Smart Way Of Practicing In Reading Test

Smart Way Of Practicing In Reading Test

When you check your answers versus the correct ones, pay special attention to those you got WRONG. There always will be a chance to congratulate yourself later on those you’ve got right.

When you are going over the wrong answers one by one, try to understand why your answer is wrong, why the answer from the answer key is correct, and most importantly – why you made that mistake. Remember it and make sure you never make it again.

See what trap you walked into, what are your “weaknesses”, what type of task is the hardest for you. If, for instance, most of your mistakes are in “True/False/Not Given” type of questions – double-check your answers there. Or is your problem on the “Matching headings” task? Then pay extra attention to that kind of questions.
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IELTS Reading Sample Questions # Doubt on Science

You should spend about 20 minutes on the Questions 1-10 which are based on the reading passage, 1 below.

DOUBT ON SCIENCE

[Para 1]

We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge—from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change—faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts. There are so many of these controversies these days, you’d think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people argumentative. And there’s so much talk about the trend these days—in books, articles, and academic conferences—that science doubt itself has become a pop-culture meme. In the recent movie Interstellar, set in a futuristic, downtrodden America where NASA has been forced into hiding, school textbooks say the Apollo moon landings were faked. In a sense, all this is not surprising. Our lives are permeated by science and technology as never before. For many of us, this new world is wondrous, comfortable, and rich in rewards—but also more complicated and sometimes unnerving. We now face risks we can’t easily analyze.

[Para 2]

We’re asked to accept, for example, that it’s safe to eat food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) because, the experts point out, there’s no evidence that it isn’t and no reason to believe that altering genes precisely in a lab is more dangerous than altering them wholesale through traditional breeding. But to some people the very idea of transferring genes between species conjures up mad scientists running amok—and so, two centuries after Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, they talk about Frankenfood.

[Para 3]

The world crackles with real and imaginary hazards, and distinguishing the former from the latter isn’t easy. Should we be afraid that the Ebola virus, which is spread only by direct contact with bodily fluids, will mutate into an airborne superplague? The scientific consensus says that’s extremely unlikely: No virus has ever been observed to completely change its mode of transmission in humans, and there’s zero evidence that the latest strain of Ebola is any different. But type “airborne Ebola” into an Internet search engine, and you’ll enter a dystopia where this virus has almost supernatural powers, including the power to kill us all.

[Para 4]

In this bewildering world we have to decide what to believe and how to act on that. In principle that’s what science is for. “Science is not a body of facts,” says geophysicist Marcia McNutt, who once headed the U.S. Geological Survey and is now editor of Science, the prestigious journal. “Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.” But that method doesn’t come naturally to most of us. And so we run into trouble, again and again.

[Para 5]

The trouble goes way back, of course. The scientific method leads us to truths that are less than self-evident, often mind-blowing, and sometimes hard to swallow. In the early 17th century, when Galileo claimed that the Earth spins on its axis and orbits the sun, he wasn’t just rejecting church doctrine. He was asking people to believe something that defied common sense—because it sure looks like the sun’s going around the Earth, and you can’t feel the Earth spinning. Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant. Two centuries later Charles Darwin escaped that fate. But his idea that all life on Earth evolved from a primordial ancestor and that we humans are distant cousins of apes, whales, and even deep-sea mollusks is still a big ask for a lot of people. So is another 19th-century notion: that carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that we all exhale all the time and that makes up less than a tenth of one percent of the atmosphere, could be affecting Earth’s climate.

[Para 6 ]

Even when we intellectually accept these precepts of science, we subconsciously cling to our intuitions—what researchers call our naive beliefs. A recent study by Andrew Shtulman of Occidental College showed that even students with an advanced science education had a hitch in their mental gait when asked to affirm or deny that humans are descended from sea animals or that Earth goes around the sun. Both truths are counterintuitive. The students, even those who correctly marked “true,” were slower to answer those questions than questions about whether humans are descended from tree-dwelling creatures (also true but easier to grasp) or whether the moon goes around the Earth (also true but intuitive). Shtulman’s research indicates that as we become scientifically literate, we repress our naive beliefs but never eliminate them entirely. They lurk in our brains, chirping at us as we try to make sense of the world.

[Para 7 ]

Most of us do that by relying on personal experience and anecdotes, on stories rather than statistics. We might get a prostate-specific antigen test, even though it’s no longer generally recommended, because it caught a close friend’s cancer—and we pay less attention to statistical evidence, painstakingly compiled through multiple studies, showing that the test rarely saves lives but triggers many unnecessary surgeries. Or we hear about a cluster of cancer cases in a town with a hazardous waste dump, and we assume pollution caused the cancers. Yet just because two things happened together doesn’t mean one caused the other, and just because events are clustered doesn’t mean they’re not still random.

