IELTS Reading Practice Test 13

Read the following passage and complete the tasks.

Learning by Examples

A Learning Theory is rooted in the work of Ivan Pavlov, the famous scien­tist who discovered and documented the principles governing how animals (humans included) learn in the 1900s. Two basic kinds of learning or condi­tioning occur, one of which is famously known as the classical conditioning. Classical conditioning happens when an animal learns to associate a neutral stimulus (signal) with a stimulus that has intrinsic meaning based on how closely in time the two stimuli are presented. The classic example of classical conditioning is a dog's ability to associate the sound of a bell (something that originally has no meaning to the dog) with the presentation of food (something that has a lot of meaning to the dog) a few moments later. Dogs are able to learn the association between bell and food, and will salivate im­mediately after hearing the bell once this connection has been made. Years of learning research have led to the creation of a highly precise learning theory that can be used to understand and predict how and under what cir­cumstances most any animal will learn, including human beings, and eventu­ally help people figure out how to change their behaviours.

B Role models are a popular notion for guiding child development, but in re­cent years very interesting research has been done on learning by examples in other animals. If the subject of animal learning is taught very much in terms of classical or operant conditioning, it places too much emphasis on how we allow animals to learn and not enough on how they are equipped to learn. To teach a course of mine, I have been dipping profitably into a very interesting and accessible compilation of papers on social learning in mammals, including chimps and human children, edited by Heyes and Galef (1996).

C The research reported in one paper started with a school field trip to Israel to a pine forest where many pine cones were discovered, stripped to the central core. So the investigation started with no weighty theoretical intent, but was directed at finding out what was eating the nutritious pine seeds and how they managed to get them out of the cones. The culprit proved to be the versatile and athletic black rat (Rattus rattus), and the technique was to bite each cone scale off at its base, in sequence from base to top following the spiral growth pattern of the cone.

D Urban black rats were found to lack the skill and were unable to learn it even if housed with experienced cone strippers. However, infants of urban mothers cross-fostered by stripper mothers acquired the skill, whereas in­fants of stripper mothers fostered by an urban mother could not. Clearly the skill had to be learned from the mother. Further elegant experiments showed that naive adults could develop the skill if they were provided with cones from which the first complete spiral of scales had been removed; rather like our new photocopier which you can work out how to use once someone has shown you how to switch it on. In the case of rats, the young­sters take cones away from the mother when she is still feeding on them, allowing them to acquire the complete stripping skill.

E A good example of adaptive bearing we might conclude, but let’s see the economies. This was determined by measuring oxygen uptake of a rat strip­ping a cone in a metabolic chamber to calculate energetic cost and compar­ing it with the benefit of the pine seeds measured by calorimeter. The cost proved to be less than 10% of the energetic value of the cone. An acceptable profit margin.

F A paper in 1996, Animal Behaviour by Bednekoff and Baida, provides a differ­ent view of the adaptiveness of social learning. It concerns the seed caching behaviour of Clark's Nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana) and the Mexican Jay (Aphelocoma ultramarina). The former is a specialist, caching 30,000 or so seeds in scattered locations that it will recover over the months of winter; the Mexican Jay will also cache food but is much less dependent upon this than the Nutcracker. The two species also differ in their social structure: the Nutcracker being rather solitary while the Jay forages in social groups.

G The experiment is to discover not just whether a bird can remember where it hid a seed but also if it can remember where it saw another bird hide a seed. The design is slightly comical with a cacher bird wandering about a room with lots of holes in the floor hiding food in some of the holes, while watched by an observer bird perched in a cage. Two days later, cachers and observers are tested for their discovery rate against an estimated random performance. In the role of cacher, not only the Nutcracker but also the less specialised Jay performed above chance; more surprisingly, however, Jay obser­vers were as successful as jay cachers whereas nutcracker observers did no better than chance. It seems that, whereas the Nutcracker is highly adapted at remembering where it hid its own seeds, the social living Mexican Jay is more adept at remembering, and so exploiting, the caches of others.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

A comparison between rats’ learning and human learning 1.1

A reference to the earliest study in animal learning 1.2

The discovery of who stripped the pine cone 1.3

A description of a cost-effectiveness experiment 1.4

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

The field trip to Israel was to investigate how black rats learn to strip pine cones. 2.1FALSETRUENOT GIVEN

The pine cones were stripped from bottom to top by black rats. 2.2FALSETRUENOT GIVEN

It can be learned from other relevant experiences to use a photocopier. 2.3TRUENOT GIVENFALSE

Stripping the pine cones is an instinct of the black rats. 2.4NOT GIVENFALSETRUE

Complete the summary below using words from the box.

While the Nutcracker is more able to cache seeds, the Jay relies 3.1 on caching food and is thus less specialised in this ability, but more 3.2. To study their behaviour of caching and finding their caches, an experiment was designed and carried out to test these two birds for their ability to remember where they hid the seeds.

