Free Reading Practice Test

Reading Passage 1

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

The “Extinct” Grass in Britain

A. The British grass interrupted brome was said to be extinct, just like the Dodo. Called interrupted brome because of its gappy seed-head, this unprepossessing grass was found nowhere else in the world, Gardening experts from the Victorian lira were first to record it. In the early 20th century, it grew far and wide across southern England. But it quickly vanished and by 1972 was nowhere to be found. Even the seeds stored at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden as an insurance policy were dead, having been mistakenly kept at room temperature. Fans of the glass were devastated.

b.However, reports of its decline were not entirely correct. Interrupted brome has enjoyed a revival, one that’s not due to science. Because of the work of one gardening enthusiast, interrupted brome is thriving as a pot plant. The relaunching into the wild of Britain’s almost extinct plant has excited conservationists everywhere

C. Originally, Philip Smith didn’t know that he had the very unusual grass at his own home. When he heard about the grass becoming extinct, he wanted to do something surprising. He attended a meeting of the British Botanical Society in Manchester in 1979, and seized His opportunity. He said that it was so disappointing to hear about the demise of the interrupted brome. “What a pity we didn’t research it further!” he added. Then all of a sudden he displayed his pots with so called “extinct grass” lot all to see.

D. Smith had kept the seeds from the last stronghold of the grass, Pamisford in 1963. It was then when the grass stalled to disappear from the wild. Smith cultivated the grass, year after year. Ultimately, it was his curiosity in the plant that saved it. Not scientific or technological projects that

E. For now, the brome's future is guaranteed. The seeds front Smith’s plants have beet, securely stored in the cutting edge facilities of Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place in Sussex. And living plants thrive at the botanic gardens at Kew, Edinburgh and Cambridge. This year, seeds are also saved at sites all across the country and the grass now nourishes at several public gardens too.

F. The grass will now be reintroduced to the British countryside. As a part of the Species Recovery Project, the organisation English Nature will re-introduce interrupted brome into the agricultural landscape, provided willing farmers are found. Alas, the grass is neither beautiful nor practical. it is undoubtedly a weed, a weed that nobody cares for these days. The brome wax was probably never widespread enough to annoy farmers and today, no one would appreciate its productivity or nutritious qualities. As a grass, it leaves a lot to be desired by agriculturalists.

G. Smith’s research has attempted to answer the question of where the grass came from. His research points to mutations from other weedy grasses as the most likely source. So close is the relationship that interrupted brome was originally deemed to be a mere variety of soil borne by the great Victorian taxonomist Professor Hackel. A botanist from the 19th century, George Claridge Druce. had taken notes on the grass and convinced his peers that the grass deserved its own status as a species. Despite Druce growing up in poverty and his self-taught profession, he became the leading botanist of his time.

H.Where the grass came from may be clear, but the timing of its birth may be tougher to find out. A clue lies in its penchant for growing as a weed in fields shared with a fodder crop, in particular nitrogen-fixing legumes such as sainfoin, lucerne or clover. According to agricultural historian Joan Thirsk. The humble sainfoin and its company were first noticed in Britain in the early 17th century. Seeds brought in from the Continent were sown in pastures to feed horses and other livestock. However, back then, only a few enthusiastic gentlemen were willing to use the new crops for their prized horses.

I.Not before too long though, the need to feed the parliamentary armies in Scotland, England and behind was more pressing than ever farmers were forced to produce more bread, cheese and beer. And by 1650 the legumes were increasingly introduced into arable rotations, to serve as green nature to boost grain yields. A bestseller of its day, Nathaniel Fiennes’s Sainfoin Improved, published in 1671, helped to spread the word. With the advent of sainfoin, clover and lucerne Britain’s very own rogue grass had suddenly riveted.

