AC IELTS Reading Practice Test

QUESTION: 1

The Impact of Wilderness Tourism reading

A. The market for tourism in remote areas is booming as never before. Countries all
across the world are actively promoting their ‘wilderness’ regions – such as
mountains, Arctic lands, deserts, small islands and wetlands – to high-spending
tourists. The attraction of these areas is obvious: by definition, wilderness tourism
requires little or no initial investment. But that does not mean that there is no
cost. As the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
recognised, these regions are fragile (i.e. highly vulnerable to abnormal
pressures) not just in terms of their ecology, but also in terms of the culture of
their inhabitants. The three most significant types of fragile environment in these
respects, and also in terms of the proportion of the Earth’s surface they cover,
are deserts, mountains and Arctic areas. An important characteristic is their
marked seasonality, with harsh conditions prevailing for many months each year.
Consequently, most human activities, including tourism, are limited to quite
clearly defined parts of the year.
Tourists are drawn to these regions by their natural landscape beauty and the
unique cultures of their indigenous people. And poor governments in these
isolated areas have welcomed the new breed of ‘adventure tourist’, grateful for
the hard currency they bring. For several years now, tourism has been the prime
source of foreign exchange in Nepal and Bhutan. Tourism is also a key element
in the economies of Arctic zones such as Lapland and Alaska and in desert
areas such as Ayers Rock in Australia and Arizona’s Monument Valley.
B. Once a location is established as a main tourist destination, the effects on the
local community are profound. When hill-farmers, for example, can make more
money in a few weeks working as porters for foreign trekkers than they can in a
year working in their fields, it is not surprising that many of them give up their
farm-work, which is thus left to other members of the family. In some hill-regions,
this has led to a serious decline in farm output and a change in the local diet,
because there is insufficient labour to maintain terraces and irrigation systems
and tend to crops. The result has been that many people in these regions have
turned to outside supplies of rice and other foods.
In Arctic and desert societies, year-round survival has traditionally depended on
hunting animals and fish and collecting fruit over a relatively short season.
However, as some inhabitants become involved in tourism, they no longer have
time to collect wild food; this has led to increasing dependence on bought food
and stores. Tourism is not always the culprit behind such changes. All kinds of
wage labour, or government handouts, tend to undermine traditional survival
systems. Whatever the cause, the dilemma is always the same: what happens if
these new, external sources of income dry up?
The physical impact of visitors is another serious problem associated with the
growth in adventure tourism. Much attention has focused on erosion along major
trails, but perhaps more important are the deforestation and impacts on water
supplies arising from the need to provide tourists with cooked food and hot
showers. In both mountains and deserts, slow-growing trees are often the main
sources of fuel and water supplies may be limited or vulnerable to degradation
through heavy use.
C. Stories about the problems of tourism have become legion in the last few years.
Yet it does not have to be a problem. Although tourism inevitably affects the
region in which it takes place, the costs to these fragile environments and their
local cultures can be minimised. Indeed, it can even be a vehicle for
reinvigorating local cultures, as has happened with the Sherpas of Nepal’s
Khumbu Valley and in some Alpine villages. And a growing number of adventure
tourism operators are trying to ensure that their activities benefit the local
population and environment over the long term.
In the Swiss Alps, communities have decided that their future depends on
integrating tourism more effectively with the local economy. Local concern about
the rising number of second home developments in the Swiss Pays d’Enhaut
resulted in limits being imposed on their growth.
There has also been a renaissance in communal cheese production in the area,
providing the locals with a reliable source of income that does not depend on
outside.
Many of the Arctic tourist destinations have been exploited by outside
companies, who employ transient workers and repatriate most of the profits to
their home base. But some Arctic communities are now operating tour
businesses themselves, thereby ensuring that the benefits accrue locally. For
instance, a native corporation in Alaska, employing local people, is running an air
tour from Anchorage to Kotzebue, where tourists eat Arctic food, walk on the
tundra and watch local musicians and dancers.
Native people in the desert regions of the American Southwest have followed
similar strategies, encouraging tourists to visit their pueblos and reservations to
purchase high-quality handicrafts and artwork. The Acoma and San Ildefonso
pueblos have established highly profitable pottery businesses, while the Navajo
and Hopi groups have been similarly successful with jewellery.
Too many people living in fragile environments have lost control over their
economies, their culture and their environment when tourism has penetrated their
homelands. Merely restricting tourism cannot be the solution to the imbalance,
because people’s desire to see new places will not just disappear. Instead,
communities in fragile environments must achieve greater control over tourism
ventures in their regions; in order to balance their needs and aspirations with the
demands of tourism. A growing number of communities are demonstrating that,
with firm communal decision-making, this is possible. The critical question now is
whether this can become the norm, rather than the exception.

