does education fuel economic growth reading answers

Does Education Fuel Economic Growth? – IELTS Reading Answers

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Updated On Jul 16, 2024

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Reading passage, answers for does education fuel economic growth ielts reading answers with location and explanation, tips for answering the question types in does education fuel economic growth reading answers.

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Does Education Fuel Economic Growth is a good resource for anyone who is preparing for IELTS Academic Reading . This passage will help you understand what kind of reading passages you will encounter and the questions that you will be asked to solve.

By taking the Does Education Fuel Economic Growth IELTS Reading Answer, you can acquaint yourself with the types of questions that you will be asked and the level of difficulty that you can expect. The question types in this Reading Passage include:

• IELTS Reading Matching Information  (Q. 1-5)
• IELTS Reading Summary Completion   (Q. 6-9)
• IELTS Reading Multiple Choice Questions  (Q. 10-13)

For more IELTS Reading practice, take more  IELTS reading practice tests .

Does Education Fuel Economic Growth

A Over the last decade, a huge database about the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900 has been compiled by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Economics. It includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists, and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries. Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer to a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s economic growth.

B As Ogilvie explains, ‘Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, and earn more … surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialize earlier.’ Between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy grew fast and it was the first country to industrialize. During this period, Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly and they industrialized late. ‘Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education,’ she adds.

C In the handwritten inventories that Ogilvie is analyzing are the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage, and death. From badger skins to Bibles, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods are included. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tools reveal economic activities; ownership of books and education­ objects like pens and slates suggests how people learned. In addition, the tax lists included in the database record the value of farms, workshops, assets, and debts; signatures and people’s estimates of their age indicate literacy and numeracy levels, and court records reveal obstacles (such as the activities of the guilds*) that stifled industry.

Previous studies usually had just one way of linking education with economic growth – the presence of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the ability to sign names. According to Ogilvie, the database provides multiple indicators for the same individuals, making it possible to analyze links between literacy, numeracy, wealth, and industriousness, for individual women and men over the long term.

D Ogilvie and her team have been building a vast database of material possessions on top of their full demographic reconstruction of the people who lived in these two German communities. ‘We can follow the same people – and their descendants – across 300 years of educational and economic change,’ she says. Individual lives have unfolded before their eyes. Stories like that of the 24-year-olds Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmiillerin, who were chastised in 1707 for reading books in church instead of listening to the sermon. ‘This tells us they were continuing to develop their reading skills at least a decade after leaving school,’ explains Ogilvie. The database also reveals the case of Juliana Schweickherdt, a SO-year-old spinster living in the small Black Forest community of Wildberg, who was reprimanded in 1752 by the local weavers’ guild for ‘weaving cloth and combing wool, counter to the guild ordinance’. When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members, she was summoned before the guild court and told to pay a fine equivalent to one-third of a servant’s annual wage. It was a small act of defiance by today’s standards, but it reflects a time when laws in Germany and elsewhere regulated people’s access to labor markets. The dominance of guilds not only prevented people from using their skills but also held back even the simplest industrial innovation.

E The data-gathering phase of the project has been completed and now, according to Ogilvie, it is time ‘to ask the big questions’. One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to ‘hold wealth constant’. This involves following the lives of different people with the same level of wealth over a period of time. If wealth is constant, it is possible to discover whether education was, for example, linked to the cultivation of new crops, or to the adoption of industrial innovations like sewing machines. The team will also ask what aspect of education helped people engage more with productive and innovative activities. Was it, for instance, literacy, numeracy, book ownership, years of schooling? Was there a threshold level – a tipping point – that needed to be reached to affect economic performance?

F Ogilvie hopes to start finding answers to these questions over the next few years. One thing is already clear, she says: the relationship between education and economic growth is far from straightforward. ‘German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theories of economic growth,’ she explains. Between 1600 and 1900, literacy rates and book ownership were high, and yet the region remained poor. It was also the case that local guilds and merchant associations were extremely powerful and legislated against anything that undermined their monopolies. In villages throughout the region, guilds blocked labor migration and resisted changes that might reduce their influence.

‘Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers, and this has implications for today,’ says Ogilvie. ‘Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries, but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people – especially women and the poor – from using their education in economically productive ways. If economic institutions are poorly set up, for instance, education can’t lead to growth.’

Questions 1-5

1 an explanation of the need for research to focus on individuals with a fairly consistent income

2 examples of the sources the database has been compiled from

3 an account of one individual’s refusal to obey an order

4 a reference to a region being particularly suited to research into the link between education and economic growth

5 examples of the items included in a list of personal possessions

Questions 6-9

Demographic reconstruction of two German communities

The database that Ogilvie and her team have compiled sheds light on the lives of a range of individuals, as well as those of their 6 …………………, over a 300-year period. For example, Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin were reprimanded for reading while they should have been paying attention to a 7  ………………….

There was also Juliana Schweickherdt, who came to the notice of the weavers’ guild in the year 1752 for breaking guild rules. As a punishment, she was later given a 8 …………………. Cases like this illustrate how the guilds could prevent 9 ………………… and stop skilled people from working.

Questions 10 and 11

Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make about literacy rates in Section B?

A Very little research has been done into the link between high literacy rates and improved earnings.

B 2 Literacy rates in Germany between 1600 and 1900 were very good.

C 3 There is strong evidence that high literacy rates in the modern world result in economic growth.

D England is a good example of how high literacy rates helped a country industrialize.

E Economic growth can help to improve literacy rates.

10 ………………….

11 ………………….

Questions 12 and 13

Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make in Section F about guilds in German-speaking Central Europe between 1600 and 1900?

A They helped young people to learn a skill.

B They were opposed to people moving to an area for work.

C They kept better records than guilds in other parts of the world.

D They opposed practices that threatened their control over trade.

E They predominantly consisted of wealthy merchants.

12 ……………………..

13 ……………………..

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Now check the answer key with explanations to the questions from the passage in the reading section of IELTS Academic , Does Education Fuel Economic Growth, and get an idea of how well you have mastered this section.

1 Answer: A

Question Type:  Matching Information

Answer Location:  Paragraph A, Line 2

Answer Explanation:  The paragraph talks about court records, tax lists, and inventories that list over a million personal possessions. The author mentions that these belongings belonged to ordinary men and women. Hence, A is the correct answer.

2 Answer: E

Answer Location:  Paragraph E, Line 5

Answer Explanation:  The author in the fifth paragraph talks about the sources from which the data has been collected. The team asked for aspects like literacy, numeracy, book ownership etc. Other factors are also mentioned in the paragraph which means that this was the source from which the database has been compiled.

3 Answer: D

Answer Location:  Paragraph D, Line 6

Answer Explanation: The author says that Juliana took jobs that were reserved for male guild members. She was also called to court for this and told to pay a fine. This is an act of defiance or refusal to obey orders. Hence, the answer is D .

4 Answer: F

Answer Location:  Paragraph F, Line 3

Answer Explanation:  The author in the last paragraph talks about a location to test the theories of economic growth. The passage talks about central Europe. Hence, the correct answer is F .

5 Answer: C

Answer Location:  Paragraph C, Line 2

Answer Explanation:  The author in this paragraph provides examples of various items that were included in the list of personal belongings. Since these are mentioned in paragraph C, it is the correct answer.

6 Answer:  descendants

Question Type:  Summary Completion

Answer Location:  Paragraph D, Line 2

Answer Explanation:  As per the paragraph, the author tells us that Ogilvie and her team came to know about the life and possessions of the people. Not only that, they also could follow the life of the descendants. Hence, descendants is the correct answer.

7 Answer:  sermon

Answer Location:  Paragraph D, Line 4

Answer Explanation:  The author as an example shared a story of Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmullerin. It is stated that they were chastised because they were reading books instead of listening to sermons. This makes the sermon the correct answer.

8 Answer:  fine

Answer Location:  Paragraph D, Line 7

Answer Explanation:  The paragraph talks about the punishment Juliana received when she continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members. She was called to court and was ordered to pay a fine. Hence fine is the correct answer.

9 Answer:  innovation

Answer Location:  Paragraph D, last sentence

Answer Explanation:  As per the author, this punishment represented the dominance of guides. This prevented people from using their skills and simple innovations. Hence, innovation is the correct answer.

10 Answer: B

Question Type:  Multiple Choice

Answer Location:  Paragraph B, Line 4

Answer Explanation:  The author states that between 1600 and 1900, the economy of England grew. Also, during the same period, Germany and Scandinavia had very good literacy rates but the economy grew slowly. This is the same as stated in Option B .

11 Answer: E

Answer Location:  Paragraph B, last sentence

Answer Explanation: The author tends to say that modern analyses have not found evidence that education causes economic growth. However, there is plenty of evidence that education increases education. This means with economic growth, literacy rates will also grow. Hence, E is the correct answer.

12 Answer: B

Answer Location:  Paragraph F, Line 6

Answer Explanation:  The author clearly states in the passage that guilds stopped the migration of labors. This means they did not support or oppose people moving to other places or migrating for work.

13 Answer: D

Answer Location:  last paragraph, Line 2

Answer Explanation:  The author says that guilds opposed practices and did not allow economic growth. With the restrictions that blocked people from using education, they proved unproductive in many ways.

Now let’s get started with the IELTS exam preparation tips for each question type. It’ll help you understand how to approach the problem of each question type.

Matching Information

Retrieve the required information from the reading passages with the help of these invaluable tips that you can leverage to get a better score in IELTS exam . Check out the tips below:

• Read the instructions carefully:  Before you start, make sure you understand what you need to match. Sometimes, you’ll be asked to match headings to paragraphs or statements to sections, so be clear on the task.
• Skim the passage: Quickly read through the passage to get a general sense of the content and layout. This will help you identify where the information you need might be located.
• Use keywords: Look for keywords or key phrases in the question and the passage. These words are often repeated or paraphrased in the text and can guide you to the correct answer.
• Underline or highlight:  As you find information that matches the question, underline or highlight it in the passage. This will make it easier to refer back to when answering the questions.
• Check for synonyms:  Be aware of synonyms and paraphrases. Sometimes, the exact words from the question may not appear in the passage, but similar words or phrases will. Keep an eye out for these.

Summary Completion

Fill in the sentences with keywords hidden in the reading passages with the following tips as they’ll come in handy to achieve a higher IELTS band score .

• Read the sentence carefully:  Begin by reading the sentence with the gap or blank. Try to understand the context and the type of word that should fit the gap (e.g., noun, verb, adjective).
• Look for clues:  Scan the surrounding sentences for clues that can help you determine the missing word. Sometimes, the sentence structure or the words nearby can provide hints.
• Identify grammatical clues:  Pay attention to the grammar of the sentence. If the sentence requires a verb, make sure you choose a verb form that fits the context. The same goes for nouns, adjectives, and other parts of speech.
• Use your vocabulary: Draw on your vocabulary to come up with a suitable word for the gap. Ensure that the word you choose makes sense in the context of the sentence.
• Check for coherence:  After you’ve filled in the gap, read the entire sentence to ensure that it flows naturally and makes sense. The completed sentence should be grammatically correct and logically coherent.

Multiple-Choice Questions

When we’re given a handful of options and each looks similar to each other then it might get tricky for one to answer it correctly. And, for that reason, we’ve outlined tips that’ll help you out for the same.

• Read the question first: Before you start reading the passage, quickly read the multiple-choice question. This will give you a specific focus as you read and help you identify relevant information more efficiently.
• Skim the passage:  Use IELTS Reading keyword techniques to get a general idea of the content. Pay attention to headings, subheadings, and any formatting features that might signal the location of the answer.
• Eliminate wrong answers: Use the process of elimination to eliminate answer choices that are clearly incorrect. This can often be done by matching keywords from the question to the passage.
• Pay attention to synonyms and paraphrasing: The answer choices may not use the exact same words as the passage but rather synonyms or paraphrases. Be on the lookout for these and be prepared to recognize them.
• Don’t spend too much time on one question: If you’re struggling with a multiple-choice question, move on and come back to it later. It’s important to manage your time effectively to answer all questions within the allotted time.

Kudos! For solving the Does Education Fuel Economic Growth IELTS reading passage! Now to do even better in your IELTS Reading section, solve IELTS Reading recent actual tests .

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Does education fuel economic growth?: Reading Passage With Answers

Practice Does education fuel economic growth? IELTS Academic Reading with Answers, Explanation and PDF.

Does education fuel economic growth?

READING PASSAGE

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Does education fuel economic growth? Reading Passage below.

A) Over the last decade, a huge database about the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900 has been compiled by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Economics. It includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries. Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer to a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s economic growth.

B) As Ogilvie explains, ‘Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, and earn more … surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier.’ Between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy grew fast and it was the first country to industrialise. During this period, Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly and they industrialised late. ‘Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education,’ she adds.

C) In the handwritten inventories that Ogilvie is analysing are the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage and death. From badger skins to Bibles, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods are included. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tools reveal economic activities; ownership of books and education­ related objects like pens and slates suggests how people learned. In addition, the tax lists included in the database record the value of farms, workshops, assets and debts; signatures and people’s estimates of their age indicate literacy and numeracy levels; and court records reveal obstacles (such as the activities of the guilds*) that stifled industry.

