IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 42 with Answers

This IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test consists of three reading passages. Passage 1 is titled "William Henry Perkin"; Passage 2 covers "Is There Anybody Out There?"; and Passage 3 focuses on " The History Of The Tortoise" The test includes a variety of question types, such as Matching Heading, True/False/Not Given, Flow Chart, Short Answer Type Question and Multiple Choice. You have 60 minutes to complete the entire test.

Passage 1 {Q1–13}

William Henry Perkin

IELTS True/False/Not Given (Q1-Q7)

IELTS  Short Answer Type Question (Q8-Q13)

Passage 2 {Q14–26}

Is There Anybody Out There?

IELTS Matching Heading (Q14-Q17)

IELTS Short Answer Type Question ( Q18-Q20)

IELTS True/False/Not Given ( Q21-Q26)

Passage 3 {Q27–40}

The History Of The Tortoise

IELTS Short Answer Type Question  (Q27-Q30)

IELTS True/False/Not Given (Q31-Q33)

IELTS Flow Chart Completion (Q34-Q39)

IELTS Multiple Choice Question ( Q40)

READING ACADEMIC: TEST PAPER 42

Passage 1

Read the text and answer questions 1-13.

William Henry Perkin

William Henry Perkin was born on March 12, 1838, in London, England. As a boy, Perkins’s curiosity prompted early interests in the arts, sciences, photography, and engineering. But it was a chance stumbling upon a run-down, yet functional, laboratory in his late grandfather’s home that solidified the young man’s enthusiasm for chemistry.

As a student at the City of London School, Perkin became immersed in chemistry. His talent and devotion to the subject were perceived by his teacher, Thomas Hall, who encouraged him to attend a series of lectures given by the eminent scientist Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution. Those speeches further fired the young chemist’s enthusiasm, and he later attended the Royal College of Chemistry, which he entered in 1853 at the age of 15.

At the time of Perkins’ enrolment, the Royal College of Chemistry was headed by the noted German chemist August Wilhelm Hofmann. Perkins’ scientific gifts soon caught Hofmann’s attention, and within two years, he became Hofmann’s youngest assistant. Not long after that, Perkin made the scientific breakthrough that would bring him both fame and fortune.

At the time, quinine was the only viable medical treatment for malaria. The drug is derived from the bark of the cinchona tree, native to South America, and by 1856, demand for it was surpassing the available supply. Thus, when Hofmann made some passing comments about the desirability of a synthetic substitute for quinine, it was unsurprising that his star pupil was moved to take up the challenge.

During his vacation in 1856, Perkins spent his time in the laboratory on the top floor of his family’s house. He was attempting to manufacture quinine from aniline, an inexpensive, readily available coal-tar waste product. Despite his best efforts, however, he did not end up with quinine. Instead, he produced a mysterious dark sludge. Luckily, Perkins’ scientific training and nature prompted him to investigate the substance further. By incorporating potassium dichromate and alcohol into aniline at various stages of the experimental process, he finally obtained a deep purple solution. And, proving the truth of the famous scientist Louis Pasteur’s words, ‘chance favours only the prepared mind’, Perkin saw the potential of his unexpected find.

Historically, textile dyes were made from such natural sources as plants and animal excretions. Some of these, such as the glandular mucus of snails, were difficult to obtain and outrageously expensive. Indeed, the purple colour extracted from a snail was once so costly that in society at the time, only the rich could afford it. Further, natural dyes tended to be muddy in hue and fade quickly. It was against this backdrop that Perkins’ discovery was made.

Perkin quickly grasped that his purple solution could be used to colour fabric, thus making it the world’s first synthetic dye. Realising the importance of this breakthrough, he wasted no time in securing a patent. But perhaps the most fascinating of all Perkins’ reactions to his find was his nearly instant recognition that the new dye had commercial possibilities.

Perkin originally named his dye Tyrian Purple, but it later became commonly known as mauve (from the French for the plant used to make the colour violet). He asked for advice from Scottish dye works owner Robert Pullar, who assured him that manufacturing the dye would be well worth it if the colour remained fast (i.e. would not fade) and the cost was relatively low. So, over the fierce objections of his mentor Hofmann, he left college to give birth to the modern chemical industry.

