IELTS Reading Recent Actual Test 07

READING PASSAGE 1

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

The Extraordinary Watkin Tench

At the end of 18th century, life for the average British citizen was changing. The population grew as health and industrialisation took hold of the country. However, land and resources were limited. Families could not guarantee jobs for all of their children. People who were poor or destitute had little option. To make things worse, the rate of people who turned to crime to make a living increased. In Britain, the prisons were no longer large enough to hold the convicted people of this growing criminal class. Many towns and governments were at a loss as to what to do. However, another phenomenon that was happening in the 18th century was I exploration of other continents. There were many ships looking for crew members who would risk a month-long voyage across a vast ocean. This job was risky and dangerous, so few would willingly choose it. However, with so many citizens without jobs or with criminal convictions, they had little choice. One such member of this new lower class of British citizens was Watkin Tench. Between 1788 and 1868, approximately 161,700 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen’s land and Western Australia. Tench was one of these unlucky convicts to sign onto a dangerous journey. When his ship set out in 1788, he signed a three years’ service to the First Fleet.

Apart from his years in Australia, people knew little about his life back in Britain. It was said he was born on 6 October 1758 at Chester in the county of Cheshire in England. He came from a decent background. Tench was a son of Fisher Tench, a dancing master who ran a boarding school in the town and Margaritta Tarleton of the Liverpool Tarletons. He grew up around a finer class of British citizens, and his family helped instruct the children of the wealthy in formal dance lessons. Though we don’t know for sure how Tench was educated in this small British town, we do know that he was well educated. His diaries from his travels to Australia are written in excellent English, a skill that not everyone was lucky to possess in the 18th century. Aside from this, we know little of Tench’s beginnings. We don’t know how he ended up convicted of a crime. But after he started his voyage, his life changed dramatically.

During the voyage, which was harsh and took many months, Tench described landscape of different places. While sailing to Australia, Tench saw landscapes that were unfamiliar and new to him. Arriving in Australia, the entire crew was uncertain of what was to come in their new life. When they arrived in Australia, they established a British colony. Governor Philip was vested with complete authority over the inhabitants of the colony. Though still a young man, Philip was enlightened for his age. From stories of other British colonies, Philip learnt that conflict with the original peoples of the land was often a source of strife and difficulties. To avoid this, Philip’s personal intent was to establish harmonious relations with local Aboriginal people. But Philip’s job was even more difficult considering his crew. Other colonies were established with middle-class merchants and craftsmen. His crew were convicts, who had few other skills outside of their criminal histories. Along with making peace with the Aboriginal people, Philip also had to try to reform as well as discipline the convicts of the colony.

From the beginning, Tench stood out as different from the other convicts. During his initial time in Australia, he quickly rose in his rank, and was given extra power and responsibility over the convicted crew members. However, he was also still very different from the upper-class rulers who came to rule over the crew. He showed humanity towards the convicted workers. He didn’t want to treat them as common criminals, but as trained military men. Under Tench’s authority, he released the convicts’ chains which were used to control them during the voyage. Tench also showed mercy towards the Aboriginal people. Governor Philip often pursued violent solutions to conflicts with the Aboriginal peoples. Tench disagreed strongly with this method. At one point, he was unable to follow the order given by the Governor Philip to punish the ten Aboriginals.

When they first arrived, Tench was fearful and contemptuous towards the Aboriginals, because the two cultures did not understand each other. However, gradually he got to know them individually and became close friends with them. Tench knew that the Aboriginal people would not cause them conflict if they looked for a peaceful solution. Though there continued to be conflict and violence, Tench’s efforts helped establish a more peaceful negotiation between the two groups when they settled territory and land-use issues.

Meanwhile, many changes were made to the new colony. The Hawkesbury River was named by Governor Philip in June 1789. Many native bird species to the river were hunted by travelling colonists. The colonists were having a great impact on the land and natural resources. Though the colonists had made a lot of progress in the untamed lands of Australia, there were still limits. The convicts were notoriously ill-informed about Australian geography, as was evident in the attempt by twenty absconders to walk from Sydney to China in 1791, believing: “China might be easily reached, being not more than a hundred miles distant, and separated only by a river.” In reality, miles of ocean separated the two.