Previous studies usually had just one way of linking education with economic growth – the presence of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the ability to sign names. According to Ogilvie, the database provides multiple indicators for the same individuals, making it possible to analyze links between literacy, numeracy, wealth, and industriousness, for individual women and men over the long term.

D) Ogilvie and her team have been building the vast database of material possessions on top of their full demographic reconstruction of the people who lived in these two German communities. ‘We can follow the same people – and their descendants – across 300 years of educational and economic change,’ she says. Individual lives have unfolded before their eyes. Stories like that of the 24-year-olds Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmiillerin, who were chastised in 1707 for reading books in church instead of listening to the sermon. ‘This tells us they were continuing to develop their reading skills at least a decade after leaving school,’ explains Ogilvie. The database also reveals the case of Juliana Schweickherdt, a SO-year-old spinster living in the small Black Forest community of Wildberg, who was reprimanded in 1752 by the local weavers’ guild for ‘weaving cloth and combing wool, counter to the guild ordinance’. When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members, she was summoned before the guild court and told to pay a fine equivalent to one third of a servant’s annual wage. It was a small act of defiance by today’s standards, but it reflects a time when laws in Germany and elsewhere regulated people’s access to labour markets. The dominance of guilds not only prevented people from using their skills, but also held back even the simplest industrial innovation.

E) The data-gathering phase of the project has been completed and now, according to Ogilvie, it is time ‘to ask the big questions’. One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to ‘hold wealth constant’. This involves following the lives of different people with the same level of wealth over a period of time. If wealth is constant, it is possible to discover whether education was, for example, linked to the cultivation of new crops, or to the adoption of industrial innovations like sewing machines. The team will also ask what aspect of education helped people engage more with productive and innovative activities. Was it, for instance, literacy, numeracy, book ownership, years of schooling? Was there a threshold level – a tipping point – that needed to be reached to affect economic performance?

F) Ogilvie hopes to start finding answers to these questions over the next few years. One thing is already clear, she says: the relationship between education and economic growth is far from straightforward. ‘German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theories of economic growth,’ she explains. Between 1600 and 1900, literacy rates and book ownership were high and yet the region remained poor. It was also the case that local guilds and merchant associations were extremely powerful and legislated against anything that undermined their monopolies. In villages throughout the region, guilds blocked labour migration and resisted changes that might reduce their influence.

‘Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers, and this has implications for today,’ says Ogilvie. ‘Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries, but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people – especially women and the poor – from using their education in economically productive ways. If economic institutions are poorly set up, for instance, education can’t lead to growth.’

Questions 14-18

Does education fuel economic growth? Reading Passage has six sections, A-F.

Which section contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

14. an explanation of the need for research to focus on individuals with a fairly consistent income

15. examples of the sources the database has been compiled from

16. an account of one individual’s refusal to obey an order

17. a reference to a region being particularly suited to research into the link between education and economic growth

18. examples of the items included in a list of personal possessions

Questions 19-22

Complete the summary below.

Choose ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 19-22 on your answer sheet

Demographic reconstruction of two German communities

Questions 23 and 24

Choose TWO letters, A-E.

Write the correct letters in boxes 23 and 24 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make about literacy rates in Section B?

A. Very little research has been done into the link between high literacy rates and improved earnings.

B. Literacy rates in Germany between 1600 and 1900 were very good.

C. There is strong evidence that high literacy rates in the modern world result in economic growth.

D. England is a good example of how high literacy rates helped a country industrialise.

E. Economic growth can help to improve literacy rates.

Questions 25 and 26

Write the correct letters in boxes 25 and 26 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make in Section F about guilds in German-speaking Central Europe between 1600 and 1900?

A. They helped young people to learn a skill.

B. They were opposed to people moving to an area for work.

C. They kept better records than guilds in other parts of the world.

D. They opposed practices that threatened their control over a trade.

E. They predominantly consisted of wealthy merchants.

IELTS Reading Answers

Does education fuel economic growth? Answer Explanation & PDF

The Academic Reading test evaluates a variety of reading abilities, including your capacity to follow an argument and identify the viewpoint, attitude, or intent of a writer. It evaluates your ability to comprehend primary ideas, specifics, viewpoints, and implicit meanings when reading.

So if you have a doubt and seek an explanation to any answer whatsoever. Feel free to comment below 🙂

Also, drop your email if you would like to have Does education fuel economic growth? Test PDF.

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Does education fuel economic growth- Reading Answers Explanations

Here are explanations of the Question of passage: ‘Does education fuel economic growth’ which is from the IELTS Cambridge 17 book. The questions are ‘finding information’, Blanks and MCQs’. You will find the locations of the Reading Answers, Keywords (highlighted and underlined) and justifications .

Questions 14-18

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs,  A-F .

Which section contains the following information?

Write the correct letter,  A-F , in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

14    and explanation of the need for research to focus on individuals with a fairly consistent income.

Location and Answer: The answer to this question is in the second line of the paragraph. ‘Consistent income ‘ is visible as ‘wealth constant ‘Moreover, research is as ‘look at’ in the paragraph.

15    examples of the sources the database has been compiled from

Location and Answer: A paragraph

The main keywords ‘database’ and ‘compiled’ in the question has been as it is in the first line of the paragraph and examples of the sources are given in the second line. It is as ‘records, guild ledgers, parish registers…’

16    an account of one individual’s refusal to obey an order

Location and Answer: D

Explanation: The answer to this question is in the middle line of the paragraph.The line starts as ‘The database also reveals…and the main keyword is ‘refusal’ which is there as ‘reprimanded’. Furthermore, the writer says, ‘guild for weaving cloth and combing wool’ here, this makes the answer very clear as Juliana was guild for breaking the rules.

17    a reference to a region being particularly suited to research into the link between education and economic growth

Location and Answer:  F

Explanation: The main keyword is ‘region’ and its name is as ‘Central Europe’ in the second line of the paragraph. The another keyword ‘economic growth’ is written exactly in the passage and ‘education’ has been paraphrased as ‘literacy rates’

18    examples of the items included in a list of personal possessions

Location and Answer: C paragraph

Explanation: The main keyword ‘items’ helps to locate the answer in the first line of the paragraph and it is there as ‘belongings ‘in the passage. List of ‘personal possessions’ is there in the paragraph as ‘badger skins to bibles’…Sewing machines…Pens, slates…

Questions 19-22

Complete the summary below.

Choose  ONE WORD  from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 19-22 on your answer sheet.

Demographic reconstruction of two German communities

The database that Ogilvie and her team has compiled sheds light on the lives of a range of individuals, as well as those of their  19  …………………, over a 300-year period.

Location: D paragraph (second line)

Explanation: The Main keywords ‘Ogilvie’ and ‘300-year period’ are exactly in the passage. ‘ Range of individuals’ in the question is visible as ‘people’  Moreover, the conjunction ‘and’ is used in the passage which is written as ‘as well as’ in the question. Thus, this makes the answer very clear.

Answer: Descendants

For example, Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin were reprimanded for reading while they should have been paying attention to a  20  ………………….

Location: D paragraph

Explanation: The main keywords ‘Ana Regina and Magdalena…’ helps to locate the answer in the third line of the paragraph as it is there exactly in the passage. ‘Reprimanded …’ is paraphrased as ‘chastised…’in the passage. Furthermore, ‘paying attention to …’ is visible as ‘listening to…’ in the passage.

Answer: Sermon

There was also Juliana Schweickherdt , who came to the notice of the weavers’ guild in the year 1752 for breaking guild rules. As a punishment, she was later given a  21  ………………….

Location:  D paragraph

Explanation: The main keyword ‘Juliana Schweickherdt’ is in the passage that helps to locate the answer in the middle line of the paragraph. The line starts as ‘when Juliana continued….and ‘given a’ is as ‘told to pay…’in the passage. Therefore, it is easy to understand that answer is ‘fine’

Answer: Fine

Cases like this illustrate how the guilds could prevent  22  ………………… and stop skilled people from working

Location: Last line of D paragraph

Explanation: The question says ‘stop skilled people from working’ and this statement is as ‘prevented people from using their skill…’ Moreover, ‘prevent’ is as ‘held back…’in the passage.

Answer: Innovation

Questions 23 and 24

Choose  TWO  letters,  A-E .

Write the correct letters in boxes 23 and 24 on your answer sheet.

Which  TWO  of the following statements does the writer make about literacy rates in Section B?

A    Very little research has been done into the link between high literacy rates and improved earnings.

B    Literacy rates in Germany between 1600 and 1900 were very good.

C    There is strong evidence that high literacy rates in the modern world result in economic growth.

D    England is a good example of how high literacy rates helped a country industrialise.

E    Economic growth can help to improve literacy rates.

Location: B paragraph

Explanation: (23) The main keywords ‘literacy rates’ and ‘Germany’ has been written exactly in the second last line of the paragraph. ‘Between 1600 and 1900…’is visible in the middle line of the paragraph.  ‘Very good …’ in the question is paraphrased as ‘excellent…’ in the passage. Thus, the best option is B.

Explanation 🙁 24) the answer to this question is in the last line of the paragraph. ‘Economic growth can help to improve literacy rates…is as as ‘the growth increases education…’Here ‘increases’ is the synonym of improve and ‘education’ is the synonym of ‘literacy rates’. Thus, the correct option is E.

Answer: 23.B/E 24.B/E

Questions 25 and 26

Write the correct letters in boxes 25 and 26 on your answer sheet.

Which  TWO  of the following statements does the writer make in Section F about guilds in German-speaking Central Europe between 1600 and 1900 ?

A    They helped young people to learn a skill.

B    They were opposed to people moving to an area for work.

C    They kept better records than guilds in other parts of the world.

D    They opposed practices that threatened their control over a trade.

E    They predominantly consisted of wealthy merchants.

Location: F Paragraph

Explanation : (25) the answer to this question is in the second last line of the paragraph.  ‘Threatened their control’ is paraphrased as ‘undermined their monopolies…’ ‘Opposed practices…’ has been written as ‘legislated against anything…’, thus the best option is D.

Explanation: (26) The location of the answer is in the last line of the first paragraph of section F. ‘opposed to the people moving to an area of work…’has been paraphrased as ‘blocked labour migration…’in the passage. Here ‘migration’ is the synonym of ‘moving’ and ‘labour’ means ‘work’, thus the correct option is B.

Answer: 25. B/D 26. B/D

Bats to the rescue- Reading Answers Explanations

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CAMB IELTS Academic Reading Test 04 (Answers, PDF)

In this CAMB IELTS Academic Reading Test 4 (Answers, PDF, Explanation) , you’ll find:

Total no. of questions: 40 Time: 60 minutes

Bats to the rescue

READING PASSAGE 1

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

How Madagascar’s bats are helping to save the rainforest

There are few places in the world where relations between agriculture and conservation are more strained. Madagascar’s forests are being converted to agricultural land at a rate of one percent every year. Much of this destruction is fuelled by the cultivation of the country’s main staple crop: rice. And a key reason for this destruction is that insect pests are destroying vast quantities of what is grown by local subsistence farmers, leading them to clear forest to create new paddy fields. The result is devastating habitat and biodiversity loss on the island, but not all species are suffering. In fact, some of the island’s insectivorous bats are currently thriving and this has important implications for farmers and conservationists alike.

Enter University of Cambridge zoologist Ricardo Rocha. He’s passionate about conservation, and bats. More specifically, he’s interested in how bats are responding to human activity and deforestation in particular. Rocha’s new study shows that several species of bats are giving Madagascar’s rice farmers a vital pest control service by feasting on plagues of insects. And this, he believes, can ease the financial pressure on farmers to turn forest into fields.

Bats comprise roughly one-fifth of all mammal species in Madagascar and thirty-six recorded bat species are native to the island, making it one of the most important regions for conservation of this animal group anywhere in the world.

Co-leading an international team of scientists, Rocha found that several species of indigenous bats are taking advantage of habitat modification to hunt insects swarming above the country’s rice fields. They include the Malagasy mouse-eared bat, Major’s long-fingered bat, the Malagasy white-bellied free-tailed bat and Peters’ wrinkle-lipped bat.

‘These winner species are providing a valuable free service to Madagascar as biological pest suppressors,’ says Rocha. ‘We found that six species of bat are preying on rice pests, including the paddy swarming caterpillar and grass webworm. The damage which these insects cause puts the island’s farmers under huge financial pressure and that encourages deforestation.’

The study, now published in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, set out to investigate the feeding activity of insectivorous bats in the farmland bordering the Ranomafana National Park in the southeast of the country.

Rocha and his team used state-of-the-art ultrasonic recorders to record over a thousand bat ‘feeding buzzes’ (echolocation sequences used by bats to target their prey) at 54 sites, in order to identify the favourite feeding spots of the bats. They next used DNA barcoding techniques to analyse droppings collected from bats at the different sites.