With the help of his father and brother, Perkin set up a factory not far from London. Utilising the cheap and plentiful coal tar that was an almost unlimited byproduct of London’s gas street lighting, the dye works began producing the world’s first synthetically dyed material in 1857. The company received a commercial boost from the Empress Eugenie of France when she decided the new colour flattered her. Very soon, mauve was the necessary shade for all the fashionable ladies in that country.

Not to be outdone, England’s Queen Victoria also appeared in public wearing a mauve gown, thus making it all the rage in England as well. The dye was bold and fast, and the public clamoured for more. Perkin went back to the drawing board.

Although Perkins’ fame and fortune were assured by his first discovery, the chemist continued his research. Among the dyes he developed and introduced were aniline red (1859), aniline black (1863), and, in the late 1860s, Perkins’ green. It is important to note that Perkins’s synthetic dye discoveries had outcomes far beyond the merely decorative. The dyes also became vital to medical research in many ways. For instance, they were used to stain previously invisible microbes and bacteria, allowing researchers to identify bacilli such as those causing tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax. Artificial dyes continue to play a crucial role today. And, in what would have been particularly pleasing to Perkin, their current use is in the search for a vaccine against malaria.

Questions 1-7

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

In boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet, write:

1. Michael Faraday was the first person to recognise Perkins’ ability as a student of chemistry.

2. Michael Faraday suggested that Perkin should enrol in the Royal College of Chemistry.

3. Perkin employed August Wilhelm Hofmann as his assistant.

4. Perkin was still young when he made the discovery that made him rich and famous.

5. The trees from which quinine is derived grow only in South America.

6. Perkin hoped to manufacture a drug from a coal tar waste product.

7. Perkin was inspired by the discoveries of the famous scientist Louis Pasteur.

Questions 8-13

Answer the questions below.

8. Before Perkins’ discovery, with what group in society was the colour purple associated?

9. What potential did Perkin immediately understand that his new dye had?

10. What was the name finally used to refer to the first colour Perkin invented?

11. What was the name of the person Perkin consulted before setting up his own dye works?

12. In what country did Perkins' newly invented colour first become fashionable?

13. According to the passage, which disease is now being targeted by researchers using synthetic dyes?

Passage 2

Read the text and answer questions 14-26.

Is There Anybody Out There?

A. The primary reason for the search is basic curiosity – the same curiosity about the natural world that drives all pure science. We want to know whether we are alone in the Universe. We want to know whether life evolves naturally under the right conditions, or whether there is something very special about the Earth that has fostered the variety of life forms we see around us. The simple detection of a radio signal will be sufficient to answer this most basic question. In this sense, SETI is another cog in the machinery of pure science, continually pushing the horizon of our knowledge. However, there are other reasons for being interested in whether life exists elsewhere. For example, we have had civilisation on Earth for perhaps only a few thousand years, and the threats of nuclear war and pollution over the last few decades have told us that our survival may be tenuous. Will we last another two thousand years, or will we wipe ourselves out? Since the lifetime of a planet like ours is several billion years, we can expect that, if other civilisations do survive in our galaxy, their ages will range from zero to several billion years. Thus, any other civilisation that we hear from is likely to be far older, on average, than ourselves. The mere existence of such a civilisation will tell us that long-term survival is possible, and gives us some cause for optimism. It is even possible that the older civilisation may pass on the benefits of their experience in dealing with threats to survival, such as nuclear war and global pollution, as well as other threats we haven’t yet discovered.

B. In discussing whether we are alone, most SETI scientists adopt two ground rules. First, UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) are generally ignored since most scientists don’t consider the evidence for them to be strong enough to bear serious consideration (although it is also important to keep an open mind in case any really convincing evidence emerges in the future). Second, we make a very conservative assumption that we are looking for a life form that is pretty well like us, since if it differs radically from us, we may well not recognise it as a life form, quite apart from whether we are able to communicate with it. In other words, the life form we are looking for may well have two green heads and seven fingers, but it will nevertheless resemble us in that it should communicate with its fellows, be interested in the Universe, live on a planet orbiting a star like our Sun, and perhaps most restrictively, have a chemistry, like us, based on carbon and water.

C. Even when we make these assumptions, our understanding of other life forms is still severely limited. We do not even know, for example, how many stars have planets, and we certainly do not know how likely it is that life will arise naturally, given the right conditions. However, when we look at the 100 billion stars in our galaxy (the Milky Way), and 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe, it seems inconceivable that at least one of these planets does not have a life form on it; in fact, the best educated guess we can make, using the little that we do know about the conditions for carbon-based life, leads us to estimate that perhaps one in 100,000 stars might have a life-bearing planet orbiting it. That means that our nearest neighbours are perhaps 100 light-years away, which is almost next door in astronomical terms.