J. Although the credit for the discovery of interrupted brome goes to a Miss A. M. Barnard, who collected the first specimens at Odsey, Bedfordshire, in 1849, the grass had probably lurked undetected in the English countryside for at least a hundred years. Smith thinks the plant- the world’s version of the Dodo probably evolved in the late 17th or early 18th century, once sainfoin became established. Due mainly to the development of the motor car and subsequent decline of fodder crops for horses, the brome declined rapidly over the 20th century. Today, sainfoin has almost disappeared from the countryside, though occasionally its colourful flowers are spotted in lowland nature reserves. More recently artificial fertilizers have made legume rotations unnecessary

K. The close relationship with out-of-fashion crops spells trouble for those seeking to re-establish interrupted brome in today’s countryside. Much like the once common arable weeds, such as the corncockle, its seeds cannot survive long in the soil. Each spring, the brome relied on farmers to resow its seeds; in the days before weed killers and advanced seed sieves, an ample supply would have contaminated supplies of crop seed. However fragile seeds are not the brome’s only problem: this species is also unwilling to release its seeds as they ripen. According to Smith. The grass will struggle to survive even in optimal conditions. It would be very difficult to thrive amongst its more resilient competitors found in today’s improved agricultural landscape

L. Nonetheless, interrupted brome’s reluctance to thrive independently may have some benefits. Any farmer willing to foster this unique contribution to the world’s flora can rest assured that the grass will never become an invasive pest. Restoring interrupted brome to its rightful home could bring other benefits too, particularly if this strange species is granted recognition as a national treasure. Thanks to British farmers, interrupted brome was given the chance to evolve in the first place. Conservationists would like to see the grass grow once again in its natural habitat and perhaps, one day, seeing the grass becomes a badge of honour for a new generation of environmentally conscious farmers.

Questions 1-8

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

TRUE	if the statement is true
FALSE	if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN	if the information is not given in the passage

1. The name of interrupted brome came from the unprepossessing grass disappeared from places in the world for a period.

2. Interrupted brome seeds cannot sprout because they were kept accidentally at unsuitable temperatures.

3. Philip Smith works at the University of Manchester.

4. Kew Botanic Gardens will operate English Nature.

5. Interrupted brome grew unwantedly at the sides of sainfoin.

6. Legumes were used for feeding livestock and enriching the soil.

7. The spread of seeds of interrupted brome depends on the harvesting of the farmers.

8. Only the weed killers can stop interrupted brome from becoming an invasive pest.

Questions 9-13

Look at the following opinions or deeds (Questions 9-13) and the list of people below.

Match each opinion or deed with the correct person, A-F.

Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 9-13 on your answer sheet.

A. A. M. Barnard

B. Philip Smith

C. George Claridge Druce

D. Joan Thirsk

E. Professor Hackel

F. Nathaniel Fiennes

9. identified interrupted brome as another species of brome.

10. convinced others about the status of interrupted brome in the botanic world.

11. said that sainfoin was first found more than 300 years ago.

12. helped farmers know that sainfoin is useful for enriching the soil.

13. collected the first sample of interrupted brome.

Reading Passage 2

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

Education Philosophy

A. Although we lack accurate statistics about child mortality in the pre-industrial period, we do have evidence that in the 1660s, the mortality rate for children who died within 14 days of birth was as much as 30 per cent. Nearly all families suffered some premature death. Since all parents expected to bury some of their children, they found it difficult to invest in their newborn children. Moreover, to protect themselves from the emotional consequences of children’s death, parents avoided making any emotional commitment to an infant. It is no wonder that we find mothers leave their babies in gutters or refer to the death in the same paragraph with reference to pickles.

B. The 18th century witnessed the transformation from an agrarian economy to an industrial one, one of the vital social changes taking place in the Western world. An increasing number of people moved from their villages and small towns to big cities where life was quite different. Social supports which had previously existed in smaller communities were replaced by ruthless problems such as poverty, crime, substandard housing and disease. Due to the need for additional income to support the family, young children from the poorest families were forced into early employment and thus their childhood became painfully short. Children as young as 7 might be required to work full-time, subjected to unpleasant and unhealthy circumstances, from factories to prostitution. Although such a role has disappeared in most wealthy countries, the practice of childhood employment still remains a staple in underdeveloped countries and rarely disappeared entirely.