The recordings revealed that bat activity over rice fields was much higher than it was in continuous forest – seven times higher over rice fields which were on flat ground, and sixteen times higher over fields on the sides of hills – leaving no doubt that the animals are preferentially foraging in these man-made ecosystems. The researchers suggest that the bats favour these fields because lack of water and nutrient run-off make these crops more susceptible to insect pest infestations. DNA analysis showed that all six species of bat had fed on economically important insect pests. While the findings indicated that rice farming benefits most from the bats, the scientists also found indications that the bats were consuming pests of other crops, including the black twig borer (which infests coffee plants), the sugarcane cicada, the macadamia nut-borer, and the sober tabby (a pest of citrus fruits).

‘The effectiveness of bats as pest controllers has already been proven in the USA and Catalonia,’ said co-author James Kemp, from the University of Lisbon. ‘But our study is the first to show this happening in Madagascar, where the stakes for both farmers and conservationists are so high.’

Local people may have a further reason to be grateful to their bats. While the animal is often associated with spreading disease, Rocha and his team found evidence that Malagasy bats feed not just on crop pests but also on mosquitoes – carriers of malaria, Rift Valley fever virus and elephantiasis – as well as blackflies, which spread river blindness.

Rocha points out that the relationship is complicated. When food is scarce, bats become a crucial source of protein for local people. Even the children will hunt them. And as well as roosting in trees, the bats sometimes roost in buildings, but are not welcomed there because they make them unclean. At the same time, however, they are associated with sacred caves and the ancestors, so they can be viewed as beings between worlds, which makes them very significant in the culture of the people. And one potential problem is that while these bats are benefiting from farming, at the same time deforestation is reducing the places where they can roost, which could have long-term effects on their numbers. Rocha says, ‘With the right help, we hope that farmers can promote this mutually beneficial relationship by installing bat houses.’

Rocha and his colleagues believe that maximising bat populations can help to boost crop yields and promote sustainable livelihoods. The team is now calling for further research to quantify this contribution. ‘I’m very optimistic,’ says Rocha. ‘If we give nature a hand, we can speed up the process of regeneration.’

Questions 1-6

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Bats to the Rescue Reading Passage 1 ?

In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, write

1. Many Madagascan forests are being destroyed by attacks from insects.

2. Loss of habitat has badly affected insectivorous bats in Madagascar.

3. Ricardo Rocha has carried out studies of bats in different parts of the world.

4. Habitat modification has resulted in indigenous bats in Madagascar becoming useful to farmers.

5. The Malagasy mouse-eared bat is more common than other indigenous bat species in Madagascar.

6. Bats may feed on paddy-swarming caterpillars and grass webworms.

Questions 7-13

Complete the table below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 7-13 on your answer sheet.

The study carried out by Rocha’s team

Does education fuel economic growth?

READING PASSAGE 2

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

A) Over the last decade, a huge database about the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900 has been compiled by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Economics. It includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries. Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer to a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s economic growth.

B) As Ogilvie explains, ‘Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, and earn more … surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier.’ Between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy grew fast and it was the first country to industrialise. During this period, Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly and they industrialised late. ‘Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education,’ she adds.

C) In the handwritten inventories that Ogilvie is analysing are the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage and death. From badger skins to Bibles, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods are included. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tools reveal economic activities; ownership of books and education­ related objects like pens and slates suggests how people learned. In addition, the tax lists included in the database record the value of farms, workshops, assets and debts; signatures and people’s estimates of their age indicate literacy and numeracy levels; and court records reveal obstacles (such as the activities of the guilds*) that stifled industry.

Previous studies usually had just one way of linking education with economic growth – the presence of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the ability to sign names. According to Ogilvie, the database provides multiple indicators for the same individuals, making it possible to analyse links between literacy, numeracy, wealth, and industriousness, for individual women and men over the long term.

D) Ogilvie and her team have been building the vast database of material possessions on top of their full demographic reconstruction of the people who lived in these two German communities. ‘We can follow the same people – and their descendants – across 300 years of educational and economic change,’ she says. Individual lives have unfolded before their eyes. Stories like that of the 24-year-olds Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmiillerin, who were chastised in 1707 for reading books in church instead of listening to the sermon. ‘This tells us they were continuing to develop their reading skills at least a decade after leaving school,’ explains Ogilvie. The database also reveals the case of Juliana Schweickherdt, a SO-year-old spinster living in the small Black Forest community of Wildberg, who was reprimanded in 1752 by the local weavers’ guild for ‘weaving cloth and combing wool, counter to the guild ordinance’. When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members, she was summoned before the guild court and told to pay a fine equivalent to one third of a servant’s annual wage. It was a small act of defiance by today’s standards, but it reflects a time when laws in Germany and elsewhere regulated people’s access to labour markets. The dominance of guilds not only prevented people from using their skills, but also held back even the simplest industrial innovation.

E) The data-gathering phase of the project has been completed and now, according to Ogilvie, it is time ‘to ask the big questions’. One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to ‘hold wealth constant’. This involves following the lives of different people with the same level of wealth over a period of time. If wealth is constant, it is possible to discover whether education was, for example, linked to the cultivation of new crops, or to the adoption of industrial innovations like sewing machines. The team will also ask what aspect of education helped people engage more with productive and innovative activities. Was it, for instance, literacy, numeracy, book ownership, years of schooling? Was there a threshold level – a tipping point – that needed to be reached to affect economic performance?

F) Ogilvie hopes to start finding answers to these questions over the next few years. One thing is already clear, she says: the relationship between education and economic growth is far from straightforward. ‘German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theories of economic growth,’ she explains. Between 1600 and 1900, literacy rates and book ownership were high and yet the region remained poor. It was also the case that local guilds and merchant associations were extremely powerful and legislated against anything that undermined their monopolies. In villages throughout the region, guilds blocked labour migration and resisted changes that might reduce their influence.

‘Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers, and this has implications for today,’ says Ogilvie. ‘Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries, but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people – especially women and the poor – from using their education in economically productive ways. If economic institutions are poorly set up, for instance, education can’t lead to growth.’

Questions 14-18

Does education fuel economic growth? Reading Passage 2 has six sections, A-F.

Which section contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

14. an explanation of the need for research to focus on individuals with a fairly consistent income

15. examples of the sources the database has been compiled from

16. an account of one individual’s refusal to obey an order

17. a reference to a region being particularly suited to research into the link between education and economic growth

18. examples of the items included in a list of personal possessions

Questions 19-22

Complete the summary below.

Choose ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 19-22 on your answer sheet

Demographic reconstruction of two German communities

Questions 23 and 24

Choose TWO letters, A-E.

Write the correct letters in boxes 23 and 24 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make about literacy rates in Section B?

A. Very little research has been done into the link between high literacy rates and improved earnings.

B. Literacy rates in Germany between 1600 and 1900 were very good.

C. There is strong evidence that high literacy rates in the modern world result in economic growth.

D. England is a good example of how high literacy rates helped a country industrialise.

E. Economic growth can help to improve literacy rates.

Questions 25 and 26

Write the correct letters in boxes 25 and 26 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make in Section F about guilds in German-speaking Central Europe between 1600 and 1900?

A. They helped young people to learn a skill.

B. They were opposed to people moving to an area for work.

C. They kept better records than guilds in other parts of the world.

D. They opposed practices that threatened their control over a trade.

E. They predominantly consisted of wealthy merchants.

Timur Gareyev – Blindfold Chess Champion

READING PASSAGE 3

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

A) Next month, a chess player named Timur Gareyev will take on nearly 50 opponents at once. But that is not the hard part. While his challengers will play the games as normal, Gareyev himself will be blindfolded. Even by world record standards, it sets a high bar for human performance. The 28-year-old already stands out in the rarefied world of blindfold chess. He has a fondness for bright clothes and unusual hairstyles, and he gets his kicks from the adventure sport of BASE jumping. He has already proved himself a strong chess player, too. In a 10-hour chess marathon in 2013, Gareyev played 33 games in his head simultaneously. He won 29 and lost none. The skill has become his brand: he calls himself the Blindfold King.

B) But Gareyev’s prowess has drawn interest from beyond the chess-playing community. In the hope of understanding how he and others like him can perform such mental feats, researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) called him in for tests. They now have their first results. ‘The ability to play a game of chess with your eyes closed is not a far reach for most accomplished players,’ said Jesse Rissman, who runs a memory lab at UCLA. ‘But the thing that’s so remarkable about Timur and a few other individuals is the number of games they can keep active at once. To me it is simply astonishing.’

C) Gareyev learned to play chess in his native Uzbekistan when he was six years old. Tutored by his grandfather, he entered his first tournament aged eight and soon became obsessed with competitions. At 16, he was crowned Asia’s youngest ever chess grandmaster. He moved to the US soon after, and as a student helped his university win its first national chess championship. In 2013, Gareyev was ranked the third best chess player in the US.

D) To the uninitiated, blindfold chess seems to call for superhuman skill. But displays of the feat go back centuries. The first recorded game in Europe was played in 13th-century Florence. In 1947, the Argentinian grandmaster Miguel Najdorf played 45 simultaneous games in his mind, winning 39 in the 24-hour session.

E) Accomplished players can develop the skill of playing blind even without realising it. The nature of the game is to run through possible moves in the mind to see how they play out. From this, regular players develop a memory for the patterns the pieces make, the defences and attacks. ‘You recreate it in your mind,’ said Gareyev. ‘A lot of players are capable of doing what I’m doing.’ The real mental challenge comes from playing multiple games at once in the head. Not only must the positions of each piece on every board be memorised, they must be recalled faithfully when needed, updated with each player’s moves, and then reliably stored again, so the brain can move on to the next board. First moves can be tough to remember because they are fairly uninteresting. But the ends of games are taxing too, as exhaustion sets in. When Gareyev is tired, his recall can get patchy. He sometimes makes moves based on only a fragmented memory of the pieces’ positions.

F) The scientists first had Gareyev perform some standard memory tests. These assessed his ability to hold numbers, pictures and words in mind. One classic test measures how many numbers a person can repeat, both forwards and backwards, soon after hearing them. Most people manage about seven. ‘He was not exceptional on any of these standard tests,’ said Rissman. ‘We didn’t find anything other than playing chess that he seems to be supremely gifted at.’ But next came the brain scans. With Gareyev lying down in the machine, Rissman looked at how well connected the various regions of the chess player’s brain were. Though the results are tentative and as yet unpublished, the scans found much greater than average communication between parts of Gareyev’s brain that make up what is called the frontoparietal control network. Of 63 people scanned alongside the chess player, only one or two scored more highly on the measure. ‘You use this network in almost any complex task. It helps you to allocate attention, keep rules in mind, and work out whether you should be responding or not,’ said Rissman.

G) It was not the only hint of something special in Gareyev’s brain. The scans also suggest that Gareyev’s visual network is more highly connected to other brain parts than usual. Initial results suggest that the areas of his brain that process visual images – such as chess boards – may have stronger links to other brain regions, and so be more powerful than normal. While the analyses are not finalised yet, they may hold the first clues to Gareyev’s extraordinary ability.

H) For the world record attempt, Gareyev hopes to play 47 blindfold games at once in about 16 hours. He will need to win 80% to claim the title. ‘I don’t worry too much about the winning percentage, that’s never been an issue for me,’ he said. ‘The most important part of blindfold chess for me is that I have found the one thing that I can fully dedicate myself to. I miss having an obsession.’

Questions 27-32

Timur Gareyev – blindfold chess champion Reading Passage 3 has eight paragraphs, A-H.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.

NB  You may use any letter more than once.

27. a reference to earlier examples of blindfold chess

28. an outline of what blindfold chess involves

29. a claim that Gareyev’s skill is limited to chess

30. why Gareyev’s skill is of interest to scientists

31. an outline of Gareyev’s priorities

32. a reason why the last part of a game may be difficult

Questions 33-36

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Timur Gareyev – blindfold chess champion Reading Passage 3 ?

In boxes 33-36 on your answer sheet, write

33. In the forthcoming games, all the participants will be blindfolded.

34. Gareyev has won competitions in BASE jumping.

35. UCLA is the first university to carry out research into blindfold chess players.

36. Good chess players are likely to be able to play blindfold chess.

Questions 37-40

Write your answers in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

How the research was carried out

Bats to the rescue Reading Answers

Does education fuel economic growth Reading Answers

Timur Gareyev – blindfold chess champion Reading Answers

CAMB Academic Reading Test 4 Answers, Explanation, PDF

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17 thoughts on “CAMB IELTS Academic Reading Test 04 (Answers, PDF)”

please send me

Please send me the explanation of IELTS 17 book academic reading, thank you.

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please send me the practice tests for making my practice effective. thank you

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Please send me pdf with answer explanation

[email protected] hello, could you send me the explanation of bats for the rescue reading

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please would want to know why no 1 was false, possibly the pdf correction for this reading test. though i got 7.5

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Cambridge IELTS 17 reading test 4 answers with explanation

Reading passage 1, bats to the rescue.