D. An alien civilisation could choose many different ways of sending information across the galaxy, but many of these either require too much energy or else are severely attenuated while traversing the vast distances across the galaxy. It turns out that, for a given amount of transmitted power, radio waves in the frequency range 1000 to 3000 MHz travel the greatest distance, and so all searches to date have concentrated on looking for radio waves in this frequency range. So far, there have been a number of searches by various groups around the world, including Australian searches using the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales. To date, there have been no detections from the few hundred stars that have been searched. The scale of the searches has been increased dramatically since 1992, when the US Congress voted NASA $10 million per year for ten years to conduct a thorough search for extraterrestrial life. Much of the money in this project is being spent on developing the special hardware needed to search many frequencies at once. The project has two parts. One part is a targeted search using the world’s largest radio telescopes, the American-operated telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico and the French telescope in Nancy, France. This part of the project searches for the nearest 1000 likely stars with high sensitivity to signals in the frequency range 1000 to 3000 MHz. The other part of the project is an undirected search that monitors all of space with a lower sensitivity, using the smaller antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network.

E. There is considerable debate over how we should react if we detect a signal from an alien civilisation. Everybody agrees that we should not reply immediately. Quite apart from the impracticality of sending a reply over such large distances at short notice, it raises a host of ethical questions that would have to be addressed by the global community before any reply could be sent. Would the human race experience culture shock if confronted with a superior, much older civilisation? Luckily, there is no urgency about this. The stars being searched are hundreds of light-years away, so it takes hundreds of years for their signal to reach us, and a further few hundred years for our reply to reach them. It’s not important, then, if there’s a delay of a few years or decades, while the human race debates the question of whether to reply, and perhaps carefully drafts a reply.

Questions 14-17

Reading passage 2 has five paragraphs, A-E.

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B-E from the headings below.

List of Headings

i. Seeking the transmission of radio signals from planets

ii. Appropriate responses to signals from other civilisations

iii. Vast distances to Earth’s closest neighbours

iv. Assumptions underlying the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence

v. Reasons for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence

vi. Knowledge of extra-terrestrial life forms

vii. Likelihood of life on other planets

Example :

Paragraph A- v

14. Paragraph B………..

15. Paragraph C

16. Paragraph D

17. Paragraph E

Questions 18-20

Answer the questions below.

18. What is the life expectancy of Earth?

19. What kind of signals from other intelligent civilisations are SETI scientists searching for?

20. How many stars are the world’s most powerful radio telescopes searching for?

Questions 21-26

Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in the reading passage?

In boxes 21-26 on your answer sheet, write:

21. Alien civilisations may be able to help the human race to overcome serious problems.

22. SETI scientists are trying to find a life form that resembles humans in many ways.

23. The Americans and Australians have cooperated on joint research projects.

24. So far, SETI scientists have picked up radio signals from several stars.

25. The NASA project attracted criticism from some members of Congress.

26. If a signal from outer space is received, it will be important to respond promptly.

Passage 3

Read the text and answer questions 27-40.

The History Of The Tortoise

If you go back far enough, everything lived in the sea. At various points in evolutionary history, enterprising individuals across many animal groups moved onto land, sometimes even to the most parched deserts, taking their own private seawater with them in their blood and cellular fluids. In addition to the reptiles, birds, mammals and insects which we see all around us, other groups that have succeeded out of water include scorpions, snails, crustaceans such as woodlice and land crabs, millipedes and centipedes, spiders and various worms. And we mustn’t forget the plants, without whose prior invasion of the land none of the other migrations could have happened.

Moving from water to land involved a major redesign of every aspect of life, including breathing and reproduction. Nevertheless, a good number of thoroughgoing land animals later turned around, abandoned their hard-earned terrestrial retooling, and returned to the water again. Seals have only gone partway back. They show us what the intermediates might have been like, on the way to extreme cases such as whales and dugongs. Whales (including the small whales we call dolphins) and dugongs, with their close cousins the manatees, ceased to be land creatures altogether and reverted to the full marine habits of their remote ancestors. They don’t even come ashore to breed. They do, however, still breathe air, having never developed anything equivalent to the gills of their earlier marine incarnation. Turtles went back to the sea a very long time ago, and like all vertebrates that return to the water, they breathe air. However, they are, in one respect, less fully given back to the water than whales or dugongs, for turtles still lay their eggs on beaches.