In the experiment, the cacher bird hid seeds in the ground while the other 3.3. As a result, the Nutcracker and the Mexican Jay showed different performance in the role of 3.4 at finding the seeds - the observing 3.5 didn’t do as well as its counterpart.

Read the following passage and complete the tasks.

Mrs. Carlill and the Carbolic Smoke Ball

On 14 January 1892, Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert Victor, second in line to the British throne, died from flu. He had succumbed to the third and most lethal wave of the Russian flu pandemic sweeping the world. The nation was shocked. The people mourned. Albert was relegated to a footnote in history. Three days later, London housewife Louisa Carlill went down with flu. She was shocked. For two months, she had inhaled thrice daily from a carbolic smoke ball, a preventive measure guaranteed to fend off flu - if you believed the advert. Which she did. And why shouldn’t she when the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company had promised to cough up £100 for any customer who fell ill? Unlike Albert, Louisa recovered, claimed her £100 and set in train events that would win her lasting fame.

It started in the spring of 1889. The first reports of a flu epidemic came from Russia. By the end of the year, the world was in the grip of the first truly global flu pandemic. The disease came in waves, once a year for the next four years, and each worse than the last. Whole cities came to a standstill. London was especially hard-hit. As the flu reached each annual peak, normal life stopped. The postal service ground to a halt, trains stopped running, banks closed. Even courts stopped sitting for lack of judges. At the height of the third wave in 1892, 200 people were buried every day at just one London cemetery. This flu was far more lethal than previ­ous epidemics, and those who recovered were left weak, depressed, and often unfit for work. It was a picture repeated across the continent.

Accurate figures for the number of the sick and dead were few and far between but Paris, Berlin and Vienna all reported a huge upsurge in deaths. The news­papers took an intense interest in the disease, not just because of the scale of it but because of who it attacked. Most epidemics carried off the poor and weak, the old and frail. This flu was cutting as great a swathe through the upper classes, dealing death to the rich and famous, and the young and fit.

The newspaper-reading public was fed a daily diet of celebrity victims. The flu had worked its way through the Russian imperial family and invaded the royal palaces of Europe. It carried off the Dowager Empress of Germany and the second son of the king of Italy, as well as England’s future king. Aristocrats and politicians, poets and opera singers, bishops and cardinals - none escaped the attentions of the Russian flu. The public grew increasingly fearful. The press might have been overdoing the doom and gloom, but their hysterical coverage had exposed one terrible fact. The medical profession had no answer to the disease. This flu, which might ft not even have begun in Russia, was a mystery. What caused it and how did it spread? No one could agree on anything. By now, the theory that micro-organisms caused disease was gaining ground, but no one had identified an organism responsible for flu (and wouldn’t until 1933). In the absence of a germ, many clung to the old idea of bad airs, or mi­asmas, possibly stirred by some great physical force - earthquakes, perhaps, or electrical phenomena in the upper atmosphere, even a passing comet.

Doctors advised people to eat well avoiding “unnecessary assemblies”, and if they were really worried, to stuff cotton wool up their nostrils. If they fell ill, they should rest, keep warm and eat a nourishing diet of “milk, eggs and farinaceous puddings”. Alcohol figured prominently among the prescriptions: one eminent English doctor suggested champagne, although he conceded “brandy M in considerable quantities has sometimes been given with manifest advantages”. French doctors prescribed warm alcoholic drinks, arguing that they never saw an alcoholic with flu. Their prescription had immediate results: over a three-day period, 1,200 of the 1,500 drunks picked up on the streets of Paris claimed they were following doctor’s orders.

Some doctors gave drugs to ease symptoms - quinine for fever, salicin for head­ache, heroin for an “incessant cough”. But nothing in the pharmacy remotely resembled a cure. Not surprisingly, people looked elsewhere for help. Hoping to cash in while the pandemic lasted, purveyors of patent medicines competed for the public’s custom with ever more outrageous advertisements. One of the most successful was the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company.

The carbolic smoke ball was a hollow rubber ball, 5 centimetres across, with a nozzle covered by gauze. Inside was a powder treated with carbolic acid, or phenol. The idea was to clutch it close to the nose and squeeze gently, inhaling deeply from the emerging cloud of pungent powder. This, the company claimed, would disinfect the mucous membranes, curing any condition related to “taking cold”. In the summer of 1890, sales were steady at 300 smoke balls a month. In January 1891, the figure skyrocketed to 1,500.

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage?

People used to believe flu was caused by miasmas. 4.3FALSENOT GIVENTRUE

Flu prescriptions often contained harmful ingredients. 4.4FALSENOT GIVENTRUE

Complete the diagram below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

18. 5.1

19. 5.2

20. 5.3

21. 5.4

Match each person with the correct statement.

