Reading 2026-05 Test 68 — 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: Ants Could Teach Ants

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. Choose FOUR letters, A-H. Write your answers in boxes 6-9 on your answer sheet. Which FOUR of the following behaviours of animals are mentioned in the passage? Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet, write YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

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 tabletop 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 researcher said the careful way the leader 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.

“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.

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.

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.

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 of a predator. Sounding the alarm can be costly, because the animal may draw the attention of the predator to itself. But it allows others to 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.”

Tim Caro, a zoologist, presented two cases of animal communication. He found that cheetah mother 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 to 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.

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 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.

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 constrains of brain size.

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 leader 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 warned that scientists may be barking up the wrong tree when they look not only for examples of humanlike behaviour among other animals but humanlike 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.

1
Animals could use objects to locate food.
- A. Nigel Franks
- B. Marc Hauser
- C. Tim Caro
- D. Bennett Galef Jr.
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.
6
touch each other with antenna
7
alert others when there is danger
8
hunt food for the young
9
use tools like twigs
10
Ants’ tandem running involves only one-way communication.
11
Franks’ 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: Tasmanian Tiger

Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 14-17 on your answer sheet. Look at the following statements (Questions 18-23) and the list of people below. Match each statement with the correct person, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter, A, B, C or D, in boxes 18-23 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once. Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet.

Although it was called tiger, it looked like a dog with black stripes on its back and it was the largest known carnivorous marsupial of modern times. Yet, despite its fame for being one of the most fabled animals in the world, it is one of the least understood of Tasmania’s native animals. The scientific name for the Tasmanian tiger is Thylacine and it is believed that they have become extinct in the 20th century.

Fossils of thylacines dating from about almost 12 million years ago have been dug up at various places in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. They were widespread in Australia 7,000 years ago, but have probably been extinct on the continent for 2,000 years. This is believed to be because of the introduction of dingoes around 8,000 years ago. Because of disease, thylacine numbers may have been declining in Tasmania at the time of European settlement 200 years ago, but the decline was certainly accelerated by the new arrivals. The last known Tasmanian Tiger died in Hobart Zoo in 1936 and the animal is officially classified as extinct. Technically, this means that it has not been officially sighted in the wild or captivity for 50 years. However, there are still unsubstantiated sightings.

Hans Naarding, whose study of animals had taken him around the world, was conducting a survey of a species of endangered migratory bird. What he saw that night is now regarded as the most credible sighting recorded of thylacine that many believe has been extinct for more than 70 years.

“I had to work at night,” Naarding takes up the story. “I was in the habit of intermittently shining a spotlight around. The beam fell on an animal in front of the vehicle, less than 10m away. Instead of risking movement by grabbing for a camera, I decided to register very carefully what I was seeing. The animal was about the size of a small shepherd dog, a very healthy male in prime condition. What set it apart from a dog, though, was a slightly sloping hindquarter, with a fairly thick tail being a straight continuation of the backline of the animal. It had 12 distinct stripes on its back, continuing onto its butt. I knew perfectly well what I was seeing. As soon as I reached for the camera, it disappeared into the tea-tree undergrowth and scrub.”

The director of Tasmania’s National Parks at the time, Peter Morrow, decided in his wisdom to keep Naarding’s sighting of the thylacine secret for two years. When the news finally broke, it was accompanied by pandemonium. “I was besieged by television crews, including four to five from Japan, and others from the United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand and South America,” said Naarding.

Government and private search parties combed the region, but no further sightings were made. The tiger, as always, had escaped to its lair, a place many insist exists only in our imagination. But since then, the thylacine has staged somethings of a comeback, becoming part of Australian mythology. There have been more than 4,000 claimed sightings of the beast since it supposedly died out, and the average claims each year reported to authorities now number 150. Associate professor of zoology at the University of Tasmanian, Randolph Rose, has said he dreams of seeing a thylacine. But Rose, who in his 35 years in Tasmanian academia has fielded countless reports of thylacine sightings, is now convinced that his dream will go unfulfilled.