There is evidence that all modern turtles are descended from a terrestrial ancestor that lived before most dinosaurs. There are two key fossils, called Proganochelys quenstedti and Palaeochersis talampayensis, dating from early dinosaur times, which appear to be close to the ancestry of all modern turtles and tortoises. You might wonder how we can tell whether fossil animals lived on land or in water, especially if only fragments are found. Sometimes it’s obvious. Ichthyosaurs were reptilian contemporaries of the dinosaurs, with fins and streamlined bodies. The fossils look like dolphins, and they surely lived like dolphins, in the water. With turtles, it is a little less obvious. One way to tell is by measuring the bones of their forelimbs.

Walter Joyce and Jacques Gauthier, at Yale University, obtained three measurements in these particular bones of 71 species of living turtles and tortoises. They used a kind of triangular graph paper to plot the three measurements against one another. All the land tortoise species formed a tight cluster of points in the upper part of the triangle, while all the water turtles clustered in the lower part of the triangle. There was no overlap, except when they included species that spend time in both water and on land. Sure enough, these amphibious species show up on the triangular graph approximately halfway between the ‘wet cluster’ of sea turtles and the ‘dry cluster’ of land tortoises. The next step was to determine where the fossils fell. The bones of P. quenstedti and P. talampayensis leave us in no doubt. Their points on the graph are right in the thick of the dry cluster. Both these fossils were dry-land tortoises. They come from the era before our turtles returned to the water.

You might think, therefore, that modern land tortoises have probably stayed on land ever since those early terrestrial times, as most mammals did after a few of them went back to the sea. But apparently not. If you draw out the family tree of all modern turtles and tortoises, nearly all the branches are aquatic. Today’s land tortoises constitute a single branch, deeply nested within the aquatic turtle branches. This suggests that modern land tortoises have not stayed on land continuously since the time of P. quenstedti and P. talampayensis. Rather, their ancestors were among those who returned to the water, and they re-emerged onto the land in (relatively) more recent times.

Tortoises, therefore, represent a remarkable double return. In common with all mammals, reptiles and birds, their remote ancestors were marine fish and before that various more or less worm-like creatures stretching back, still in the sea, to the primaeval bacteria. Later ancestors lived on land and stayed there for a very large number of generations. Later ancestors still evolved back into the water and became sea turtles. And finally, they returned yet again to the land as tortoises, some of which now live in the driest of deserts.

Questions 27-30

Answer the questions below.

27. What had to transfer from sea to land before any animals could migrate?

28. Which TWO processes are mentioned as those in which animals had to make big changes as they moved onto land?

29. Which physical feature, possessed by their ancestors, do whales lack?

30. Which animals might ichthyosaurs have resembled?

Questions 31-33

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

In boxes 31-33 on your answer sheet, write:

31. Turtles were among the first group of animals to migrate back to the sea.

32. It is always difficult to determine where an animal lived when its fossilised remains are incomplete.

33. The habitat of ichthyosaurs can be determined by the appearance of their fossilised remains.

Questions 34-39

Complete the flow-chart below.

Method Of Determining Where The Ancestors Of Turtles And Tortoises Come From

Step 1: 71 species of living turtles and tortoises were examined, and a total of 34. …………… were taken from the bones of their forelimbs.

Step 2: The data was recorded on a 35. ………………. (necessary for comparing the information).

Outcome: Land tortoises were represented by a dense 36. ……………… of points towards the top. Sea turtles were grouped together at the bottom.

Step 3: The same data was collected from some living 37. ……………… species and added to the other results.

Outcome: The points for these species were positioned about 38. ……………… up the triangle between the land tortoises and the sea turtles.

Step 4: Bones of R. quenstedti and P. talampayensis were examined in a similar way, and the results were added.

Outcome: The position of the points indicated that both these ancient creatures were 39. ………………….

Question 40

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

40. According to the writer, the most significant thing about tortoises is that

A. They are able to adapt to life in extremely dry environments.

B. Their original life form was a kind of primaeval bacteria,

C. They have so much in common with sea turtles.

D. They have made the transition from sea to land more than once.

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