Category: IELTS Reading

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IELTS Reading preparation posts are here.

Answering Properly # Reading Section

Reading section is often the most difficult section, for students. What makes it more difficult is although you know the answer, it is very important that you answer it properly. After all, you are marked on the basis of what you have answered, rather than whether you knew the answer or not. For today, let us have a look at how to answer in reading section and gain all the marks.

  1. STYLE MATTERS- Yes, the way you answer the question must be similar to the way it has been given in the example. For instance, if in the example the answer is given as 34%, your answer must be given as a number, followed by percentage. If you answer as simply 34 or 34 percent, chances are that you may lose some marks.
  2. WORD LIMIT- Often in questions a word limit is given for answering the question. Even prepositions and articles are counted as words. Make sure you answer within the word limit, if you exceed it, you may lose some marks.
  3. APPROPRIATE ANSWER- Often while reading a passage you may find details, that could fit in the question of an answer. Sometimes it so happens that the question is asking for just one of the options available in the passage. If you answer more than one,( just because they are given), you may surely lose marks.

So, go on, read the passage properly, but more importantly, answer them properly.

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The Social Media Effect # Practice Reading

Over the past 15 years, the world as we know it has been taken by storm through the onset (a beginning or start) of social media (websites and other online means of communication that are used by large groups of people to share information and to develop social and professional contacts). According to Com score (2011) about 90 percent of U.S. Internet users visit a social media site each month. Because we live in such a largely global-society (used to refer to a society that is being built in modern times in which all the people of the world have a good deal in common with one another), creating and maintaining an online presence has become most relevant (bearing upon or connected with the matter in hand) in promoting (to help or encourage to exist or flourish) your brand and expanding (to increase in extent, size, volume, scope, etc) your social network (a network of friends, colleagues, and other personal contacts).

As we know, perception (the act or faculty of perceiving, or apprehending by means of the senses or of the mind; cognition; understanding)is everything; especially in the world of social media. In terms of perception, we all have an ideal self. We all wish to maximize our careers, our profession, and aspire (to long, aim, or seek ambitiously) to be like those who we find most successful (achieving or having achieved success). As the use of social media continues to evolve; the concept of presenting our ideal selves versus our real selves has become more and more prevalent (widespread; of wide extent or occurrence; in general use or acceptance.) on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, and even LinkedIn.

As research (to search or search for again) suggests (to mention or introduce (an idea, proposition, plan, etc.) for consideration or possible action), your “real self” is what you are – your attributes (to regard as resulting from a specified cause; consider as caused by something indicated (usually followed by to), your characteristics (a distinguishing feature or quality), and your personality (the visible aspect of one’s character as it impresses others). Your “ideal self” is what you feel you should be; much of it due to societal and environmental influences. From a societal (noting or pertaining to large social groups, or to their activities,customs, etc.) standpoint (the point or place at which a person stands to view something), many of us are driven by competition (the act of competing; rivalry for supremacy, a prize, etc), achievement (something accomplished, especially by superior ability, special effort,great courage, etc.; a great or heroic deed), and status; hence, the creation (the act of producing or causing to exist; the act of creating;engendering.) and portrayal (a portrait)of our ideal selves.

Source : The Huffing ton Post

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History Of Natural Gas # Reading Section

History Of Natural Gas

[A]Natural gas is nothing new. In fact, most of the natural gas that is brought out from under the ground is millions and millions of years old. However, it was not until recently that methods for obtaining this gas, bringing it to the surface, and putting it to use were developed.

[B]Before there was an understanding of what natural gas was, it posed a mystery to man. Sometimes, lightning strikes would ignite natural gas that was escaping from under the earth’s crust. This would create a fire coming from the earth, burning the natural gas as it seeped out from underground. These fires puzzled most early civilizations, and were the root of myth and superstition. One of the most famous of these flames was found in ancient Greece, on Mount Parnassus around 1000 B.C. A goat herdsman came across what looked like a ‘burning spring’, a flame rising from a fissure in the rock. The Greeks, believing it to be of divine origin, built a temple on the flame. This temple housed a priestess who was known as the Oracle of Delphi, giving out prophecies she claimed were inspired by the flame.