[Para 8]

We have trouble digesting randomness; our brains crave pattern and meaning. Science warns us, however, that we can deceive ourselves. To be confident there’s a causal connection between the dump and the cancers, you need statistical analysis showing that there are many more cancers than would be expected randomly, evidence that the victims were exposed to chemicals from the dump, and evidence that the chemicals really can cause cancer.

[Para 9]

Even for scientists, the scientific method is a hard discipline. Like the rest of us, they’re vulnerable to what they call confirmation bias—the tendency to look for and see only evidence that confirms what they already believe. But unlike the rest of us, they submit their ideas to formal peer review before publishing them. Once their results are published, if they’re important enough, other scientists will try to reproduce them—and, being congenitally skeptical and competitive, will be very happy to announce that they don’t hold up. Scientific results are always provisional, susceptible to being overturned by some future experiment or observation. Scientists rarely proclaim an absolute truth or absolute certainty. Uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge.

[Para 10]

Sometimes scientists fall short of the ideals of the scientific method. Especially in biomedical research, there’s a disturbing trend toward results that can’t be reproduced outside the lab that found them, a trend that has prompted a push for greater transparency about how experiments are conducted. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, worries about the “secret sauce”—specialized procedures, customized software, quirky ingredients—that researchers don’t share with their colleagues. But he still has faith in the larger enterprise.

Questions 1-7

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

In boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE                                   if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE                                 if the statement disagrees with the information

NOT GIVEN                        if there is no information on it.

  1. Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstiene.
  2. Ebola virus is likely to change its mode of transmission and will become an air borne disease.
  3. As per Charles Darwin, humans are ancestors of whales and other deep-sea mollusks. Humans tend to stick to their belief even though the scientific facts are known to them.
  4. With knowledge base increasing rapidly, there is more doubt on the facts presented by science than ever before.
  5. The absolute truth lies in the words of the scientists.
Questions 8-13

Choose the correct letter,A,B,C,D.

Write the correct letter in boxes 8-13 of your answer sheet.

8. Marcia McNutt, the once head of US, Geological survey is now associated with the __________ magazine.

A.Science

B. Nat Geo

C. Time

                      D. The New York Times

9. In which of the following movie, it was depicted that NASA has been forced into hiding and Apollo moon landings were faked.

A. The Interstellar

                     B. Inception

C. Eat, Pray, Love

D. Life, as we know it.

10. “Earth spins on its axis and orbits the sun”. The statement was given by which of the following scientist. 

A. Charles Darwin

B. Galileo

C.  Marcia McNutt

D. Albert Einstein

ANSWERS

When solving the reading passage, it is best to skim through the passage and make notes along with the passage. You can even underline the important points as you read along the passage.

  1. True
  2. False
  3. True
  4. True
  5. Not Given
  6. False
  7. A
  8. A
  9. B
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IELTS Reading Sample Questions # Big Data

Big Data is the buzz word in the technology sphere of the world and with other industries realizing its importance are slowly shifting their paradigms and trying to tame the importance of big data and finding different ways of utilizing the big data. This time we are looking at an article on big data, to understand it better and practice reading for IELTS academic.

The below passage is 828 words and is more likely to come in IELTS Academic.

You should spend 20 minutes on this task.

[PARA 1]

In the early decades of the 20th century, Henry Ford devised a manufacturing system of mass production, using specialized machinery and standardized products. It quickly became the dominant vision of technological progress. ‘Fordism’ meant automation and assembly lines; for decades onward, this became the orthodoxy of manufacturing: out with skilled craftspeople and slow work, in with a new machine-made era. But it was more than just a new set of tools. The 20th century was marked by Fordism at a cellular level and it produced a new understanding of labor, the human relationship to work, and society at large.

[PARA 2]

Big Data not only refers to very large data sets and the tools and procedures used to manipulate and analyze them, but also to a computational turn in thought and research . Just as Ford changed the way we made cars – and then transformed work itself – Big Data has emerged a system of knowledge that is already changing the objects of knowledge, while also having the power to inform how we understand human networks and community. ‘Change the instruments, and you will change the entire social theory that goes with them,’ Latour reminds us. Big Data creates a radical shift in how we think about research. Commenting on computational social science, Lazer et al argue that it offers ‘the capacity to collect and analyze data with an unprecedented breadth and depth and scale’.