Mrs. Carlill 6.1

Read the following passage and complete the tasks.

The Columbian Exchange

A Millions of years ago, continental drift carried the Old World and New World apart, splitting North and South America from Eurasia and Africa. That sep­aration lasted so long that it fostered divergent evolution; for instance, the development of rattlesnakes on one side of the Atlantic and of vipers on the other. After 1492, human voyagers in part reversed this tendency. Their ar­tificial re-establishment of connections through the commingling of Old and New World plants, animals, and bacteria, commonly known as the Columbian Exchange, is one of the more spectacular and significant ecological events of the past millennium.

B When Europeans first touched the shores of the Americas, Old World crops such as wheat, barley, rice, and turnips had not travelled west across the Atlantic, and New World crops such as maize, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, and manioc had not travelled east to Europe. In the Americas, there were no horses, cattle, sheep, or goats, all animals of Old World origin. Except for the llama, alpaca, dog, a few fowl, and guinea pig, the New World had no equivalents to the domesticated animals associated with the Old World, nor did it have the pathogens associated with the Old World’s dense populations of humans and such associated creatures as chickens, cattle, black rats, and Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Among these germs were those that carried smallpox, measles, chickenpox, influenza, malaria, and yellow fever.

C As might be expected, the Europeans who settled on the east coast of the United States cultivated crops like wheat and apples, which they had brought with them. European weeds, which the colonists did not cultivate, and, in fact, preferred to uproot, also fared well in the New World. John Josselyn, an Englishman and amateur naturalist who visited New England twice in the seventeenth century, left us a list, “Of Such Plants as Have Sprung Up since the English Planted and Kept Cattle in New England,” which included couch grass, dandelion, shepherd’s purse, groundsel, sow thistle, and chickweed.

One of these, a plantain (Plantago major), was named “Englishman’s Foot” by the Amerindians of New England and Virginia who believed that it would grow only where the English “have trodden, and was never known before the English came into this country”. Thus, as they intentionally sowed Old World crop seeds, the European settlers were unintentionally contaminating American fields with weed seeds. More importantly, they were stripping and burning forests, exposing the native minor flora to direct sunlight, and the hooves and teeth of Old World livestock. The native flora could not tolerate the stress. The imported weeds could, because they had lived with large numbers of graz­ing animals for thousands of years.

D Cattle and horses were brought ashore in the early 1600s and found hos­pitable climate and terrain in North America. Horses arrived in Virginia as early as 1620 and in Massachusetts in 1629. Many wandered free with little more evidence of their connection to humanity than collars with a hook at the bottom to catch on fences as they tried to leap over them to get at crops. Fences were not for keeping livestock in, but for keeping livestock out.

E Native American resistance to the Europeans was ineffective. Indigenous peoples suffered from white brutality, alcoholism, the killing and driving off of game, and the expropriation of farmland, but all these together are insufficient to explain the degree of their defeat. The crucial factor was not people, plants, or animals, but germs. Smallpox was the worst and the most spectacular of the infectious diseases mowing down the Native Americans. The first recorded pandemic of that disease in British North America detonated among the Al­gonquin of Massachusetts in the early 1630s. William Bradford of Plymouth Plantation wrote that the victims “fell down so generally of this disease as they were in the end not able to help one another, no, not to make a fire nor fetch a little water to drink, nor any to bury the dead”. The missionaries and the traders who ventured into the American interior told the same appalling story about smallpox and the indigenes. In 1738 alone, the epidemic destroyed half the Cherokee; in 1759 nearly half the Catawbas; in the first years of the next century, two thirds of the Omahas and perhaps half the entire population between the Missouri River and New Mexico; in 1837-38 nearly every last one of the Mandans and perhaps half the people of the high plains.

F The export of America’s native animals has not revolutionised Old World agri­culture or ecosystems as the introduction of European animals to the New World did. America’s grey squirrels and muskrats and a few others have established themselves east of the Atlantic and west of the Pacific, but that has not made much of a difference. Some of America’s domesticated animals are raised in the Old World, but turkeys have not displaced chickens and geese, and guinea pigs have proved useful in laboratories, but have not usurped rabbits in the butcher shops.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

8.1 A description of an imported species that is named after the English colonists

8.2 The reason why both the New World and Old World experienced population growth

8.3 The formation of new continents explained

8.4 The reason why the indigenous population declined

8.5 An overall description of the species lacked in the Old World and New World

8.6 A description of some animal species being ineffective in affecting the Old World

8.7 An overall explanation of the success of the Old World species invasion

8.8 An account of European animals taking roots in the New World

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage?

Answer the questions below using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Who reported the same story of European diseases among the indigenes from the American interior?

- 10.1

What is the still existing feature of the Old World's invasion of the New?

- 10.2