TRUE / FALSE / NOT GIVEN

• Many Madagascan forests are being destroyed by attacks from insects.

False – First paragraph fourth and fifth line. And a key reason for this destruction is that insect pests are destroying vast quantities of what is grown by local subsistence farmers, leading them to clear forest to create new paddy fields.

Explanation:- Forests are not directly destructed (attacked) by insects. Insects are destroying paddy crops, and farmers are clearing forests to create new paddy (rice) fields. Insects are not directly attacking forests.  

• Loss of habitat has badly affected insectivorous bats in Madagascar.

False – first paragraph last three lines. but not all species are suffering. In fact, some of the island’s insectivorous bats are currently thriving and this has important implications for farmers and conservationists alike.

Explanation:- Insectivorous bats are thriving (grow or develop), not being affected.

• Ricardo Rocha has carried out studies of bats in different parts of the world.

Not given – Second paragraph’s first three lines. No Such information is given.

• Habitat modification has resulted in indigenous bats in Madagascar becoming useful to farmers.

True – Second paragraph’s last three lines and fourth paragraph’s first two lines. Rocha’s new study shows that several species of bats are giving Madagascar’s rice farmers a vital pest control service by feasting on plagues of insects. And this, he believes, can ease the financial pressure on farmers to turn forest into fields. Co-leading an international team of scientists, Rocha found that several species of indigenous bats are taking advantage of habitat modification to hunt insects swarming above the country’s rice fields.

Explanation:- After habitat modification, Indigenous bat species started acting as pest controllers by eating insects that destroy rice crops.

• The Malagasy mouse-eared bat is more common than other indigenous bat species in Madagascar.

Not given – Fourth paragraph’s last two lines. No such information is given.

• Bats may feed on paddy swarming caterpillars and grass webworms.

True – fifth paragraph’s second and third line. ‘We found that six species of bat are preying on rice pests, including the paddy swarming caterpillar and grass webworm.

Explanation:- Preying = hunt and kill for food.

Complete the table below.

• DNA analysis of bat…………………

Droppings – seventh paragraph’s last line. They next used DNA barcoding techniques to analyse droppings collected from bats at the different sites.

• ate pests of rice, …………….. , sugarcane, nut and fruit

Coffee – eighth paragraph last three lines. The scientists also found indications that the bats were consuming pests of other crops, including the black twig borer (which infests coffee plants), the sugarcane cicada, the macadamia nut-borer, and the sober tabby (a pest of citrus fruits).

• prevent the spread of disease by eating………….and blackflies

Mosquitoes – tenth paragraph last two lines. Malagasy bats feed not just on crop pests but also on mosquitoes – carriers of malaria, Rift Valley fever virus and elephantiasis – as well as blackflies, which spread river blindness.

• they provide food rich in………..

Protein – eleventh paragraph’s first and second line. Rocha points out that the relationship is complicated. When food is scarce, bats become a crucial source of protein for local people.  

• the buildings where they roost become……………..

Unclean – eleventh paragraph’s third-fourth line. The bats sometimes roost in buildings, but are not welcomed there because they make them unclean .

• they play an important role in local…………….

Culture – eleventh paragraph’s fourth & fifth line. They are associated with sacred caves and the ancestors, so they can be viewed as beings between worlds, which makes them very significant in the culture of the people.

• farmers should provide special…………….. to support the bat population

Houses – eleventh paragraph’s last two line. ‘With the right help, we hope that farmers can promote this mutually beneficial relationship by installing bat houses .’

Reading Passage 2

Does education fuel economic growth.

Which section (A–F) contains the following information?

• an explanation of the need for research to focus on individuals with a fairly consistent income

E – E paragraph’s second to fourth line. One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to ‘hold wealth constant’. This involves followings the lives of different people with the same level of wealth over a period of time.

Explanation:- Fairly consistent income = the same level of wealth over a period of time. The research on whether education causes economic growth needs to focus (following) on individuals (different people) with the same level of income over time.

• examples of the sources the database has been compiled from

A – A paragraph’s third to sixth line. It includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries.

Explanation:- In the beginning of the paragraph, the writer mentions a large database. Then, in the following lines, from the third to the sixth line, the writer explains how the information in the database was collected. The sources include guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists, and over 9,000 handwritten inventories that list more than a million personal possessions of ordinary people from three centuries.

• an account of one individual’s refusal to obey an order

D – D paragraph’s eighth to twelfth line. The database also reveals the case of Juliana Schweickherdt, a 50-year-old spinster living in the small Black Forest community of Wildberg, who was reprimanded in 1752 by the local weavers’ guild for ‘weaving cloth and combing wool, counter to the guild ordinance’. When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members, she was summoned before the guild court and told to pay a fine equivalent to one third of a servant’s annual wage.

Explanation:- Weaving cloth and combing wool was only allowed to be done by men, but an old lady, Juliana Schweickherdt, kept doing it despite ordering her to stop this work by local wavers. That is how she refused to obey the orders of the weaver’s guild(a medieval association of craftsmen or merchants, often having considerable power).

• a reference to a region being particularly suited to research into the link between education and economic growth

F – F paragraph’s third to fifth line. ‘German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theories of economic growth,’ she explains. Between 1600 and 1900, literacy rates and book ownership were high and yet the region remained poor.

Explanation:- The central idea of this whole passage is to find a link between education and economic growth. But in a German-speaking area of Europe, between 1600 and 1900, the number of educated people increased, and their book ownership was also high. Despite that, the people of that area remained poor. So, it is the best area to research whether education makes people rich or not.

• examples of the items included in a list of personal possessions

C – C paragraph’s first part, first to fifth line. In the handwritten inventories that Ogilvie is analysing are the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage and death. From badger skins to Bibles, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods are included. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tools reveal economic activities; ownership of books and education related objects like pens and slates suggests how people learned.

Example:- Inventory =  a complete list of items. The list of personal possessions Ogilvie made for analysis has badger skins, Bibles, sewing machines, scarlet bodices, agriculture equipment, craft tools, books, pens and slates.    

Complete the summary below .

Demographic reconstruction of two German communities

• The database that Ogilvie and her team has compiled sheds light on the lives of a range of individuals, as well as those of their…………………, over a 300-year period.

descendants – D paragraph’s first three lines. Ogilvie and her team have been building the vast database of material possessions on top of their full demographic reconstruction of the people who lived in these two German communities. ‘We can follow the same people – and their descendants – across 300 years of educational and economic change,

Explanation:- Descendants = Children or grandchildren      

      20. For example, Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin were reprimanded for reading while they should have been paying attention to a……………………..

sermon – D paragraph’s fifth to sixth line. Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin, who were chastised in 1707 for reading books in church instead of listening to the sermon.

Explanation:- Chastise = Rebuke or Reprimand. Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin were Chastise for reading books instead of paying attention (listening) to the sermon ( a talk on a religious or moral subject, especially one given during a church service and based on a passage from the Bible). 

• There was also Juliana Schweickherdt, who came to the notice of the weavers’ guild in the year 1752 for breaking guild rules. As a punishment, she was later given a………………

fine – D paragraph’s eleven to thirteenth line. When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members, she was summoned before the guild court and told to pay a fine equivalent to one-third of a servant’s annual wage.

• Cases like this illustrate how the guilds could prevent……………………..and stop skilled people from working.

 innovation – D paragraph’s second-last line. The dominance of guilds not only prevented people from using their skills, but also held back ( prevent ) even the simplest industrial innovation .

Choose TWO letters, A–E.

      23 & 24. Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make about literacy rates in Section B?

            B ( Literacy rates in Germany between 1600 and 1900 were very good) B paragraph fourth to sixth line. Between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy grew fast and it was the first country to industrialise. During this period, Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates.

Explanation:- Between 1600 and 1900, England had  mediocre  (not very good) literacy, but Germany had  excellent ( very good )  literacy rates.    

            E ( Economic growth can help to improve literacy rates)  B paragraph’s last three line. ‘Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education ,’ she adds.

Explanation:- It is evident that economic growth increase (improve) education (literacy rate).  

      25 & 26. Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make in Section F about guilds in German-speaking Central Europe between 1600 and 1900?

            B ( They were opposed to people moving to an area for work)  F paragraph first part’s last two lines. In villages throughout the region, guilds blocked labour migration and resisted changes that might reduce their influence.

Explanation:- Local guilds blocked ( opposed ) people moving for labour migration ( moving to an area for work ).

            D ( They opposed practices that threatened their control over a trade) F paragraph first part’s fifth to seventh line. It was also the case that local guilds and merchant associations were extremely powerful and legislated against anything that undermined their monopolies.

Explanation:- Local guilds and merchant associations made rules ( legislated ) against anything ( practices ) that undermined ( threatened/reduced the power ) their monopolies ( an exclusive control over a service or commodity ).

Reading Passage 3

Timur gareyev – blindfold chess champion.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

• a reference to earlier examples of blindfold chess

D – D paragraph’s first three lines. To the uninitiated, blindfold chess seems to call for superhuman skill. But displays of the feat go back centuries. The first recorded game in Europe was in 13 th – century Florence.

Explanation:- Blindfold chess feat was the first ( earliest ) recorded to be held in 13th century Florence.

• an outline of what blindfold chess involves

E – E paragraph second line to ninth line. The nature of the game is to run through possible moves in the mind to see how they play out. From this, regular players develop a memory for the patterns the pieces make, the defences and attacks. ‘You recreate it in your mind,’ said Gareyev. ‘A lot of players are capable of doing what I’m doing.’ The real mental challenge comes from playing multiple games at once in the head. Not only must the positions of each piece on every board be memorised, they must be recalled faithfully when needed, updated with each player’s moves, and then reliably stored again, so the brain can move on to the next board.

Explanation:- How blindfold chess is played is described by Gareyev. He explains possible moves of pieces are stored and recalled in the mind. With every move, the position of pieces is updated in the head. Similarly, several possible games are played in the head, which are updated with the changing position of pieces.

• a claim that Gareyev’s skill is limited to chess

F – F paragraph’s first line to sixth line. The scientists first had Gareyev perform some standard memory tests. These assessed his ability to hold numbers, pictures and words in mind. One classic test measures how many numbers a person can repeat, both forwards and backwards, soon after hearing them. Most people manage about seven. ‘He was not exceptional on any of these standard tests,’ said Rissman. ‘We didn’t find anything other than playing chess that he seems to be supremely gifted at.

Explanation:- In a test of memorizing numbers and pictures, Gareyev performed similarly to other people. Thus, his performance is only exceptional in chess.

• why Gareyev’s skill is of interest to scientists

B – B paragraph’s first to fourth line. But Gareyev’s prowess has drawn interest from beyond the chess-playing community. In the hope of understanding how he and others like him can perform such mental feats, researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) called him in for tests

Explanation:- Gareyev’s prowess ( skill or expertise in a particular activity or field ) attracted scientists ( researchers ) to know how he could perform such mental feats(an achievement that requires great courage, skill, or strength).

• an outline of Gareyev’s priorities

H – H paragraph’s first line. For the world record attempt, Gareyev hopes to play 47 blindfold games at once in about 16 hours.

Explanation:- Gareyev’s priority is to play 47 blindfold games at once in 16 hours to make a world record.

• a reason why the last part of a game may be difficult

E – E paragraph’s eighth to eleventh line. First moves can be tough to remember because they are fairly uninteresting. But the ends of games are taxing too, as exhaustion sets in. When Gareyev is tired, his recall can get patchy.

Explanation:- As described in paragraph E, the final stages of the game can be mentally challenging for players as they begin to tire. Due to this exhaustion, Gareyev had difficulty recalling everything he had memorized, making the end of the game more difficult.

TRUE/FALSE/NOT GIVEN

• In the forthcoming games, all the participants will be blindfolded.

False – A paragraph’s first three lines. Next month, a chess player named Timur Gareyev will take on nearly 50 opponents at once. But that is not the hard part. While his challengers will play the games as normal, Gareyev himself will be blindfolded.

Explanation:- All 50 players will play normally (not blindfolded) only Gareyev will be blindfolded while playing against them at once. Hence,  False .

• Gareyev has won competitions in BASE jumping.

            Not given – A paragraph’s sixth to seventh line. He has a fondness for bright clothes and unusual hairstyles, and he gets his kicks from the adventure sport of BASE jumping.

Explanation:- He  gets his kicks  (get enjoyment or pleasure) from BASE jumping. No information about winning a competition in BASE Jumping is given.

• UCLA is the first university to carry out research into blindfold chess players.

Not given – B paragraph’s first to fourth line. But Gareyev’s prowess has drawn interest from beyond the chess-playing community. In the hope of understanding how he and others like him can perform such mental feats, researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) called him in for tests.

Explanation:- No such information is give.

• Good chess players are likely to be able to play blindfold chess.

            True – E paragraph’s first line. Accomplished players can develop the skill of playing blind even without realizing it.

Explanation:- Accomplished = highly trained or skilled .

Complete the summary below.

