IELTS practice test 16 reading academic test

IELTS PRACTICE TESTS

READING
TEST 16


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Reading Academic
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Test 16

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SECTION 1

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Questions 1 – 13

Social housing
Over the past 20 years in Britain, the proportion of social homes in the total stock has fallen from 31% to
21% and their number has declined from 6.8m to 5.3m. Blame—or credit—Margaret Thatcher for this. Her

government forced local authorities to sell homes cheaply to existing tenants and stopped them building
new ones. New social homes were to be financed centrally and run by local housing associations.
It now looks like the long squeeze is over. Next week, the government is expected to announce a
near-doubling of the Housing Corporation's £1.2 billion annual budget and plans to extend eligibility for
social housing. An extra £1 billion would build around 20,000 new homes each year at current rates. This
could be stretched further by reducing the amount of subsidy per house.
The government is hoping that this move will help solve its housing difficulties. Thanks to nimbyism, the
supply of new houses in Britain falls well short of demand, by more than 50,000 a year according to the
Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a social research charity. The result: surging housing costs which have priced
modest earners out of the market, particularly in London and the south-east of England. Chief among the
victims are public-sector workers, such as nurses and teachers.

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The government will try to fulfil its ambitions in part through a phenomenon known as planning gain.
Councils are grabbing an increasing share of rising land prices by bumping up the amount of social housing
developers must build as part of a new scheme and hand over to the local housing association. Even before
the government's fresh money arrives, some local authorities in southern England are relying on planning
gain to help meet demanding targets. In plush regency Cheltenham, the council wants 30% of new housing
to be social; the figure is 40% in comfortable Poole in Dorset, while the Greater London Authority is
targeting 50% in the capital over the next twenty years.

Will this policy just create new ghettos? Maybe not. People have learnt from the mistakes of the post-war
housing boom. Providers have got better at design and building. Everybody now knows that concrete blocks
do not work in rainy countries. The stigma of social housing can often be eliminated by making it
indistinguishable from neighbouring private housing. Social housing developments are even winning
awards in competition with private sector developments—the Peabody Trust's Bedzed development in
Surrey won the Evening Standard Lifestyle Home of the Year award—though it is worth remembering that
some of the most notorious 1960s and 1970s council housing estates also won design awards.

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Housing associations are generally better at getting repairs done than are councils. They have also been
more effective in tackling problems like drugs and prostitution through innovations such as estate offices
and on-site caretakers. Above all, planners have learned not to think too big. “No one will ever build a big
single tenure estate again,” says Richard McCarthy, Chief Executive of the Peabody Trust.
Yet despite this encouraging news, the central flaw of social housing remains: it discourages mobility. What
happens to the teacher who lives in social housing in one borough, and is offered a job in a borough that
cannot offer her new cheap housing? What happens to a nurse in cheap housing who wants to move into a
new profession? A government so keen on enterprise and initiative should not be recreating a system that
makes it difficult for people to change their lives. If public-sector workers cannot afford to live in the
south-east of England, then the government should be changing pay scales that currently discriminate in
favour of public sector workers in cheap bits of the country and against those in expensive bits, rather than
reintroducing something that once looked like a boon to the poor and turned out to be a shackle.

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Questions 1 - 7
Match each heading to the most suitable paragraph.

i

Still difficult to move around

ii

Councils give way to housing associations

iii

Increased spending

iv

The cost of moving home

v

A shrinking supply

vi

Learning from the past

vii

Public-sector workers squeezed out

viii

New demands on developers

1

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

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2

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

3

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

4

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

5

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

6

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

7

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

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Questions 9 - 13
Write True, False or Not Given.

8 During the Thatcher years, there was a block on building social homes.

9 The housing problem in London is worse than in the rest of south-east England.
10 Local authorities are starting to depend on the 'planning gain' scheme.
11 One way to make social housing more successful is to make it similar to private housing.
12 Local councils are unable to deal with crimes committed on social housing land.
13 It would not be helpful to modify pubic workers salary depending on where they lived.

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SECTION 2

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Questions 14 – 26

Tales of youth and age
It is a story as old as boy meets girl...who become man and woman...who (either before or after that step into
adulthood) become father and mother...who grow old...and who become more and more puzzled, or even
resentful, about the behaviour of the younger generation. Yet that story, which is explored in numerous ways,
direct or indirect, large or small, is bringing with it some new twists. These twists arise from science, from
economics and from society-all of which could later pop up in that eternal mirror of power and change,
politics. For, in the broadest sense of all, the clash or contrast between youth and age could prove to be one
of the defining issues of the 21st century.
That is rather a bold claim to make. In truth, the defining issues of the next 100 years cannot yet be defined,
any more than for the 20th century they could securely have been outlined in 1900. But demography, at least,
is the most forecastable of trends, because it takes so long for the statistics of births and deaths to have an
impact on the population structure of the living. And it is worth recalling that even in 1900 one thing was,

or should have been, clear: that industrial and social change in the developed countries was shifting millions
of people into the cities and the factories. The political and economic consequences of that were
unpredictable, but the rise of urban working classes did indeed prove one of the century's defining issues.

