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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The Bright Side In America # Improve Vocabulary
Vocabulary is indeed a very important part of preparing for IELTS. If you are preparing for IELTS, then it is very important for you to understand the vocabulary and practice it well, is important to score well in the IELTS exam. This time we are looking at an article written on TIME magazine and understand it for the vocabulary.
Source – TIME
[PARA 1]
Charity–humanity’s most benevolent impulse–is a timeless and borderless virtue, dating at least to the dawn of religious teaching. Philanthropy as we understand it today, however, is a distinctly American phenomenon, inseparable from the nation that shaped it. From colonial leaders to modern billionaires like Buffett, Gates and Zuckerberg, the tradition of giving is woven into our national DNA.
[PARA 2]
Like so many of our social structures, the formal practice of giving money to aid society traces its origin to a Founding Father. Benjamin Franklin, an icon of individual industry and frugality even in his own day, understood that with the privilege of doing well came the price of doing good. When he died in 1790, Franklin thought to future generations, leaving in trust two gifts of 1,000 lb. of sterling silver. One to the city of Boston, the other to Philadelphia. Per his instruction, a portion of the money and its dividends could not be used for 200 years.
[PARA 3]
While Franklin’s gifts lay in wait, the tradition he established evolved alongside the young nation. After the Civil War, rapid industrialization concentrated unfathomable wealth in the hands of a few, creating a period of unprecedented inequality. In response, the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie pioneered scientific philanthropy, which sought to address the underlying causes of social ills, rather than their symptoms. In his lifetime, Carnegie gave away more than $350 million, the equivalent of some $9 billion today. His 1889 essay “Wealth”–now better known as Carnegie’s “The Gospel of Wealth”–effectively launched modern philanthropy by creating a model that the wealthy continue to follow.
[PARA 4]
Two decades later, John D. Rockefeller endowed the Rockefeller Foundation, which soon became the largest such “benevolent trust” in the world. Prior to World War II, the Rockefeller Foundation provided more foreign aid than the entire federal government.
[PARA 5]
Other, often far less well-known men and women have played a critical role in philanthropy’s evolution. One of my personal heroes is Julius Rosenwald, who made his fortune building Sears, Roebuck and Co. With his giving, Rosenwald helped construct more than 5,300 schools across the segregated South and opened classroom doors to a generation of African-American students, including Maya Angelou and Congressman John Lewis.
[PARA 6]
America’s philanthropic instinct is not limited to the rich. The nation’s history is rife with people like Oseola McCarty, a Mississippi washerwoman who gave away her life savings of $150,000 in 1995 to fund college scholarships for low-income students with promise.
[PARA 7]
What accounts for this culture of generosity? The answer is not solely altruistic. Incentives in the tax code, for one, encourage the well-off to give. And philanthropy has long helped improve the public image of everyone from robber barons to the new tech elite.
[PARA 8]
More troubling, however, are the foundational problems that make philanthropy so necessary. Just before his death, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”
[PARA 9]
Indeed, King illuminates a central contradiction: philanthropy is an offspring of the market, conceived and sustained by returns on capital. Yet its most important responsibility is to help address the market’s imbalances and inadequacies.
[PARA 10]
Today institutional giving is undergoing a radical transformation. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg made headlines for committing $45 billion in Facebook stock through a limited liability corporation. They’re among a host of emerging donors who are experimenting with approaches to giving away their fortunes outside the boundaries of traditional foundations.
[PARA 11]
Only 26 years ago, the last of Franklin’s gifts were finally made available, having multiplied to $6.5 million. More than the sum, they represent a broader principle. We are custodians of a public trust, even if our capital was derived from private enterprise. The most important obligation is ensuring that the system works more equally and more justly for more people. This belief is core to our national character. America’s greatest strength is not the fact of perfection, but rather the act of perfecting.