“The consensus among conservationists is that, usually, any animal with a population base of less than 1,000 is headed for extinction within 60 years,” says Rose. “Sixty years ago, there was only one thylacine that we know of, and that was in Hobart Zoo,” he says.

Dr. David Pemberton, curator of zoology at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, whose PhD thesis was on the thylacine, says that despite scientific thinking that 500 animals are required to sustain a population, the Florida panther is down to a dozen or so animals and, while it does have some inbreeding problems, is still ticking along. “I’ll take a punt and say that, if we manage to find a thylacine in the scrub, it means that there are 50-plus animals out there.”

After all, animals can be notoriously elusive. The strange fish known as the coelacanth, with its “proto-legs”, was thought to have died out along with the dinosaurs 700 million years ago until a specimen was dragged to the surface in a shark net off the south-east coast of South Africa in 1938.

Wildlife biologist Nick Mooney has the unenviable task of investigating all “sightings” of the tiger totaling 4,000 since the mid-1930s, and averaging about 150 a year. It was Mooney who was first consulted late last month about the authenticity of digital photographic images purportedly taken by a German tourist while on a recent bushwalk in the state. On face value, Mooney says, the account of the sighting, and the two photographs submitted as proof, amount to one of the most convincing cases for the species’ survival he has seen.

And Mooney has seen it all – the mistakes, the hoaxes, the illusions and the plausible accounts of sightings. Hoaxers aside, most people who report sightings end up believing they have seen a thylacine, and are themselves believable to the point they could pass a lie-detector test, according to Mooney. Others, having tabled a creditable report, then become utterly obsessed like the Tasmanian who has registered 99 thylacine sightings to date. Mooney has seen individuals bankrupted by the obsession, and families destroyed. “It is a blind optimism that something is, rather than a cynicism that something isn’t,” Mooney says. “If something crosses the road, it’s not a case of ‘I wonder what that was?’ Rather, it is a case of ‘that’s a thylacine!’ It is a bit like a gold prospector’s blind faith, ‘it has got to be there’.”

However, Mooney treats all reports on face value. “I never try to embarrass people, or make fools of them. But the fact that I don’t pack the car immediately they ring can often be taken as ridicule. Obsessive characters get irate that someone in my position is not out there when they think the thylacine is there.”

But Hans Naarding, whose sighting of a striped animal two decades ago was the highlight of “a life of animal spotting”, remains bemused by the time and money people wasted on tiger searches. He says resources would be better applied to saving the Tasmanian devil, and helping migratory bird populations that are declining as a result of shrinking wetlands across Australia.

Could the thylacine still be out there? “Sure,” Naarding says. But he also says any discovery of surviving thylacine would be “rather pointless”. “How do you save a species from extinction? What could you do with it? If there are thylacines out there, they are better off right where they are.”

14
The Tasmanian tiger, also called thylacine, resembles the look of a dog and has __________ on its fur coat.
15
Many fossils have been found, showing that thylacines had existed as early as __________ years ago.
16
They lived throughout __________ before disappearing from the mainland.
17
And soon after the __________ settlers arrived the size of thylacine population in Tasmania shrunk at a higher speed.
18
His report of seeing a live thylacine in the wild attracted international interest.
- A. Hans Naarding
- B. Randolph Rose
- C. David Pemberton
- D. Nick Mooney
19
Many eye-witnesses’ reports are not trustworthy.
20
It doesn’t require a certain number of animals to ensure the survival of a species.
21
There is no hope of finding a surviving Tasmanian tigers.
22
Do not disturb them if there are any Tasmanian tigers still living today.
23
The interpretation of evidence can be affected by people’s beliefs.
24
Hans Naarding’s sighting has resulted in A government and organisations’ cooperative efforts to protect thylacine. B extensive interests to find a living thylacine. C increase of the number of reports of thylacine worldwide. D growth of popularity of thylacine in literature.
- A. government and organisations’ cooperative efforts to protect thylacine.
- B. extensive interests to find a living thylacine.
- C. increase of the number of reports of thylacine worldwide.
- D. growth of popularity of thylacine in literature.
25
The example of coelacanth is to illustrate A it lived in the same period with dinosaurs. B how dinosaurs evolved legs. C some animals are difficult to catch in the wild. D extinction of certain species can be mistaken.
- A. it lived in the same period with dinosaurs.
- B. how dinosaurs evolved legs.
- C. some animals are difficult to catch in the wild.
- D. extinction of certain species can be mistaken.
26
Mooney believes that all sighting reports should be A given some credit as they claim even if they are untrue. B acted upon immediately. C viewed as equally untrustworthy. D questioned and carefully investigated.
- A. given some credit as they claim even if they are untrue.
- B. acted upon immediately.
- C. viewed as equally untrustworthy.
- D. questioned and carefully investigated.

