IELTS Academic Reading practice test 1

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

The wandering pole

Anyone who navigates with a compass learns early on that magnetic north drifts, which is why maps record how far it has moved since they were printed. The geographic North Pole, by contrast, is usually imagined as a fixed point on the planet. It is, after all, defined not by magnetism but by rotation: it is the place where Earth's spin axis emerges from the surface. Yet this point is not fixed either. It, too, is on the move, shifting by a small distance every year across the Arctic. Geophysicists call the phenomenon true polar wander, and although it is slow, it reveals a great deal about how our planet responds to changes on and beneath its surface. The two kinds of movement have quite different causes. The magnetic pole wanders because the field is generated by swirling currents of liquid iron in the outer core, thousands of kilometres below our feet. As these currents change, the field changes with them, and the point towards which compass needles are drawn can shift considerably within a few years. In true polar wander, the axis itself keeps pointing in almost exactly the same direction in space. What shifts is the solid planet beneath it: the mantle and crust slowly turn as a single unit, so that a different spot on the surface comes to sit at the top of the axis. A useful comparison is a spinning ball whose outer layer gradually rotates while the line through its centre stays where it is. Why should a planet behave like this? The answer lies in the way rotating objects distribute their weight. A spinning body is most stable when any extra mass lies as far from its axis as possible, in other words close to the equator. If mass builds up or disappears somewhere else, the whole planet slowly turns until balance is restored. On Earth, such changes happen all the time. Mountain ranges rise and wear away, slabs of ocean floor sink deep into the mantle, and enormous ice sheets grow and shrink. Even the ground beneath the oceans is not a constant: as material below it shifts, the distribution of weight across the globe changes too. Today the position of the pole is tracked to within a few centimetres by a combination of satellites, a worldwide network of GPS stations and radio telescopes that observe very distant galaxies known as quasars. Because quasars are so far away, they appear to stay in exactly the same place in the sky, which makes them an ideal fixed frame against which the turning Earth can be measured. Observatories on different continents watch the same quasars at the same moment, and the tiny differences in when their signals arrive allow the orientation of the planet to be calculated with remarkable precision. These measurements have shown that the pole does not simply drift in one steady direction. Around the turn of the century, the drift of the pole swung noticeably towards the east, and researchers have connected this change in direction to the rapid loss of ice from Greenland as well as to shifts in the way water is stored on land. Melting ice is the most obvious example of mass on the move, but it is not the only one. In many dry regions, huge quantities of groundwater have been pumped up to irrigate crops, and most of it eventually flows into the oceans, moving a significant amount of mass from the land to the sea. Seen in this light, the path of the pole is partly a record of human activity, written in the slow turning of the planet. Superimposed on this slow drift are small circular wobbles. One of them follows the calendar: each year, the seasonal movement of large masses of air and water across the surface pushes the pole a few metres to one side and back again. Snow piles up on the northern continents in winter and melts in spring, while weather systems shift between the oceans and the land. Another wobble, lasting slightly longer than a year, arises from the way the planet responds to being set a little off balance, rather like a spinning top that has been nudged. Together these motions trace a looping path that never quite returns to its starting point. To look further back, scientists turn to rocks. As volcanic rock cools, tiny magnetic grains inside it line up with the planet's magnetic field and are then locked in place, preserving the direction of the field at that moment. Because the magnetic field, averaged over long periods, lies roughly along the spin axis, these frozen compass needles indicate where the pole lay in relation to the rock when it formed. The difficulty is that continents themselves move. When a single continent drifts, only its own rocks record the change. When true polar wander occurs, the records in rocks of the same age on every continent shift together, and by comparing them geologists can separate one process from the other, although some proposed episodes in the distant past are still disputed. Some researchers believe that at certain times the whole outer shell of the planet turned far more quickly than it does today; others argue that the evidence can be explained in other ways. This matters well beyond geology. Satellite navigation systems must know exactly how the planet is oriented beneath their orbits, and the most precise clocks used to define world time must be adjusted for the same information, so international services publish regular updates on where the pole is. Without these updates, positions calculated from space would gradually move away from their true locations on the ground. The North Pole, it turns out, is less a fixed point than a moving target, and keeping track of it has become a routine but essential part of modern life.