C. The lives of children underwent a drastic change during the 1800s in the United States. Previously, children from both rural and urban families were expected to participate in everyday labour due to the bulk of manual hard working. Nevertheless, thanks to the technological advances of the mid-1800s, coupled with the rise of the middle class and redefinition of roles of family members, work and home became less synonymous over time. People began to purchase toys and books for their children. When the country depended more upon machines, children in rural and urban areas, were less likely to be required to work at home. Beginning from the Industrial Revolution and rising slowly over the course of the 19th century, this trend increased exponentially after civil war. John Locke, one of the most influential writers of his period, created the first clear and comprehensive statement of the ‘environmental position’ that family education determines a child’s life, and via this, he became the father of modem learning theory. During the colonial period, his teachings about child care gained a lot of recognition in America.

D. According to Jean Jacques Rousseau, who lived in an era of the American and French Revolution, people were ‘noble savages’ in the original state of nature, meaning they are innocent, free and uncorrupted. In 1762, Rousseau wrote a famous novel Emile to convey his educational philosophy through a story of a boy’s education from infancy to adult-hood. This work was based on his extensive observation of children and adolescents, their individuality, his developmental theory and on the memories of his own childhood. He contrasts children with adults and describes their age-specific characteristics in terms of historical perspective and developmental psychology. Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi, living during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, sought to develop schools to nurture children’s all-round development. He agreed with Rousseau that humans are naturally good but were spoiled by a corrupt society. His approach to teaching consists of the general and special methods, and his theory was based upon establishing an emotionally healthy homelike learning environment, which had to be in place before more specific instructions occurred.

E. One of the best-documented cases of Pestalozzi’s theory concerned a so-called feral child named Victor, who was captured in a small town in the south of France in 1800. Prepubescent, mute, naked, and perhaps 11 or 12 years old, Victor had been seen foraging for food in the gardens of the locals in the area and sometimes accepted people’s direct offers of food before his final capture. Eventually, he was brought to Paris and expected to answer some profound questions about the nature of human, but that goal was quashed very soon. A young physician Jean Marc Gaspard Itard was optimistic about the future of Victor and initiated a five-year education plan to civilise him and teach him to speak. With a subsidy from the government, Itard recruited a local woman Madame Guerin to assist him to provide a semblance of a home for Victor, and he spent an enormous amount of time and effort working with Victor. Itard’s goal to teach Victor the basics of speech could never be fully achieved, but Victor had learnt some elementary forms of communication.

F. Although other educators were beginning to recognise the simple truth embedded in Rousseau’s philosophy, it is not enough to identify the stages of children’s development alone. There must be certain education which had to be geared towards those stages. One of the early examples was the invention of kindergarten, which was a word and a movement created by a German-born educator, Friedrich Froebel in 1840. Froebel placed a high value on the importance of play in children’s learning. His invention would spread around the world eventually in a verity of forms. Froebel’s ideas were inspired through his cooperation with Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Froebel didn’t introduce the notion of kindergarten until 58 years old, and he had been a teacher for four decades. The notion was a haven and a preparation for children who were about to enter the regimented educational system. The use of guided or structured play was a cornerstone of his kindergarten education because he believed that play was the most significant aspect of development at this time of life. Play served as a mechanism for a child to grow emotionally and to achieve a sense of self-worth. Meanwhile, teachers served to organise materials and a structured environment in which each child, as an individual, could achieve these goals. When Froebel died in 1852, dozens of kindergartens had been created in Germany. Kindergartens began to increase in Europe, and the movement eventually reached and flourished in the United States in the 20th century.

Questions 14-17

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A and C-E from the list of headings

List of Headings

i. The inheritance and development of educational concepts of different thinkers

ii. Why children had to work to alleviate the burden on family

iii. Why children are not highly valued

iv. The explanation for children dying in hospital at their early age

v. The first appearance of modem educational philosophy

vi. The application of a creative learning method on a wild kid

vii. The emergence and spread of the notion of kindergarten

14. Paragraph A

Example Answer :Paragraph B ii

15. Paragraph C

16. Paragraph D

17. Paragraph E

Questions 18-21

Look at the following events (Questions 18-21) and the list of dates below.