[C]These types of springs became prominent in the religions of India, Greece, and Persia. Unable to explain where these fires came from, they were often regarded as divine, or supernatural. It wasn’t until about 500 B.C. that the Chinese discovered the potential to use these fires to their advantage. Finding places where gas was seeping to the surface, the Chinese formed crude pipelines out of bamboo shoots to transport the gas, where it was used to boil sea water, separating the salt and making it palatable.

[D]Britain was the first country to commercialize the use of natural gas. Around 1785, natural gas produced from coal was used to light houses, as well as streetlights.

[E]Manufactured natural gas of this type (as opposed to naturally occurring gas) was first brought to the United States in 1816, when it was used to light the streets of Baltimore, Maryland. However, this manufactured gas was much less efficient, and less environmentally friendly, than modern natural gas that comes from underground.

[F]Naturally occurring natural gas was discovered and identified in America as early as 1626, when French explorers discovered Native Americans igniting gases that were seeping into and around Lake Erie. The American natural gas industry got its beginnings in this area. In 1859, Colonel Edwin Drake (a former railroad conductor who adopted the title ‘Colonel’ to impress the townspeople) dug the first well. Drake hit oil and natural gas at 69 feet below the surface of the earth.

[G]Most historians characterize this well as the beginning of the natural gas industry in America. A two-inch diameter pipeline was built, running 5 and ½ miles from the well to the village of Titusville, Pennsylvania. The construction of this pipeline proved that natural gas could be brought safely and relatively easily from its underground source to be used for practical purposes.

[H]In 1821, the first well specifically intended to obtain natural gas was dug in Fredonia, New York by William Hart. After noticing gas bubbles rising to the surface of a creek, Hart dug a 27-foot well to try and obtain a larger flow of gas to the surface. Hart is regarded by many as the ‘father of natural gas’ in America. Expanding on Hart’s work, the Fredonia Gas Light Company was eventually formed, becoming being the first American natural gas company.

[I]During most of the 19th century, natural gas was used almost exclusively as a source of light. Without a pipeline infrastructure, it was difficult to transport the gas very far, or into homes to be used for heating or cooking. Most of the natural gas produced in this era was manufactured from coal, rather than coming from a well. Near the end of the 19th century, with the advent of electricity, natural gas lights were converted to electric lights. This led producers of natural gas to look for new uses for their product.

[J]In 1885, Robert Bunsen invented what is now known as the Bunsen burner. He managed to create a device that mixed natural gas with air in the right proportions, creating a flame that could be safely used for cooking and heating. The invention of the Bunsen burner opened up new opportunities for the use of natural gas in America, and throughout the world. The invention of temperature-regulating thermostatic devices allowed for better use of the heating potential of natural gas, allowing the temperature of the flame to be adjusted and monitored.

Without any way to transport it effectively, natural gas discovered pre-WWII was usually just allowed to vent into the atmosphere, or burnt, when found alongside coal and oil, or simply left in the ground when found alone.

[K]One of the first major pipelines was constructed in 1891. This pipeline was 120 miles long, and carried natural gas from wells in central Indiana to the city of Chicago. However, this early pipeline was not very efficient at transporting natural gas. It wasn’t until the 1920s that significant effort was put into building a pipeline infrastructure. After World War II, new welding techniques, along with advances in pipe rolling and metallurgy, further improved pipeline reliability. This post-war pipeline construction boom lasted well into the ‘60s, and allowed for the construction of thousands of miles of pipeline in America.

[L]Once the transportation of natural gas was possible, new uses for natural gas were discovered. These included using natural gas to heat homes and operate appliances such as water heaters, ovens, and cooktops. Industry began to use natural gas in manufacturing and processing plants. Also, natural gas was used to heat boilers used to generate electricity. The expanded transportation infrastructure had made natural gas easy to obtain, and it was becoming an increasingly popular energy choice.