How the research was carried out

• The researchers started by testing Gareyev’s………………… ;

memory – F paragraph’s first line. The scientists first had Gareyev perform some standard memory tests.

• for example, he was required to recall a string of……………….in order and also in reverse order.

numbers – F paragraph’s second to fourth line. One classic test measures how many numbers a person can repeat, both forwards and backwards, soon after hearing them.

Explanation:- In order and in reverse order = Forward and backward

• Although his performance was normal, scans showed an unusual amount of………..….. within the areas of Gareyev’s brain that are concerned with directing attention.

communication – F paragraph’s ninth and tenth line. the scans found much greater than average communication between parts of Gareyev’s brain

• In addition, the scans raised the possibility of unusual strength in the parts of his brain that deal with………………….input.

visual – G paragraph’s first two lines. It was not the only hint of something special in Gareyev’s brain. The scans also suggest that Gareyev’s visual network is more highly connected to other brain parts than usual.

Explanation:- highly connected = unusual strength

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Does education fuel economic growth?

Book Cambridge IELTS 17 Test Four Academic Reading

Does education fuel economic growth?

Over the last decade, a huge database about the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900 has been compiled by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Economics. It includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries. Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer to a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s economic growth.

As Ogilvie explains, ‘Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, and earn more … surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier.’ Between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy grew fast and it was the first country to industrialise. During this period, Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly and they industrialised late. ‘Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education,’ she adds.

In the handwritten inventories that Ogilvie is analysing are the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage and death. From badger skins to Bibles, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods are included. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tools reveal economic activities; ownership of books and education-related objects like pens and slates suggests how people learned. In addition, the tax lists included in the database record the value of farms, workshops, assets and debts; signatures and people’s estimates of their age indicate literacy and numeracy levels; and court records reveal obstacles (such as the activities of the guilds*) that stifled industry.

Previous studies usually had just one way of linking education with economic growth – the presence of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the ability to sign names. According to Ogilvie, the database provides multiple indicators for the same individuals, making it possible to analyse links between literacy, numeracy, wealth, and industriousness, for individual women and men over the long term.

Ogilvie and her team have been building the vast database of material possessions on top of their full demographic reconstruction of the people who lived in these two German communities. ‘We can follow the same people – and their descendants – across 300 years of educational and economic change,’ she says. Individual lives have unfolded before their eyes. Stories like that of the 24-year-olds Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmullerin, who were chastised in 1707 for reading books in church instead of listening to the sermon. ‘This tells us they were continuing to develop their reading skills at least a decade after leaving school,’ explains Ogilvie. The database also reveals the case of Juliana Schweickherdt, a 50-year-old spinster living in the small Black Forest community of Wildberg, who was reprimanded in 1752 by the local weavers’ guild for ‘weaving cloth and combing wool, counter to the guild ordinance’. When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members, she was summoned before the guild court and told to pay a fine equivalent to one third of a servant’s annual wage. It was a small act of defiance by today’s standards, but it reflects a time when laws in Germany and elsewhere regulated people’s access to labour markets. The dominance of guilds not only prevented people from using their skills, but also held back even the simplest industrial innovation.

The data-gathering phase of the project has been completed and now, according to Ogilvie, it is time ‘to ask the big questions’. One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to ‘hold wealth constant’. This involves following the lives of different people with the same level of wealth over a period of time. If wealth is constant, it is possible to discover whether education was, for example, linked to the cultivation of new crops, or to the adoption of industrial innovations like sewing machines. The team will also ask what aspect of education helped people engage more with productive and innovative activities. Was it, for instance, literacy, numeracy, book ownership, years of schooling? Was there a threshold level – a tipping point – that needed to be reached to affect economic performance?

Ogilvie hopes to start finding answers to these questions over the next few years. One thing is already clear, she says: the relationship between education and economic growth is far from straightforward. ‘German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theories of economic growth,’ she explains. Between 1600 and 1900, literacy rates and book ownership were high and yet the region remained poor. It was also the case that local guilds and merchant associations were extremely powerful and legislated against anything that undermined their monopolies. In villages throughout the region, guilds blocked labour migration and resisted changes that might reduce their influence.

‘Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers, and this has implications for today,’ says Ogilvie. ‘Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries, but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people – especially women and the poor – from using their education in economically productive ways. If economic institutions are poorly set up, for instance, education can’t lead to growth.’

*guild: an association of artisans or merchants which oversees the practice of their craft or trade in a particular area

Questions 1-5

The Reading Passage has six paragraphs, A-F .

Which section contains the following information?

Write the correct letter,  A-F , in boxes on your answer sheet.

Cambridge IELTS 17 Academic Reading Test 4 (Questions 14-18)

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CAMBRIDGE BOOK 17 – TEST 4 READING PASSAGE 2 : IELTS READING 17-4-2 TIME MANAGEMENT AND EXPLANATORY KEY Does education fuel economic growth?

READING PASSAGE 2 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14–26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

Does education fuel economic growth?

A Over the last decade, a huge database about the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900 has been compiled by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Economics. It includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries. Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer to a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s economic growth.

B As Ogilvie explains, ‘Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, and earn more … surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier.’ Between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy grew fast and it was the first country to industrialise. During this period, Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly and they industrialised late. ‘Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education,’ she adds.

C In the handwritten inventories that Ogilvie is analysing are the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage and death. From badger skins to Bibles, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods are included. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tools reveal economic activities; ownership of books and educationrelated objects like pens and slates suggests how people learned. In addition, the tax lists included in the database record the value of farms, workshops, assets and debts; signatures and people’s estimates of their age indicate literacy and numeracy levels; and court records reveal obstacles (such as the activities of the guilds*) that stifled industry. Previous studies usually had just one way of linking education with economic growth – the presence of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the ability to sign names. According to Ogilvie, the database provides multiple indicators for the same individuals, making it possible to analyse links between literacy, numeracy, wealth, and industriousness, for individual women and men over the long term.

D Ogilvie and her team have been building the vast database of material possessions on top of their full demographic reconstruction of the people who lived in these two German communities. ‘We can follow the same people – and their descendants – across 300 yearsof educational and economic change,’ she says. Individual lives have unfolded before their eyes. Stories like that of the 24-year-olds Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin, who were chastised in 1707 for reading books in church instead of listening to the sermon. ‘This tells us they were continuing to develop their reading skills at least a decade after leaving school,’ explains Ogilvie. The database also reveals the case of Juliana Schweickherdt, a 50-year-old spinster living in the small Black Forest community of Wildberg, who was reprimanded in 1752 by the local weavers’ guild for ‘weaving cloth and combing wool, counter to the guild ordinance’. When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members, she was summoned before the guild court and told to pay a fine equivalent to one third of a servant’s annual wage. It was a small act of defiance by today’s standards, but it reflects a time when laws in Germany and elsewhere regulated people’s access to labour markets. The dominance of guilds not only prevented people from using their skills, but also held back even the simplest industrial innovation.

E The data-gathering phase of the project has been completed and now, according to Ogilvie, it is time ‘to ask the big questions’. One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to ‘hold wealth constant’. This involves following the lives of different people with the same level of wealth over a period of time. If wealth is constant, it is possible to discover whether education was, for example, linked to the cultivation of new crops, or to the adoption of industrial innovations like sewing machines. The team will also ask what aspect of education helped people engage more with productive and innovative activities. Was it, for instance, literacy, numeracy, book ownership, years of schooling? Was there a threshold level – a tipping point – that needed to be reached to affect economic performance?

F Ogilvie hopes to start finding answers to these questions over the next few years. One thing is already clear, she says: the relationship between education and economic growth is far from straightforward. ‘German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theories of economic growth,’ she explains. Between 1600 and 1900, literacy rates and book ownership were high and yet the region remained poor. It was also the case that local guilds and merchant associations were extremely powerful and legislated against anything that undermined their monopolies. In villages throughout the region, guilds blocked labour migration and resisted changes that might reduce their influence. ‘Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers, and this has implications for today,’ says Ogilvie. ‘Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries, but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people – especially women and the poor – from using their education in economically productive ways. If economic institutions are poorly set up, for instance, education can’t lead to growth.’

Questions 14–18 Reading Passage 2 has six sections, A–F. Which section contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A–F, in boxes 14–18 on your answer sheet. 14 an explanation of the need for research to focus on individuals with a fairly consistent income 15 examples of the sources the database has been compiled from 16 an account of one individual’s refusal to obey an order 17 a reference to a region being particularly suited to research into the link between education and economic growth 18 examples of the items included in a list of personal possessions

Questions 19–22 Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 19–22 on your answer sheet.

Demographic reconstruction of two German communities The database that Ogilvie and her team has compiled sheds light on the lives of a range of individuals, as well as those of their 19…………… , over a 300-year period. For example, Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin were reprimanded for reading while they should have been paying attention to a 20……………………… . There was also Juliana Schweickherdt, who came to the notice of the weavers’ guild in the year 1752 for breaking guild rules. As a punishment, she was later given a 21………………….. . Cases like this illustrate how the guilds could prevent 22………………………… and stop skilled people from working.

Questions 23 and 24 Choose TWO letters, A–E. Write the correct letters in boxes 23 and 24 on your answer sheet. Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make about literacy rates in Section B ? A Very little research has been done into the link between high literacy rates and improved earnings. B Literacy rates in Germany between 1600 and 1900 were very good. C There is strong evidence that high literacy rates in the modern world result in economic growth. D England is a good example of how high literacy rates helped a country industrialise. E Economic growth can help to improve literacy rates. Questions 25 and 26 Choose TWO letters, A–E. Write the correct letters in boxes 25 and 26 on your answer sheet. Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make in Section F about guilds in German-speaking Central Europe between 1600 and 1900? A They helped young people to learn a skill. B They were opposed to people moving to an area for work. C They kept better records than guilds in other parts of the world. D They opposed practices that threatened their control over a trade. E They predominantly consisted of wealthy merchants.

14 E 15 A 16 D 17 F 18 C 19 descendants 20 sermon 21 fine 22 innovation 23&24 IN EITHER ORDER B E 25&26 IN EITHER ORDER B D

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Giải đề Cambridge IELTS 17, Test 3, Reading Passage 2: Does education fuel economic growth?

TÓM TẮT NỘI DUNG

Giải thích đáp án đề Cambridge IELTS 17, Test 4, Reading Passage 2

Questions 14-20, question 14.

Vị trí: Section E, câu 1-3.

Giải thích đáp án:

Question 15

Vị trí: Section A, câu 1-2.

Question 16

Vị trí: Section D, câu 6-7.

Question 17

Vị trí: Section F, đoạn 1, câu 2-3.

Question 18

Vị trí: Section C, đoạn 1, câu 1-3.

Question 19

Đáp án: descendants

Vị trí: Section D, câu 1-2.

Question 20

Đáp án: sermon

Vị trí: Section D, câu 4.

Question 21

Đáp án: fine

Vị trí: Section D, câu 7.

Question 22

Đáp án: innovation

Vị trí: Section D, câu cuối.

Questions 23-24

Đáp án: 23 - B; 24 - E

Vị trí: Section B.

Question 25-26

Đáp án: 25 - B; 26 - D

Vị trí: Section F, đoạn 1, câu 4-6.

Trên đây là toàn bộ giải thích đáp án cho đề Cambridge IELTS 17, Test 4, Reading Passage 2 - Does education fuel economic growth? được đội ngũ chuyên môn tại Anh Ngữ ZIM biên soạn. Người học có thể thảo luận về đề thi và đáp án dưới phần bình luận hoặc tham gia diễn đàn ZIM Helper để được giải đáp kiến thức tiếng Anh luyện thi Đại học và các kì thi tiếng Anh khác, được vận hành bởi các High Achievers.

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• Giải đề Cambridge IELTS 17, Test 4, Listening Part 4: Maple syrup
• Giải đề Cambridge IELTS 17, Test 3, Speaking Part 1
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Does education fuel econo

Does education fuel economic growth.

Over the last decade, a huge database about the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900 has been compiled by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Economics. It includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries. Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer to a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s economic growth.

As Ogilvie explains, ‘Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, and earn more … surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier.’ Between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy grew fast and it was the first country to industrialise. During this period, Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly and they industrialised late. ‘Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education,’ she adds.

In the handwritten inventories that Ogilvie is analysing are the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage and death. From badger skins to Bibles, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods are included. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tools reveal economic activities; ownership of books and education-related objects like pens and slates suggests how people learned. In addition, the tax lists included in the database record the value of farms, workshops, assets and debts; signatures and people’s estimates of their age indicate literacy and numeracy levels; and court records reveal obstacles (such as the activities of the guilds*) that stifled industry.

Previous studies usually had just one way of linking education with economic growth – the presence of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the ability to sign names. According to Ogilvie, the database provides multiple indicators for the same individuals, making it possible to analyse links between literacy, numeracy, wealth, and industriousness, for individual women and men over the long term.