Match each event with the correct date, A, B or C.

18. the need for children to work

19. the rise of the middle class

20. the emergence of a kindergarten

21. the spread of kindergartens around the U.S.

List of Dates

Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS for each answer.

A. the 18th century (1700-1799)

B. the 19th century (1800-1899)

C. the 20th century (1900-1999)

Questions 22-26

Look at the following opinions or deeds (Questions 22-26) and the list of people below.

Match each opinion or deed with the correct person, A, B, C or D.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

22. was not successful to prove the theory

23. observed a child’s record

24. requested a study setting with emotional comfort firstly

25. proposed that corruption was not a characteristic in people’s nature

26. was responsible for an increase in the number of a type of school

List of People

A. Jean Jacques Rousseau

B. Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi

C. Jean Marc Gaspard Itard

D. Friedrich Froebel

Reading Passage 3

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

What Do Babies Know?

As Daniel Haworth is settled into a high chair and wheeled behind a black screen, a sudden look of worry furrows his 9-month-old brow. His dark blue eyes dart left and right in search of the familiar reassurance of his mother’s face. She calls his name and makes soothing noises, but Daniel senses something unusual is happening. He sucks his fingers for comfort, but, finding no solace, his month crumples, his body stiffens, and he lets rip an almighty shriek of distress. This is the usual expression when babies are left alone or abandoned. Mom picks him up, reassures him, and two minutes later, a chortling and alert Daniel returns to the darkened booth behind the screen and submits himself to the baby lab, a unit set up in 2005 at the University of Manchester in northwest England to investigate how babies think.

Watching infants piece life together, seeing their senses, emotions and motor skills take shape, is a source of mystery and endless fascination—at least to parents and developmental psychologists.

We can decode their signals of distress or read a million messages into their first smile. But how much do we really know about what’s going on behind those wide, innocent eyes? How much of their understanding of and response to the world comes preloaded at birth? How much is built from scratch by experience? Such are the questions being explored at baby lab. Though the facility is just 18 months old and has tested only 100 infants, it’s already challenging current thinking on what babies know and how they come to know it.

Daniel is now engrossed in watching video clips of a red toy train on a circular track. The train disappears into a tunnel and emerges on the other side. A hidden device above the screen is tracking Daniel’s eyes as they follow the train and measuring the diameter of his pupils 50 times a second. As the child gets bored—or “habituated”, as psychologists call the process— his attention level steadily drops. But it picks up a little whenever some novelty is introduced. The train might be green, or it might be blue. And sometimes an impossible thing happens— the train goes into the tunnel one color and comes out another.

Variations of experiments like this one, examining infant attention, have been a standard tool of developmental psychology ever since the Swiss pioneer of the field, Jean Piaget, started experimenting on his children in the 1920s. Piaget’s work led him to conclude that infants younger than 9 months have no innate knowledge of how the world works or any sense of “object permanence” (that people and things still exist even when they’re not seen). Instead, babies must gradually construct this knowledge from experience. Piaget’s “constructivist” theories were massively influential on postwar educators and psychologist, but over the past 20 years or so they have been largely set aside by a new generation of “nativist” psychologists and cognitive scientists whose more sophisticated experiments led them to theorise that infants arrive already equipped with some knowledge of the physical world and even rudimentary programming for math and language. Baby lab director Sylvain Sirois has been putting these smart-baby theories through a rigorous set of tests. His conclusions so far tend to be more Piagetian: “Babies,” he says, “know nothing.”

What Sirois and his postgraduate assistant Lain Jackson are challenging is the interpretation of a variety of classic experiments begun in the mid-1980s in which babies were shown physical events that appeared to violate such basic concepts as gravity, solidity and contiguity. In one such experiment, by University of Illinois psychologist Renee Baillargeon, a hinged wooden panel appeared to pass right through a box. Baillargeon and M.I.T’s Elizabeth Spelke found that babies as young as 3 1/2 months would reliably look longer at the impossible event than at the normal one. Their conclusion: babies have enough built-in knowledge to recognise that something is wrong.