Reading Passage 3: The Future of the World’s Language

Complete the summary using the list of words, A-J, below. Write the correct letter, A-J, in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet. Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 32-35 on your answer sheet, write TRUE if the statement agrees with the information FALSE if the statement contradicts with the information NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet.

Of the world’s 6,500 living languages, around half are expected to die out by the end of this century, according to UNESCO. Just 11 are spoken by more than half of the earth’s population, so it is little wonder that those used by only a few are being left behind as we become a more homogenous, global society. In short, 95 percent of the world’s languages are spoken by only five percent of its population – a remarkable level of linguistic diversity stored in tiny pockets of speakers around the world. Mark Turin, a university professor, has launched WOLP (World Oral Language Project) to prevent the language from the brink of extinction.

He is trying to encourage indigenous communities to collaborate with anthropologists around the world to record what he calls “oral literature” through video cameras, voice recorders and other multimedia tools by awarding grants from a £30,000 pot that the project has secured this year. The idea is to collate this literature in a digital archive that can be accessed on demand and will make the nuts and bolts of lost cultures readily available.

For many of these communities, the oral tradition is at the heart of their culture. The stories they tell are creative as well as communicative. Unlike the languages with celebrated written traditions, such as Sanskrit, Hebrew and Ancient Greek, few indigenous communities have recorded their own languages or ever had them recorded until now.

The project suggested itself when Turin was teaching in Nepal. He wanted to study for a PhD in endangered languages and, while discussing it with his professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, was drawn to a map on his tutor’s wall. The map was full of pins of a variety of colours which represented all the world’s languages that were completely undocumented. At random, Turin chose a “pin” to document. It happened to belong to the Thangmi tribe, an indigenous community in the hills east of Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. “Many of the choices anthropologists and linguists who work on these traditional field-work projects are quite random,” he admits.

Continuing his work with the Thangmi community in the 1990s, Turin began to record the language he was hearing, realising that not only was this language and its culture entirely undocumented, it was known to few outside the tiny community. He set about trying to record their language and myth of origins. “I wrote 1,000 pages of grammar in English that nobody could use – but I realised that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough for me, it wasn’t enough for them. It simply wasn’t going to work as something for the community. So then I produced this trilingual word list in Thangmi, Nepali and English.”

In short, it was the first ever publication of that language. That small dictionary is still sold in local schools for a modest 20 rupees, and used as part of a wider cultural regeneration process to educate children about their heritage and language. The task is no small undertaking: Nepal itself is a country of massive ethnic and linguistic diversity, home to 100 languages from four different language families. What’s more, even fewer ethnic Thangmi speak the Thangmi language. Many of the community members have taken to speaking Nepali, the national language taught in schools and spread through the media, and community elders are dying without passing on their knowledge.