Much of Australia was unexplored by the convicts. Even Tench had little understanding of what existed beyond the established lines of their colony. Slowly, but surely, the colonists expanded into the surrounding area. A few days after arrival at Botany Bay, their original location, the fleet moved to the more suitable Port Jackson where a settlement was established at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788. This second location was strange and unfamiliar, and the fleet was on alert for any kind of suspicious behaviors. Though Tench had made friends in Botany Bay with Aboriginal peoples, he could not be sure this new land would be uninhabited. He recalled the first time he stepped into this unfamiliar ground with a boy who helped Tench navigate. In these new lands, he met an old Aboriginal.

Questions 1-6

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 1-6 on you 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

1   There was a great deal of information available about the life of Tench before he arrived in Australia.

2   Tench drew pictures to illustrate different places during the voyage.

3   Other military personnel in New South Wales did not treated convicts in the same way as Tench did.

4   Tench’s view towards the Aboriginals remained unchanged during his time in Australia.

5   An Aboriginal gave him gifts of food at the first time they met.

6   The convicts had a good knowledge of Australian geography.

Questions 7-13

Answer the questions below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 7-13 on your answer sheet.

7     What could be a concrete proof of Tench’s good education?

8     How many years did Tench sign the contract to the First Fleet?

9     What was used to control convicts during the voyage?

10   Who gave the order to punish the Aboriginals?

11   When did the name of Hawkesbury River come into being?

12   Where did the escaped convicts plan to go?

13   In which place did Tench feel unaccustomed?

READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below. 

Stress of Workplace

A

How busy is too busy? For some it means having to miss the occasional long lunch; for others it means missing lunch altogether. For a few, it is hot being able to take a “sickie” once a month. Then there is a group of people for whom working every evening and weekend is normal, and franticness is the tempo of their lives. For most senior executives, workloads swing between extremely busy and frenzied. The vice-president of the management consultancy AT Kearney and its head of telecommunications for the Asia-Pacific region, Neil Plumridge, says his work weeks vary from a “manageable” 45 hours to 80 hours, but average 60 hours.

B

Three warning signs alert Plumridge about his workload: sleep, scheduling and family. He knows he has too much on when he gets less than six hours of sleep for three consecutive nights; when he is constantly having to reschedule appointments; “and the third one is on the family side”, says Plumridge, the father of a three-year-old daughter, and expecting a second child in October. “If I happen to miss a birthday or anniversary, I know things are out of control.” Being “too busy” is highly subjective. But for any individual, the perception of being too busy over a prolonged period can start showing up as stress: disturbed sleep, and declining mental and physical health. National workers’ compensation figures show stress causes the most lost time of any workplace injury. Employees suffering stress are off work an average of 16.6 weeks. The effects of stress are also expensive. Comcare, the Federal Government insurer, reports that in 2003-04, claims for psychological injury accounted for 7% of claims but almost 27% of claim costs. Experts say the key to dealing with stress is not to focus on relief—a game of golf or a massage-—but to reassess workloads. Neil Plumridge says he makes it a priority to work out what has to change; that might mean allocating extra resources to a job, allowing more time or changing expectations. The decision may take several days. He also relies on the advice of colleagues, saying his peers coach each other with business problems. “Just a fresh pair of eyes over an issue can help,” he says.

C

Executive stress is not confined to big organisations. Vanessa Stoykov has been running her own advertising and public relations business for seven years, specialising in work for financial and professional services firms. Evolution Media has grown so fast that it debuted on the BRW Fast 100 list of fastest-growing small enterprises last year—just after Stoykov had her first child. Stoykov thrives on the mental stimulation of running her own business. “Like everyone, I have the occasional day when I think my head’s going to blow off,” she says. Because of the growth phase the business is in, Stoykov has to concentrate on short-term stress relief—weekends in the mountains, the occasional “mental health” day—rather than delegating more work. She says: “We’re hiring more people, but you need to train them, teach them about the culture and the clients, so it’s actually more work rather than less.”