Sirois does not take issue with the way these experiments were conducted. “The methods are correct and replicable,” he says, “it’s the interpretation that’s the problem.” In a critical review to be published in the forthcoming issue of the European Journal of Developmental Psychology, he and Jackson pour cold water over recent experiments that claim to have observed innate or precocious social cognition skills in infants. His own experiments indicate that a baby’s fascination with physically impossible events merely reflects a response to stimuli that are novel. Data from the eye tracker and the measurement of the pupils (which widen in response to arousal or interest) show that impossible events involving familiar objects are no more interesting than possible events involving novel objects. In other words, when Daniel had seen the red train come out of the tunnel green a few times, he gets as bored as when it stays the same color. The mistake of previous research, says Sirois, has been to leap to the conclusion that infants can understand the concept of impossibility from the mere fact that they are able to perceive some novelty in it. “The real explanation is boring,” he says.

So how do babies bridge the gap between knowing squat and drawing triangles—a task Daniel’s sister Lois, 2 1/2, is happily tackling as she waits for her brother? “Babies have to learn everything, but as Piaget was saying, they start with a few primitive reflexes that get things going,” said Sirois. For example, hardwired in the brain is an instinct that draws a baby’s eyes to a human face. From brain imaging studies we also know that the brain has some sort of visual buffer that continues to represent objects after they have been removed—a lingering perception rather than conceptual understanding. So when babies encounter novel or unexpected events, Sirois explains, “there’s a mismatch between the buffer and the information they’re getting at that moment. And what you do when you’ve got a mismatch is you try to clear the buffer. And that takes attention.” So learning, says Sirois, is essentially the laborious business of resolving mismatches. “The thing is, you can do a lot of it with this wet sticky thing called a brain. It’s a fantastic, statistical-learning machine”. Daniel, exams ended, picks up a plastic tiger and, chewing thoughtfully upon its heat, smiles as if to agree.

Questions 27-32

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

TRUE	if the statement is true
FALSE	if the statement is false
NOT GIVEN	if the information is not given in the passage

27. Baby’s behavior after being abandoned is not surprising.

28. Parents are overestimating what babies know.

29. Only 100 experiments have been done but can prove the theories about what we know.

30. Piaget’s theory was rejected by parents in the 1920s.

31. Sylvain Sirois’s conclusion on infant’s cognition is similar to Piaget’s.

32. Sylvain Sirois found serious flaws in the experimental designs by Baillargeon and Elizabeth Spelke.

Questions 33-37

Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-E, below.

33. Jean Piaget thinks infants younger than 9 months won’t know something existing

34. Jean Piaget thinks babies only get the knowledge

35. Some cognitive scientists think babies have the mechanism to learn a language

36. Sylvain Sirois thinks that babies can reflect a response to stimuli that are novel

37. Sylvain Sirois thinks babies’ attention level will drop

A. before they are born.

B. before they learn from experience.

C. when they had seen the same thing for a while.

D. when facing the possible and impossible events.

E. when the previous things appear again in the lives.

Questions 38-40

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

38. What can we know about Daniel in the third paragraph?

A. Daniel’s attention level rose when he saw a blue train.

B. Kid’s attention fell when he was accustomed to the changes.

C. Child’s brain activity was monitored by a special equipment.

D. Size of the train changed when it came out of the tunnel.

39. What can we know from the writer in the fourth paragraph?

A. The theories about what baby knows changed over time.

B. Why the experiments that had been done before were rejected.

C. Infants have the innate knowledge to know the external environment.

D. Piaget’s “constructivist” theories were massively influential on parents.

40. What can we know from the argument of the experiment about the baby in the sixth paragraph?

A. Infants are attracted by various colours of the trains all the time.

B. Sylvain Sirois accuses misleading approaches of current experiments.

C. Sylvain Sirois indicates that only impossible events make children interested.

D. Sylvain Sirois suggests that novel things attract baby’s attention.

Answer Key