QUESTIONS 1-5

Do the following statements agree with the information given in reading passage 1?

In boxes 1-5 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.

  1. Natural gas is an invention of human beings.
  2. The divine energies in early periods produced flames, marking their presence.
  3. China was the first country to use the possibilities of fire as an asset.
  4. The only country to make a business out of natural gas was Britain.
  5. United States first used the natural gas in 1817.
  6. Native Americans kindled natural gas occurring around the Lake Erie during the 15th century.

questions 7-13

Reading passage 1 has ten paragraphs.

Given below are some facts that you can either comprehend/ are directly given in the paragraphs.

Match the paragraph number with the correct facts.

Write your answers in the answer sheet in boxes 7-13.

7. pipeline gets built between titusville and Pennsylvania.

8. Different ways to use natural gas get invented.

9.Bunsen Burner gets invented.

10. Electricity invention shifts the use of natural gas.

11. William Hart is declared the father of natural gas.

12.Natural Gas is wasted without the presence of pipeline.

13. Electricity generation with natural gas.

ANSWERS

1. false

2. false

3. true

4. false

5. false

6. true

7. G

8. L

9. J

10. I

11. H

12.K

13.L

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The microelectronic revolution # Reading Section

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

The microelectronic revolution

[A]Vacuum tubes were a considerable advance on relay switches, but machines like the ENIAC were notoriously unreliable. The modern term for a problem that holds up a computer program is a “bug.” Popular legend has it that this word entered the vocabulary of computer programmers sometime in the 1950s when moths, attracted by the glowing lights of vacuum tubes, flew inside machines like the ENIAC, caused a short circuit, and brought work to a juddering halt. But there were other problems with vacuum tubes too. They consumed enormous amounts of power: the ENIAC used about 2000 times as much electricity as a modern laptop. And they took up huge amounts of space. Military needs were driving the development of machines like the ENIAC, but the sheer size of vacuum tubes had now become a real problem. ABC had used 300 vacuum tubes, Colossus had 2000, and the ENIAC had 18,000. The ENIAC’s designers had boasted that its calculating speed was “at least 500 times as great as that of any other existing computing machine.” But developing computers that were an order of magnitude more powerful still would have needed hundreds of thousands or even millions of vacuum tubes—which would have been far too costly, unwieldy, and unreliable. So a new technology was urgently required.

[B]The solution appeared in 1947 thanks to three physicists working at Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs). John Bardeen (1908–1991), Walter Brattain (1902–1987), and William Shockley (1910–1989) were then helping Bell to develop new technology for the American public telephone system, so the electrical signals that carried phone calls could be amplified more easily and carried further. Shockley, who was leading the team, believed he could use semiconductors (materials such as germanium and silicon that allow electricity to flow through them only when they’ve been treated in special ways) to make a better form of amplifier than the vacuum tube. When his early experiments failed, he set Bardeen and Brattain to work on the task for him. Eventually, in December 1947, they created a new form of amplifier that became known as the point-contact transistor. Bell Labs credited Bardeen and Brattain with the transistor and awarded them a patent. This enraged Shockley and prompted him to invent an even better design, the junction transistor, which has formed the basis of most transistors ever since.

[C]Like vacuum tubes, transistors could be used as amplifiers or as switches. But they had several major advantages. They were a fraction the size of vacuum tubes (typically about as big as a pea), used no power at all unless they were in operation, and were virtually 100 percent reliable. The transistor was one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of computing and it earned its inventors the world’s greatest science prize, the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. By that time, however, the three men had already gone their separate ways. John Bardeen had begun pioneering research into superconductivity, which would earn him a second Nobel Prize in 1972. Walter Brattain moved to another part of Bell Labs.

