimed at restoring the health of the heirloom tomato.
15
A reference to a false belief about the heirloom tomato.
16
A description of the flavor of the heirloom tomato.
17
A reference to a single gene that significantly improves the cultivation of tomatoes.
18
The transplanting of certain genes into tomatoes can change their shape.
- A. Steven Tanksley
- B. Esther van der Knaap
- C. Roger Chetelat
- D. Doug Heath
19
The flavor of the heirloom tomato is largely dependent on actual yield and cultivation.
20
A new type of tomato can be produced that is stronger than the original heirloom tomato yet equally sweet and flavorsome.
21
The wide variety of heirloom tomatoes is due to only a small number of genes.
22
There is little information on the ______ of the tomato despite the existence of data on the growing of other New World crops.
23
Although it is uncertain, the tomato is thought to have first grown in the ______.
24
In regard to genetic similarities, the type of tomato ______ is the nearest to the earliest.
25
A genetic ______ which is evident in pomodoro produced larger tomatoes.
26
______ are a problem for heirloom tomatoes because they frequently lead to damage and deterioration.

Reading Passage 3: Research into the effects of different teaching styles

Prior to 1960, most inquiries into pupils’ learning skills explored the relationship between factors such as children’s social background, personality or measured intelligence and their achievement in various school subjects. Studies of teachers were largely a quest for criteria of effectiveness, and numerous investigations sought links between personality or attitude and ‘success’ at teaching. By 1950, Domas and Tiedeman were able to survey 672 such studies of teacher effectiveness. Yet there was widespread disappointment with such research, partly because so little of value seemed to emerge. First of all, there was little agreement about what constituted ‘good’ teaching or who the good teachers were. Secondly, there were numerous conflicting and contradictory findings. No sooner had one investigator found a relationship which appeared to be significant, than another discovered the opposite effect.

For example, in 1945, two American researchers, Rostker and Rolfe, both using standardized testing techniques and broad samples of teachers, reached exactly opposite conclusions. Rostker concluded that the intelligence of the teacher is the most important single factor conditioning teaching ability, and that there is no significant relationship between personality and teaching ability. Rolfe, however, found no correlation between intelligence and teaching efficiency: he claimed that the teacher’s personality was what produced good teaching. Another American writer, Barr (1961), summarized a massive amount of American research and underlined the chaos in the research literature on effectiveness: “Some teachers were preferred by administrators, some were liked by the pupils, and some taught in classes where there were substantial pupil gains, and generally speaking these were not the same teachers.”

One of the earliest pieces of research dates from 1912, when Stevens made 100 random observations of lessons in a variety of subject areas, in order to analyze the number and nature of questions being asked by teachers. Stevens’s overall total was 64% teacher talk and 36% pupil talk, figures which are remarkably similar to a number of findings half a century later.

For many years in the first half of the 20th century, so-called ‘formal’ teaching was the norm. Teachers taught their classes as a whole group, gave out information, asked questions which predominantly required factual recall, and frequently set a common written task for the children to complete in a prescribed period of time. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that one focus of classroom interaction research in the decades following Stevens’s inquiry was on the phenomenon of ‘attentiveness’. A number of studies in the 1920s and 1930s, by Morrison and others, sought relationships between the degree of attention being paid by children and the amount they subsequently appeared to have learnt. Such research was usually based on observing teachers at work, a technique which was also employed extensively by United States administrators in the 1920s and 1930s, in order to assess teachers’ competence and allocate merit payments to so-called ‘superior’ teachers.

As the 1930s came to an end, it was partly the emergence of totalitarian regimes in Europe which led to a shift in interest in the United States away from attentiveness, with its emphasis on the authority of the teacher, and towards a scrutiny of authoritarianism itself. A number of people began to feel that if dictatorship were to be avoided, children must learn in school how to handle democracy. Several investigators examined the processes taking place within small discussion groups, and tried to establish superiority for discussion groups over lecture classes, but with conflicting results. The movement towards what was becoming known as child-centred education was gathering momentum, and as interest in child development increased, investigators began to discover the usefulness of direct observation and the categorization of child behavior.

This was when systematic observation of teacher-pupil interaction began in earnest. Anderson (1939) studied what he called ‘domination’ and ‘integration’ amongst kindergarten children. Dominative acts by children included blaming and snatching toys, and such acts by teachers included restricting children’s activities; while children’s integrative acts included sharing facilities and playing harmoniously, and those of teachers included expanding opportunities for self-direction and co-operation. Anderson then attempted to measure what is now commonly called ‘classroom climate’.

Lewin, Lippitt and White (1939 and 1943) studied the effects of different teaching styles. They arranged for three groups of five boys each to be taught in very different ways: these were labelled ‘authoritarian’, ‘democratic’ and ‘laissez-faire’. The first two of these were similar to Anderson’s concept of dominative and integrative teachers.

Beginning with Withall’s work in 1949, there was much greater interest in interaction within the classroom. Withall used the term ‘social-emotional climate’ to describe the emotional tone created as a result of face-to-face interaction in groups, and, like many who followed him, concentrated his analysis of this climate on the study of teachers’ verbal behavior. Withall also made efforts towards increasing the reliability of analyses, and this important pioneering work in the development of classroom observation methodology was followed by many others during the 1950s.