[PARA 3]

It is not just a matter of scale nor is it enough to consider it in terms of proximity, or what Moretti (2007) refers to as distant or close analysis of texts. Rather, it is a profound change at the levels of epistemology and ethics. Big Data reframes key questions about the constitution of knowledge and the processes of research, how we should engage with information, and the nature and the categorization of reality. Just as du Gay and Pryke note that ‘accounting boyd, danah and Kate Crawford. Speaking in praise of what he terms ‘The Petabyte Age’, Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired, writes: This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity.

[PARA 4]

With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves. Do numbers speak for themselves? We believe the answer is ‘no’. Significantly, Anderson’s sweeping dismissal of all other theories and disciplines is a tell: it reveals an arrogant undercurrent in many Big Data debates where other forms of analysis are too easily sidelined. Other methods for ascertaining why people do things, write things, or make things are lost in the sheer volume of numbers. This is not a space that has been welcoming to older forms of intellectual craft. As David Berry writes, Big Data provides ‘destablising amounts of knowledge and information that lack the regulating force of philosophy.’ Instead of philosophy – which Kant saw as the rational basis for all institutions – ‘computationality might then be understood as an ontotheology, creating a new ontological “epoch” as a new historical constellation of intelligibility’. We must ask difficult questions of Big Data’s models of intelligibility before they crystallize into new orthodoxies.

[PARA 5]

If we return to Ford, his innovation was using the assembly line to break down interconnected, holistic tasks into simple, atomized, mechanistic ones. He did this by designing specialized tools that strongly predetermined and limited the action of the worker. Similarly, the specialized tools of Big Data also have their own inbuilt limitations and restrictions. For example, Twitter and Facebook are examples of Big Data sources that offer very poor archiving and search functions. Consequently, researchers are much more likely to focus on something in the present or immediate past – tracking reactions to an election, TV finale or natural disaster – because of the sheer difficulty or impossibility of accessing older data. If we are observing the automation of particular kinds of research functions, then we must consider the inbuilt flaws of the machine tools. It is not enough to simply ask, as Anderson has suggested ‘what can science learn from Google?’, but ask how the harvesters of Big Data might change the meaning of learning, and what new possibilities and new limitations may come with these systems of knowing. Claims to Objectivity and Accuracy are Misleading ‘Numbers, numbers, numbers,’ writes Latour (2010).

[PARA 6]

‘Sociology has been obsessed with the goal of becoming a quantitative science.’ Sociology has never reached this goal, in Boyd, danah and Kate Crawford. (2012). “Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon.” Latour’s view, because of where it draws the line between what is and is not quantifiable knowledge in the social domain. Big Data offers the humanistic disciplines a new way to claim the status of quantitative science and objective method. It makes many more social spaces quantifiable. In reality, working with Big Data is still subjective, and what it quantifies does not necessarily have a closer claim on objective truth – particularly when considering messages from social media sites. But there remains a mistaken belief that qualitative researchers are in the business of interpreting stories and quantitative researchers are in the business of producing facts. In this way, Big Data risks reinscribing established divisions in the long running debates about scientific method and the legitimacy of social science and humanistic inquiry.

Questions 1-7

Do the following questions agree with the following information given in the passage?

  1. Automation and assembly lines were considered synonymous with Henry Ford.
  2. Big Data has transformed the objects of knowledge and transformed the way we understand humans.
  3. Most of the tools in the current age tend to get replaced with applied mathematics and computations.
  4. As per David Berry, Big Data lacks the regulating forces of philosophy.
  5. All of the Big Data sources are poor sources of archiving and search functions.
  6. Qualitative researchers are in the business of producing facts.
Answers
  1. True
  2. False
  3. True
  4. True
  5. Force
  6. False
Vocabulary

Let us now learn the vocabulary used in the above passage –

 

WORD MEANING
orthodoxy authorized or generally accepted theory
computational something that is relating to the process of mathematical calculation
unprecedented something that is never known or done before
proximity
nearness in space, time, or relationship.
epistemology  the theory of knowledge, especially with regards to its methods, validity and scope and the distinction between justified belief and opinion
linguistics  the scientific study of language and its structure
taxonomy the branch dealing with nature of being
ontology the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being
psychology  the scientific study of human mind and its functions
fidelity  faithfulness to a person, cause or belief, demonstrated by continuing loyalty and support
onto theology  the theology or science of being
epoch  a particular period of time in history or a person’s life
holistic  characterized by the belief that the parts of something are intimately connected and explicable only by reference to the whole
provocations  action or speech that makes someone angry, especially deliberately
reinscribing   to re establish or rename in a new and especially stronger form or context.
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IELTS Reading Vocabulary # Katherine Johnson

SOURCE : NASA

Being handpicked to be one of three black students to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools is something that many people would consider one of their life’s most notable moments, but it’s just one of several breakthroughs that have marked Katherine Johnson’s long and remarkable life. Born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia in 1918, Katherine Johnson’s intense curiosity and brilliance with numbers vaulted her ahead several grades in school. By thirteen, she was attending the high school on the campus of historically black West Virginia State College. At eighteen, she enrolled in the college itself, where she made quick work of the school’s math curriculum and found a mentor in math professor W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African American to earn a PhD in Mathematics. Katherine graduated with highest honors in 1937 and took a job teaching at a black public school in Virginia.