Questions 1-3
Reading Passage 1 has three section, A-C.
Choose the correct heading for each section from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number I-VI in boxes 1-3 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
I The expansion of international tourism in recent years
II How local communities can balance their own needs with the demands of
wilderness tourism
III Fragile regions and the reasons for the expansion of tourism there
IV Traditional methods of food-supply in fragile regions
V Some of the disruptive effects of wilderness tourism
VI The economic benefits of mass tourism
1 Section A
2 Section B
3 Section C

Questions 4-9
Do the following statements reflect the claims of the writer in Reading Passage
1?
YES if the statement reflects 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
4 The low financial cost of setting up wilderness tourism makes it attractive to
many countries.
5 Deserts, mountains and Arctic regions are examples of environments that are
both ecologically and culturally fragile.
6 Wilderness tourism operates throughout the year in fragile areas.
7 The spread of tourism in certain hill-regions has resulted in a fall in the amount
of food produced locally.
8 Traditional food-gathering in desert societies was distributed evenly over the
year.
9 Government handouts do more damage than tourism does to traditional
patterns of food-gathering.

Questions 10-13
Choose ONE WORD from Reading Passage 1 for each answer.
The positive ways in which some local communities have responded to tourism
People/Location Activity
Swiss Pays d’Enhaut Revived production of 10........
Arctic communities Operate 11............... businesses
Acoma and San Ildefonso Produce and sell 12..............
Navajo and Hopi Activity Produce and sell 13...............

QUESTION: 2

Flawed Beauty: the problem with toughened glass

On 2nd August 1999, a particularly hot day in the town of Cirencester in the UK,
a large pane of toughened glass in the roof of a shopping centre at Bishops Walk
shattered without warning and fell from its frame. When fragments were analysed
by experts at the giant glass manufacturer Pilkington, which had made the pane,
they found that minute crystals of nickel sulphide trapped inside the glass had
almost certainly caused the failure.
‘The glass industry is aware of the issue,’ says Brian Waldron, chairman of the
standards committee at the Glass and Glazing Federation, a British trade
association, and standards development officer at Pilkington. But he insists that
cases are few and far between. ‘It’s a very rare phenomenon,’ he says.
Others disagree. ‘On average I see about one or two buildings a month suffering
from nickel sulphide related failures,’ says Barrie Josie, a consultant engineer
involved in the Bishops Walk investigation. Other experts tell of similar
experiences. Tony Wilmott of London-based consulting engineers Sandberg, and
Simon Armstrong at CladTech Associates in Hampshire both say they know of
hundreds of cases. ‘What you hear is only the tip of the iceberg,’ says Trevor
Ford, a glass expert at Resolve Engineering in Brisbane, Queensland. He
believes the reason is simple: ‘No-one wants bad press.’
Toughened glass is found everywhere, from cars and bus shelters to the
windows, walls and roofs of thousands of buildings around the world. It’s easy to
see why. This glass has five times the strength of standard glass, and when it
does break it shatters into tiny cubes rather than large, razor-sharp shards.
Architects love it because large panels can be bolted together to make
transparent walls, and turning it into ceilings and floors is almost as easy.
It is made by heating a sheet of ordinary glass to about 620°C to soften it slightly,
allowing its structure to expand, and then cooling it rapidly with jets of cold air.
This causes the outer layer of the pane to contract and solidify before the interior.
When the interior finally solidifies and shrinks, it exerts a pull on the outer layer
that leaves it in permanent compression and produces a tensile force inside the
glass. As cracks propagate best in materials under tension, the compressive
force on the surface must be overcome before the pane will break, making it
more resistant to cracking.
The problem starts when glass contains nickel sulphide impurities. Trace
amounts of nickel and sulphur are usually present in the raw materials used to
make glass, and nickel can also be introduced by fragments of nickel alloys
falling into the molten glass. As the glass is heated, these atoms react to form
tiny crystals of nickel sulphide. Just a tenth of a gram of nickel in the furnace can
create up to 50,000 crystals.
These crystals can exist in two forms: a dense form called the alpha phase,
which is stable at high temperatures, and a less dense form called the beta
phase, which is stable at room temperatures. The high temperatures used in the
toughening process convert all the crystals to the dense, compact alpha form.
But the subsequent cooling is so rapid that the crystals don’t have time to change
back to the beta phase. This leaves unstable alpha crystals in the glass, primed
like a coiled spring, ready to revert to the beta phase without warning.
When this happens, the crystals expand by up to 4%. And if they are within the
central, tensile region of the pane, the stresses this unleashes can shatter the
whole sheet. The time that elapses before failure occurs is unpredictable. It could
happen just months after manufacture, or decades later, although if the glass is
heated – by sunlight, for example – the process is speeded up. Ironically, says
Graham Dodd, of consulting engineers Arup in London, the oldest pane of
toughened glass known to have failed due to nickel sulphide inclusions was in
Pilkington’s glass research building in Lathom, Lancashire. The pane was 27
years old.
Data showing the scale of the nickel sulphide problem is almost impossible to
find. The picture is made more complicated by the fact that these crystals occur
in batches. So even if, on average, there is only one inclusion in 7 tonnes of
glass, if i you experience one nickel sulphide failure in your building, that
probably means you’ve got a problem in more than one pane. Josie says that in
the last decade he has worked on over 15 buildings with the number of failures
into double figures.
One of the worst examples of this is Waterfront Place, which was completed in
1990. Over the following decade the 40 storey Brisbane block suffered a rash of
failures. Eighty panes of its toughened glass shattered due to inclusions before
experts were finally called in. John Barry, an expert in nickel sulphide
contamination at the University of Queensland, analysed every glass pane in the
building. Using a studio camera, a photographer went up in a cradle to take
photos of every pane.
These were scanned under a modified microfiche reader for signs of nickel
sulphide crystals. ‘We discovered at least another 120 panes with potentially
dangerous inclusions which were then replaced,’ says Barry. ‘It was a very
expensive and time-consuming process that took around six months to
complete.’ Though the project cost A$1.6 million (nearly ?700,000), the
alternative – re-cladding the entire building – would have cost ten times as much.