1. Most people who navigate with a compass do not realise that magnetic north moves.

TRUE) TRUE

FALSE) FALSE

NOT GIVEN) NOT GIVEN

2. During true polar wander, the direction in which Earth's spin axis points into space changes considerably.

TRUE) TRUE

FALSE) FALSE

NOT GIVEN) NOT GIVEN

3. True polar wander was first detected with the help of satellite data.

TRUE) TRUE

FALSE) FALSE

NOT GIVEN) NOT GIVEN

4. The loss of ice from Greenland has been linked to a change in the direction in which the pole is moving.

TRUE) TRUE

FALSE) FALSE

NOT GIVEN) NOT GIVEN

5. The yearly wobble of the pole is mainly caused by movements in Earth's core.

TRUE) TRUE

FALSE) FALSE

NOT GIVEN) NOT GIVEN

6. Rock evidence can help scientists distinguish true polar wander from the movement of individual continents.

TRUE) TRUE

FALSE) FALSE

NOT GIVEN) NOT GIVEN

7. Correcting for polar motion costs more for timekeeping than for satellite navigation.

TRUE) TRUE

FALSE) FALSE

NOT GIVEN) NOT GIVEN

8. • Magnetic north shifts as flows of molten {{8}} change far below the surface.

9. • A rotating planet is steadiest when additional weight is located at the greatest distance from its spin axis, which means near the {{9}}.

10. • Scientists use GPS stations and radio telescopes that observe very distant galaxies known as {{10}}.

11. • Apart from melting ice, the pumping of {{11}} for agriculture has also moved mass around the planet.

12. • Minute {{12}} with magnetic properties become fixed as lava hardens and preserve the field's direction.

13. • Data on the pole's location are also used to correct the highly accurate {{13}} that set international time.

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

The sitting room that became a concert hall

A On most evenings, the timber-framed house halfway along the high street of Wexley, a small market town in Shropshire, looks much like the other seventeenth-century buildings around it. Its owner, Ruth Ashdown, taught music in local schools for thirty years, and when she retired she wanted to hear more of it at home. One winter she asked a friend who sang traditional folk songs to perform in her sitting room, and she pushed a handwritten note through a few doors along the street. At first only neighbours came, each bringing a dish to share; within a year, strangers were driving over from Birmingham, and Ruth applied for a licence and began selling tickets. Turning a private evening into a public one meant some practical changes. There was nowhere obvious to serve drinks: the kitchen was too small, so the bar was built into the hallway, where guests now queue beside the coats and umbrellas. The furniture, however, stayed much as it had been. There are no rows of seats; the sofa was her grandmother's, and the armchairs came from house clearance sales, so no two of them match. With a few cushions on the floor, the room holds about forty people, and the name painted on a board by the door, Hollin House, is the only sign that the building is anything other than a home. B Because there is no stage, the performers stand on the same floorboards as the audience, and that single fact changes how everyone in the room behaves. The front row is barely a metre from the singer, close enough to watch a guitarist's fingers move, and listeners who might chat through a set in a pub fall completely silent. Musicians notice the difference at once. They still play through small amplifiers, but these are turned so low that the sound seems to come from the instrument itself. Many use the evening to try out songs that are not yet on any record, and, rather than moving straight to the next number, they stop to tell the room where a song came from. Mara Quill, a Canadian singer-songwriter who has called in at Wexley during several tours, says that in larger halls she feels she is putting on a show, whereas in Ruth's sitting room she feels she is having a conversation. An evening consists of two sets of around forty minutes each. Ruth keeps them short on purpose: in a room this close, she believes, attention is intense, and it is better to finish while everyone still wants more. C Hollin House is an exception rather than the rule: across the country, small music rooms have been closing at a rate that worries musicians and promoters alike. The pattern is often the same. Many of these venues occupy rented premises in town centres, frequently above pubs or in former warehouses. When the buildings around them are sold for flats, landlords raise the rent, and many owners simply cannot pay it. The people who move into those flats then complain about the noise, and a venue that has operated for decades can lose its licence within months. It is sometimes suggested that the real problem is that audiences have lost interest in live music, yet owners repeatedly report that their rooms are full on concert nights; the difficulty lies in the cost of keeping the doors open, not in a lack of demand. This matters well beyond the venues themselves. Many performers who now fill arenas learned their craft in rooms of a hundred people or fewer, and if those rooms disappear, it is not clear where the next generation will learn theirs. Ruth is protected from the worst of this for a simple reason: she owns the building, so there is no landlord to raise the rent. As she puts it, the venue is safe only because it happens to be her home. D This autumn, that home has attracted attention of a different kind. Hollin House has been nominated for the Small Stages Prize, awarded each year by the Grassroots Music Fellowship to a venue that has found its own way of supporting live music. The judges singled out two things: every penny taken at the door goes to the performers, and on the first Thursday of each month the room is given over to people who have never played in public before. Ruth earns nothing from tickets; what little income the venue produces comes from the bar in the hallway. Other aspects of the way she runs it are equally personal. She chooses every act herself, working through a waiting list that now contains more than a hundred names, and apart from the monthly Thursday evening the house opens only on Fridays and Saturdays. Filming is not permitted, partly to protect the atmosphere and partly because, she says, a song heard once in a small room should stay there. Ruth is pleased by the nomination, but she is also cautious about it. More publicity could bring more visitors than forty places can hold, and she has no intention of moving the concerts anywhere larger. 'If it stopped being a sitting room,' she says, 'it would stop being Hollin House.'