When West Virginia decided to quietly integrate its graduate schools in 1939, West Virginia State’s president Dr. John W. Davis selected Katherine and two male students as the first black students to be offered spots at the state’s flagship school, West Virginia University. Katherine left her teaching job, and enrolled in the graduate math program. At the end of the first session, however, she decided to leave school to start a family with her husband.

She returned to teaching when her three daughters got older, but it wasn’t until 1952 that a relative told her about open positions at the all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA’s) Langley laboratory, headed by fellow West Virginian Dorothy Vaughan. Katherine and her husband, James Goble, decided to move the family to Newport News to pursue the opportunity, and Katherine began work at Langley in the summer of 1953. Just two weeks into Katherine’s tenure in the office, Dorothy Vaughan assigned her to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division, and Katherine’s temporary position soon became permanent. She spent the next four years analyzing data from flight test, and worked on the investigation of a plane crash caused by wake turbulence. As she was wrapping up this work her husband died of cancer in December 1956.

The 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik changed history—and Katherine Johnson’s life. In 1957, Katherine provided some of the math for the 1958 document Notes on Space Technology, a compendium of a series of 1958 lectures given by engineers in the Flight Research Division and the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD). Engineers from those groups formed the core of the Space Task Group, the NACA’s first official foray into space travel, and Katherine, who had worked with many of them since coming to Langley, “came along with the program” as the NACA became NASA later that year. She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 mission Freedom 7, America’s first human spaceflight. In 1960, she and engineer Ted Skopinski coauthoredDetermination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position, a report laying out the equations describing an orbital spaceflight in which the landing position of the spacecraft is specified. It was the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report.

In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Katherine Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for. The complexity of the orbital flight had required the construction of a worldwide communications network, linking tracking stations around the world to IBM computers in Washington, DC, Cape Canaveral, and Bermuda. The computers had been programmed with the orbital equations that would control the trajectory of the capsule in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission, from blast off to splashdown, but the astronauts were wary of putting their lives in the care of the electronic calculating machines, which were prone to hiccups and blackouts.

As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Katherine Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine.  “If she says they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space.

When asked to name her greatest contribution to space exploration, Katherine Johnson talks about the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo’s Lunar Lander with the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module. She also worked on the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Satellite, and authored or coauthored 26 research reports. She retired in 1986, after thirty-three years at Langley. “I loved going to work every single day,” she says. In 2015, at age 97, Katherine Johnson added another extraordinary achievement to her long list: President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.

WORDMEANING
handpickedselect carefully with a particular purpose in mind.
breakthroughsa sudden, dramatic, and important discovery or development.
remarkableworthy of attention; striking.
curiositya strong desire to know or learn something.
brillianceintense brightness of light.
vaultedprovide (a building or room) with an arched roof or roofs.
historicallywith reference to past events.
curriculumthe subjects comprising a course of study in a school or college.
mentoran experienced and trusted adviser.
enrolledofficially register as a member of an institution or a student on a course.
analyzingexamine (something) methodically and in detail, typically in order to explain and interpret it.
turbulenceviolent or unsteady movement of air or water, or of some other fluid.
compendiuma collection of concise but detailed information about a particular subject, especially in a book or other publication.
foraya sudden attack or incursion into enemy territory, especially to obtain something; a raid.
trajectorythe path followed by a projectile flying or an object moving under the action of given forces.
orbitalrelating to an orbit or orbits.
spaceflighta journey through space.
researchthe systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions.
complexitythe state or quality of being intricate or complicated.
worldwideextending or reaching throughout the world.
communicationsthe imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium.
networka group or system of interconnected people or things.
hiccupsan involuntary spasm of the diaphragm and respiratory organs, with a sudden closure of the glottis and a characteristic gulping sound.
blackoutsa period when all lights must be turned out or covered to prevent them being seen by the enemy during an air raid.
authoredbe the author of (a book or piece of writing).
extraordinaryvery unusual or remarkable.
civiliana person not in the armed services or the police force.
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