Ogilvie and her team have been building the vast database of material possessions on top of their full demographic reconstruction of the people who lived in these two German communities. ‘We can follow the same people – and their descendants – across 300 years of educational and economic change,’ she says. Individual lives have unfolded before their eyes. Stories like that of the 24-year-olds Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin, who were chastised in 1707 for reading books in church instead of listening to the sermon. ‘This tells us they were continuing to develop their reading skills at least a decade after leaving school,’ explains Ogilvie. The database also reveals the case of Juliana Schweickherdt, a 50-year-old spinster living in the small Black Forest community of Wildberg, who was reprimanded in 1752 by the local weavers’ guild for ‘weaving cloth and combing wool, counter to the guide ordinance’. When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members, she was summoned before the guild court and told to pay a fine equivalent to one third of a servant’s annual wage. It was a small act of defiance by today’s standards, but it reflects a time when laws in Germany and elsewhere regulated people’s access to labour markets. The dominance of guilds not only prevented people from using their skills, but also held back even the simplest industrial innovation.

The data-gathering phase of the project has been completed and now, according to Ogilvie, it is time ‘to ask the big questions’. One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to ‘hold wealth constant’. This involves following the lives of different people with the same level of wealth over a period of time. If wealth is constant, it is possible to discover whether education was, for example, linked to the cultivation of new crops, or to the adoption of industrial innovations like sewing machines. The team will also ask what aspect of education helped people engage more with productive and innovative activities. Was it, for instance, literacy, numeracy, book ownership, years of schooling? Was there a threshold level – a tipping point – that needed to be reached to affect economic performance?

Ogilvie hopes to start finding answers to these questions over the next few years. One thing is already clear, she says: the relationship between education and economic growth is far from straightforward. ‘German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theories of economic growth,’ she explains. Between 1600 and 1900, literacy rates and book ownership were high and yet the region remained poor. It was also the case that local guilds and merchant associations were extremely powerful and legislated against anything that undermined their monopolies. In villages throughout the region, guilds blocked labour migration and resisted changes that might reduce their influence.

‘Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers, and this has implications for today,’ says Ogilvie. ‘Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries, but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people – especially women and the poor – from using their education in economically productive ways. If economic institutions are poorly set up, for instance, education can’t lead to growth.’

* guild: an association of artisans or merchants which oversees the practice of their craft or trade in a particular area

Questions 1 - 5

Questions 1-5.

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs,  A-F .

Which section contains the following information?

Write the correct letter,  A-F , in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

Questions 6 - 9

Questions 6-9.

Complete the summary below.

Choose  ONE WORD  from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 6-9 on your answer sheet.

Questions 10 - 11

Questions 10 and 11.

Choose  TWO  letters,  A-E .

Write the correct letters in boxes 10 and 11 on your answer sheet.

Which  TWO  of the following statements does the writer make about literacy rates in Section B?

• A Very little research has been done into the link between high literacy rates and improved earnings.
• B Literacy rates in Germany between 1600 and 1900 were very good.
• C There is strong evidence that high literacy rates in the modern world result in economic growth.
• D England is a good example of how high literacy rates helped a country industrialise.
• E Economic growth can help to improve literacy rates.

Questions 12 - 13

Questions 12 and 13.

Write the correct letters in boxes 12 and 13 on your answer sheet.

Which  TWO  of the following statements does the writer make in Section F about guilds in German-speaking Central Europe between 1600 and 1900?

• A They helped young people to learn a skill.
• B They were opposed to people moving to an area for work.
• C They kept better records than guilds in other parts of the world.
• D They opposed practices that threatened their control over a trade.
• E They predominantly consisted of wealthy merchants.

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READING PASSAGE 1

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

Bats to the rescue

How Madagascar’s bats are helping to save the rainforest

There are few places in the world where relations between agriculture and conservation are more strained. Madagascar’s forests are being converted to agricultural land at a rate of one percent every year. Much of this destruction is fuelled by the cultivation of the country’s main staple crop: rice. And a key reason for this destruction is that insect pests are destroying vast quantities of what is grown by local subsistence farmers, leading them to clear forest to create new paddy fields. The result is devastating habitat and biodiversity loss on the island, but not all species are suffering. In fact, some of the island’s insectivorous bats are currently thriving and this has important implications for farmers and conservationists alike.

Enter University of Cambridge zoologist Ricardo Rocha. He’s passionate about conservation, and bats. More specifically, he’s interested in how bats are responding to human activity and deforestation in particular. Rocha’s new study shows that several species of bats are giving Madagascar’s rice farmers a vital pest control service by feasting on plagues of insects. And this, he believes, can ease the financial pressure on farmers to turn forest into fields.

Bats comprise roughly one-fifth of all mammal species in Madagascar and thirty-six recorded bat species are native to the island, making it one of the most important regions for conservation of this animal group anywhere in the world.

Co-leading an international team of scientists, Rocha found that several species of indigenous bats are taking advantage of habitat modification to hunt insects swarming above the country’s rice fields. They include the Malagasy mouse-eared bat, Major’s long-fingered bat, the Malagasy white-bellied free-tailed bat and Peters’ wrinkle-lipped bat.

‘These winner species are providing a valuable free service to Madagascar as biological pest suppressors,’ says Rocha. ‘We found that six species of bat are preying on rice pests, including the paddy swarming caterpillar and grass webworm. The damage which these insects cause puts the island’s farmers under huge financial pressure and that encourages deforestation.’

The study, now published in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment , set out to investigate the feeding activity of insectivorous bats in the farmland bordering the Ranomafana National Park in the southeast of the country.

Rocha and his team used state-of-the-art ultrasonic recorders to record over a thousand bat ‘feeling buzzes’ (echolocation sequences used by bats to target their prey) at 54 sites, in order to identify the favourite feeding spots of the bats. The next used DNA barcoding techniques to analyse droppings collected from bats at the different sites.

The recordings revealed that bat activity over rice fields was much higher than it was in continuous forest – seven times higher over rice fields which were on flat ground, and sixteen times higher over fields on the sides of hills – leaving no doubt that the animals are preferentially foraging in these man-made ecosystems. The researchers suggest that the bats favour these fields because lack of water and nutrient run-off make these crops more susceptible to insect pest infestations. DNA analysis showed that all six species of bat had fed on economically important insect pests. While the findings indicated that rice farming benefits most from the bats, the scientists also found indications that the bats were consuming pests of other crops, including the black twig borer (which infests coffee plants), the sugarcane cicada, the macadamia nut-borer, and the sober tabby (a pest of citrus fruits).

‘The effectiveness of bats as pest controllers has already been proven in the USA and Catalonia,’ said co-author James Kemp, from the University of Lisbon. ‘But our study is the first to show this happening in Madagascar, where the stakes for both farmers and conservationists are so high.’

Local people may have a further reason to be grateful to their bats. While the animal is often associated with spreading disease, Rocha and his team found evidence that Malagasy bats feed not just on crop pests but also on mosquitoes – carriers of malaria, Rift Valley fever virus and elephantiasis – as well as blackflies, which spread river blindness.

Rocha points out that the relationship is complicated. When food is scarce, bats become a crucial source of protein for local people. Even the children will hunt them. And as well as roosting in trees, the bats sometimes roost in buildings, but are not welcomed there because they make them unclean. At the same time, however, they are associated with sacred caves and the ancestors, so they can be viewed as beings between worlds, which makes them very significant in the culture of the people. And one potential problem is that while these bats are benefiting from farming, at the same time deforestation is reducing the places where they can roost, which could have long-term effects on their numbers. Rocha says, ‘With the right help, we hope that farmers can promote this mutually beneficial relationship by installing bat houses.’

Rocha and his colleagues believe that maximising bat populations can help to boost crop yields and promote sustainable livelihoods. The team is now calling for further research to quantify this contribution. ‘I’m very optimistic,’ says Rocha. ‘If we give nature a hand, we can speed up the process of regeneration.’

Questions 1-6

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE                if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE               if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN     if there is no information on this

1   Many Madagascan forests are being destroyed by attacks from insects.

2   Loss of habitat has badly affected insectivorous bats in Madagascar.

3   Ricardo Rocha has carried out studies of bats in different parts of the world.

4   Habitat modification has resulted in indigenous bats in Madagascar becoming useful to farmers.

5    The Malagasy mouse-eared bat is more common than other indigenous bat species in Madagascar.

6    Bats may feed on paddy swarming caterpillars and grass webworms.

Questions 7-13

Complete the table below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 7-13 on your answer sheet.  

READING PASSAGE 2

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

Does education fuel economic growth?

Over the last decade, a huge database about the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900 has been compiled by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Economics. It includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries. Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer to a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s economic growth.

As Ogilvie explains, ‘Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, and earn more … surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier.’ Between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy grew fast and it was the first country to industrialise. During this period, Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly and they industrialised late. ‘Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education,’ she adds.

In the handwritten inventories that Ogilvie is analysing are the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage and death. From badger skins to Bibles, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods are included. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tools reveal economic activities; ownership of books and education-related objects like pens and slates suggests how people learned. In addition, the tax lists included in the database record the value of farms, workshops, assets and debts; signatures and people’s estimates of their age indicate literacy and numeracy levels; and court records reveal obstacles (such as the activities of the guilds*) that stifled industry.

Previous studies usually had just one way of linking education with economic growth – the presence of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the ability to sign names. According to Ogilvie, the database provides multiple indicators for the same individuals, making it possible to analyse links between literacy, numeracy, wealth, and industriousness, for individual women and men over the long term.

Ogilvie and her team have been building the vast database of material possessions on top of their full demographic reconstruction of the people who lived in these two German communities. ‘We can follow the same people – and their descendants – across 300 years of educational and economic change,’ she says. Individual lives have unfolded before their eyes. Stories like that of the 24-year-olds Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin, who were chastised in 1707 for reading books in church instead of listening to the sermon. ‘This tells us they were continuing to develop their reading skills at least a decade after leaving school,’ explains Ogilvie. The database also reveals the case of Juliana Schweickherdt, a 50-year-old spinster living in the small Black Forest community of Wildberg, who was reprimanded in 1752 by the local weavers’ guild for ‘weaving cloth and combing wool, counter to the guide ordinance’. When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members, she was summoned before the guild court and told to pay a fine equivalent to one third of a servant’s annual wage. It was a small act of defiance by today’s standards, but it reflects a time when laws in Germany and elsewhere regulated people’s access to labour markets. The dominance of guilds not only prevented people from using their skills, but also held back even the simplest industrial innovation.

The data-gathering phase of the project has been completed and now, according to Ogilvie, it is time ‘to ask the big questions’. One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to ‘hold wealth constant’. This involves following the lives of different people with the same level of wealth over a period of time. If wealth is constant, it is possible to discover whether education was, for example, linked to the cultivation of new crops, or to the adoption of industrial innovations like sewing machines. The team will also ask what aspect of education helped people engage more with productive and innovative activities. Was it, for instance, literacy, numeracy, book ownership, years of schooling? Was there a threshold level – a tipping point – that needed to be reached to affect economic performance?

Ogilvie hopes to start finding answers to these questions over the next few years. One thing is already clear, she says: the relationship between education and economic growth is far from straightforward. ‘German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theories of economic growth,’ she explains. Between 1600 and 1900, literacy rates and book ownership were high and yet the region remained poor. It was also the case that local guilds and merchant associations were extremely powerful and legislated against anything that undermined their monopolies. In villages throughout the region, guilds blocked labour migration and resisted changes that might reduce their influence.

‘Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers, and this has implications for today,’ says Ogilvie. ‘Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries, but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people – especially women and the poor – from using their education in economically productive ways. If economic institutions are poorly set up, for instance, education can’t lead to growth.’

——————–

* guild: an association of artisans or merchants which oversees the practice of their craft or trade in a particular area

Questions 14-18

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F .

Which section contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-F , in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

14    an explanation of the need for research to focus on individuals with a fairly consistent income

15    examples of the sources the database has been compiled from

16    an account of one individual’s refusal to obey an order

17    a reference to a region being particularly suited to research into the link between education and economic growth

18   examples of the items included in a list of personal possessions

Questions 19-22

Complete the summary below.

Choose ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 19-22 on your answer sheet.

Demographic reconstruction of two German communities

The database that Ogilvie and her team has compiled sheds light on the lives of a range of individuals, as well as those of their 19 …………………, over a 300-year period. For example, Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin were reprimanded for reading while they should have been paying attention to a 20 ………………… .

There was also Juliana Schweickherdt, who came to the notice of the weavers’ guild in the year 1752 for breaking guild rules. As a punishment, she was later given a 21 ………………… . Cases like this illustrate how the guilds could prevent 22 ………………… and stop skilled people from working

Questions 23 and 24

Choose TWO letters, A-E .

Write the correct letters in boxes 23 and 24 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make about literacy rates in Section B?

A   Very little research has been done into the link between high literacy rates and improved earnings.

B   Literacy rates in Germany between 1600 and 1900 were very good.

C   There is strong evidence that high literacy rates in the modern world result in economic growth.

D   England is a good example of how high literacy rates helped a country industrialise.

