IELTS Reading Practice Test 38

READING PASSAGE 1

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

Ants Could Teach Ants

A

The ants are tiny and usually nest between rocks on 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 researchers said the careful way the leaders 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.

B

“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.

C

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.

D

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.

E

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 naïve 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 a transfer of information.”

F

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

G

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’s leader ants really knew that the follower ants were ignorant. Could they simply have been following an instinctive rule to proceed when 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.

H

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 constraints of brain size.

I

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 leaders 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 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.

Questions 1-5

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.

1   Animals could use objects to locate food.

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.

List of People

A          Nigel Franks

B          Marc Hauser

C          Tim Caro

D         Bennett Galef Jr.

Questions 6-9

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?

A   touch each other with antenna

B   alert others when there is a danger

C   escape from predators

D   protect the young

E   hunt food for the young

F   fight with each other

G   use tools like twigs

H   feed on a variety of foods

Questions 9-13

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

10   Ants’ tandem running involves only one-way communication.

11   Franks’s 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

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-27 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below. 

Father of modern management 2

A

Peter Drucker was one of the most important management thinkers of the past hundred years. He wrote about 40 book and thousands of articles and he never rested in his mission to persuade the world that management matters. “Management is an organ of institutions … the organ that converts a mob into an organisation, and human efforts into performance.” Did he succeed? The range of his influence was extraordinary. Wherever people grapple with tricky management problems, from big organizations to small ones, from the public sector to the private, and increasingly in the voluntary sector, you can find Drucker’s fingerprints.

B

His first two books – The End of Economic Man (1939) and The Future of Industrial Man (1942) – had their admirers, including Winston Churchill, but they annoyed academic critics by ranging so widely over so many different subjects. Still, the second of these books attracted attention with its passionate insistence that companies had a social dimension as well as an economic purpose. His third book, The Concept of the Corporation, became an instant bestseller and has remained in print ever since.

C

The two most interesting arguments in The Concept of the Corporation actually had little to do with the decentralization fad. They were to dominate his work. The first had to do with “empowering” workers. Drucker believed in treating workers as resources rather than just as costs. He was a harsh critic of the assembly-line system of production that then dominated the manufacturing sector – partly because assembly lines moved at the speed of the slowest and partly because they failed to engage the creativity of individual workers. The second argument had to do with the rise of knowledge workers. Drucker argued that the world is moving from an “economy of goods” to an economy of “knowledge” – and from a society dominated by an industrial proletariat to one dominated by brain workers. He insisted that this had profound implications for both managers and politicians. Managers had to stop treating workers like cogs in a huge inhuman machine and start treating them as brain workers. In turn, politicians had to realise that knowledge, and hence education, was the single most important resource for any advanced society. Yet Drucker also thought that this economy had implications for knowledge workers themselves. They had to come to terms with the fact that they were neither “bosses” nor “workers”, but something in between: entrepreneurs who had responsibility for developing their most important resource, brainpower, and who also needed to take more control of their own careers, including their pension plans.

D

However, there was also a hard side to his work. Drucker was responsible for inventing one of the rational school of management’s most successful products – “management by objectives”. In one of his most substantial works, The Practice of Management (1954), he emphasised the importance of managers and corporations setting clear long-term objectives and then translating those long-term objectives into more immediate goals. He argued that firms should have an elite corps of general managers, who set these long-term objectives, and then a group of more specialised managers. For his critics, this was a retreat from his earlier emphasis on the soft side of management. For Drucker it was all perfectly consistent: if you rely too much on empowerment you risk anarchy, whereas if you rely too much on command-and-control you sacrifice creativity. The trick is for managers to set long-term goals, but then allow their employees to work out ways of achieving those goals. If Drucker helped make management a global industry, he also helped push it beyond its business base. He was emphatically a management thinker, not just a business one. He believed that management is “the defining organ of all modern institutions”, not just corporations.