[D]William Shockley decided to stick with the transistor, eventually forming his own corporation to develop it further. His decision would have extraordinary consequences for the computer industry. With a small amount of capital, Shockley set about hiring the best brains he could find in American universities, including young electrical engineer Robert Noyce (1927–1990) and research chemist Gordon Moore (1929–). It wasn’t long before Shockley’s idiosyncratic and bullying management style upset his workers. In 1956, eight of them—including Noyce and Moore—left Shockley Transistor to found a company of their own, Fairchild Semiconductor, just down the road. Thus began the growth of “Silicon Valley,” the part of California centered on Palo Alto, where many of the world’s leading computer and electronics companies have been based ever since.

[E]It was in Fairchild’s California building that the next breakthrough occurred—although, somewhat curiously, it also happened at exactly the same time in the Dallas laboratories of Texas Instruments. In Dallas, a young engineer from Kansas named Jack Kilby (1923–2005) was considering how to improve the transistor. Although transistors were a great advance on vacuum tubes, one key problem remained. Machines that used thousands of transistors still had to be hand wired to connect all these components together. That process was laborious, costly, and error prone. Wouldn’t it be better, Kilby reflected, if many transistors could be made in a single package? This prompted him to invent the “monolithic” integrated circuit (IC), a collection of transistors and other components that could be manufactured all at once, in a block, on the surface of a semiconductor. Kilby’s invention was another step forward, but it also had a drawback: the components in his integrated circuit still had to be connected by hand. While Kilby was making his breakthrough in Dallas, unknown to him, Robert Noyce was perfecting almost exactly the same idea at Fairchild in California. Noyce went one better, however: he found a way to include the connections between components in an integrated circuit, thus automating the entire process.

[F]Integrated circuits, as much as transistors, helped to shrink computers during the 1960s. In 1943, IBM boss Thomas Watson had reputedly quipped: “I think there is a world market for about five computers.” Just two decades later, the company and its competitors had installed around 25,000 large computer systems across the United States. As the 1960s wore on, integrated circuits became increasingly sophisticated and compact. Soon, engineers were speaking of large-scale integration (LSI), in which hundreds of components could be crammed onto a single chip, and then very large-scale integration (VLSI), when the same chip could contain thousands of components.

[G]The logical conclusion of all this miniaturization was that, someday, someone would be able to squeeze an entire computer onto a chip. In 1968, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore had left Fairchild to establish a new company of their own. With integration very much in their minds, they called it Integrated Electronics or Intel for short. Originally they had planned to make memory chips, but when the company landed an order to make chips for a range of pocket calculators, history headed in a different direction. One of their engineers, Marcian Edward (Ted) Hoff (1937–), realized that instead of making a range of specialist chips for a range of calculators, he could make one chip that could be programmed to work in them all. Thus was born the general-purpose, single chip computer or microprocessor—and that brought about the next phase of the computer revolution.

Questions 1-8

Do the following statements agree with the information given in reading passage 1?

In boxes 1-8 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.

  1. Bug is used to talk about something that causes issues in the computer.
  2. ENIAC used 1000 times more electricity as needed by the modern laptops.
  3. The need for a new technology came because people got bored from the previous technology.
  4. The junction transistor was invented by John Bardeen.
  5. Transistors could be used only as amplifiers.
  6. John Bardeen won a Nobel Prize in the year 1956 for introducing semiconductors.
  7. Robert Noyce was a research chemist hired by William Shockley.
  8. Silicon Valey is situated in Palo Alto.

Questions 9-13

Complete the sentences below.

Write ONE WORD ONLY for each answer.

  •  Monolithic integrated circuits were being made by (9)________________.
  • The development of integrated circuits led to (10)____________________ and (11)______________ integration.
  • Integrated Electronics was founded by(12) ________________ and  (13) ____________.

ANSWERS

1. True

2. False

3. False

4. False

5. False

6. False

7. True

8.  True

9. Jack Kilby

10. large scale integration

11. very large scale

12. Robert Noyce

13. Gordon Moore

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