IELTS practice test 12 reading academic test

IELTS PRACTICE TESTS

READING
TEST 12


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Reading Academic
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Test 12

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SECTION 1

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Questions 1 – 13

The listening game
A A SIMPLE computer program that teaches children to distinguish between sounds can dramatically
boost their listening skills. It can allow them to progress by the equivalent of 2 years in just a few weeks, the

game's creator claims.
B The game, called Phonomena, was devised by David Moore of the University of Oxford as an aid for
children with language problems, but he says his latest trials also show that it can help any child. Other
experts, however, are reserving judgement until independent tests are carried out.
C Phonomena is designed to improve children's ability to distinguish between different phonemes, the
basic sounds that form the building blocks of language. Up to a fifth of all children are thought to have
problems hearing the differences between some sounds, says Moore, who heads the UK Medical Research
Council's Institute of Hearing Research.
D In the game, children have to distinguish between pairs of phonemes such as the "i" sound from the
word "bit" and the "e" from "bet". They are played one phoneme followed by two more examples, and asked
which one matches the first sound. As the game progresses the phonemes are gradually "morphed" to make
them more and more similar, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between them. With 49
phonemes in English, there are potentially more than 1000 different pairs, but the game concentrates on just
22 pairs of the commonest and most similar-sounding phonemes.

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E In the latest trials, 18 children aged between 8 and 10 played the game three times a week for 3 weeks.
Their language abilities were compared before and after exposure to the game using a standard listening test.
The team found a dramatic improvement in their language abilities, with listening ages up by an average 2.4
years compared with 12 children who did not play the game. In earlier trials on children with learning
difficulties, the speech and language therapists who tested the game reported similar improvements.
F Tedd Wragg, however, an expert in education at the UK's University of Exeter, warns that such trials can
produce misleading results. The improvements could be due to the efforts and attention of teachers and
therapists, rather than the game itself. There is a history in education of people and companies making
claims about learning products that do not stand up to scrutiny, he says.

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G Moore says independent tests will be done. But he is convinced that computer games such as
Phonomena that are designed to teach key sensory skills could make a big difference in education. Even
normal computer games have been shown to improve visual skills, he points out. "In the future, every child's

dream of homework consisting of hours spent playing computer games may well become a reality."
H It's a bit like teaching someone to catch a ball, Moore adds. "Sensory performance is no different from
motor performance. As far as we know, the neural processes driving them both are the same." What is more,
just as playing catch improves hand-eye coordination in other tasks, Moore thinks the phoneme training
boosts children's general language skills. The advantage of using computers, he says, is each game can be
tailored to a child's abilities.
I An Oxford-based company called MindWeavers has been set up to commercialise the game. Similar
computer-based language tools already exist, such as those developed by Scientific Learning of Oakland,
California. But these are geared exclusively towards children with speech and language problems and
involve intensive training. "We don't believe you need to do this draconian amount of training for it to do
good," says Moore. He is also exploring the use of phoneme training as an aid to adults learning a foreign
language.

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Questions 1 - 9
Match each heading to the most suitable paragraph.

i

The sound system

ii

A fairly widespread problem

iii

Help for all

iv

Similarities to physical training

v

The basic challenge

vi

Marked improvements

vii

Business opportunities

viii

The perfect after school activity

ix

A remarkable time saving

x

A need for caution

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1

Paragraph A ..........

2

Paragraph B ..........

3

Paragraph C ..........

4

Paragraph D ..........

5

Paragraph E ..........

6

Paragraph F ..........

7

Paragraph G ..........

8

Paragraph H ..........

9

Paragraph I ..........

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Questions 10 - 13
Choose A, B or C.

10 In the game of Phonomena children are required to choose between
A vowel sounds that have similar pronunciation.
B thousands of different sounds.
C complicated sounds which are not common in real words.

11 During the most recent tests, the researchers noticed

A a dramatic improvements in the language ability of children aged 18.
B a modest improvement in children with learning difficulties.
C an increase of about 2.4 years in the listening age of children with learning difficulties.

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12 Tedd Wragg says that the recent test results

A will lead to more interesting results in the future.
B should be viewed with a degree of scepticism.

C are a credit to the hard work of teachers and therapists.

13 Moore thinks that computer games
A are mainly useful in improving children's visual skills.
B could play a bigger role in children's homework in the future.
C will force children to spend more time in front of computers.