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The twists and turns of youth and age are pushing in all sorts of different directions. The difficulty lies in
balancing those trends against each other. For one thing science, combined with the better diet that comes
with affluence, is making just about everyone outside the AIDS-afflicted areas of sub-Saharan Africa live
longer. With every decade that the age of death recedes and the fertility rate (largely for social and economic
reasons, helped by technology) declines, so the developed countries' populations are leaning more and more
towards the aged. Hence the conventional worry that rich countries will, by 2025 or so, have too little youth
and too much old age. Those countries will be divided between taxpayers and benefit-consumers, just as
they are already coming to be divided between those with children (who consume public services and make
lots of noise) and the increasing number of those without (who think they pay for the services and endure
the noise).

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Even in the developing countries, at least those where AIDS has not reached plague proportions, a time
looms, perhaps nearer 2050, when that same problem will arise of a large group of elderly needing pensions
and health care, supported by a smaller group of younger workers, paying the taxes and earning the profits.
And, unless those countries are by then much richer, the pain imposed by this imbalance will be much
nastier than for the wealthy West. If all those demographic predictions come about, then battles between the
young and the old could, in both the poor world and the rich, come to dominate politics in the same way as
battles between workers and bosses, rich and poor, did in the past.
Yet that conclusion is too glib. For this ageing of the population structure is not the only change that science,
economics and society are bringing. In the rich world, led as so often by America, what has recently been
happening has been rather paradoxical: that, even as the old have become more numerous, so opportunities
for the young have been proliferating. Companies, and even societies, have become less hierarchical, a trend
which has been under way for decades but which seemed to accelerate in the 1990s. Seniority counts for less,
initiative and creativity for more; and when technology conspires, as it did during the Internet boom, to

provide extra rewards to those with minds and fingers nimble enough to exploit it, the balance shifts
especially sharply towards the young.

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But who are the young? Another twist brought by science is that people now feel young and look young, for
far longer than in the past, and social mores have altered to allow them to express that feeling, whether in
dress or behaviour. This year the top-selling disc in the pop music charts, in many countries around the
world, is yet another compilation of the greatest hits of that trendy youth phenomenon...the Beatles.
Whether that success is explained by the enduring desire of people in their 50s to relive the 1960s, or by a
surprising interest in Lennon and McCartney among the conventionally young, is immaterial. The line
between youth and age has become blurred, and is likely to get even blurrier.
If it is allowed to by governments, that trend ought in time to ease those conventional worries about too
many pensioners and too few vigorous youthful workers, for the line between work and retirement ought
also to fade, as more people choose to carry on working, either full- or part-time, well into their 70s or even
80s. Pension schemes will certainly need to change if this is to occur. But if that comes about, it will greatly
ease the potentially divisive problem of an unequal tax burden, as well as providing a welcome freedom of
choice to the soon-to-be numerous old.
All these trends-except, possibly, for the recent revving up of youthful change by the Internet-are for the
long term. But as John Maynard Keynes famously said, in the long run we are all dead. The demographic
trends of the 20th century were much altered, or interrupted, by other, more short-run forces such as war
and economic depressions. Is that not just as likely, once again?

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The answer is that it is just as possible. All the opportunities, or problems, caused by these great
demographic trends, of ageing populations, or newly youthful 70-year-olds, or even of ageing Chinese, will
come to pass (or at least to dominate) only in a world that develops in a fairly benign way. They will, in
other words, be problems of success: in generating economic growth, in maintaining peace, in avoiding
other shocks of the sort that could alter birth or death rates.

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Questions 14 - 19
Write Yes, No or Not Given.

14 Predictions about the size of the human population can be made quite successfully.
15 In 1900 it was difficult to see that many people would move to urban areas.
16 Better food is helping to extend people's lives in sub-Saharan Africa.
17 Many rich countries are concerned about a significant imbalance in old and young people by 2025.
18 The consequences of an imbalance between the old and the young would be worse in developed
countries than in developing countries.
19 In most developed countries today the elderly are respected less than in the past.

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Questions 20 - 22

Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS for each answer.

20 The difference between the definition of an old person and a young one is more .............. than in the past.
21 If people work past today's retirement age, .................. will need to be modified for sure.
22 If work opportunities exist for the elderly, they will have more .................. as to how to live during their
'retirement' years.

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Question 23 - 26
Complete the summary with ONE WORD from the text.

These concerns over the 23 ..................... of the future may be uncalled for. In fact they are of concern only if
the 24 ................ is a place where 25 ..................... is prevalent. If war or disaster hits a region, it can, sadly,
affect the population size considerably. If such things can be avoided, the problems which exist on societies
will be a result of 26..................... .