Partly because of the disappointing results of the teacher-effectiveness research, and partly because of the general neglect in earlier work of the variables of actual classroom behavior, the decade 1960–70 produced a large number of studies of classroom processes, based on observation of teachers at work.

27
Research into classroom interaction: 1920–1970 1920–1939 Research largely investigated the relationship between children’s attentiveness and their _____ (27). In addition, attentiveness was used to measure the _____ (28) of the teachers.
- A. authoritarianism
- B. competence
- C. emergence
- D. learning
- E. observation
- F. personality
- G. processes
- H. reliability
- I. training
- J. verbal behavior
28
1939–49 Research was influenced by a growing distrust of _____ (29). The period saw the beginnings of systematic analysis of the _____ (30) which occur in lecture classes and in small group discussions.
29
1949–60 Classroom transactions were analysed in more detail, often with a focus on the _____ (31) of teachers. Researchers aimed to improve the _____ (32) of their methods.
30
1960–70 The number of studies based on live _____ (33) greatly increased.
31
34 claimed that the most important contribution to success in teaching is made by intelligence
- A. Domas and Tiedeman
- B. Rostker
- C. Rolfe
- D. Barr
- E. Stevens
- F. Morrison
- G. Lewin, Lippitt and White
32
35 set up an experiment to discover how pupils responded to various types of teaching
33
36 focused on the questions which teachers asked in the classroom
34
37 discovered a connection between success in teaching and the personality of the teacher
35
38 the influence of political events on research
36
39 an example of how children’s behavior was categorized for research purposes
37
40 a reason for research into children’s attention

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1. C
Both ambergris and amber are described as 'very expensive' in the passage, so C is correct.
2. A
Ambergris is used as a food flavouring, but amber is not, so A is correct.
3. D
Neither ambergris nor amber has been used as currency, so D is correct.
4. A
Ambergris is described as sweet-smelling, but amber is not, so A is correct.
5. C
Both ambergris and amber are mentioned by Herman Melville, so C is correct.
6. B
Amber can be seen through (it is translucent), but ambergris cannot, so B is correct.
7. beaks
The answer is 'beaks' because the passage says ambergris forms in whales due to problems digesting the beaks of giant squid.
8. vomited up
The black liquid is 'vomited up from time to time,' as stated in the passage.
9. hardens
The liquid 'hardens on contact with the air,' which matches the answer.
10. TRUE
It is TRUE because the passage says most ambergris in the 20th century came from processing dead whales.
11. NOT GIVEN
NOT GIVEN is correct because the passage does not mention if the value of ambergris has increased recently.
12. FALSE
FALSE is correct because the passage says ambergris is no longer an important ingredient in perfume.
13. NOT GIVEN
NOT GIVEN is correct because the passage does not say if new uses have recently been found for ambergris.
14. E
E is correct because this section explains research to restore the health of the heirloom tomato.
15. A
A is correct because this section talks about a false belief about the heirloom tomato.
16. E
E is correct because this section describes the flavor of the heirloom tomato.
17. D
D is correct because this section mentions a single gene that improves tomato cultivation.
18. B
B is correct because Esther van der Knaap is mentioned as transplanting genes to change tomato shape; A is tempting but focuses on variety, not shape.
19. C
C is correct because Roger Chetelat says flavor depends on yield and cultivation; B is tempting but she focuses on shape, not flavor.
20. D
D is correct because Doug Heath talks about making a new tomato that is strong and tasty like the heirloom.
21. A
A is correct because Steven Tanksley says the variety of heirloom tomatoes comes from only a few genes.
22. origin
'Origin' is correct because the passage says there is little information on the origin of the tomato.
23. Andes
'Andes' is correct because the passage says the tomato is thought to have first grown in the Andes.
24. currant
'Currant' is correct because the passage says the currant tomato is genetically closest to the earliest type.
25. mutation
'Mutation' is correct because the passage says a genetic mutation in pomodoro made larger tomatoes.
26. infections
'Infections' is correct because the passage says infections cause damage and deterioration in heirloom tomatoes.
27. D / B
'Learning' is correct because research looked at children's attentiveness and their learning; 'competence' is correct because attentiveness was used to measure teacher competence.
28. A / G
'Authoritarianism' is correct because research distrusted authoritarianism; 'processes' is correct because the period started systematic analysis of classroom processes.
29. J / H
'Verbal behavior' is correct because research focused on teachers' verbal behavior; 'reliability' is correct because researchers wanted to improve the reliability of their methods.
30. E
'Observation' is correct because the number of studies using live observation increased.
31. B
B is correct because Rostker claimed intelligence is the most important for teaching success.
32. G
G is correct because Lewin, Lippitt and White set up experiments to see how pupils responded to different teaching styles.
33. E
E is correct because Stevens focused on the questions teachers asked in class.
34. C
C is correct because Rolfe found a link between teaching success and teacher personality.
35. E
E is correct because this section discusses how political events influenced research.
36. F
F is correct because this section gives an example of how children's behavior was categorized for research.
37. D
D is correct because this section gives a reason for research into children's attention.

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