D

Identify the causes: Jan Eisner, Melbourne psychologist who specialises in executive coaching, says thriving on a demanding workload is typical of senior executives and other high-potential business adrenalin periods followed by quieter patches, while others thrive under sustained pressure. “We could take urine and blood hormonal measures and pass a judgement of whether someone’s physiologically stressed or not,” she says. “But that’s not going to give us an indicator of what their experience of stress is, and what the emotional and cognitive impacts of stress are going to be.”

E

Eisner’s practice is informed by a movement known as positive psychology, a school of thought that argues “positive” experiences—feeling engaged, challenged, and that one is making a contribution to something meaningful—do not balance out negative ones such as stress; instead, they help people increase their resilience over time. Good stress, or positive experiences of being challenged and rewarded, is thus cumulative in the same way as bad stress. Eisner says many of the senior business people she coaches are relying more on regulating bad stress through methods such as meditation and yoga. She points to research showing that meditation can alter the biochemistry of the brain and actually help people “retrain” the way their brains and bodies react to stress. “Meditation and yoga enable you to shift the way that your brain reacts, so if you get proficient at it you’re in control.”

F

Recent research, such as last year’s study of public servants by the British epidemiologist Sir Michael Marmot, shows the most important predictor of stress is the level of job control a person has. This debunks the theory that stress is the prerogative of high-achieving executives with type-A personalities and crazy working hours. Instead, Marmot’s and other research reveals they have the best kind of job: one that combines high demands (challenging work) with high control (autonomy). “The worst jobs are those that combine high demands and low control. People with demanding jobs but little autonomy have up to four times the probability of depression and more than double the risk of heart disease,” LaMontagne says. “Those two alone count for an enormous part of chronic diseases, and they represent a potentially preventable part.” Overseas, particularly in Europe, such research is leading companies to redesign organisational practices to increase employees’ autonomy, cutting absenteeism and lifting productivity.

G

The Australian vice-president of AT Kearney, Neil Plumridge says, “Often stress is caused by our setting unrealistic expectations of ourselves. I’ll promise a client I’ll do something tomorrow, and then [promise] another client the same thing, when I really know it’s not going to happen. I’ve put stress on myself when I could have said to the clients: Why don’t I give that to you in 48 hours?’ The client doesn’t care.” Overcommitting is something people experience as an individual problem. We explain it as the result of procrastination or Parkinson’s law: that work expands to fdl the time available. New research indicates that people may be hard-wired to do it.

H

A study in the February issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology shows that people always believe they will be less busy in the future than now. This is a misapprehension, according to the authors of the report, Professor Gal Zauberman, of the University of North Carolina, and Professor John Lynch, of Duke University. “On average, an individual will be just as busy two weeks or a month from now as he or she is today. But that is not how it appears to be in everyday life,” they wrote. “People often make commitments long in advance that they would never make if the same commitments required immediate action. That is, they discount future time investments relatively steeply.” Why do we perceive a greater “surplus” of time in the future than in the present? The researchers suggest that people underestimate completion times for tasks stretching into the future, and that they are bad at imagining future competition for their time.

Questions 14-18

Look at the following statements (Questions 14-18) and the list of people below.
Match each statement with the correct person, A-D.
Write the correct letter, A-D, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

List of People

A          Jan Eisner
B          Vanessa Stoykov
C          Gal Zauberman
D          Neil Plumridge

14   Work stress usually happens in the high level of a business.

15   More people involved would be beneficial for stress relief.

16   Temporary holiday sometimes doesn’t mean less work.

17   Stress leads to a wrong direction when trying to satisfy customers.

18   It is commonly accepted that stress at present is more severe than in the future.

Questions 19-21

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 19-21 on your answer sheet.