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SECTION 3

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Questions 27 – 40

Righting wrongs
A In Shaw's "Pygmalion", Colonel Pickering asks Alfred Doolittle whether he has no morals. "Can't afford

them, governor," the philanderer replies; "Neither could you if you was as poor as me." Morals are costly to
maintain. So are rights, especially the kind of "universal human rights" that become enshrined in United
Nations' declarations.
B International support for a core group of human rights, mainly civil and political, has been enshrined
for more than half a century in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by the United Nations in
the aftermath of the second world war and the Holocaust. The declaration proved compelling as a statement
of principles, but too general and vague to be useful as a legal instrument. So, during the 1960s, two more
covenants were thrashed out in an effort to give the declaration some substance: the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
C During the cold war, enthusiasm for these covenants split along the obvious divide: capitalists were keen
on civil and political rights, Communists on social and economic rights. When Western lobbyists accused
the Soviet Union of violating its citizens' civil rights, the Soviet government replied that the economic and
social rights of its people were more important. The division survives: today the Chinese make much the
same argument.

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D In terms of publicity and promotion, the rights set out in the first covenant have had the benefit of
human-rights advocates such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW). They have
publicised the plight of prisoners of conscience and victims of torture. As a result, regimes that torture,
unjustly imprison or disenfranchise their citizens have sometimes been pushed or shamed into changing
their behaviour. Until now, the second covenant has been used less widely to promote the rights that it
enshrines-mainly to economic benefits such as housing, food, health care and fair wages. Now, though,
Western human-rights groups, which have traditionally focused only on civil and political violations, are
looking again at economic rights, and hope eventually to persuade governments to place the right to a house
or a meal on an equal footing with the right to vote.

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E If this sounds foolish, human-rights veterans are used to scepticism. "Twenty-five years ago, when
Amnesty started talking about torture victims, everyone thought we were ridiculous, out of our minds," says
Larry Cox, the senior programme officer for human rights at the Ford Foundation. Few people then

believed, he says, that mere letter-writing and lobbying could be such powerful weapons. But a great deal
more manoeuvring and persuasion will be needed to give meaning to social and economic rights than to
fight torturers and censors.
F Not surprisingly, the big battalions among human-rights campaigners approach the issue with some
trepidation. On August 16th, several hundred representatives of Amnesty International, the first and largest
such group, met in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, to discuss changes to its mandate.
G At the moment, Amnesty's campaigners battle in support of civil and political rights. They define their
battleground with care, supporting only the rights of individuals. If a journalist is thrown into prison,
Amnesty will launch a campaign on his or her behalf. If a government bans a newspaper, however, Amnesty
will remain mute, because the action harms no single individual.

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H Over the past four years, Amnesty's main policy committee, the Standing Committee on the Mandate,
has been developing a set of resolutions that would explicitly incorporate economic and social rights into
Amnesty's mandate. These will be debated and put to the vote at the Dakar meeting. Amnesty's rules, oddly
enough, prevent its officials from discussing their exact wording until after the vote. But, if adopted, the
resolutions will alter the character of the organisation profoundly and permanently.
I The Dakar votes could go either way. And much remains to be settled. For instance, Peter Pack, the
standing committee's chairman, says the organisation could well end up with a position on economic and
social rights that resembles its stance on civil and political rights: only certain abuses, under certain
circumstances, would fall within Amnesty's remit.
J However, the main question is whether such a change would reinvigorate Amnesty's mission or splinter
it. Amnesty's letters, petitions and appeals have successfully chastised torturers and despots. Would their

tactics be equally effective in the greyer worlds of health, housing, and labour policy? Amnesty's
representatives are already fretting about the strains on the group's time, personnel and expertise.
Expanding its mandate would mean extra work. Besides, Amnesty's success rests on the efforts of its
members. If a sudden change in direction perplexes or annoys Amnesty's membership, the group's core
competence may be damaged with few compensating gains.

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Questions 27 - 36
Match each heading to the most suitable paragraph.

i

Amnesty's dilemma

ii

More weight given to the original

iii

A significant change at Amnesty

iv

The pitfalls of a wider remit

v

A renewed effort

vi

An Amnesty review

vii

More effort required than for previous battles

viii

Amnesty's territory

ix

The cost of rights

x

A division of backing

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xi

An unclear outcome

27

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

28

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

29

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

30

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

31

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

32

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

33

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

34

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

35

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

36

Paragraph J ..........

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Questions 37 - 40
Write True, False or Not Given.

37 Larry Cox is optimistic about the future of human-rights campaigns.
38 Amnesty fights battles for individuals and groups involved in civil and political rights.
39 At Dakar members will vote on the wording of Amnesty's potentially new role.
40 The draw on Amnesty's resources is a concern for some members.

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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

v
iii
vii
viii
vi
ii
i
False
Not Given
True
True
Not Given
False

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

Yes

No
No
Yes
No
Not Given
blurred
pension
schemes
choice
demographics
world
peace
success

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

ix

ii
x
v
vii
vi
viii
iii
xi
iv
Not Given
False
False
True

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