Despite Turin’s enthusiasm for his subject, he is baffled by many linguists’ refusal to engage in the issue he is working on. “Of the 6,500 languages spoken on Earth, many do not have written traditions and many of these spoken forms are endangered,” he says. “There are more linguists in universities around the world than there are spoken languages – but most of them aren’t working on this issue. To me it’s amazing that in this day and age, we still have an entirely incomplete image of the world’s linguistic diversity. People do PhDs on the apostrophe in French, yet we still don’t know how many languages are spoken.”

“When a language becomes endangered, so too does a cultural world view. We want to engage with indigenous people to document their myths and folklore, which can be harder to find funding for if you are based outside Western universities.”

Yet, despite the struggles facing initiatives such as the World Oral Literature Project, there are historical examples that point to the possibility that language restoration is no mere academic pipe dream. The revival of a modern form of Hebrew in the 19th century is often cited as one of the best proofs that languages long dead, belonging to small communities, can be resurrected and embraced by a guage of Jewish population of both Ottoman and British Palestine. It is now spoken by more than seven million people in Israel.

Yet, despite the difficulties these communities face in saving their languages, Dr. Turin believes that the fate of the world’s endangered languages is not sealed, and globalisation is not necessarily the nefarious perpetrator of evil it is often presented to be. “I call it the globalisation paradox: on the one hand globalisation and rapid socio-economic change are the things that are eroding and challenging diversity. But on the other, globalisation is providing us with new and very exciting tools and facilities to get to places to document those things that globalisation is eroding. Also, the communities at the coal-face of change are excited by what globalisation has to offer.”

In the meantime, the race is on to collect and protect as many of the languages as possible, so that the Rai Shaman in eastern Nepal ad those in the generations that follow him can continue their traditions and have a sense of identity. And it certainly is a race: Turin knows his project’s limits and believes it inevitable that a large number of those languages will disappear. “We have to be wholly realistic. A project like ours is in no position, and was not designed, to keep languages alive. The only people who can help languages survive are the people in those communities themselves. They need to be reminded that it’s good to speak their own language and I think we can help them do that – becoming modern doesn’t mean you have to lose your language.”

27
Most of the world’s languages are spoken by a __________ of people.
- A. similarity
- B. significance
- C. funding
- D. minority
- E. education
- F. difference
- G. economy
- H. diversity
- I. majority
- J. disappearance
28
However, Dr. Turin set up a project WOLP to prevent __________ of the languages.
29
The project provides the community with __________ to enable people to record their endangered languages.
30
The oral tradition has great cultural __________ .
31
An important __________ between languages spoken by few people and languages with celebrated written documents existed in many communities.
32
Turin argued that anthropologists and linguists usually think carefully before selecting an area to research.
33
Turin concluded that the Thangmi language had few similarities with other languages.
34
Turin has written that 1000-page document was inappropriate for Thangmi community.
35
Some Nepalese schools lack resources to devote to language teaching.
36
Why does Turin say people do PhDs on the apostrophe in French?
- A. He believes that researchers have limited role in the research of languages.
- B. He compares the methods of research into languages.
- C. He thinks research should result in a diverse cultural outlook.
- D. He holds that research into French should focus on more general aspects.
37
What is discussed in the ninth paragraph?
- A. Forces driving people to believe endangered languages can survive.
- B. The community where people distrust language revival.
- C. The methods of research that have improved language restoration.
- D. Initiatives the World Oral Literature Project is bringing to Israel.
38
How is the WOLP’s prospect?
- A. It would not raise enough funds to achieve its aims.
- B. It will help keep languages alive.
- C. It will be embraced by a large number of people.
- D. It has chance to succeed to protect the endangered languages.
39
What is Turin’s main point of globalisation?
- A. Globalisation is the main reason for endangered language.
- B. Globalisation has both advantages and disadvantages.
- C. We should have a more critical view of globalisation.
- D. We should foremost protect our identity in face of globalisation.
40
What does Turin suggest that community people should do?
- A. Learn other languages.
- B. Only have a sense of identity.
- C. Keep up with the modern society without losing their language.
- D. Join the race to protect as many languages as possible but be realistic.