19   Which of the following workplace stress is NOT mentioned according to Plumridge in the following options?

A  not enough time spent on family

B  unable to concentrate on work

C  inadequate time of sleep

D  alteration of appointment

20   Which of the following solution is NOT mentioned in helping reduce the work pressure according to Plumridge?

A  allocate more personnels

B  increase more time

C  lower expectation

D  do sports and massage

21   What is the point of view of Jan Eisner towards work stress?

A  Medical test can only reveal part of the data needed to cope with stress

B  Index of body samples plays determined role.

C  Emotional affection is superior to physical one.

D  One well designed solution can release all stress.

Questions 22-26

Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 22-26 on your answer sheet. 

Statistics from National worker’s compensation indicate stress plays the most important role in 22…………………… Staffs take about 23……………………….. for absence from work caused by stress. Not just time is our main concern but great expenses generated consequently. An official insurer wrote sometime that about 24……………………….. of all claims were mental issues whereas nearly 27% costs in all claims. Sports such as 25……………………….., as well as 26…………………….. could be a treatment to release stress; However, specialists recommended another practical way out, analyse workloads once again.

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

Improving Patient Safety

Packaging

One of the most prominent design issues in pharmacy is that of drag packaging and patient information leaflets (Pits). Many letters have appeared in The Journal’s letters pages over the years from pharmacists dismayed at the designs of packaging that are “accidents waiting to happen”.

Packaging design in the pharmaceutical industry is handled by either in-house teams or design agencies. Designs for over-the-counter medicines, where characteristics such as attractiveness and distinguish-ability are regarded as significant, are usually commissioned from design agencies. A marketing team will prepare a brief and the designers will come up with perhaps six or seven designs. These are whittled down to two or three that might be tested on a consumer group. In contrast, most designs for prescription-only products are created in-house. In some cases, this may simply involve applying a company’s house design (ie, logo, colour, font, etc). The chosen design is then handed over to design engineers who work out how the packaging will be produced.

Design considerations

The author of the recently published “Information design for patient safety,” Thea Swayne, tracked the journey of a medicine from manufacturing plant, through distribution warehouses, pharmacies and hospital wards, to patients’ homes. Her book highlights a multitude of design problems with current packaging, such as look-alikes and sound-alikes, small type sizes and glare on blister foils. Situations in which medicines are used include a parent giving a cough medicine to a child in the middle of the night and a busy pharmacist selecting one box from hundreds. It is argued that packaging should be designed for moments such as these. “Manufacturers are not aware of the complex situations into which products go. As designers, we are interested in not what is supposed to happen in hospital wards, but what happens in the real world,” Ms Swayne said.

Incidents where vein has been injected intrathecally instead of spine are a classic example of how poor design can contribute to harm. Investigations following these tragedies have attributed some blame to poor typescript.

Safety and compliance

Child protection is another area that gives designers opportunities to improve safety. According to the Child Accident Prevention Trust, seven out of 10 children admitted to hospital with suspected poisoning have swallowed medicines. Although child-resistant closures have reduced the number of incidents, they are not: fully child-proof. The definition of such a closure is one that not more than 15 percent of children aged between 42 and 51 months can open within five minutes. There is scope for improving what is currently available, according to Richard Mawle, a freelance product designer. “Many child-resistant packs

are based on strength. They do not necessarily prevent a child from access, but may prevent people with a disability,” he told The Journal. “The legal requirements are there for a good reason, but they are not good enough in terms of the users,” he said. “Older people, especially those with arthritis, may have the same level of strength as a child,” he explained, and suggested that better designs could rely on cognitive skills (eg, making the opening of a container a three-step process) or be based on the physical size of hands.

Mr. Mawle worked with GlaxoSmithKline on a project to improve compliance through design, which involved applying his skills to packaging and PILs. Commenting on the information presented, he said: “There can be an awful lot of junk at the beginning of PILs. For example, why are company details listed towards the beginning of a leaflet when what might be more important for the patient is that the medicine should not be taken with alcohol?”