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SECTION 2

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Questions 14 – 26

Education in America and Britain
A LOTS of wealthy people and crummy state schools, especially in the big cities where well-off folk tend
to live: these common features of America and Britain help explain the prominence in both countries of an
elite tier of private schools. Mostly old, some with fat endowments, places like Eton, Harrow and Phillips
Exeter have done extraordinarily well. Fees at independent schools have approximately doubled in real
terms over the past 25 years and waiting lists have lengthened almost beyond belief. Even in the recession,
they are proving surprisingly resilient. A few parents are pulling out, but most are soldiering on and plenty
more are clamouring to get their children in.
B All sorts of class-based conspiracy theories exist to explain the success of such institutions, but the main
reason why they thrive in a more meritocratic world is something much more pragmatic: their ability to get
people into elite universities. For Britain and America also have the world's best universities. Look at any of
the global rankings and not only do the Ivy League and Oxbridge monopolise the top of the tree, British and,
especially, American colleges dominate most of the leading 100 places. This summer graduates will struggle
to find jobs, so a degree from a world-famous name like Berkeley or the London School of Economics will
be even more valuable than usual. The main asset of the private schools is their reputation for getting
children into those distinguished universities.

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C In point of fact, only 7% of British children go to private schools, but they account for more than 40% of
the intake at Oxford and Cambridge. That statistic is a little unfair: private schools account for a fifth of the
people taking A-levels, pretty much essential for getting in. All the same it is notable that Britain's two
best-known universities educate more Etonians than boys who were poor enough to get free meals at their
schools. In America figures are harder to come by, but the independent sector again does disproportionately
well. The universities on both sides of the Atlantic have tried to balance things up, indeed, some rich British
children are whisked out of private schools in their final years so they appear to have been state-educated. In
general however the elite schools deserve their reputation for getting children onto the next rung up, if only
because their pupils do so much better at the exams you need to pass to get in.

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D A system of elite schools and universities to which the rich have privileged access is neither fair nor
efficient. Yet there are worse ways of organising education. At least Britain and America have top-class
universities: European and Asian countries, which do not, or at least have far fewer, are scrambling to create
some of their own. What is more, attempts to increase equality by getting rid of elitism sometimes achieve
the opposite: when British governments in the 1960s and 1970s abolished elite state grammar schools, it
became harder still for poor, clever children to get into elite universities.
E Nowadays few reformers talk about banning independent schools. Instead they look at fiddling with
university admissions. Sadly the methods of most left-leaning educators say much more about their own
outdated preoccupations than about the problem. In America tragically the focus has been on race and
affirmative-action programmes, a system the private schools have duly exploited by giving scholarships to
poor black and Hispanic pupils. In Britain the obsession has been class, with Labour ministers telling the
dons of Oxford to find more working-class talent, and setting up a government "Office for Fair Access",
widely known as OffToff, to set targets, albeit non-binding ones, for the proportion of state-school
applicants at each university.

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F There are some areas where universities could be reined in, notably America's system of favouring the
children of alumni. That said, admissions are a symptom, not a cause. Black Americans and working-class
Britons struggle because they are overwhelmingly educated in poor government-run schools. Change them
and you change the system, and here the private elite schools are useful exemplars. Their success is not
based on money, but on organisation. Make head teachers at state schools as accountable to parents as their
peers at private schools are and give them the same freedoms, notably to sack poor teachers and pay more to
good ones. Then people will not need to go to Winchester or Amherst any more.

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Questions 14 - 19
Match each heading to the most suitable paragraph.

i

The price of unfairness

ii

What's really needed

iii

Not necessarily the worst scenario

iv

The main pull of private schools

v

A surer route to a top university

vi

The ongoing preference for a private education

vii

Attempts to rebalance the intake

14

Paragraph A ..........

15

Paragraph B ..........

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16

Paragraph C ..........

17

Paragraph D ..........

18

Paragraph E ..........

19

Paragraph F ..........

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Questions 20 -26

Write Yes, No or Not Given.

20 One of the main reasons why parents wish to send their children to private schools in Britain and
America is the poor state of public schooling.
21 Most parents have plenty of money with which to send their children to private schools.
22 It is much easier for graduates to find a job if they have a degree from an elite university.
23 Twenty percent of the children who sit A-levels have studied in private schools.
24 Some children are taken out of private education a year early in order that elite universities can claim
they came from state education.
25 European and Asian countries are not interested in developing an elite tier of universities.
26 The writer believes that one way forward for state schools is to give more power to head teachers.

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SECTION 3

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Questions 27 – 40

End of a Classic?
In Greek mythology Atropos, one of three goddesses of fate and destiny, is the Fate who cuts the lifeline
once your time is up; now it would seem she has her shears out for the study of classical Ancient Greek.
Once, along with Latin, the staple diet of a civilised education, it now appears to be very much flickering on
the sidelines.
At first sight, the statistics are positively wine-dark. As part of school education, countries may maintain it
in theory but rarely do they do so in practice. Portuguese pupils have it as an option in their final year; in
Sweden fewer than 100 schoolchildren study it, in Belgium around the figure is around 800. In the UK, of a
mere 241 entrants for Greek A-level, typically taken at the age of 18, in 2007, fully 226 were from
independent, that is to say ‘private’, schools.
The problem for Greek is that snobbery does not trounce pragmatism. Latin, once seemingly moribund, is
on the rise again in Britain and America. It is not just useful: in a competitive system, it sends a coded
message about the nature of the school, and the kind of pupils it attracts. Finding the time, however, and
teachers to teach even one dead language properly is a hard enough task. A second imposes near-intolerable
strains on what are invariably over-crowded timetables.