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1. C
Tim Caro is mentioned as studying how animals use objects, like twigs, to find food, which matches the answer.
2. A
Nigel Franks is described as observing ants showing two-way, interactive teaching behaviors, which fits the question.
3. D
Bennett Galef Jr. warns that it is risky to claim ants teach like humans, saying we should be careful with such statements.
4. A
Nigel Franks found that ant leadership, like tandem running, helps other ants find food faster.
5. B
Marc Hauser points out that not all ant communication is true teaching, suggesting some behaviors are just signals.
6. A
Ants are described as touching each other with their antennae, which is a behavior linked to Nigel Franks (A).
7. B
Marc Hauser (B) is associated with ants alerting others when there is danger.
8. E
The passage says some animals hunt food for the young, which matches option E.
9. G
Using tools like twigs is linked to option G, as described in the passage about animal behavior.
10. NO
The passage explains that tandem running in ants involves two-way communication, not just one-way, so the answer is NO.
11. NOT GIVEN
There is no information about how many supporters Franks’ theory got after publicity, so the answer is NOT GIVEN.
12. NOT GIVEN
The passage does not say if ant teaching is exactly the same as human teaching, so the answer is NOT GIVEN.
13. YES
It is stated that cheetahs share food with younger ones, so the answer is YES.
14. black stripes
The passage says the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, has black stripes on its fur coat.
15. 12 million
Fossils show thylacines existed as early as 12 million years ago, as stated in the passage.
16. Australia
They lived throughout Australia before disappearing from the mainland, according to the passage.
17. European
The passage says the thylacine population shrunk faster after European settlers arrived.
18. A
Hans Naarding’s report of seeing a live thylacine attracted international interest.
19. D
Nick Mooney is noted for saying many eye-witness reports are not trustworthy.
20. C
David Pemberton argues that survival of a species does not require a certain number of animals.
21. B
Randolph Rose is the one who says there is no hope of finding surviving Tasmanian tigers.
22. A
Hans Naarding suggests that if any Tasmanian tigers are still alive, people should not disturb them.
23. D
Nick Mooney says that people’s beliefs can affect how they interpret evidence.
24. B
Naarding’s sighting led to extensive interest in finding a living thylacine, not just government action or more reports.
25. D
The coelacanth example is used to show that extinction can be mistaken, not just that animals are hard to catch.
26. A
Mooney believes all sighting reports should be given some credit, even if they are untrue, rather than being dismissed or acted on immediately.
27. J
Most of the world’s languages are spoken by a minority of people, not a majority.
28. C
Dr. Turin set up the project to prevent the disappearance of languages.
29. B
The project provides funding to help people record their endangered languages.
30. F
The oral tradition has great cultural significance, as stated in the passage.
31. H
There is an important difference between languages spoken by few people and those with celebrated written documents.
32. FALSE
The passage says Turin disagrees with the idea that researchers always choose areas carefully, so the answer is FALSE.
33. NOT GIVEN
There is no information about whether Thangmi had few similarities with other languages, so the answer is NOT GIVEN.
34. TRUE
Turin wrote that a 1000-page document was not suitable for the Thangmi community, so the answer is TRUE.
35. NOT GIVEN
The passage does not mention if Nepalese schools lack resources for language teaching, so the answer is NOT GIVEN.
36. A
Turin says people do PhDs on the apostrophe in French to show that researchers have a limited role in language research, not just to compare methods.
37. A
The ninth paragraph discusses why people believe endangered languages can survive, matching option A.
38. D
The passage suggests WOLP has a chance to succeed in protecting endangered languages, not just raising funds or being embraced by many people.
39. B
Turin’s main point is that globalisation has both advantages and disadvantages, not just that it endangers languages.
40. C
Turin suggests people should keep up with modern society without losing their language, not just focus on identity or learning other languages.

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