E

There are three persistent criticisms of Drucker’s work. The first is that he focused on big organisations rather than small ones. The Concept of the Corporation was in many ways a fanfare to big organisations. As Drucker said, “We know today that in modern industrial production, particularly in modern mass production, the small unit is not only inefficient, it cannot produce at all.” The book helped to launch the “big organisation boom” that dominated business thinking for the next 20 years. The second criticism is that Drucker’s enthusiasm for management by objectives helped to lead the business down a dead end. They prefer to allow ideas, including ideas for long-term strategies, to bubble up from the bottom and middle of the organisations rather than being imposed from on high. Thirdly, Drucker is criticised for being a maverick who has increasingly been left behind by the increasing rigour of his chosen field. There is no single area of academic management theory that he made his own.

F

There is some truth in the first two arguments. Drucker never wrote anything as good as The Concept of the Corporation on entrepreneurial start-ups. Drucker’s work on management by objectives sits uneasily with his earlier and later writings on the importance of knowledge workers and self-directed teams. But the third argument is short-sighted and unfair because it ignores Drucker’s pioneering role in creating the modern profession of management. He produced one of the first systematic studies of a big company. He pioneered the idea that ideas can help galvanise companies. The biggest problem with evaluating Drucker’s influence is that so many of his ideas have passed into conventional wisdom. In other words, he is the victim of his own success. His writings on the importance of knowledge workers and empowerment may sound a little banal today. But they certainly weren’t banal when he first dreamed them up in the 1940s, or when they were first put in to practice in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s. Moreover, Drucker continued to produce new ideas up until his 90s. His work on the management of voluntary organisations remained at the cutting edge.

Questions 14-19

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list below.

Write the correct number, i-ix, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i           The popularity and impact of Drucker’s work

ii          Finding fault with Drucker

iii         The impact of economic globalisation

iv         Government regulation of business

v          Early publications of Drucker’s

vi         Drucker’s view of balanced management

vii        Drucker’s rejection of big business

viii       An appreciation of the pros and cons of Drucker’s work

ix         The changing role of the employee

14   Paragraph A

15   Paragraph B

16   Paragraph C

17   Paragraph D

18   Paragraph E

19   Paragraph F

Questions 20-23

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?

In boxes 20-23 on your answer sheet, write

YES                  if the statement agrees with what is stated in the passage

NO                   if the statement counters to what is stated in the passage

NOT GIVEN    if there is no relevant information given in the passage

20   Drucker believed the employees should enjoy the same status as the employers in a company

21   Drucker argued the managers and politicians will dominate the economy during a social transition

22   Drucker support that workers are not simply put themselves just in the employment relationship and should develop their resources of intelligence voluntarily

23   Drucker’s work on the management is out of date in moderns days

Questions 24-25

Choose TWO letters from A-E.

Write your answers in boxes 24 and 25 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following are true of Drucker’s views?

A   High-rank executives and workers should be put in balanced positions in management practice

B   Young executives should be given chances to start from low-level jobs

C   More emphasis should be laid on fostering the development of the union.

D   Management should facilitate workers with tools of self-appraisal instead of controlling them from the outside force

E   Leaders should go beyond the scope of management details and strategically establish goals 

Questions 26-27

Choose TWO letters from A-E.

Write your answers in boxes 26 and 27 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following are mentioned in the passage as criticisms to Drucker and his views?

A   His lectures focus too much on big organisations and ignore the small ones.

B   His lectures are too broad and lack of being precise and accurate about the facts.

C   He put a source of objectives more on corporate executives but not on average workers.

D   He acted much like a maverick and did not set up his own management groups

E   He was overstating the case for knowledge workers when warning business to get prepared.

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

The secret of the Yawn

A

When a scientist began to study yawning in the 1980s, it was difficult to convince some of his research students of the merits of “yawning science.” Although it may appear quirky, his decision to study yawning was a logical extension to human beings of my research in developmental neuroscience, reported in such papers as “Wing-flapping during Development and Evolution.” As a neurobehavioral problem, there is not much difference between the wing-flapping of birds and the face – and body-flapping of human yawners.

B

Yawning is an ancient, primitive act. Humans do it even before they are born, opening wide in the womb. Some snakes unhinge their jaws to do it. One species of penguins yawns as part of mating. Only now are researchers beginning to understand why we yawn, when we yawn and why we yawn back. A professor of cognitive neuroscience at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Steven Platek, studies the act of contagious yawning, something done only by people and other primates.