E   Economic growth can help to improve literacy rates.

Questions 25 and 26

Write the correct letters in boxes 25 and 26 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make in Section F about guilds in German-speaking Central Europe between 1600 and 1900?

A   They helped young people to learn a skill.

B   They were opposed to people moving to an area for work.

C   They kept better records than guilds in other parts of the world.

D   They opposed practices that threatened their control over a trade.

E   They predominantly consisted of wealthy merchants.

READING PASSAGE 3

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

Timur Gareyev – blindfold chess champion

Next month, a chess player named Timur Gareyev will take on nearly 50 opponents at once. But that is not the hard part. While his challengers will play the games as normal, Gareyev himself will be blindfolded. Even by world record standards, it sets a high bar for human performance. The 28-year-old already stands out in the rarefied world of blindfold chess. He has a fondness for bright clothes and unusual hairstyles, and he gets his kicks from the adventure sport of BASE jumping. He has already proved himself a strong chess player, too. In a 10-hour chess marathon in 2013, Gareyev played 33 games in his head simultaneously. He won 29 and lost none. The skill has become his brand: he calls himself the Blindfold King.

But Gareyev’s prowess has drawn interest from beyond the chess-playing community. In the hope of understanding how he and others like him can perform such mental feats, researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) called him in for tests. They now have their first results. ‘The ability to play a game of chess with your eyes closed is not a far reach for most accomplished player,’ said Jesse Rissman, who runs a memory lab at UCLA. ‘But the thing that’s so remarkable about Timur and a few other individuals is the number of games they can keep active at once. To me it is simply astonishing.’

Gareyev learned to play chess in his native Uzbekistan when he was six years old. Tutored by his grandfather, he entered his first tournament aged eight and soon became obsessed with competitions. At 16, he was crowned Asia’s youngest ever chess grandmaster. He moved to the US soon after, and as a student helped his university win its first national chess championship. In 2013, Gareyev was ranked the third best chess player in the US.

To the uninitiated, blindfold chess seems to call for superhuman skill. But displays of the feat go back centuries. The first recorded game in Europe was played in 13th-century Florence. In 1947, the Argentinian grandmaster Miguel Najdorf played 45 simultaneous games in his mind, winning 39 in the 24-hour session.

Accomplished players can develop the skill of playing blind even without realising it. The nature of the game is to run through possible moves in the mind to see how they play out. From this, regular players develop a memory for the patterns the pieces make, the defences and attacks. ‘You recreate it in your mind,’ said Gareyev. ‘A lot of players are capable of doing what I’m doing.’ The real mental challenge comes from playing multiple games at once in the head. Not only must the positions of each piece on every board be memorised, they must be recalled faithfully when needed, updated with each player’s moves, and then reliably stored again, so the brain can move on to the next board. First moves can be tough to remember because they are fairly uninteresting. But the ends of games are taxing too, as exhaustion sets in. When Gareyev is tired, his recall can get patchy. He sometimes makes moves based on only a fragmented memory of the pieces’ positions.

The scientists first had Gareyev perform some standard memory tests. These assessed his ability to hold numbers, pictures and words in mind. One classic test measures how many numbers a person can repeat, both forwards and backwards, soon after hearing them. Most people manage about seven. ‘He was not exceptional on any of these standard tests,’ said Rissman. ‘We didn’t find anything other than playing chess that he seems to be supremely gifted at.’ But next came the brain scans. With Gareyev lying down in the machine, Rissman looked at how well connected the various regions of the chess player’s brain were. Though the results are tentative and as yet unpublished, the scans found much greater than average communication between parts of Gareyev’s brain that make up what is called the frontoparietal control network. Of 63 people scanned alongside the chess player, only one or two scored more highly on the measure. ‘You use this network in almost any complex task. It helps you to allocate attention, keep rules in mind, and work out whether you should be responding or not,’ said Rissman.

It was not the only hint of something special in Gareyev’s brain. The scans also suggest that Gareyev’s visual network is more highly connected to other brain parts than usual. Initial results suggest that the areas of his brain that process visual images – such as chess boards – may have stronger links to other brain regions, and so be more powerful than normal. While the analyses are not finalised yet, they may hold the first clues to Gareyev’s extraordinary ability.

For the world record attempt, Gareyev hopes to play 47 blindfold games at once in about 16 hours. He will need to win 80% to claim the title. ‘I don’t worry too much about the winning percentage, that’s never been an issue for me,’ he said. ‘The most important part of blindfold chess for me is that I have found the one thing that I can fully dedicate myself to. I miss having an obsession.’

Questions 27-32

Reading Passage 3 has eight paragraphs, A-H .

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-H , in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.

NB   You may use any letter more than once.

27   a reference to earlier examples of blindfold chess

28   an outline of what blindfold chess involves

29   a claim that Gareyev’s skill is limited to chess

30   why Gareyev’s skill is of interest to scientists

31   an outline of Gareyev’s priorities

32   a reason why the last part of a game may be difficult

Questions 33-36

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 33-36 on your answer sheet, write

33   In the forthcoming games, all the participants will be blindfolded.

34   Gareyev has won competitions in BASE jumping.

35   UCLA is the first university to carry out research into blindfold chess players.

36   Good chess players are likely to be able to play blindfold chess.

Questions 37-40

Complete the summary below

Write the correct letter in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

How the research was carried out

The researchers started by testing Gareyev’s 37 ……………………; for example, he was required to recall a string of 38 …………………… in order and also in reverse order. Although his performance was normal, scans showed an unusual amount of 39 …………………… within the areas of Gareyev’s brain that are concerned with directing attention. In addition, the scans raised the possibility of unusual strength in the parts of his brain that deal with 40 …………………… input.

Cam 17 Reading Test 03

Cam 18 reading test 01, answer cam 17 reading test 04.

3   NOT GIVEN

5   NOT GIVEN

7   droppings

9   mosquitoes

10   protein

11   unclean

12   culture

13   houses

19   descendants

20   sermon

22   innovation

23&24   B, E

25&26   B, D

34   NOT GIVEN

35   NOT GIVEN

37   memory

38   numbers

39   communication

40   visual

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Does Education Fuel Economic Growth? – IELTS Academic Reading Passage

A  Over the last decade, a huge database about the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900 has been compiled by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Economics. It includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries. Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer t a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s economic growth.

C  In the handwritten inventories that Ogilvie is analysing are the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage and death. From badger skins to Bibles, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods are included. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tods reveal economic activities; ownership of books and education- related objects like pens and slates suggests how people learned. In addition, the tax lists included in the database record the value of farms, workshops, assets and debts; signatures and people’s estimates of their age indicate literacy and numeracy levels; and court records reveal obstacles (such as the activities of the guilds) that stifled industry. Previous studies usually had just one way of linking education with economic growth – the presence of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the ability to sign names. According to Ogilvie, the database provides multiple indicators for the same individuals, making it possible to analyse links between literacy, numeracy, wealth, and industriousness, for individual women and men over the long term.

F  Ogilvie hopes to start finding answers to these questions over the next few years. One thing is already clear, fie says: the relationship between education and economic growth is far from straightforward. ‘German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theor.es of economic growth,’ she explains. Between 1600 and 1900, literacy rates and book ownership were high and yet the region remained poor. It was also the case that local guilds and merchant associations were extremely powerful and legislated against anything that undermined their monopolies. In villages throughout the region, guilds blocked labour migration and resisted changes that might reduce their influence. ‘Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers, and this has implications for today,’ says Ogilvie. ‘Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries, but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people – especially women and the poor – from using their education in economically productive ways. If economic institutions are poorly set up, for instance, education can’t lead to growth.’

Questions 14-18 Reading Passage has six sections, A-F. Which section contains the following information?

Questions 19-22 Complete the summary below. Choose  ONE WORD  from the passage for each answer.

The database that Ogilvie and her team has compiled sheds light on the lives of a range of individuals, as well as those of their (19) ……………….. , over a 300-year period. For example, Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmullerin were reprimanded for reading while they should have been paying attention to a (20) ……………… There was also Juliana Schweickherdt, who came to the notice of the weavers’ guild in the year 1752 for breaking guild rules. As a punishment, she was later given a (21) …………………. Cases like this illustrate how the guilds could prevent (22) ………………. and stop skilled people from working.

Questions 23 and 24 Choose  TWO  letters, A-E. Write the correct letters in boxes 23 and 24 on your answer sheet.

Questions 25 and 26 Choose  TWO  letters, A-E. Write the correct letters in boxes 25 and 26 on your answer sheet.

Which  TWO  of the following statements does the writer make in Section F about guilds in German-speaking Central Europe between 1600 and 1900? A  They helped young people to learn a skill. B  They were opposed to people moving to an area for work. C  They kept better records than guilds in other parts of the world. D  They opposed practices that threatened their control over a trade. E  They predominantly consisted of wealthy merchants.

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Cambridge IELTS 17 Reading Test 4 Academic

Table of Contents

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

Bats to the rescue

How Madagascar’s bats are helping to save the rainforest

There are few places in the world where relations between agriculture and conservation are more strained. Madagascar’s forests are being converted to agricultural land at a rate of one percent every year. Much of this destruction is fuelled by the cultivation of the country’s main staple crop: rice. And a key reason for this destruction is that insect pests are destroying vast quantities of what is grown by local subsistence farmers, leading them to clear forest to create new paddy fields. The result is devastating habitat and biodiversity loss on the island, but not all species are suffering. In fact, some of the island’s insectivorous bats are currently thriving and this has important implications for farmers and conservationists alike.

Enter University of Cambridge zoologist Ricardo Rocha. He’s passionate about conservation, and bats. More specifically, he’s interested in how bats are responding to human activity and deforestation in particular. Rocha’s new study shows that several species of bats are giving Madagascar’s rice farmers a vital pest control service by feasting on plagues of insects. And this, he believes, can ease the financial pressure on farmers to turn forest into fields.

Bats comprise roughly one-fifth of all mammal species in Madagascar and thirty-six recorded bat species are native to the island, making it one of the most important regions for conservation of this animal group anywhere in the world.

Co-leading an international team of scientists, Rocha found that several species of indigenous bats are taking advantage of habitat modification to hunt insects swarming above the country’s rice fields. They include the Malagasy mouse-eared bat, Major’s long-fingered bat, the Malagasy white-bellied free-tailed bat and Peters’ wrinkle-lipped bat.

‘These winner species are providing a valuable free service to Madagascar as biological pest suppressors,’ says Rocha. ‘We found that six species of bat are preying on rice pests, including the paddy swarming caterpillar and grass webworm. The damage which these insects cause puts the island’s farmers under huge financial pressure and that encourages deforestation.’

The study, now published in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, set out to investigate the feeding activity of insectivorous bats in the farmland bordering the Ranomafana National Park in the southeast of the country.

Rocha and his team used state-of-the-art ultrasonic recorders to record over a thousand bat ‘feeling buzzes’ (echolocation sequences used by bats to target their prey) at 54 sites, in order to identify the favourite feeding spots of the bats. The next used DNA barcoding techniques to analyse droppings collected from bats at the different sites.

The recordings revealed that bat activity over rice fields was much higher than it was in continuous forest – seven times higher over rice fields which were on flat ground, and sixteen times higher over fields on the sides of hills – leaving no doubt that the animals are preferentially foraging in these man-made ecosystems. The researchers suggest that the bats favour these fields because lack of water and nutrient run-off make these crops more susceptible to insect pest infestations. DNA analysis showed that all six species of bat had fed on economically important insect pests. While the findings indicated that rice farming benefits most from the bats, the scientists also found indications that the bats were consuming pests of other crops, including the black twig borer (which infests coffee plants), the sugarcane cicada, the macadamia nut-borer, and the sober tabby (a pest of citrus fruits).

‘The effectiveness of bats as pest controllers has already been proven in the USA and Catalonia,’ said co-author James Kemp, from the University of Lisbon. ‘But our study is the first to show this happening in Madagascar, where the stakes for both farmers and conservationists are so high.’

Local people may have a further reason to be grateful to their bats. While the animal is often associated with spreading disease, Rocha and his team found evidence that Malagasy bats feed not just on crop pests but also on mosquitoes – carriers of malaria, Rift Valley fever virus and elephantiasis – as well as blackflies, which spread river blindness.

Rocha points out that the relationship is complicated. When food is scarce, bats become a crucial source of protein for local people. Even the children will hunt them. And as well as roosting in trees, the bats sometimes roost in buildings, but are not welcomed there because they make them unclean. At the same time, however, they are associated with sacred caves and the ancestors, so they can be viewed as beings between worlds, which makes them very significant in the culture of the people. And one potential problem is that while these bats are benefiting from farming, at the same time deforestation is reducing the places where they can roost, which could have long-term effects on their numbers. Rocha says, ‘With the right help, we hope that farmers can promote this mutually beneficial relationship by installing bat houses.’