Design principles and guidelines

Look-alike boxes present a potential for picking errors and an obvious solution would be to use colours to highlight different strengths. However, according to Ms.Swayne, colour differentiation needs to be approached with care. Not only should strong colour contrasts be used, but designating a colour to a particular strength (colour coding) is not recommended because this could lead to the user not reading the text on a box.

Design features can provide the basis for lengthy debates. For example, one argument is that if all packaging is white with black lettering, people would have no choice but to read every box carefully. The problem is that trials of drug packaging design are few—common studies of legibility and comprehensibility concern road traffic signs and visual display units. Although some designers take results from such studies into account, proving that a particular feature is beneficial can be difficult. For example, EU legislation requires that packaging must now include the name of the medicine in Braille but, according to Karel van der Waarde, a design consultant to the pharmaceutical industry, “it is not known how much visually impaired patients will benefit nor how much the reading of visually able patients will be impaired”.

More evidence might, however, soon be available. EU legislation requires PILs to reflect consultations with target patient groups to ensure they are legible, clear and easy to use. This implies that industry will have to start conducting tests. Dr. van der Waarde has performed readability studies on boxes and PILs for industry. A typical study involves showing a leaflet or package to a small group and asking them questions to test understanding. Results and comments are used to modify the material, which is then tested on a larger group. A third group is used to show that any further changes made are an improvement. Dr. van der Waarde is, however, sceptical about the legal requirements and says that many regulatory authorities do not have the resources to handle packaging information properly. “They do not look at the use of packaging in a practical context—they only see one box at a time and not several together as pharmacists would do,” he said.

Innovations

The RCA innovation exhibition this year revealed designs for a number of innovative objects. “The popper”, by Hugo Glover, aims to help arthritis sufferers remove tablets from blister packs, and “pluspoint”, by James Cobb, is an adrenaline auto-injector that aims to overcome the fact that many patients do not carry their auto-injectors due to their prohibitive size. The aim of good design, according Roger Coleman, professor of inclusive design at the RCA, is to try to make things more user-friendly as well as safer. Surely, in a patient-centred health system, that can only be a good thing. “Information design for patient safety” is not intended to be mandatory. Rather, its purpose is to create a basic design standard and to stimulate innovation. The challenge for the pharmaceutical industry, as a whole, is to adopt such a standard.

Questions 27-32

Look at the following statements (Questions 27-32) and the list of people or organisation below.
Match each statement with the correct person or organisation, A-D.
Write the correct letter, A-D, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

   A   Thea Swayne
   B   Children Accident Prevention Trust
   C    Richard Mawle
   D    Karel van der Waarde

27   Elderly people may have the same problem with children if the lids of containers require too much strength to open.

28   Adapting packaging for the blind may disadvantage the sighted people.

29   Specially designed lids cannot eliminate the possibility of children swallowing pills accidentally.

30   Container design should consider situations, such as drug used at home.

31   Governing bodies should investigate many different container cases rather than individual ones.

32   Information on the list of a leaflet hasn’t been in the right order.

Questions 33-37

Complete the notes using the list of words, A-G, below.
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 33-37 on your answer sheet.

Packaging in pharmaceutical industry

Designs for over-the-counter medicines

First, 33……………………. make the proposal, then pass them to the 34……………………. Finally, these designs will be tested by 35……………………….

Prescription-only

First, the design is made by 36………………………. and then subjected to 37……………………………

A          consumers
B          marketing teams
C          pharmaceutical industry
D          external designers
E          in-house designers
F          design engineers
G         pharmacist

Questions 38-40

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 38-40 on your answer sheet.

38   What may cause the accident in “design container”?

A  a print error

B  style of print

C  wrong label

D  the shape of the bottle

39   What do people think about the black and white only print?

A  Consumers dislike these products.

B  People have to pay more attention to the information.

C  That makes all products looks alike.

D  Sighted people may feel it more helpful.

40   Why does the writer mention “popper” and “pluspoint”?

A  to show that container design has made some progress

B  to illustrate an example of inappropriate design which can lead to accidents

C  to show that the industry still needs more to improve

D  to point out that consumers should be more informed about the information