C

In his first experiment, he used a psychological test to rank people on their empathic feelings. He found that participants who did not score high on compassion did not yawn back. “We literally had people saying, ‘Why am I looking at people yawning?’” Professor Platek said. “It just had no effect.”

D

For his second experiment, he put 10 students in a magnetic resonance imaging machine as they watched video tapes of people yawning. When the students watched the videos, the part of the brain which reacted was the part scientists believe controls empathy – the posterior cingulate, in the brain’s middle rear.” I don’t know if it’s necessarily that nice people yawn more, but I think it’s a good indicator of a state of mind,” said Professor Platek. “It’s also a good indicator if you’re empathizing with me and paying attention.”

E

His third experiment is studying yawning in those with brain disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia, in which victims have difficulty connecting emotionally with others. A psychology professor at the University of Maryland, Robert Provine, is one of the few other researchers into yawning. He found the basic yawn lasts about six seconds and they come in bouts with an interval of about 68 seconds. Men and women yawn or half-yawn equally often, but men are significantly less likely to cover their mouths which may indicate complex distinction in genders.” A watched yawner never yawns,” Professor Provine said. However, the physical root of yawning remains a mystery. Some researchers say it’s coordinated within the hypothalamus of the brain, the area that also controls breathing.

F

Yawning and stretching also share properties and may be performed together as parts of a global motor complex. But they do not always co-occur – people usually yawn when we stretch, but we don’t always stretch when we yawn, especially before bedtime. Studies by J.I.P, G.H.A. Visser and H.F. Prechtl in the early 1980s, charting movement in the developing fetus using ultrasound, observed not just yawning but a link between yawning and stretching as early as the end of the first prenatal trimester.

G

The most extraordinary demonstration of the yawn-stretch linkage occurs in many people paralyzed on one side of their body because of brain damage caused by a stroke. The prominent British neurologist Sir Francis Walshe noted in 1923 what when these hemiplegics yawn, they are startled and mystified to observe that their otherwise paralyzed arm rises and flexes automatically in what neurologists term an “associated response.” Yawning apparently activates undamaged, unconsciously controlled connections between the brain and the cord motor system innervating the paralyzed limb. It is not known whether the associated response is a positive prognosis for recovery, nor whether yawning is therapeutic for reinnervation or prevention of muscular atrophy.

H

Clinical neurology offers other surprises. Some patients with “locked-in” syndrome, who are almost totally deprived of the ability to move voluntarily, can yawn normally. The neural circuits for spontaneous yawning must exist in the brain stem near other respiratory and vasomotor centers, because yawning is performed by anencephalic who possess only the medulla oblongata. The multiplicity of stimuli of contagious yawning, by contrast, implicates many higher brain regions.

Questions 28-32

Complete the Summary paragraph described below.

In boxes 28-32 on your answer sheet, write the correct answer with NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS.

A psychology professor drew a conclusion after observation that it takes about six seconds to complete average yawning which needs 28……………………….. before the following yawning comes. It is almost at the same frequency that male and female yawn or half, yet behavior accompanied with yawning showing a 29………………………. in genders. Some parts within the brain may affect the movement which also has something to do with 30………………………. another finding also finds there is a link between a yawn and 31………………………. before a baby was born, which two can be automatically co-operating even among people whose 32………………………. is damaged.

Questions 33-37

Read paragraph A-H.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-H for questions 33-37

NB  You may use any letter more than once.

33   The rate for yawning shows some regular pattern.

34   Yawning is an inherent ability that appears in both animals and humans.

35   Stretching and yawning is not always going together.

36   Yawning may suggest people are having positive notice or response in communicating.

37   Some superior areas in the brain may deal with the infectious feature of yawning.

Questions 38-40

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE               if the statement is true

FALSE              if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN    if the information is not given in the passage

38   Several students in Platek’s experiment did not comprehend why their tutor ask them to yawn back.

39   Some results from the certain experiment indicate the link between yawning and compassion.

40   Yawning can show an affirmative impact on the recovery from brain damage brought by s stroke.