Questions 14-17
Look at the following people and the list of statements below.
Match each person with the correct statement.
14 Brian Waldron
15 Trevor Ford
16 Graham Dodd
17 John Barry
List of Statements
A suggests that publicity about nickel sulphide failure has been suppressed
B regularly sees cases of nickel sulphide failure
C closely examined all the glass in one building
D was involved with the construction of Bishops Walk
E recommended the rebuilding of Waterfront Place
F thinks the benefits of toughened glass are exaggerated
G claims that nickel sulphide failure is very unusual
H refers to the most extreme case of delayed failure

Questions 18-23
Complete the summary with the list of words A-P below.
Toughened Glass

Toughened glass is favoured by architects because it is much stronger than
ordinary glass, and the fragments are not as 18............ when it breaks.
However, it has one disadvantage: it can shatter 19 ................ This fault is a result
of the manufacturing process. Ordinary glass is first heated, then cooled
very 20 .................
The outer layer 21............... before the inner layer, and the tension between the
two layers which is created because of this makes the glass stronger. However, if
the glass contains nickel sulphide impurities, crystals of nickel sulphide are
formed. These are unstable, and can expand suddenly, particularly if the weather
is 22............... If this happens, the pane of glass may break. The frequency with
which such problems occur is 23.................. by glass experts. Furthermore, the
crystals cannot be detected without sophisticated equipment.
Words for the gaps: numerous, detected, quickly, agreed, warm, sharp,
expands, slowly, unexpectedly, removed, contracts, disputed, cold, moved,
small, calculated

Questions 24-26
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage
2?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
24 Little doubt was expressed about the reason for the Bishops Walk
accident.
25 Toughened glass has the same appearance as ordinary glass.
26 There is plenty of documented evidence available about the incidence of
nickel sulphide failure.