| WORD | MEANING | SYNONYMS |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Benevolent | Well-meaning and kindly | Benign, caring, compassionate, generous, humane, philanthropic |
| 2. virtue | Moral excellence; goodness; righteousness | Advantage, character, ethic, excellence, faith, generosity, goodness, ideal, kindness, love, merit, morality, purity, quality, rectitude, righteousness, value |
| 3. philanthropy | Altruistic concern for human welfare and advancement, usually manifested by donations of money, property, or work to needy persons by endowment of institutions of learning and hospitals and by generosity to other socially useful purposes. | Charity, generosity, alms, alms-giving, altruism, assistance, benefaction, beneficence, contribution, dole, donation, endowment, fund, relief |
| 4. frugality | The quality of being frugal, or prudent in saving; the lack of wastefulness | Moderation, prudence, thrift, avarice, carefulness, conservation, economy, miserliness, niggardliness, parsimoniousness, parsimony, penuriousness, providence, saving, stinginess |
| 5. wait | stay where one is or delay action until a particular time or event: | Interval, down, halt, downtime, hold, interim, rest, stay |
| 6. unfathomable | Not able to fathom or completely understand; incomprehensible | Boundless, immeasurable, infinite |
| 7. unprecedented | Without previous instance; never known or experienced | Bizzare, extraordinary, fantastic, miraculous, new, remarkable, singular, uncommon, unheard- of, unique, unparalleled, unrivaled, unusual |
| 8. endowed | To provide with a permanent fund or source of income | Blessed. Enriched, equipped, graced, suppilied |
| 9. segregated | Restricting to one group, especially exclusively on the basis of racial or ethnic membership | Isolated, restricted, excluded, separated, discriminative |
| 10. rife | Of common or frequent occurrence; prevalent; in widespread existence, activity or use | Abundant, alive, plentiful, popular, prevalent, rampant, replete, abounding, common, current, epidemic, extensive, frequent |
| 11. generosity | Readiness or liberality in giving | Goodness, hospitality, kindness, largesse, unselfishness, alms-giving, altruism, beneficence |
| 12. altruistic | Unselfishly concerned or devoted to the welfare of others | Charitable, humanitarian, magnanimous, philanthropic, all heart, benevolent, big, bleeding heart, considerate, good scout |
| 13. incentives | Something that incites or tends to incite to action or greater effort as a reward offered for increased productivity | Encouragement, enticement, impetus, motivation, reason, stimulus, allurement, bait, carrot, catalyst, come- on, provocation, stimulant, insistence, exhortation |
| 14. robber | A person who robs (steals) | Bandit, burglar, con artist, crook, looter, marauder, mugger, pickpocket, pirate, raider, rustler, shoplifter, swindler, thief, thug, brigand, buccaneer, cardsharper, cheat, chiseler, desperado, despoiler, fence, forager, fraud, hijacker, housebreaker, prowler, punk, safecracker, pillager, plunderer, operator |
| 15. barons | A member of the lowest grade of nobility | Aristocrat, lord, peer |
| 16. contradiction | A statement or proposition that contradicts or denies another or itself and is logically incongruous | Conflict, difference, disagreement, discrepancy, dispute, inconsistency, confutation, contravention, defiance, denial, dissension, incongruity, negation, opposite, opposition |
| 17. radical | Of or going to the root or origin; fundamental | Profound, basal, bottom, cardinal, constitutional, essential, native, natural, organic, original, primary, primitive, deep-seated, foundational, inherent, innate, intrinsic, meat-and-potatoes, primal |
| 18. obligation | Something by which a person is bound or obliged to do certain things, and which arises out of a sense of duty or results from custom, law etc. | Accountability, agreement bond, burden, commitment, constraint, contract, debt, duty, liability, necessity, need, promise, requirement, right, trust, understanding |
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.
- Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstiene.
- Ebola virus is likely to change its mode of transmission and will become an air borne disease.
- 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.
- With knowledge base increasing rapidly, there is more doubt on the facts presented by science than ever before.
- 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.
- True
- False
- True
- True
- Not Given
- False
- A
- A
- B
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IELTS Reading # iPhone Successor
The below post has been taken from THE TIME. You can read the post at – THE TIME.
Apple doesn’t usually unveil its new iPhones until September, but the rumors are already circulating about what fans should expect from this year’s model. The successor to the iPhone 7, which may be called the iPhone 7s or iPhone 8, could be a more noticeable departure from the current iPhone’s design. This year’s release will also mark 10 years since the original iPhone launched in 2007.
Here’s a look at what’s been reported about Apple’s next iPhone so far.
Better screen technology
Apple may use an OLED (organic light emitting diode) screen for its next iPhone instead of an LCD display, according to reports from The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. These types of screens offer better contrast than LCD displays, and are often brighter. The blacks in OLED screens are also deeper than those of LCD displays, making colors pop more prominently.
Apple already uses OLED display technology for the Apple Watch, while other tech giants, like Samsung, have been using variants of OLED screens in their smartphones for years. It’s unclear whether or not all new iProhone models will feature an OLED screen or if Apple will reserve them for its high-end variant, as a report from Nikkei Asian Review indicates.
A curved screen
Certain iPhone models may feature a screen that’s curved on both sides similar to Samsung’s Galaxy S7 Edge, according to Nikkei Asian Review. This rounded model will likely be more expensive than the standard edition and may be 5.5-inches or larger, says the report. If Apple indeed decides to give its next iPhone a curved screen, it will likely use an OLED display, as those types of screens are more flexible than their LCD counterparts.