14. Section A

i) Pressures facing small venues far beyond one town

The historical importance of a building

How the arrangement of a room affects audience and performers

An unusual way of running a venue receives recognition

v) Complaints from neighbours force a move

A private gathering that gradually became public

The challenge of attracting well-known performers

15. Section B

i) Pressures facing small venues far beyond one town

The historical importance of a building

How the arrangement of a room affects audience and performers

An unusual way of running a venue receives recognition

v) Complaints from neighbours force a move

A private gathering that gradually became public

The challenge of attracting well-known performers

16. Section C

i) Pressures facing small venues far beyond one town

The historical importance of a building

How the arrangement of a room affects audience and performers

An unusual way of running a venue receives recognition

v) Complaints from neighbours force a move

A private gathering that gradually became public

The challenge of attracting well-known performers

17. Section D

i) Pressures facing small venues far beyond one town

The historical importance of a building

How the arrangement of a room affects audience and performers

An unusual way of running a venue receives recognition

v) Complaints from neighbours force a move

A private gathering that gradually became public

The challenge of attracting well-known performers

18. Which TWO ways in which musicians perform differently at Hollin House are mentioned in the passage?

A) They play without any amplification

B) They include songs they have not yet recorded

C) They play longer sets than at larger venues

D) They explain the background of their songs

E) They invite the audience to sing along

19. Which TWO ways in which musicians perform differently at Hollin House are mentioned in the passage?

A) They play without any amplification

B) They include songs they have not yet recorded

C) They play longer sets than at larger venues

D) They explain the background of their songs

E) They invite the audience to sing along

20. Which TWO reasons does the writer give for the closure of small music venues?

A) rents rising when buildings are sold for housing

B) audiences losing interest in live music

C) competition from large arenas

D) a shortage of performers willing to play small rooms

E) complaints about noise from new residents

21. Which TWO reasons does the writer give for the closure of small music venues?

A) rents rising when buildings are sold for housing

B) audiences losing interest in live music

C) competition from large arenas

D) a shortage of performers willing to play small rooms

E) complaints about noise from new residents

22. Which TWO features of Hollin House did the judges of the Small Stages Prize praise?

A) Performers are chosen by an audience vote

B) It is open every night of the week

C) All ticket money goes to the performers

D) Concerts are filmed and shared online

E) Some evenings are reserved for first-time performers

23. Which TWO features of Hollin House did the judges of the Small Stages Prize praise?

A) Performers are chosen by an audience vote

B) It is open every night of the week

C) All ticket money goes to the performers

D) Concerts are filmed and shared online

E) Some evenings are reserved for first-time performers

24. At first, the audience consisted only of {{24}}, each of whom brought a dish of food.

25. Because there was not enough space elsewhere, drinks were served from a bar in the {{25}}.

26. Instead of rows of seats, the room was furnished with mismatched {{26}} bought at house clearance sales.

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

Checking the camera: how newsrooms verify eyewitness video

When something dramatic happens, from a flood to a street protest, the first pictures rarely come from professional camera crews. They come from bystanders holding phones, and they appear on social platforms within minutes. For news organisations this material is both a gift and a hazard. It can show events that would otherwise go unseen, but it arrives without any of the guarantees that come with footage shot by a trusted employee. In response, a growing number of large newsrooms have set up dedicated verification desks: small teams whose job is to establish whether a clip is what it claims to be before it is shown to an audience. The first task is usually to trace a clip back to its source. A video that appears to show last night's events may have been circulating for hours, copied and re-uploaded by accounts with no connection to the person who filmed it. By searching for earlier versions, verifiers try to find the first copy that appeared online. This step matters more than many viewers assume. Public discussion of misleading video tends to focus on sophisticated fabrication, yet in daily newsroom work the most common problem is not invented footage but genuine recordings of an earlier event, re-posted with a new and misleading caption. A clip of a crowd at a sports celebration five years ago, for example, can easily be presented as a political demonstration taking place today. Once a likely original has been found, verifiers look for information about how it was made. Digital video files can contain metadata, details stored within the file itself, such as the type of device used and the time at which recording began. In principle, this could settle many questions quickly. In practice, most platforms strip this embedded data when a file is uploaded, so verifiers usually have to contact the original uploader directly. Such conversations also give the team a chance to judge whether the person was really