Rocha and his colleagues believe that maximising bat populations can help to boost crop yields and promote sustainable livelihoods. The team is now calling for further research to quantify this contribution. ‘I’m very optimistic,’ says Rocha. ‘If we give nature a hand, we can speed up the process of regeneration.’ IELTS-Reading.com

Questions 1-6 Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information FALSE if the statement contradicts the information NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

1. Many Madagascan forests are being destroyed by attacks from insects. 2. Loss of habitat has badly affected insectivorous bats in Madagascar. 3. Ricardo Rocha has carried out studies of bats in different parts of the world. 4. Habitat modification has resulted in indigenous bats in Madagascar becoming useful to farmers. 5. The Malagasy mouse-eared bat is more common than other indigenous bat species in Madagascar. 6. Bats may feed on paddy swarming caterpillars and grass webworms.

Questions 7-13 Complete the table below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 7-13 on your answer sheet.

The study carried out by Rocha’s team

Aim ● to investigate the feeding habits of bats in farmland near the Ranomafana National Park

● ultrasonic recording to identify favourite feeding spots ● DNA analysis of bat 7 …………………

– were most active in rice fields located on hills – ate pests of rice, 8 …………………, sugarcane, nuts and fruit – prevent the spread of disease by eating 9 ………………… and blackflies

● local attitudes to bats are mixed:

– they provide food rich in 10 ………………… – the buildings where they roost become 11 ………………… – they play an important role in local 12 …………………

Recommendation

● farmers should provide special 13 ………………… to support the bat population

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

Does education fuel economic growth?

A Over the last decade, a huge database about the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900 has been compiled by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Economics. It includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries. Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer to a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s economic growth. IELTS-Reading.com

B As Ogilvie explains, ‘Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, and earn more … surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier.’ Between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy grew fast and it was the first country to industrialise. During this period, Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly and they industrialised late. ‘Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education,’ she adds.

C In the handwritten inventories that Ogilvie is analysing are the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage and death. From badger skins to Bibles, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods are included. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tools reveal economic activities; ownership of books and education-related objects like pens and slates suggests how people learned. In addition, the tax lists included in the database record the value of farms, workshops, assets and debts; signatures and people’s estimates of their age indicate literacy and numeracy levels; and court records reveal obstacles (such as the activities of the guilds*) that stifled industry.

Previous studies usually had just one way of linking education with economic growth – the presence of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the ability to sign names. According to Ogilvie, the database provides multiple indicators for the same individuals, making it possible to analyse links between literacy, numeracy, wealth, and industriousness, for individual women and men over the long term.

D Ogilvie and her team have been building the vast database of material possessions on top of their full demographic reconstruction of the people who lived in these two German communities. ‘We can follow the same people – and their descendants – across 300 years of educational and economic change,’ she says. Individual lives have unfolded before their eyes. Stories like that of the 24-year-olds Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin, who were chastised in 1707 for reading books in church instead of listening to the sermon. ‘This tells us they were continuing to develop their reading skills at least a decade after leaving school,’ explains Ogilvie. The database also reveals the case of Juliana Schweickherdt, a 50-year-old spinster living in the small Black Forest community of Wildberg, who was reprimanded in 1752 by the local weavers’ guild for ‘weaving cloth and combing wool, counter to the guide ordinance’. When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members, she was summoned before the guild court and told to pay a fine equivalent to one third of a servant’s annual wage. It was a small act of defiance by today’s standards, but it reflects a time when laws in Germany and elsewhere regulated people’s access to labour markets. The dominance of guilds not only prevented people from using their skills, but also held back even the simplest industrial innovation.

E The data-gathering phase of the project has been completed and now, according to Ogilvie, it is time ‘to ask the big questions’. One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to ‘hold wealth constant’. This involves following the lives of different people with the same level of wealth over a period of time. If wealth is constant, it is possible to discover whether education was, for example, linked to the cultivation of new crops, or to the adoption of industrial innovations like sewing machines. The team will also ask what aspect of education helped people engage more with productive and innovative activities. Was it, for instance, literacy, numeracy, book ownership, years of schooling? Was there a threshold level – a tipping point – that needed to be reached to affect economic performance?

F Ogilvie hopes to start finding answers to these questions over the next few years. One thing is already clear, she says: the relationship between education and economic growth is far from straightforward. ‘German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theories of economic growth,’ she explains. Between 1600 and 1900, literacy rates and book ownership were high and yet the region remained poor. It was also the case that local guilds and merchant associations were extremely powerful and legislated against anything that undermined their monopolies. In villages throughout the region, guilds blocked labour migration and resisted changes that might reduce their influence.

‘Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers, and this has implications for today,’ says Ogilvie. ‘Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries, but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people – especially women and the poor – from using their education in economically productive ways. If economic institutions are poorly set up, for instance, education can’t lead to growth.’

——————– * guild: an association of artisans or merchants which oversees the practice of their craft or trade in a particular area

Questions 14-18 Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F. Which section contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.

14. an explanation of the need for research to focus on individuals with a fairly consistent income 15. examples of the sources the database has been compiled from 16. an account of one individual’s refusal to obey an order 17. a reference to a region being particularly suited to research into the link between education and economic growth 18. examples of the items included in a list of personal possessions

Questions 19-22 Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 19-22 on your answer sheet.

Demographic reconstruction of two German communities

The database that Ogilvie and her team has compiled sheds light on the lives of a range of individuals, as well as those of their 19 _______________ over a 300-year period. For example, Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin were reprimanded for reading while they should have been paying attention to a 20 _______________ .

There was also Juliana Schweickherdt, who came to the notice of the weavers’ guild in the year 1752 for breaking guild rules. As a punishment, she was later given a 21 _______________ . Cases like this illustrate how the guilds could prevent 22 _______________ and stop skilled people from working

Questions 23 and 24 Choose TWO letters, A-E. Write the correct letters in boxes 23 and 24 on your answer sheet.

Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make about literacy rates in Section B?

A. Very little research has been done into the link between high literacy rates and improved earnings. B. Literacy rates in Germany between 1600 and 1900 were very good. C. There is strong evidence that high literacy rates in the modern world result in economic growth. D. England is a good example of how high literacy rates helped a country industrialise. E. Economic growth can help to improve literacy rates.

Questions 25 and 26 Choose TWO letters, A-E. Write the correct letters in boxes 25 and 26 on your answer sheet. IELTS-Reading

Which TWO of the following statements does the writer make in Section F about guilds in German-speaking Central Europe between 1600 and 1900?

A. They helped young people to learn a skill. B. They were opposed to people moving to an area for work. C. They kept better records than guilds in other parts of the world. D. They opposed practices that threatened their control over a trade. E. They predominantly consisted of wealthy merchants.

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

Timur Gareyev – Blindfold Chess Champion

A Next month, a chess player named Timur Gareyev will take on nearly 50 opponents at once. But that is not the hard part. While his challengers will play the games as normal, Gareyev himself will be blindfolded. Even by world record standards, it sets a high bar for human performance. The 28-year-old already stands out in the rarefied world of blindfold chess. He has a fondness for bright clothes and unusual hairstyles, and he gets his kicks from the adventure sport of BASE jumping. He has already proved himself a strong chess player, too. In a 10-hour chess marathon in 2013, Gareyev played 33 games in his head simultaneously. He won 29 and lost none. The skill has become his brand: he calls himself the Blindfold King.

B But Gareyev’s prowess has drawn interest from beyond the chess-playing community. In the hope of understanding how he and others like him can perform such mental feats, researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) called him in for tests. They now have their first results. ‘The ability to play a game of chess with your eyes closed is not a far reach for most accomplished player,’ said Jesse Rissman, who runs a memory lab at UCLA. ‘But the thing that’s so remarkable about Timur and a few other individuals is the number of games they can keep active at once. To me it is simply astonishing.’

C Gareyev learned to play chess in his native Uzbekistan when he was six years old. Tutored by his grandfather, he entered his first tournament aged eight and soon became obsessed with competitions. At 16, he was crowned Asia’s youngest ever chess grandmaster. He moved to the US soon after, and as a student helped his university win its first national chess championship. In 2013, Gareyev was ranked the third best chess player in the US.

D To the uninitiated, blindfold chess seems to call for superhuman skill. But displays of the feat go back centuries. The first recorded game in Europe was played in 13th-century Florence. In 1947, the Argentinian grandmaster Miguel Najdorf played 45 simultaneous games in his mind, winning 39 in the 24-hour session.

E Accomplished players can develop the skill of playing blind even without realising it. The nature of the game is to run through possible moves in the mind to see how they play out. From this, regular players develop a memory for the patterns the pieces make, the defences and attacks. ‘You recreate it in your mind,’ said Gareyev. ‘A lot of players are capable of doing what I’m doing.’ The real mental challenge comes from playing multiple games at once in the head. Not only must the positions of each piece on every board be memorised, they must be recalled faithfully when needed, updated with each player’s moves, and then reliably stored again, so the brain can move on to the next board. First moves can be tough to remember because they are fairly uninteresting. But the ends of games are taxing too, as exhaustion sets in. When Gareyev is tired, his recall can get patchy. He sometimes makes moves based on only a fragmented memory of the pieces’ positions.

F The scientists first had Gareyev perform some standard memory tests. These assessed his ability to hold numbers, pictures and words in mind. One classic test measures how many numbers a person can repeat, both forwards and backwards, soon after hearing them. Most people manage about seven. ‘He was not exceptional on any of these standard tests,’ said Rissman. ‘We didn’t find anything other than playing chess that he seems to be supremely gifted at.’ But next came the brain scans. With Gareyev lying down in the machine, Rissman looked at how well connected the various regions of the chess player’s brain were. Though the results are tentative and as yet unpublished, the scans found much greater than average communication between parts of Gareyev’s brain that make up what is called the frontoparietal control network. Of 63 people scanned alongside the chess player, only one or two scored more highly on the measure. ‘You use this network in almost any complex task. It helps you to allocate attention, keep rules in mind, and work out whether you should be responding or not,’ said Rissman. IELTS-Reading.com

G It was not the only hint of something special in Gareyev’s brain. The scans also suggest that Gareyev’s visual network is more highly connected to other brain parts than usual. Initial results suggest that the areas of his brain that process visual images – such as chess boards – may have stronger links to other brain regions, and so be more powerful than normal. While the analyses are not finalised yet, they may hold the first clues to Gareyev’s extraordinary ability.

H For the world record attempt, Gareyev hopes to play 47 blindfold games at once in about 16 hours. He will need to win 80% to claim the title. ‘I don’t worry too much about the winning percentage, that’s never been an issue for me,’ he said. ‘The most important part of blindfold chess for me is that I have found the one thing that I can fully dedicate myself to. I miss having an obsession.’

Questions 27-32 Reading Passage 3 has eight paragraphs, A-H. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

27. a reference to earlier examples of blindfold chess 28. an outline of what blindfold chess involves 29. a claim that Gareyev’s skill is limited to chess 30. why Gareyev’s skill is of interest to scientists 31. an outline of Gareyev’s priorities 32. a reason why the last part of a game may be difficult

Questions 33-36 Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 33-36 on your answer sheet, write

33. In the forthcoming games, all the participants will be blindfolded. 34. Gareyev has won competitions in BASE jumping. 35. UCLA is the first university to carry out research into blindfold chess players. 36. Good chess players are likely to be able to play blindfold chess.

Questions 37-40 Complete the summary below Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write the correct letter in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.

How the research was carried out

The researchers started by testing Gareyev’s 37 _______________ ; for example, he was required to recall a string of 38 _______________ in order and also in reverse order. Although his performance was normal, scans showed an unusual amount of 39 _______________ within the areas of Gareyev’s brain that are concerned with directing attention. In addition, the scans raised the possibility of unusual strength in the parts of his brain that deal with 40 _______________ input.

Cambridge IELTS 17 Reading Test 4 Answers

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Bats to the Rescue IELTS Reading Answers

3. NOT GIVEN

5. NOT GIVEN

7. droppings

9. mosquitoes

10. protein

11. unclean

12. culture

Does education fuel economic growth IELTS Reading Answers

19. descendants

22. innovation

23&24. B, E

25&26. B, D

Timur Gareyev – blindfold chess champion IELTS Reading Answers

34. NOT GIVEN

35. NOT GIVEN

38. numbers

39. communication

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Does Education Fuel Economic Growth? IELTS Reading Answers with Explanation

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📖 Bài đọc (reading passage)

❓ câu hỏi (questions).

The database that Ogilvie and her team has compiled sheds light on the lives of a range of individuals, as well as those of their 6  , over a 300-year period. For example, Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin were reprimanded for reading while they should have been paying attention to a 7  There was also Juliana Schweickherdt, who came to the notice of the weavers' guild in the year 1752 for breaking guild rules. As a punishment, she was later given a 8  Cases like this illustrate how the guilds could prevent 9  and stop skilled people from working.

🔥 Answer key (đáp án và giải thích)

Giải thích chi tiết.

Dựa vào keyword như trên ' following the lives of different people ' và ' the same level of wealth over a period of time '

=> Thông tin tìm được ở Paragraph E

 1 it  is time to ask  questions  .

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