Facial recognition
Apple could add facial recognition to its upcoming iPhone, according to Cowen and Company’s Timothy Arcuri. In a recent note, which Apple Insider published, Arcuri predicts Apple may place an infrared sensor next to the front-facing camera to enable the phone to recognize a user’s face. Separately, Digitimes has reported that Apple plans to add an iris scanner to its next iPhone, although it’s worth noting the website hasn’t always been accurate about future Apple products in the past. Samsung introduced a similar feature on its ill-fated Galaxy Note 7, which included an iris scanner that allowed owners to unlock their phone just by looking at it.
A new name
Apple traditionally releases its new iPhones on a tick-tock cycle, either giving them a title that includes just a number or a number paired with an “S.” For its next iPhone, however, the company may break this habit by simply calling it iPhone X, as Loup Venture’s Gene Munster predicts.
“Apple will likely break from its historical naming convention and call this iPhone something other than iPhone 7S or iPhone 8 because it will be the 10th anniversary iPhone,” Munster writes. “Like they did with the 10th version of the Mac OS, it seems logical that they’ll call the next iPhone: iPhone X.”
Three models to choose from
The introduction of a curved iPhone could mean that Apple plans to offer its next smartphone in three variants instead of two. Apple may release 4.7 and 5.5-inch iPhones with flat screens and then an additional model with a rounded display, according to Nikkei Asian Review.
A new design with no home button
Apple hasn’t significantly redesigned its iPhone since it unveiled the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in 2014. That could change in 2017. The company reportedly plans to overhaul the next iPhone with a new design that includes an edge-poto-edge glass screen and no home button, according to The Wall Street Journal.
These changes would let Apple get rid of the borders around the iPhone’s display, potentially allowing it to make the phone’s screen larger without having to increase the size of the overall device. Further changes could include a glass back similar to that of the iPhone 4 and 4s rather than the aluminum design of Apple’s more recent iPhones, says a note from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.
Wireless charging
Future iPhone owners may not have to plug their phones into a power cord to charge it. Apple is said to be testing wireless charging technology that could appear in iPhones as soon as 2017, according to reports from Bloomberg and Nikkei Asian Review. Wireless charging has existed in certain Android smartphones for years, but Apple could be exploring a method that makes it possible to power iPhones from a distance, Bloomberg reports. It’s unclear how close that technology is to a commercial release, however.
| WORD | MEANING |
|---|---|
| unveil | remove a veil or covering from, in particular uncover (a new monument or work of art) as part of a public ceremony. |
| rumors | a currently circulating story or report of uncertain or doubtful truth. |
| circulating | move continuously or freely through a closed system or area. |
| successor | a person or thing that succeeds another. |
| departure | the action of leaving, especially to start a journey. |
| reported | give a spoken or written account of something that one has observed, heard, done, or investigated. |
| contrast | the state of being strikingly different from something else in juxtaposition or close association. |
| displays | put (something) in a prominent place in order that it may readily be seen. |
| prominently | with an important role; to a large extent. |
| Hig-end | denoting the most expensive of a range of products. |
| variant | a form or version of something that differs in some respect from other forms of the same thing or from a standard. |
| announcements | a formal public statement about a fact, occurrence, or intention. |
| touchscreen | a display device which allows the user to interact with a computer by touching areas on the screen. |
| rounded | having a smooth, curved surface. |
| expensive | costing a lot of money. |
| edition | a particular form or version of a published text. |
| flexible | capable of bending easily without breaking. |
| counterparts | a person or thing that corresponds to or has the same function as another person or thing in a different place or situation. |
| facial | of or affecting the face. |
| recognition | the action or process of recognizing or being recognized, in particular: |
| significantly | in a sufficiently great or important way as to be worthy of attention. |
| redesigned | design (something) again or in a different way. |
| unveiled | remove a veil or covering from, in particular uncover (a new monument or work of art) as part of a public ceremony. |
| reportedly | according to what some say (used to express the speaker's belief that the information given is not necessarily true). |
| Edge-to-edge | to move edgeways |
| potentially | with the capacity to develop or happen in the future. |
| almunium | the chemical element of atomic number 13, a light silvery-grey metal. |
| securities | the state of being free from danger or threat. |
| power cord | A power cord, line cord, or mains cable is a cable that temporarily connects an appliance to the mains electricity supply via a wall socket or extension cord. |
| wireless charging | Wireless charging is the process of electrically charging battery-powered devices and equipment without the need for a wired electrical power connection. It enables the wireless transfer of electrical charge from a charging device or node to the recipient device. |
| technology | the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry. |
| commercial | concerned with or engaged in commerce. |
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