present, by asking what they saw just before and after the clip begins. Whatever the uploader says, the footage itself has to be tested. Geolocation, the process of establishing where a clip was filmed, relies on patient observation. Details such as road signs, shop fronts or even the outline of a distant ridge can be compared with satellite images and street-level photographs until a match is found. Chronolocation, which aims to fix when a clip was filmed, is often harder. Here, the length and direction of shadows can indicate roughly what time of day a scene was filmed, but on their own they cannot reveal the date; for that, verifiers turn to sources such as historical weather records, which may show, for instance, that it had not rained in the area on the day a clip claims to depict a storm. Even when a clip has passed every check, teams record their conclusion as a level of confidence, such as 'confirmed', 'likely' or 'unverified', rather than as a certainty. This reflects an honest recognition that verification reduces doubt without always removing it. The team's work ends there: this assessment is passed to editors, with whom the final decision on broadcasting rests, since they must weigh the strength of the evidence against the public importance of the story. Synthetic video, footage generated or altered by software, has added a new layer to this work. The technology has improved rapidly: early fakes often gave themselves away through unnatural blinking or lighting on a face that did not match the rest of the scene, flaws that a trained eye could spot without special equipment. Today's examples are far more convincing, and newsrooms increasingly rely on detection software to analyse suspicious clips. Such tools have value, but their limits need to be understood. For one thing, most of these tools produce a probability score rather than a yes-or-no answer, which leaves the final judgement with a human being. For another, their accuracy falls sharply when a clip has been compressed again each time it is shared from one platform to another, because each round of compression destroys some of the fine detail the software depends on. Perhaps the most troubling effect of synthetic media, however, has little to do with fake clips themselves. As the public becomes aware that convincing fakes exist, anyone caught on camera doing something wrong can simply declare that a genuine recording has been fabricated. Doubt, in other words, becomes a resource that can be exploited, and commentators have called this advantage the 'liar's dividend'. It means that the task of verifiers is not only to expose what is false but also to defend what is true. Newsrooms have responded in two main ways. The first is educational. Rather than correcting false claims after they have spread, some organisations have experimented with so-called prebunking, which involves explaining in advance the tricks most often used to mislead, such as false captions and selective editing. The idea is that audiences who recognise a technique are less likely to be taken in when they meet it. The second response concerns transparency: some newsrooms now publish a short verification note alongside a clip, explaining how it was checked, which sources were consulted and what remains uncertain. This second development may prove the more significant. Audiences have long been asked to accept a news organisation's word that footage is genuine, and in an age of widespread suspicion that request is harder to make. In my view, trust depends less on the verdict itself than on whether audiences can see the process behind it. A newsroom that shows its working invites viewers to judge the evidence for themselves, and in doing so it offers something that no detection tool can supply.

27. Most news organisations now have a team that specialises in checking footage filmed by the public.

TRUE) TRUE

FALSE) FALSE

NOT GIVEN) NOT GIVEN

28. The majority of misleading videos that verifiers deal with have been created artificially.

TRUE) TRUE

FALSE) FALSE

NOT GIVEN) NOT GIVEN

29. Verifiers often need to ask the person who recorded a video for details, because the information stored in the original file has usually been removed.

TRUE) TRUE

FALSE) FALSE

NOT GIVEN) NOT GIVEN

30. Features of the natural landscape, as well as buildings and signs, can help verifiers to identify where a video was filmed.

TRUE) TRUE

FALSE) FALSE

NOT GIVEN) NOT GIVEN

31. Studying shadows in a video allows verifiers to work out the precise date on which it was recorded.

TRUE) TRUE

FALSE) FALSE

NOT GIVEN) NOT GIVEN

32. Verifiers may still express some doubt about a video after they have completed all their checks.

TRUE) TRUE

FALSE) FALSE

NOT GIVEN) NOT GIVEN

33. Editors usually accept the advice of the verification team when deciding whether to broadcast a video.

TRUE) TRUE

FALSE) FALSE

NOT GIVEN) NOT GIVEN

34. The earliest synthetic clips could often be identified because the {{34}} on a person's face did not match the rest of the scene.

35. Detection software now tends to give a {{35}} instead of a simple yes-or-no judgement.

36. Such tools become less dependable when a clip has been {{36}} again and again as it is shared.

37. People who are caught on camera may benefit from public awareness of synthetic media by claiming that real footage is fake, an advantage known as the {{37}}.

38. One educational approach warns the public in advance about the {{38}} that are most commonly used to mislead, such as false captions.

39. Some newsrooms now attach a {{39}} to verified clips, describing the checks that were carried out.

40. The writer argues that audiences trust a conclusion more readily when they can see the {{40}} that led to it.