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Yet mingle with the 300-plus participants from Britain, Europe, America, Hong Kong and elsewhere
indulging in frantic pedagogy at the Hellenists’ version of Woodstock, an annual summer school at
Bryanston in southern England, and a different picture seems to emerge. Monopod classicists add Greek to
their existing Latin, covering a semester’s-worth of study in a fortnight. For relaxation, they can listen to the
world’s academic authorities disputing the pronunciation of Homer and illuminating the knotty wordplay of
Plato’s “Republic”.

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The rosy fingers are touching universities too. Though some classics departments in the United States have
had to close or merge, the number of students enrolled in Greek has been going up since the 1990s. In 2006
fully 22,849 took some Greek while 32,191 studied some Latin. Applications for classics courses at top
British universities are healthy too.

Christianity, rather than the glories of Athens and the horrors of Sparta, may be proving the biggest draw.
Though some fundamentalists appear to believe that the Bible was written in English, for the more
thoughtful, or pious, Christian, serious study of the New Testament or the early Christian church is
impossible without first knowing alpha from omega. In America, Greek and Hebrew are standard parts of a
Master of Divinity degree, necessary to become a minister in most respectable Protestant denominations.
That does not match the now fast-reviving use of Latin in the Roman Catholic liturgy. But it helps. While
the koine1 Greek current in the eastern Mediterranean in the 1st century AD is different from the Attic,
Ionian or Homeric dialects used in the greatest works of classical literature, it is also considerably easier. For
the austere classicists of St Paul’s Girls’ School in London, a touch of koine is regarded as a “Christmas treat”.
In practice, few classes bond quite as tightly as the six students featured in Donna Tartt’s bestselling novel
“The Secret History”, in a pastiche of Euripides’s “Bacchae”, they commit and conceal two vicious murders.
However, such references highlight the subject as something exotic and therefore desirable, at least to those
with time and brainpower to engage in it. The cryptic difficulties of Greek, for instance alphabet, accents,

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moods, particles and tenses, repel Οί Πολλοί (hoi polloi) but attract devotees. Intellectual elitism, as much as
an appreciation of Aristophanes’s bawdy humour, is the glue that binds Hellenists2 together stoked, in some

schools, by a feeling of official neglect or hostility from peers.
The real threat it seems is not modernity, but globalisation. Europe’s glorious past is one of many: when
those seeking to understand China start studying Confucius’s “Analects” with the same attention that past
generations have paid to Pericles, the intricacies of the aorist optative may finally lose their charms. But that
may be a way off yet.
1

a dialect of a language

2

someone who studies Greece academically

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Questions 27 - 30
Write True, False or Not Given.

27 Greek and Latin have never played a central role in people's education.
28 The vast majority of students sitting Greek A-level outside the UK are from private schools.

29 Latin is more effective than Greek in attributing status to a school.
30 In Britain in 2006 the number of students taking Latin exceeded those taking Greek.

Questions 31 - 39

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Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

It seems that the principal 31 ............. towards Greek is a result of a desire to study the Bible. For some
Christians 32 ............. Greek is an absolute prerequisite to studying the New Testament or 33 .............
Christianity. This Greek is also much 34 ............. to learn than the Attic, Ionian or Homeric dialects. What
seems to help the Hellenists form a close group is a sense of 35 ............., a shared 36 ............. of vulgar jokes
and a certain 37 ............. they feel from their intellectual equals. The risk of Greek losing its appeal probably
comes from 38 ............. however the writer believes that this is unlikely to happen just 39 .............. .

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Question 40
Which of the following phrases best describes the main aim of Reading Passage 3?

A To warn about the consequences of not studying Greek
B To describe recent trends in the study of Greek
C To compare changes in attitudes towards Latin and Greek
D To suggest ways in which the learning of Greek can be encouraged

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Answers

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Pra ctice Test / Rea ding

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

ix
iii
ii
v
vi
x
viii
iv
vii
A
A
B
B

14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26

vi
iv

v
iii
vii
ii
Yes
Not Given
Not Given
Yes
Yes
No
Yes

27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40

False
Not Given
True

Not Given
draw
knowing
early
easier
intellectual elitism
appreciation
hostility
globalisation
yet
B

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