QUESTION: 3

The effects of light on plant and animal species

Light is important to organisms for two different reasons. Firstly it is used as a
cue for the timing of daily and seasonal rhythms in both plane and animals, and
secondly it is used to assist growth in plants.
Breeding in most organisms occurs during a part. of the year only, and so a
reliable cue is needed to trigger breeding behaviour. Day length is an excellent
cue, because it provides a perfectly predictable pattern of change within the year.
In the temperate zone in spring, temperatures fluctuate greatly from day to day,
but day length increases steadily by a predictable amount. The seasonal impact
of day length on physiological responses is called photoperiodism, and the
amount of experimental evidence for this phenomenon is considerable. For
example, some species of birds’ breeding can be induced even in midwinter
simply by increasing day length artificially (Wolfson 1964). Other examples of
photoperiodism occur in plants. A short-day plant flowers when the day is less
than a certain critical length. A long-day plant flowers after a certain critical day
length is exceeded. In both cases the critical day length differs from species to
species. Plane which flower after a period of vegetative growth, regardless of
photoperiod, are known as day-neutral plants.
Breeding seasons in animals such as birds have evolved to occupy the part of
the year in which offspring have the greatest chances of survival. Before the
breeding season begins, food reserves must be built up to support the energy
cost of reproduction, and to provide for young birds both when they are in the
nest and after fledging. Thus many temperate-zone birds use the increasing day
lengths in spring as a cue to begin the nesting cycle, because this is a point
when adequate food resources will be assured.
The adaptive significance of photoperiodism in plane is also clear. Short-day
plane that flower in spring in the temperate zone are adapted to maximising
seedling growth during the growing season. Long-day plants are adapted for
situations that require fertilization by insects, or a long period of seed ripening.
Short-day plane that flower in the autumn in the temperate zone are able to build
up food reserves over the growing season and over winter as seeds. Day-neutral
plane have an evolutionary advantage when the connection between the
favourable period for reproduction and day length is much less certain. For
example, desert annuals germinate, flower and seed whenever suitable rainfall
occurs, regardless of the day length.
The breeding season of some plants can be delayed to extraordinary lengths.
Bamboos are perennial grasses that remain in a vegetative state for many years
and then suddenly flower, fruit and die (Evans 1976). Every bamboo of the
species Chusquea abietifolio on the island of Jamaica flowered, set seed and
died during 1884. The next generation of bamboo flowered and died between
1916 and 1918, which suggests a vegetative cycle of about 31 years. The
climatic trigger for this flowering cycle is not-yet known, but the adaptive
significance is clear. The simultaneous production of masses of bamboo seeds
(in some cases lying 12 to 15 centimetres deep on the ground) is more than all
the seed-eating animals can cope with at the time, so that some seeds escape
being eaten and grow up to form the next generation (Evans 1976).
The second reason light is important to organisms is that it is essential for
photosynthesis. This is the process by which plants use energy from the sun to
convert carbon from soil or water into organic material for growth. The rate of
photosynthesis in a plant can be measured by calculating the rate of its uptake of
carbon. There is a wide range of photosynthetic responses of plants to variations
in light intensity. Some plants reach maximal photosynthesis at one-quarter full
sunlight, and others, like sugarcane, never reach a maximum, but continue to
increase photosynthesis rate as light intensity rises.
Plants in general can be divided into two groups: shade-tolerant species and
shade-intolerant species. This classification is commonly used in forestry and
horticulture. Shade-tolerant plane have lower photosynthetic rates and hence
have lower growth rates than those of shade-intolerant species. Plant species
become adapted to living in a certain kind of habitat, and in the process evolve a
series of characteristics that prevent them from occupying other habitats. Grime (
1966) suggests that light may be one of the major components directing these
adaptations. For example, eastern hemlock seedlings are shade-tolerant. They
can survive in the forest understorey under very low light levels because they
have a low photosynthetic rate.

Questions 27-33
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage
3?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
27 There is plenty of scientific evidence to support photoperiodism.
28 Some types of bird can be encouraged to breed out of season.
29 Photoperiodism is restricted to certain geographic areas.
30 Desert annuals are examples of long-day plants.
31 Bamboos flower several times during their life cycle.
32 Scientists have yet to determine the cue for Chusquea abietifolia’s seasonal
rhythm.
33 Eastern hemlock is a fast-growing plant.

Questions 34-40
Complete the sentences.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
34 Day length is a useful cue for breeding in areas where are
unpredictable.
35 Plants which do not respond to light levels are referred to as .
36 Birds in temperate climates associate longer days with nesting and the
availability of .
37 Plants that Bower when days are long often depend on to help them
reproduce.
38 Desert annuals respond to as a signal for reproduction.
39 There is no limit to the photosynthetic rate in plants such as .
40 Tolerance to shade is one criterion for the of plants in forestry and
horticulture.

Answers

The Impact of Wilderness Tourism Reading answers

iii
v
ii
YES
YES
NO
YES
NO
NOT GIVEN
cheese
tourism/ tourist/ tour
pottery
jewellery/ jewelry

Reading passage 2- Flawed Beauty: the problem with toughened glass

Flawed Beauty: the problem with toughened glass Reading Answers

G
A
H
C
F
I
C
K
E
L
TRUE
NOT GIVEN
FALSE

Reading passage 3- The effects of light on plant and animal species

The effects of light on plant and animal species Reading Answers

TRUE
TRUE
NOT GIVEN
FALSE
FALSE
TRUE
FALSE
temperatures
day-neutral/ day- neutral plants
food / food resources/ adequate food/ adequate food resources
insects/ fertilizations by insects
rainfall/ suitable rainfall
sugarcane
classification

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